For those too young…

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In a way, I wish significant parts of it had been preserved.  We need to remember the Zimmerstraße death zone.  We need to remember people like Peter Fechter, who was left to bleed to death in a ditch after being shot during an escape attempt.  We can never forget the simple truth that socialism can only be enacted on a large scale through oppression and force upon the governed.

The Wall may have been the largest public symbol of that fact. Its fall was a huge victory, both in idea and act, but schoolchildren need to know that some systems are so cruel, so harsh and so repressive that the risk of death is acceptable if it means escaping.

I grew up in a world that had a divided Europe.  You had NATO and you had the Warsaw Pact.  Germany was split into the Federal Republic in the west and the German Democratic Republic in the east.  “Russia” was actually encompassed by the Soviet Union, an entity whose tendrils stretched from the Sea of Japan to the Baltic Sea.  Certain nations were bound under a single arbitrary flag, such as Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.

It was Them and Us.  Our guys were Reagan and Thatcher.  Their guys were Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko.  Folks used phrases like Détente and Neue Ostpolitik quite a bit.

In the middle of the 1980’s, things started changing.  Not in any grand, dramatic way, mind you.  But they were changing.  In the USSR, any sort of reform was paramount to a revolution.

Upon his ascension, Premier Gorbachev set the wheels in motion.  His glasnost programs lifted much of the shadow of censorship and disinformation, and he sponsored legislation to allow the private ownership of certain businesses.

The USSR was losing its satellite republics, and rather than resort to reprisals as they had in Hungary thirty years earlier, they began allowing them to leave without incident.  Gorbachev started dismantling the war effort in Afghanistan.  The writing was on the wall:  the Cold War was winding down.

Apparently, the GDR hadn’t received the memo.  Head of state Erich Honecker rebuffed and renounced Gorbachev’s reforms.  He’d expanded the reach and powers of the Stasi and refused to acknowledge the human rights provisions of the Helsinki Accords.  This was a man who stated, “the Wall will be standing in 50 and even in 100 years, if the reasons for it are not yet removed.”

In 1989, he was replaced by Egon Krenz.  Though much of the USSR had already begun the march towards liberalization, the GDR was sticking to its reactionary stance.  Hungary and Czechoslovakia had lifted most travel restrictions, and citizens from the GDR were defecting to the West through those countries.  In an interview with Time magazine,  Krenz vowed to preserve the system, but promised “socialism with a human face.”

It was a small step, but the Wall still stood.

Then something odd happened.  There were talks in the Politburo about easing travel restrictions between East and West Germany, but implementation had been postponed.  Spokesman Günter Schabowski had been informed of the plans but had been given spotty information.  He let the matter slip during a press conference, and it spread like wildfire over the next few hours. By the next day, Germans in the East had flocked to several portions of the border and were demanding to be let across.

The Wall still stood, but the reasons for it had been removed.

Lieutenant-Colonel Harald Jäger was in charge of the checkpoint at Bornholmer Straße. Confronted with athe sudden crowds, he was given the choice between acquiescence and violence. Lacking direction from his superiors, he chose the former.  The barrier was opened.

Over the next few days, the Wall itself would be struck down, by bulldozer, by pickaxe, by bare hands.

The rest is history.

The older I get, the more I realize how fluid the very idea of “history” can be.  I’d grown up with the idea of the Wall, and to see it dismantled was somehow surreal.  The maps I’d known my whole life were changing.  I wonder if children are seeing the old maps in school today.  I fervently hope they are.  While November 9 marks a great reconciliation, and one well worth celebrating, it’s also a time for remembrance.