It still is a shock to realize my relatives in the East might visit me now, and amusing to think it is now easier for an East German to visit West Germany than vice versa.

One often talks of West Berlin as an island in a Red sea, but, as one West Berliner put it, “We were an island and the sea came to us.”

I often imagine I have been in a dream, sometimes that I have just awakened from one.

My parents left East Germany before the Wall was built, and we had to live with it afterward. Trips to visit relatives in the East were made expensive by a compulsory exchange of one to one… 25 West marks for 25 worthless Eastmarks per person per day.

No Visits

Relatives visiting us, of course, was out of the question. For my family, the wall was a permanent frustration and a permanent mental fixture: one had idle thoughts and wishes for its removal, but they were simply implausible.

Traveling around West Berlin could occasionally be a claustrophobic experience. Few know that the city has enormous forests and even farmland within its city limits where the Berliners enjoy taking walks. But it did not matter where you walked. As soon as you had gained a feeling of being in open space in the countryside, you would round a corner or reach a hillcrest… and there it was again. There were limits to your freedom, not nearly as confining as the limits on the Wall’s other side, but limits nonetheless.

Now, suddenly it is gone, but my mind didn’t quite believe it. Eventually, as I walked back from my archive one day, I couldn’t help thinking of a line from William Wordsworth about the French Revolution: “Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven.” The new reality ,which I had seen, heard, felt and cried tears in finally had forced the old reality out of my mind. I have rarely felt happier.

We had gone to sleep Thursday night, Nov.9, hearing East Germany Politburo member Guenter Schabowski’s speech about opening the borders, but I interpreted that to mean that the German Democratic Republic’s goal in the near future, announced now as a sop to a rebellious population.

Travel Laws

That, after all, was how East Berlin had announced the previous travel laws, which had graciously given each East German 30 days travel time in the West.

We woke up on Friday morning, turned on BBC and heard a live report about open borders. (It was amusing to think that North America actually knew about the border before most Berliners did, simply because we were asleep and it was prime time in North America.)

We saw the champagne corks flying on the morning news coupled with an interview with many East Berliners who were so anxious to go over that they simply threw coats over their pajamas. At that point, we decided to take the day off and see the city.

Our first stop was at a rapid transit station, known as Wollankstrasse, which straddles the border. (In fact, the station is within East Germany, although the entrance is in West Berlin. East Germans can’t use the train, but West Berliners can, although they enter a different country in doing so. But the city is full of contradictions like that.) On a previous visit, we had noticed that people living on the other side of the rails, in East Berlin, rarely looked out their windows to the West, or looked down if they did. Before, we had decided not to even try waving, lest we get someone in trouble. We resolved to wave this time, but no one was there to wave back.

We moved on, going on the U-Bahn under East Berlin. The West’s subway crosses under East Berlin, but only stops – or used to – at one spot: Friedrichstrasse. We got off, just to see people. Most of them were relatively old, but all had flowers and were headed west. We could have gone into East Berlin, but realized that that would be expensive and useless, since all of the action was in the West that day.

We went on further to Kochstrasse – Checkpoint Charlie. You’ve undoubtedly seen the pictures of throngs of people cheering, throwing flowers, laughing ,crying, shaking hands and pounding (lightly) the roofs of those little GDR cars, the Trabants. There were hundreds of people, but no one was upset, or even annoyed at being jostled and pushed as they waited for another East German to come visit. Even the military police and the Berlin police were polite. They had a crowd and traffic problem, but it was a happy problem and no one minded, especially the East Germans, who didn’t even object that people were slapping their little cars. One wonders how dents of welcome would be explained to an insurance agent. A Soviet bus came through, too, filled the honor guard for their war memorial (which is in the West). We cheered for them, too, and waved. They tried not to be impressed, but didn’t succeed. Whenever a car with East German plates came through, though, the cheers became a roar. The East Germans themselves were either laughing or crying and rolled the windows down to shake hands with everyone as they drove by.

Everyone was willing to talk about anything. Our neighbors in the crowd were from Wiesbaden. The son had been in the first wave of recruits from the Bundeswehr after the war. He enjoyed telling stories about drinking beer with American GIs. Texans, he said, were especially friendly. He couldn’t speak English, they couldn’t speak German, but it was no obstacle. The day catalyzed happy memories such as that.

It would have been easy to spend the whole day at Checkpoint Charlie. The taverns were all crowded and had various offers for East Germans. Some were offering coffee for 1 Eastmark (about a nickel in the United States – it may be less now) or even free food and drinks. The bus lines and subways were free for East Germans, too.

We decided to go to the Brandenburg Gate. This was difficult. The city government had advised all teachers to take their children on “field trips”, and all buses in this direction were overflowing with children and teachers. In any case, we left the bus at the Plaza of the Republic, began walking down the Street of the 17th of June (renamed after the East German rebellion in 1953) and saw a wall of people. This was confusing: I had been to the Wall before, and remembered it well, but the location and the wall of people didn’t match my memory of the wall, or of the gate. What I saw suggested that people were actually on the Wall, but my mind told me that was nonsense, that the East German People’s Police (the “Vopos”) would never permit that. (Indeed, they had tried to prevent it the previous night with water cannon but the attempt failed.)

