The Fall of the Wall

With so much navel-gazing going on about the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago today, I’ll pull out my own lint.

In 1979, I traveled alone by train from Nuremburg, the former soul of Nazi power, to West Berlin, a capitalist island in a sea of Communist waters. On the way, I sat in a compartment with a linguistic professor from West Germany. Since she spoke perfect English and I spoke little German, we had a great discussion about how Germany, the west in particular, had not atoned for the crimes it committed against humanity in World War II.

The Wall, or division, was a small price to pay, she allowed, for the havoc and horror that Germans unleashed on Europe and Russia. It was easy for her to say since she didn’t live in East Germany (GDR or DDR – Deutsche Democratik Republik). Still she saved my ass when the Stasi (East German secret police) came through the train and started to hassle me, a 23-year-old punk from California.

Outside the train station in West Berlin, I stood staring at the ridiculously complicated map. (Germans are terrible mapmakers). Suddenly, a car came screeching to a halt in front of me and the passenger door flew open. Was this the Stasi again? Or the CIA?

No, it was a middle-aged couple who were children during the Berlin Airlift in the late 1940s. They could tell instantly tell that I was an American and they wanted to give me a lift to a youth hostel I had read about. I got in their small four-door car and along the way they thanked Americans for all that we did back then. They had just been grocery shopping and when they dropped me off at the hostel, they filled my arms with their food. They raced off and I stood there dumbfounded.

Where was I?

I was in the center of east-west divide, between capitalism and communism, between reality and façade.

On the train ride through East Germany, we passed by small burgs that reminded me of Baja California: squalor and poverty. What would Berlin offer?

West Berlin was wild, decidedly western and relatively prosperous. It was living color. East Berlin was hollow, drab and lifeless. The guided tour of East Berlin was like the Universal City tram ride except that there were no jokes, corny or not. There were few people and store windows were barely stocked with small pyramids of goods. It was as phony as Hollywood without the glitz. It was a place without color, not in the American sense, but in the sense of black-and-white films.

It was easy to see then that this charade, this wall, wouldn’t last.

Ten years later it didn’t.

How did this happen?

In America, the narrative goes like this: President Ronald Reagan said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” and moments later the wall came tumbling down.

In actuality, Reagan uttered his words in 1987, as Alzheimer’s disease began to take over his life. By November 1989, Reagan was long gone from office.

What started in Gdansk, Poland, in 1980 with the Solidarity movement, finally reverberated across the Eastern Bloc and through Moscow itself in 1989.

Without Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Solidarity would have never become the force that it became and the Berlin Wall would have never come down.

Gorbachev, through glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring), ensured the eventual collapse of the wall in 1989 and the Soviet Union itself in 1991.

But, it has to be noted that the Soviet Union was beginning to crumble in the 1970s as more “easterners,” -- be they athletes, artists or diplomats – traveled to the west. They could see for themselves the lie that the Communists had foisted on the Soviet “Union,” the Baltics, Balkans and Eastern Europe. Much as the Crimean War of 1854 led to “openness” in Russia to western ideas which ultimately led to the Communist Revolution of 1917, so did the exchanges – athletic, artistic and diplomatic – lead to the fall of repression and totalitarianism beginning in 1989.

Yes, Reagan played his part, but the real credit belongs to Lech Walesa (the leader of Solidarity), Gorbachev and the East Germans who wanted freedom more than anything else.

They are the heroes we need to remember today, the 20th anniversary of the fall of the wall.