NATO – A Bridge Across Time - Newsdesk Media

Wall was opened for the same reason that
it was built 28 years previously: to keep the
citizens inside the country. We all know
how this experiment turned out. It ended
with the collapse of the dictatorship of old
men – not only in the GDR, but also in the
Soviet Union and its satellite states.
On the day of the fall of the Berlin
Wall I found myself in Dartmouth, New
Hampshire, about as conceivably far away
as possible from the once-in-a-century
event. However, I had declared in the New
York Times Magazine of June 1989, in an
article titled “If the wall came tumbling
down,” that the fall of the Berlin Wall was
“quite possible.” (“Ironically,” I modified
in the subtitle, “the two Germanys would
lose the only thing still unifying them.”)
But my prophetic mood wasn’t enough to
make me sit down by the Berlin Wall, wait
for my prophecy to come true or resist
the temptation of being called to the U.S.
In my office, in the German department,
I was busy revising the New York Times
article for the Nouvel Observateur when
a colleague stuck his head into my office
and asked, “Have you already heard? The
Berlin Wall is open. Trabis are driving up
and down Kurfürstendamm.”
How do you react to the news of a
surprising event, which you yourself
predicted? Utter surprise. First I laughed
disbelievingly, asked almost angrily for
him to repeat what he said, then was
overwhelmed first with joy, then again
disbelief until eventually I blurted out
as millions of Germans did on that day
“Incredible.” I have to admit that amid a
torrent of emotions I also rather selfishly
wondered why they couldn’t have waited
with the opening of the Berlin Wall
until after my article had appeared in
Nouvel Observateur.
The following day I enjoyed the
sensation of being greeted in the college
corridors over and over again with raised
thumbs and the word “congratulations.”
People I knew and didn’t know patted me
approvingly on the back, as though I had
personally given the order to bring the wall
down. Suddenly it felt good to be a German
in the U.S. As quickly as I could, I packed up
my things in Dartmouth, traveled back to
Berlin and asked everyone I met how they
had experienced the first days after the fall
of the Berlin Wall.
Many stories and images have imprinted
themselves in my memory. There was the
woman from East Berlin who arrived at
the suddenly open border checkpoint, in
her nightshirt and slippers, who looked
confusedly at the ground and asked the
border official: “Where is the border?
Am I in the West now?” When the official
confirmed that she was, she walked two
more steps westward, and then calmly
turned round and started back for home.
A nursery teacher from West Berlin
told me about eight young people who
squeezed out of a Trabi outside her
nursery. They frightened the life out
of some youngsters from the West by
hugging them and dancing with them in
the streets. A Turkish woman from the
Akarsa health center was running to the
Wall together with 100 other Turkish
women on November 10. They all cheered
and greeted the Germans who came over in
their stone-washed jeans. But one of them
said: “Crikey, the men are all so ugly!” Also
unforgettable is the conscientious library
user from East Berlin who, shortly before
the erection of the Wall, had borrowed
a book from the American Memorial
Library. After 28 years he had nothing
more urgent to do than to return it.
The standard Hollywood image of the
blond, uniform-wearing German who
clicks his heels and screams “At your
command, Senior Storm Unit Leader,”
was replaced overnight by a new image:
the jubilant, celebrating, exuberant
German, who infected the whole world
with his high spirits.
As the Berlin Wall fell, it became even
more of a worldwide icon, a powerful
symbol for the suppression of freedom,
the very antithesis of the Statue of Liberty.
That’s exactly the reason why millions
of people in distant countries applauded
when this monstrosity suddenly lost
its power following that stumbling
announcement.
In retrospect, the path from the
building of the Wall to reunification
appears short and inevitable – the
accession of the GDR to the FGR was
implemented on October 3, 1990. In
reality this reunification was a miracle
that had not appeared in any political
probability calculations. In fact, the
Germans owe their reunification to the
interplay between half a population
and four men: half the population was
the people of the GDR, the four men
were Mikhail Gorbachev, George W.
Bush, Helmut Kohl and Hans-Dietrich
Genscher. The only woman governing in
Europe at the time, Margaret Thatcher,
made no secret of the fact that she simply
detested the idea of reunification of
the two German states. Her French and
Italian colleagues expressed themselves
rather more diplomatically, and
confirmed half-heartedly the right to selfdetermination,
but did everything behind
this rhetorical backdrop to undermine
the threatening Greater Germany. Honi
soit qui mal y pense – the Germans had
given their neighbors enough reasons for
apprehension during the two world wars.
Admittedly, at this point, one has to
acknowledge a surprising dissent between
governments and governed people,
which is usually overlooked. The people
of Western Europe revealed in several
opinion polls that the majority agreed with
their German neighbors’ reunification
or – as in Poland’s case – an impressive
majority. As the wind of change blew in,
the Western European governments and
the intellectuals stared with alarm towards
22 The Atlantic Council