The Wall was crowded with schoolchildren, teachers, university students. It was often necessary to wait until people jumped off it before others climbed on. But there were always a few willing to help strangers up and down. All of us, of course, were trespassers, since the Wall is actually a few meters inside East Germany. The Vopos, however, were hardly in a position to arrest all 6,000 of us and certainly would have looked foolish arresting 10-year-olds. I still don’t know whether the invasion of children was deliberately intended to happen. Was it a propaganda masterpiece, or simply a happy accident?

So, we all stayed. Presumably, if this really were the “Anti-Fascist Protection Wall”, then our presence there was truly an imperialist act of trespass. But the Vopos stayed a few meters away, lined up to prevent us from jumping down, but otherwise paying no obvious attention to us, choosing instead to study the ground intensely or to talk to each other in muted tones. They never looked up unless it was absolutely necessary. (I read later that one of the guards said they were armed only with hats an uniforms, anyway.)

The younger students simply sat on the Wall, their legs hanging over the other side. Occasionally someone would jump down, an act culminating their “field trip”. If the jumper were an adult, the Vopos would surround him, but still stayed a foot or two away. Many kids did jump down, to the cheers of their classmates, walking a few meters along the Wall, waving a two-fingered “V” before adding insult to injury by asking the Vopos for help back up.

Any assistance, or any gesture suggesting that the Vopo was human being, too, was met with cheers. We noticed that he Vopos always removed their hats before helping the kids. Were they afraid of losing them to young souvenir-hunters?

A few people had brought picks, and actually were hacking at the Wall, but naturally on the western side, where the Vopos couldn’t see. A prankster had nailed a banner advertising a demolition company to the Wall, too. In the crowd below were two people carrying a banner proclaiming “Test the West!” a current cigarette ad slogan in West Berlin, here given a new meaning.

We left the proximity of the Wall and went back to the metal barrier that actually marks the boundary. We had been standing on it to take photographs. Coincidentally, this was when Willi Brandt and Berlin Mayer Walter Momper arrived, to great cheers (more for Brand than for the mayor). The crowd began to chant “Willi auf die Mauer!” (“On the Wall, Willi!”) but Brandt had more sense than that. His age (75ish) would not have prevented him, since he is still vigorous, but I believe it would have been an undiplomatic gesture.

Brandt and Momper announced that there would be a rally later than night at Rathaus Schöneberg, West Berlin’s City Hall.

Brandt, Momper, Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl would all be there. This was met with derision. (Kohl is unloved in this town.)

We went to the rally, but left very early. The crowd around us seemed composed mainly of Greens who threatened to ruin the joy of the day for me. They treated the rally as simply another campaign speech and later booed Kohl to the point where he was inaudible.

Two Germans standing behind me were simply sarcastic about everything. They discovered that we were Americans.

The male of the pair made a point of telling me how little he thought of Bush’s visit, and his farewell to the Germans: “God bless you and God bless your wonderful country.”

This annoyed me, and I told him that Bush was undoubtedly sincere. He repeated his disapproval, and I told him then that I had voted for Michael Dukakis, but that I had found Bush to be a pleasant surprise thus far, especially in comparison to his predecessor.

Fashionably Left

The Green was simply mute. He gave the impression being simply fashionably left, in opposition without any idea really of what he stood for, or how to get it, and being faced directly with equally strong opinions was too much for him.

(I’ve listened to a [sic] several Green speeches here; they have been equally unimpressive, and surprisingly lacking in content. I had expected more.)

At one point, as a speaker inside spoke of a democratic, reunited Germany within a democratic, reunited Europe, this same Green booed even more loudly.

I turned around, gave him an annoyed look again, and asked whether that truly was such a bad idea. He looked surprised again and mumbled that Europe wasn’t such a bad idea, but that we had our problems and the East Germans had theirs.

That solving those might be a precondition for solving the European problem didn’t seem to occur to him.

We watched the remainder of the speeches at home. There was great enthusiasm for reunification, but there was even greater stress laid on the context. Brandt noted that Germany’s tragedy had not begun on August 12, 1961, but in 1933.

Genscher noted that Germany’s neighbors had nothing to fear, that no borders were being questioned and that the German question would be solved within the European question.

West Germany, no matter what, he said, would stay within the European Community and NATO and he noted that the Allies should be thanked for having protected West Berlin so long. (Gorbachev was thanked, too, and I noticed many European flags, too.) Even reunification received lower priority than free elections and a free press in East Germany. Twin states, of equal freedom and wealth, would suit everybody.

It was difficult to get home that night, because of the thousands of East Germans; the city’s population had had 1 million added to it. We visited some acquaintances in another district; it took two hours to return, instead of 30 minutes. The trains were simply so packed that it was impossible to get on. Berlin’s entire transport staff was working overtime.

Giant Volksfest

Our neighbor told us about Kurfuerstendamm, West Berlin’s commercial center, which was filled to capacity that night. The city even closed the streets to wheeled traffic, for safety’s sake, which simply turned downtown into a giant Volksfest.

