30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall
Two wonderful articles in the New York Times try to convey the excitement of that not so distant November 9th, as well as the unravelling of events leading to such an unexpected outcome, and the absurdity of practical matters associated with the wall, and the dramatic influence it had on people's lives. I select the passages that struck me most:
"The wall through Berlin was actually two parallel cement barriers with a no man’s land between, and in the in-between haven of this strip rabbits had multiplied like, well, rabbits, often fed by tourists from the observation platforms built along the wall on the West Berlin side.
After the border crossings fell open, thousands of people began chipping away at the wall itself — a tough, noisy and, in my case, painful exercise (I smashed my thumb with a hammer). Before long, gaps appeared in the wall, and out hopped the bunnies, into what they probably believed was a world paved with lettuce. Alas, it proved to be a world teeming with cats, dogs and cars."
"A generation has passed since that fateful day — more years than the 28 years in which the wall loomed. The exhilaration that seized us all back then seems almost quaintly utopian now. The promise of coming together in a free and democratic world has given way, in many places, to new divisions and new hostilities; nationalistic and tribal instincts are on the loose, and the lifting of draconian censorship has been replaced by the deeply troubling information jungle of the internet and the ubiquity of surveillance technology that the Stasi could scarcely imagine."
"When I think back on that long, extraordinary night, I refuse to accept that nothing changed, that the world stayed just as bad, only in different ways, that the hopes raised were false.
The people who flooded through the wall that night, and all the other people who rose up against tyranny across the crumbling Soviet empire, and then in “color” revolutions of that empire’s corrupt successors, and then in the Arab world, and now in Hong Kong and Chile, demonstrate that tyranny is not the choice of the tyrannized, that hope never dies behind a wall, and people will finally crash through and dance their hearts out in the name of freedom."
__________
"The youngest victim was 15-month-old Holger H., who suffocated when his mother tried to quiet him while the truck his family was hiding in was being searched on Jan. 22, 1971. The parents made it across before realizing that their baby was dead."
"Years later, after reading his own Stasi file, he learned that special commandos had bugged his home, updating the technology whenever he was on holiday with his family."
"That, said Axel Klausmeier, director of the Berlin Wall Foundation, was perhaps the greatest miracle of that night. “It was a peaceful revolution, the first of its kind,” he said. “They were prepared for everything, except candles and prayers.”"
"when the Cold War’s most notorious armed border opened overnight, and was torn apart in the days that followed, it was not in the end the result of some carefully crafted geopolitical grand bargain.
It was, at the most basic level at least, the wondrous result of human error, spontaneity and individual courage.
Against the backdrop of mass protests and a wave of eastern German refugees that had already fled the country via Hungary and what was then Czechoslovakia, Günter Schabowski, the leader of the East Berlin Communist Party, convened journalists to announce a series of reforms to ease travel restrictions.
When asked when the new rules would take effect, Mr. Schabowski paused and studied the notes before him with a furrowed brow. Then he stumbled through a partially intelligible answer, declaring, “It takes effect, as far as I know... it is now... immediately.” It was a mistake. The Politburo had planned nothing of the sort. The idea had been to appease the growing resistance movement with minor adjustments to visa rules — and also to retain the power to deny travel.
But many took Mr. Schabowski by his word."
"Complacency is dangerous, said Ms. Applebaum: “The lesson is: Societies that don’t reform, die.”"