Our neighbor and his friend did drive around the city, just to see everything and noted how many people were waiting for buses. They said they pulled their car over and offered a ride to any East German who wanted one. They finally found a small enough group – a family of four – who climbed into the back seat.

The family was impressed with the car, especially the daughter. The daughter, however, was still worried: What she was told in school was different from what she was experiencing. “Mami”, she asked confusedly, “are these the bad people in the West?”

The next day (Saturday), we went to Bernauer Strasse, where another section of the Wall was coming dow,n in order to relieve the strain on other border crossings.

There were already hundreds of people waiting (on both sides), and a few “Wessies” had already imbibed a bit, adding to their cheerfulness. As the first East Germans crossed, they began calling, “Good Morning!”, and occasionally “Did you sleep well? Maybe a little nervous?” They asked in quieter tones, too, whether there still people on the other side waiting. This produced loud laughter.

The visitors themselves were again greeted with cheers and applause, which lasted the entire two hours for which we were present. They cried, and laughed, raised hands into the air. One woman danced across the no-man’s land; she was simply too excited to keep still. Another woman stopped, looked into the sky and said, “Wow, we’re over there!”

We started talking with another family who had driven down from Mecklenburg, pulling the kids from school just to be there today.

The father of this family said that it had been difficult for his daughter – who at that very moment already had her nose against a storefront window – to understand. She had asked once before why the Wall had been built and why all of these goods she saw on Western television weren’t in the stores. The father said that it had been difficult to answer.

We parted with family as they went looking for a bank in order to collect their 100 Marks of “Begruessungsgeld” (“Greetings money”), which West Germany was giving to every visitor.

German Revolution

Have the American media mentioned that each East German gets 100 Marks upon arrival, even children? The West German banks stamped the passports to ensure that nobody collects twice. Some did accidentally, and actually returned the money. I had to laugh. This is a German revolution: orderly, punctual, stamped, and stapled.

We had met another, rather quiet man on the subway. (You could identify East Germans immediately: they either had subway maps or stared at the maps posted above the doors, trying to locate destinations.)

He looked around, and said simply, “Yes, well, we’ll have to work hard.” He added that he was against unemployment, more than anything else, and that both germanys needed to work on that. His was a controlled quiet, though, and finally his need to tell us something was too great.

His grandfather had died in 1978 and the East German government had denied him permission to attend the funeral. His first task in the West was not to get his 100 Marks, but to buy flowers and pay his respects, to allow 11 years of grief to emerge. We paid our respects and did not disturb him, watching him instead as he studied a map, and then set out toward the cemetery.

Conversations were easy to start in the U-Bahn. My wife and I made a point of having a few subway maps with us to hand out, which also helped to start conversations. (And to relieve the station masters of another job.) After talking 10 minutes with one couple from East Berlin, we were already exchanging addresses.

We decided to take the U-Bahn under East Berlin again, to see a newly cleaned station, revived to ease the pressure on Friedrichsstrasse.

The new station, Jannowitzbruecke, was well-lit, and well-cleaned. They had hosed down 28 years of dust overnight. An East Berliner riding with us, was surprised to see the other idele stations under East Berlin: Mitte, Alexandersplatz, Oranienburger Strasse – there are dozens which West Berlin’s subways pass through without stopping, because East Germany boarded them up and sealed them off in 1961.

The East Berliner’s surprise led us to realize what 28 years could do. Essentially, anybody with little memory of 1961 had no knowledge of West Berlin’s trains passing under East Berlin, not even any awareness of where the neglected stations were, since most traces of them above ground in East Berlin had disappeared, too.

“One City”

The East Berliner observed these stations as we whisked by, and said, “you can really see here that it was one city back then”. I have this vision of him playing amateur archaeologist the next weekend, trying to locate the station entrances.

Later that day, we visited my aunt and uncle in another part of the city, and spent most of the day watching television and simply talking about what we had seen.

The trains were too crowded again and we could not go home so we simply spent the night. The news broadcast appealed for blankets, hot food and shelter: It seems that the checkpoints between West Berlin and it surroundings could not handle it all and a lot of East Germans were stuck.

The next morning, we woke up to a special concert performed by the Berlin Philharmonic, with free admission for all East Germans. Daniel Barenboim happened to be in Berlin at the time, and agreed to direct. No one took payment.

The Philharmonic performed an all-Beethoven program, even though [they had had little time to rehearse, I have never heard] the Seventh Symphony performed better.

There was an extra spirit in Barenboim and the musicians and even Barenboim realized that all had performed far beyond their previous best.

He applauded the orchestra with a triumphant look on his face before turning to face the audience.

On an ordinary day, the luster of the performance would have brought cheers, but the magnitude of the weekend led to a loud, joyful and prolonged roar, mixed with many tears, followed by a rain of flowers onto the stage that lasted minutes.

25-Year Sentence

There were the usual post-performance interviews. Barenboim and the audience praised the orchestra. Many were in tears. One man stated that the greatest punishment in the civilized world was the 25-year sentence, and those in the East had been punished for 28 years, 3 months and… at that point he broke into tears, too.

At the other end of town from the Philharmonic, a rock concert was taking place in the Deutschlandhalle, with bands from both sides of Berlin, and the German Opera was giving a free performance of Mozart’s “Magic Flute”.

In East Berlin, the SED held its own rally. (Even now, there are some committed socialists over there. We have heard rumors that four have committed suicide already, in despair.) But their rally was pathetic in contrast.

How proud they were, that some East Germans had visited West Berlin, and actually had come back to work, on time. Forty years of rule and that was their greatest boast! They kept talking about “rewinning the people’s trust”, too, a slogan which discretely assumes the fact that, at one time, they had had it in the first place.

There really is a sense of desperation in East Germany, on both sides.

The demonstrators have placards reading: “DDR: Die Dauernde Reiselust” (“The continuing desire to travel”) and “SED: Stalinistische Egoistische Diktatur” (“SED: Stalinist Egotistical Dictatorship”).

Lately, we have seen other posters, hostile to (now deposed party chief) Ego Krenz and the SED (the Socialist Unity Party, or Communist Party). Most recently, one read “40 Years of Work = 100 DM Charity”.

The SED is in a tight, desperate spot. They are trying to make themselves look tolerant, but the more they permit free speech, the more people complain about them.

They have the same problem with the parliament, the Volkskammer. The more they try to legitimize it, giving more than rubber-stamp powers the less legitimacy and power the SED has.

If the SED tries to retain its power, on the other hand, the Volkskammer remains a rubber stamp. They are stuck. They need both to retain control, but they can have only one at a time.

In the meantime, they are paralyzed between a realist wing (favoring reform only if it can’t be helped) and a Stalinist wing.

The paralysis set in a long time ago, which is why the dissenters had been able to get such a toehold in the first place, and which is also why the SED consistently only takes half-measures to address the masses’ demands: half-measures and quick-fixes are the only points on which the two factions can agree. Even Krenz was a compromise choice. But more about him later.

That night (Sunday), my aunt and uncle had some guests, two sisters, over from East Berlin. One of them worked for a ministry, and was initially afraid to come (and certainly was not about to collect her hundred marks, since that required putting a stamp in her passport), but her sister finally took her by the hand, and brought her over.

They were impressed with everything, noting spices in the dinner unavailable in East Germany. (Later, they went on a tour of the apartment and did not recognize the washing machine when they saw it.)

Matters Chaotic

The sister who worked in the ministry mentioned that matters were chaotic. In fact, she literally did not know who her boss would be on the following Monday.

The other sister, who worked in a hospital, hold of how things had stood in the weeks before. Many of the hospital workers had simply become fed up, and begun a petition campaign. (Hospitals are in especially bad shape in the GDR because so many doctors and nurses left for the West.)

The petitioners had met resistance at every step, from both the SED and from the local union which, in theory, was supposed to be protecting them. It got heated, but the confrontation never occurred. In the meantime, the whole country had collapsed (probably because similar confrontations were occurring elsewhere).

As for the sister in the ministry. She had a new boss on Monday, but work still didn’t get done. All members of the SED had been trained to accept and transmit orders from above, rather than to think for themselves. They simply weren’t capable of doing it.

The next week, her whole department was abolished, and she has been transferred elsewhere. Since they don’t have a space for her yet, she is being paid to do nothing. Even in its death throes, the East German economy is retaining its character.

The two sister left that night, promising to visit again… but taking a second look at everything to remember it, just it case it was all a dream.

My wife went shopping that Monday, Nov. 13, thinking that Monday would be easier than the happily insane weekend, but it was not so.

The news announced that more than 5.5 million visas had been issued in the last three days, meaning that about a third of East Germans has gone traveling. Of the three million travelers over the weekend, 2 million came to Berlin, meaning that the city doubled in size for 48 hours.

Once could tell at the subways, which seemed about as crowded as Tokyo’s subways but far less orderly since Berlin has had not practice with crowds.

Traffic Control

The traffic controllers got into the habit of shouting that people should be let off first before people boarded; it seems that some people could only get off trains three stops after they had intended to. (This has happened on the trains going to West Germany, too. Some East German infantry – in uniform – on one train couldn’t get off and found themselves well inside West Germany by the time they got to a door. Embarrassing.)

One train on which my wife and I had gone traveling actually creaked with the weight. We didn’t even bother with Zoologischer Garten, a stop for Ku’damm: everyone was going there , and that was exactly why we wouldn’t.

So my wife went shopping, but it was no better.

East Germans (and we speak now not of East Berliners, but of East Germans, who are coming to West Berlin in droves) who had the day off came over, even if they had used up their 100 Marks on the weekend.

The store was almost sold out, even at 9am. My wife had to wait in line just to enter the store. One could instantly tell who the East Germans were, since they had had no experience with shopping carts or with turnstiles and consequently tried to take the shopping carts through the turnstiles.

There was a limit to six of anything in the store, but that hadn’t helped. Almost everything was gone. Items that ran out first: milk, fruit juice (any fruit juice), fruit (any fruit, but especially bananas and pineapples), yogurt, coffee, chocolate, toilet paper and newspapers.

82 Types of Salami

There were crowds at McDonald’s and Woolworth’s and toy stores, some going in (Woolworth’s was as crowded inside as out) but most just looking in windows. There is a good quote about a woman going into KaDeWe, which is the largest department store in Western Europe, and going up to the sixth floor, where gourmet food was sold. Her incredulous response: “What kind of person needs 82 types of salami?”

The Bundestag (West German legislature) on hearing that the Wall was open, instantaneously stood and sang the national anthem … except for a few Greens, of course, who walked out. An East German girl in a restaurant mentioned casually that she wanted a Walkman for Christmas. When the restaurant owner found out, he went home, got his own and gave it to the girl.

I suppose the only sensation that might approach the mood would be going into Disneyland with unlimited tickets and getting to be at the head of the line every time. But what would happen when you realized that it would be only for one day?

My wife and I worry about what the East German kids will do when the thrill wears off, when they find themselves stuck in the East without money.

What’s Next

In fact, both Germanys are worried about that. My uncle admitted, “As a good German, I’m supposed to want reunification, but right now two German states would suit me just fine.” West Berlin workers worry about a wave of East Berliners willing to work more cheaply. Some have suggested now that there is no reason for East Germans to move West now. Others have expressed the thought that perhaps things had moved a bit to quickly over there. The two sisters at my aunt and uncle’s even suggested that Krenz, for all of his flaws and hypocrisies (more on that below) might be the right man right now. If one ousted him and the SED, there would be no one left with any knowledge of governance at all. A progressively less repressive government apparently was better than one that was instantly free; a controlled belly-landing was better than a democratically run crash. They don’t like the SED, but it might be useful for the moment.

There is cautious optimism about the future: a sense of the new possibilities, but also the need to be careful. One doesn’t wish to startle neighbors. There is agreement, too, that something must be done.

West Germans, though, have the unspoken assumption that they are the archetypical Germans, which shows even in conversation. One speaks of “Germany” and “East Germany”, “Berlin” and “East Berlin”. East Germans speak of both states using their initials, the “BRD” and the “DDR”. Both are “a” Germany, but not “the” Germany. West Germans, thinking of themselves as “the” Germans, tend to assume that the East Germans want to be just like them. Some political and business leaders have speculated already on television about what it would take to bring the redeemed East up to Western levels.

I have noticed some resentment among East Germans about this: there is fear of being overrun or swallowed, of becoming “the Sicily of Germany”, as one worker put it, a place of cheap labor there for the taking. The East Germans do not want to trade one “big brother” for another, even if the brother is wealthy and generous. West Germans are learning this gradually, and are stressing (although perhaps not enough) that the East Germans must have self-determination first, and that their decision must be respected.

In the debates of the Berlin city council, the two dominant parties quite clearly demanded East Germany’s right to self-determination, but equally clearly accused the other of dispecting [sic] the same. The Social Democrats accused the Christian Democrats of wanting reunification at all costs, and the latter accused the former of opposing it [at] all costs. The fact that they actually agreed on the same point – self-determination – was forgotten. There is agreement, both East and West, that the East must be brought to the West’s level, since neither side can afford to have the East collapse. This, again, is where the sensitivity becomes a sore point.

When West Germans speculate on what must be done, they sound potentially overbearing, but the need to discuss East Germany is present because it is a West German problem, too. If East Germany collapses how do we handle millions of refugees? How do we stop the collapse? Rebuild East Germany, of course. It becomes viewed as a technical, abstracted problem, which ignores the desire for East Germans to be consulted, which is why they revolted in the first place.

There is also agreement that everything must be done democratically. Both Germanys have learned their past well.

“Anti-Fascism”

East Germans, in particular, soaked up “anti-fascism”, but perhaps little else, from Communist attempts at indoctrination. West Germans have had a healthy democracy for 40 years (the longest any form of government has lasted since 1918, and very nearly since 1871), and the overwhelming majority of West Germans now have no memory of anything else. Both Germanys know their past, and they know why their neighbors might be nervous. The talk of reunification in the West and renewal in the East thus stress, quite sincerely, the European context of the German problem.

There is a right-radical fringe that talks of regaining territories lost to Poland. (A few of the former have been elected to the Berlin city council. If they speak during council sessions, all members of other parties leave the chambers. There is simply no tolerance for extremism.) Fears of a Fourth Reich, which are articulated occasionally by neighbors, are groundless.

There is an awareness of the many problems ahead. But in the [sic] sense, they are happy problems resulting from having room to maneuver for the first time in 40 years. The mood in Berlin is not as festive as it was those first, post-Wall days. But how could it be? Euphoria by definition is temporary. But memories of that euphoria will help to keep despair away in the coming months, when problems seem especially difficult.

I’m glad as [sic] I was there to share in the beginning.

Roland Spickermann
University of Texas – Permian Basin

Gareth Dale
Brunel University

In late August, 1989, I had just returned to San Antonio from an amazing study abroad sojourn at the Universidad de Guadalajara (México), and I was full of plans to return to study there as soon as I could (I never did). I returned with a severe case of intestinal distress that took several months to clear up. My two best friends, who had been dating each other, broke up unhappily, and it distanced me from both of them. I started spending more time with orchestra friends, with whom I eventually began playing in a woodwind quintet. I declared a Spanish major and planned a tentative senior thesis (never written) on a genre of novel written during the Mexican Revolution. Though I had followed events in Tienanmen Square closely on TV earlier that summer, I did not connect them with events elsewhere. I was not yet a reader of a national newspaper, and though I had a TV in my dorm room, conflict with a roommate assigned to me at the last minute meant that I was not often there to watch it. It may be significant that the only news event of that fall of which I have a visual memory is the Loma Prieta earthquake, of which I saw some news coverage because a friend asked to use the TV. I was flabbergasted by the collapse of a segment of freeway–Wikipedia suggests it might have been Interstate 880. I had had an email account since June, 1988 (for work in the campus computer center), which I accessed only via mainframe. I had used a BBS via to play an RPG that summer–we all thought the 9.6kbps modem was a revelation–but if news was available electronically, I was not aware of it.

I *did* enroll in my first German class that fall, as a second language for the Spanish major. I chose the language because the class met at a convenient time. We watched a videotape series produced by the Goethe Institut in which a TV-style moderator ended each episode with “Und bis zum nächsten Mal, alles Gute!” The videos covered elementary aspects of life in the BRD in the 1980s–I remember feeling particularly triumphant upon discerning the phrase “Die Strassen sind frei! Die Strassen sind aufgelöst!” in a video entitled “Wir haben Ferien!” in which a vacationing family gets caught in a _Stau_. As far as I remember, the professor, herself an émigré in the 1950s, never referred to events in Berlin in November. I have her in fond memory as traditional and indefatigable. In the fall, she made us write awkward _Krimis_ which were published in the newsletter of the now defunct TAGS (Texas Ass’n of German Students); in the winter she recruited us to read Bible texts at a German-language Christmas service (Google reveals that these events were held at Bethany Congregational UCC); and in spring she recruited us to judge a German-speaking contest, which left me with a potentially lifelong dislike of Goethe’s trivial poetry. She told us to say “Hier spricht …” when we phoned someone, a phrase that made my German friends giggle when I finally started using it regularly, in 1995. I took four semesters of grammar with her. I probably owed more of my initial facility with German language to excellent summer instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1990–in which current events were not taken up in class instruction, either.

In German class, I was falling in love with the boy who sat in the seat next to me, a Russian major who was much better at memorizing the genera of nouns than I. That never went anywhere. (Because of him, however, I visited Moscow in January 1991, so the events around the ousting of Mikhail Gorbachev, the week before I started graduate school in August of that year, when I again had free time for TV, seem much clearer in retrospect.) I never memorized most of the German genera and to this day I depend on guessing, reasoning, dictionaries, and “what sounds right” (which is often wrong). I bitterly regret this–but I thought I was going to study Spanish literature and figured the effort would be wasted. The most memorable thing I read that semester was the sonnet “O dulces prendas” by the Spanish poet Garcilaso de la Vega. I still know it by heart, and I leave it to the reader’s judgment whether it is more useful than the genera would be. The synergy between German language and history that led me to study the Reformation didn’t occur until Spring term, 1990, in a religious studies course on the Reformation and its exploitation in notable works of social theory.

I also remember an international politics professor I had that semester telling us off the cuff in a course on the politics of China and Japan that Germany would never be allowed to reunify; such a possibility would create such severe geopolitical destabilization that NATO wouldn’t allow it. I feel less inclined to guffaw about such a statement, though, when I think of all the events I ignored and the mistaken predictions about my own life that colored the fall of 1989.

The highlight of my professional career was covering the astounding changes in Germany and Central Europe in 1989. Within this reportage the individual highlight was the Leipzig march on October 9, 1989; the runner-up was, of course, the November 9 crumbling of the Berlin Wall. In both cases I interviewed principals after the events as well.

Leipzig

Contrary to popular lore, the Berlin Wall did not fall on Nov. 9, 1989. Nor did it fall in Berlin. It fell on October 9 some 120 miles away, in Leipzig. First, civil courage—a rare quality in German history—had to dissolve the four-decade-old mental wall of East German fear. Only thereafter could the cement wall collapse in Berlin.

Here’s how it happened:

When Valentine Kosch set out to join the Monday peace march in Leipzig on October 9, she expected to be shot by the massed East German security forces. She explained to her 6- and 3-year-old daughters that she was going to take a walk with friends so that teachers would be nicer to their pupils — an accurate enough description in her case. And she told her husband that if she did not return by 10 p.m., he should take their girls, move to Dresden, and start a new life there, where the two sisters would not be branded as children of an enemy of the state.

Like most East Germans in the decades after Soviet tanks suppressed the East Berlin workers’ uprising in 1953, Frau Kosch was apolitical. Rather than fighting the constraints of the Communist system, she adapted to them, the better to shape her private sphere with a minimum of outside interference.

However, a few years earlier she had spontaneously introduced Montessori methods in the class she taught in the city school system. For this breach of the rules she had been demoted, in effect, to a classroom for special-needs children. She felt stifled by the rigidity of the educational bureaucracy. She was fed up.

The weekly peace vigils that Kosch joined had begun eight years earlier at the Nikolai Church in the medieval town center. It was just around the corner from the St. Thomas Church where Johann Sebastian Bach was once cantor, and where Martin Luther introduced the Protestant Reformation to Leipzig in 1539. The Monday peace prayers followed a joint call by young East and West German theologians for removal from German soil of both NATO and (more discreetly, if more daringly) Soviet nuclear weapons.

Christian Führer, one of the originators of the appeal, was then the new pastor at the Nikolai Church. He conceived of his mission as succoring all who came to him in need, whether believers or non-believers. He is still revered today as the unpretentious denim-jacketed hero of the 1989 transformation, one of those clerics who showed compassion for all, did not collaborate with the Stasi secret police, and conferred on the Protestant Church a moral authority that it alone possessed in the German Democratic Republic.

Throughout the 1980s, the Nikolai peace vigils had attracted a loyal but tiny number of participants. In 1989 the ranks swelled exponentially as two separate strands of exasperation came together. The first movement consisted of modest reformers, like Kosch, who wanted to hold the GDR to its own constitution and laws and their provisions for fair elections and human rights. The second consisted of the growing number of East Germans who simply wanted to escape to the normality of West Germany’s casual freedom and opulence, in the wake of more than a hundred thousand compatriots who had in recent weeks abandoned country and possessions to flee west via Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland.

People in the two categories disdained each other, but Pastor Führer — while personally urging everyone to stay at home and build the GDR — opened the Nikolai haven to both persuasions. Indeed, he reconciled them to each other, in part through their common interest in his Monday updating of the list of those who shouted out their names as they were secretly hauled off to jail.

With our contemporary knowledge of the outcome, it is hard to recall just how much courage Kosch and her fellow marchers required twenty years ago to carry their candles on that disciplined hour-long walk around the old town, right past the Leipzig Stasi headquarters. At the time many in both East and West feared that although detente was blossoming in Europe, an anachronistic hardline East German hierarchy could hang on for a long time (on the pattern, say, of North Korea today).

The Stasi — whose ranks maintained a much higher ratio in proportion to the population than Hitler’s SS ever enjoyed — still held tight control. And East German citizens still shared with the Bulgarians the reputation of being the most quiescent people in the Soviet bloc.

Moreover, there had been a nasty crackdown over the weekend. On October 7 and 8, security forces had detained several thousand demonstrators in Leipzig, Dresden, and East Berlin on the occasion of the GDR’s gala fortieth anniversary. In Leipzig the watchdogs, tone-deaf to history, had even rehearsed plans to inter thousands of dissidents in new concentration camps. Hospitals had been stocked with extra blood plasma in preparation for a Monday-night clash, and Leipzigers knew it. The city’s security contingents, reinforced to 8,000 — only 2,000 short of the record turnout of 10,000 peace watchers the previous Monday — had been issued with live ammunition and ordered to use whatever means were required to suppress the “counterrevolution,” the most serious crime in the Communist books.

By all measures of the previous 36 years, this show of power should have sufficed to keep would-be marchers safely at home.

But what was the fallback if intimidation didn’t work this time? Throughout the day, as confrontation loomed, the Leipzig party secretaries tried in vain to elicit new instructions from East Berlin party headquarters. Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra director Kurt Masur, theologian Peter Zimmermann, deputy city party secretary Roland Wötzel, and three others hammered out an urgent appeal for nonviolence, to be read in all the churches and broadcast on radio. Marchers braced themselves to hold each other back from any rash action or reaction.

At 6 p.m., the hour the Nikolai congregation was to leave the church and walk around the inner city ring, the top Leipzig party secretaries made one last desperate phone call to East Berlin, to Egon Krenz, the deputy and heir apparent to veteran strongman Erich Honecker. Krenz had risen as high as he had by never sticking his neck out. This night was no exception. He equivocated and said he would have to consult the others.

After Leipzig party secretary Helmut Hackenberg hung up the phone, “a very, very long time passed,” said Wötzel later, recalling the eternity of the next few minutes. Then Hackenberg asked his deputies, “What do we do now?” One shot by a jumpy 18-year-old in the ill-trained factory militia, or one step too far by an angry marcher — or a Stasi provocation — could have triggered an explosion.

Under the circumstances, it was marginally less risky to nullify sacrosanct standing orders than to dare bloodshed that their superiors might later blame on them. The junior secretaries urged Hackenberg to disengage the security forces. He did so. The Leipzig officials fully expected to be expelled from the party for taking such forbidden local initiative.

Yet their wariness about the new mood on the street was justified. Not only were the 10,000 of the previous week not scared away. Astonishingly, they were joined by 60,000 others who also cast aside their fear and walked past Stasi headquarters chanting, “Wir sind das Volk.” “We are the people.”

Germany’s first successful revolution in history was bloodless. East German parliamentary Speaker Horst Sindermann famously admitted later, “We were ready for everything — everything except candles and prayers.”

As Pastor Führer commented this summer, reflecting on that night: “We were afraid day and night, but we had the courage of our convictions. The Bible had taught us the power of peaceful protest and this was the only weapon we had…. It still moves me today to recall that in a secular country, the masses condensed the Beatitudes in the Lord’s Sermon on the Mount into two words: No violence!”

Observant East Berliners and Eastern Europeans quickly realized that in Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s new era, if enough demonstrators turned out, the security forces would not shoot. Within weeks the East German, Czech, Bulgarian, and Romanian Communist leaders were all deposed.

“For the first time in my life,” confided a forty-something West German who had long been inured to the shame of the German failure to resist Hitler in the 1930s or to establish a republic in 1848, “I’m proud to be a German.”

Berlin

History’s judgment will probably call it a draw between rival claims to causality. Structural evolution in the Soviet bloc made the fall of the Berlin Wall possible. But a comedy of errors in East Berlin and Moscow on November 9, 1989 ensured that the wall fell overnight, irreversibly—and that this led to swift unification of the two Germanys that Hitler had bequeathed his nation 44 years earlier.

The key words uttered by SED party spokesman Günter Schabowski just before the main 7 p.m. news broadcasts were: “we decided today to make a regulation that will enable each citizen of the GDR to travel abroad over border crossings of the GDR.”

A reporter asked when this plan would take effect. Schabowski, suddenly wondering whether in the chaos Moscow had ever been consulted about the measure—Berlin was still legally under the administration of the four World War II victors—hesitated. Then, skimming a copy of the draft legislation that had been thrust into his hand minutes before the press conference began, he read out the word “immediately.”

There was total confusion about precisely what it was that was supposed to happen “immediately.” “GDR crossings” might exclude intra-Berlin crossings. And what bureaucrats suddenly gave, bureaucrats might suddenly retract. It had been expected that the leadership would ease travel abroad to try to stanch the flood of young East Germans who were escaping to the West every day via Hungary and Czechoslovakia, never to return. But it was clear that the party intended to maintain control by requiring official exit visas for travel—and by preserving the presence of Soviet forces in East Germany.

As soon as East Berliners heard the 7 p.m. news, then, first a trickle and then a steadily growing horde set out for the wall’s crossing points to West Berlin to test the ambiguity for themselves. By 10:30 p.m., the crush of East Berliners at the Bornholmer crossing was so great that the few hapless guards there—lacking any instructions from their superiors—faced the choice of either letting the crowd through or shooting some at the front. They opted to lift the toll bar. Guards at all the other crossing points then followed suit.

Berliners from both sides partied all night on Kudamm and on top of the wall. West Berliners showered flowers and bananas on the newcomers. And when eastern drivers of the ubiquitous no-frills Trabant cars too wedged their way through the openings, West Berliners greeted them by banging giddily on their hoods and roofs and invented the instant new verb of /trabitrommeln/—Trabi-

Doing an MA at a small institute devoted almost entirely to world
politics and business meant that all 600 of us talked about events
unfolding in central and eastern Europe on a daily basis. I don’t know
that any of us had the foresight to think about predicting what border
would go next – we were mostly interested observers.

On 9 November 1989 I was sitting with about 100 of my closest friends
in our course on the Balance of World Power, taught by Frank Teti, a
diplomatic historian and policy studies scholar who also worked at the
nearby Naval Postgraduate Institute. Suddenly the door to the lecture
hall burst open, and a German student whom my friend and I referred to
as Fraeulein Lippenstift (this detail of her absolute professional
approach to lipstick sticks with me today as a symbol of the Wall
falling) started crying and yelling, “The Wall is down! The Wall is
down!”

I don’t remember that any of us was particularly surprised; we did ask
her a few more questions (she had just gotten off the phone with her
parents in Germany) and slowly other people came in to our lecture
hall to talk about what they were watching on TV. Still, we all sat
there in our seats, talking about what it all meant, until Professor
Teti finally announced “Okay, take a two week break while I go
re-write my lectures.” He walked out and we all went to the student
center to watch TV.

I remember thinking, “Oh no, what in the world am I going to do for a
job now?” and I think I remember that the administration even brought
in some sort of guidance counselors for us. I ended up delving further
into history, and somehow met Hans Coppi (the son of the Rote Kapelle
Hans and Hilde Coppi; Coppi junior was born in jail, his parents
executed, and he went on to become a scholar of the Rote Kapelle in
the GDR – don’t ask me what he was doing in California; I don’t
remember). He was in town in 1991 when I defended my MA thesis on
University Reforms After 1989 in Eastern and Central Europe, and
joined in my audience. The dean, present at the defense, actually
asked what good it would do for me to write about a dead country. Dr.
Coppi was quite helpful in tackling that question for me.

By that time, the First Gulf War had begun, and our commencement
speaker focused on what it meant to live in a post-history world. His
theme centered on new threats, not letting our guard down, etc. I was
really angry then about that take, and still am. In the fall of 1989,
everything had seemed possible. A peaceful revolution had remained
peaceful for the most part, and no matter how naive it might now seem
to some people, the feeling that there was a chance of the world being
different – really different, better – even for a few months, weeks,
or just days, significantly informed how I viewed the world in which I
lived.

My 1989 is about the possibility of change for the better, of not
giving in to cynicism, of people standing together to insist on a
better society – even when that stance is dangerous. My 1989 is
short-hand for it being okay, and even necessary, to work for and
believe – for even a brief moment  - in the existence of utopia.