We throw chocolates up to the putty-faced East German frontier troops, as they stand guard – against whom? defending what? – atop a Wall that since yesterday has become useless. They push the chocs away with their boots. One of the West Berliners standing next to me tries again: “Wouldn’t you like a West-cigarette?” Sheepish refusal. Then I ask: “Why are you there?” This time, I get an answer: “Interview requests must be registered in advance, on this side as on yours.”

Lines scribbled in my notebook. Surreal moments from the greatest turning point of our time. In German, all nouns take an initial capital letter, so even a bungalow wall is a Mauer with a capital M. In English, there are many walls, but only one Wall. It’s the one that “fell” on the night of Thursday 9 November 1989, giving us history’s new rhyme: the fall of the Wall.

There are things in my notebook which I later published and therefore always remember: the breathless, denim-jacketed couple from the provinces asking: “Excuse me, is this the way out?”; the man walking up Friedrichstrasse who exclaimed “28 years and 91 days!” (that’s how long he had been stuck behind the Wall); the improvised poster proclaiming “Only today is the war really over”.

But there are other passages that I had quite forgotten, and some of them don’t fit so comfortably into hindsight’s fairytale of liberation. For example, during an onstage discussion at a well-known East Berlin theatre, three days after the Wall’s fall, Markus “Mischa” Wolf, the longtime East German spy chief who had become a Gorbachevite reformer after his retirement a few years earlier, still defended the Stasi.

“Most of Stasi not torturers, beasts,” recorded my indignant pencil, but “decent, clean people – anständige, saubere Menschen”. Wolf insisted he had no responsibility for the persecution of dissidents (sound of Pontius Pilate washing hands) and anyway, there “must be an apparatus for the security of the state and individual citizens as in any developed country”. Then, expressing its holder’s evident amazement, my pencil added “Loud applause!!”

Some of those who applauded loudly then, in the Deutsches Theater, will have re-remembered their own reaction by now. Nietszche: “‘I did that,’ says my memory. ‘I can’t have done that,’ says my pride, and remains implacable. Finally, memory gives way.”

And then there were the two American television reporters I overheard conversing at the airport on the way home: “Good story”, “Yeah, kinda trailed off yesterday and today”, “Yeah, audience interest has gone right down”, “Yeah …” I bet that is not how they tell the story now. Ah, what memories.

* * *



My father landed with the first wave of allied forces on D-day, 6 June 1944. He used to go back sometimes for anniversary events on the Normandy beaches, standing to attention in a dark suit, wearing his campaign medals and the miniature of his Military Cross. The 25th anniversary of those landings was in 1969 – so reminiscing about the fall of the Berlin Wall today is like talking about your memories of D-day in the year the Beatles released Abbey Road and Neil Armstrong landed on the moon. I would not presume to compare my experience to my father’s. He risked his life for the freedom of his nation and other nations; I just carried a notebook. Yet the calendar tells me that I must seem, to someone born after the Wall’s fall, as much a veteran, repeating well-worn tales of vanished times, as my father would have been in 1969. “Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot, / But he’ll remember with advantages / What feats he did that day ...” and so on, and so forth, while bored schoolchildren thumb messages on their smartphones.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest West Berlin, 1961. A young woman talks to her mother on the eastern side of the newly erected Wall. Photograph: Bettmann/CORBIS

So why not leave it to a new generation of bright-eyed historians, versed in all the documents, armed with their interrogations of the survivors, cognisant of all the consequences, wise after the event? Let them tell us “how it really was”, in the famous phrase of the father of modern historiography, Leopold von Ranke (who taught at Berlin’s leading university, now called the Humboldt University, which itself endured decades behind the Wall).

On a plane back from Warsaw last week, I finished a new book by the American historian Mary Elise Sarotte. It is called The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall. Surprisingly, she opens with a two-page vignette of NBC’s Tom Brokaw reporting from the West Berlin side of the about-to-open Wall. Brokaw? Why Brokaw? If you had said that name to an East Berliner, he might well have thought Brokaw was a small town in Poland. Or she would have asked the Berlinisch equivalent of “Who the fuck is he?”

That vignette may attract a few American readers, but what mattered to the East Germans was the news anchors whom they regularly watched on the main West German television channels. (Western broadcasts reached most of East Germany, apart from a remote corner, popularly known as the Valley of the Clueless). Authoritative figures such as the silver haired, avuncular ARD anchorman Hanns-Joachim Friedrichs – who declared, at around 10.40pm: “This 9th of November is a historic day. The GDR has announced that its borders are, starting immediately, open for everyone.” There were already crowds at some border crossings, but this West German news – which completely overwhelmed East German state television warnings that “journeys must be applied for!” – was what brought ever larger streams of East Berliners pouring towards the concrete barrier that had imprisoned them since 1961.

Once you get past Sarotte’s Brokaw opening, it turns out she has produced a skilful, scrupulously documented, nuanced reconstruction of how a series of mistakes by East German leaders and officials – and individual decisions made by border post commanders, such as Harald Jäger, on duty that night at the Bornholmer Strasse crossing – turned what was meant to be a carefully managed process of controlled opening (“journeys must be applied for”) into the world’s most celebrated festival of popular liberation. Those fateful missteps included the wording of an official document on travel liberalisation to include Berlin as well as the rest of the inter-German frontier, and the famous moment when Politburo member Günter Schabowski at a crucial press conference early on the evening of 9 November, when he suggested people could travel “right away”. On such fumbles, contingencies and individual choices, Sarotte suggests, history turns.

Her subtitle – “the accidental opening” – is both wrong and right. Wrong in the sense that the old, Wall-sealed regime in East Berlin could not have carried on as before, given what Mikhail Gorbachev was prepared to encourage – far-reaching reform – and, even more important, what he was willing to accept: peaceful negotiated revolution, as was already happening in Poland and Hungary. Right in the sense that the “accidental” way in which this happened, from those spontaneous East German popular reactions to West German television reporting of East German officials’ blunders, all the way to the pentecostal scenes of that night of wonders, changed everything for ever: in Berlin, Germany, Europe, the world.

As she observes, the “why” is inseparable from the “how”. In this case, the “how” then became both the essence of the event and a key determinant of its consequences. Not only did it produce unforgettable images that in an important sense are the event (in this respect comparable, though in shades of light rather than dark, to the collapse of the twin towers in New York on 11 September 2001). It marked the moment when power shifted decisively from the so-called Machthaber – powerholders – to the people. Because everyone said the Wall was open, the Wall was open. Because everyone said everything had changed, everything had changed.

* * *



All this the historian can tell. So is there anything that the person who was there at the time does know – and those who come after do not? Most obviously, we know what it felt like at the time. In the case of the opening of the Wall, this is not half as easy to convey as you might think. Everyone can imagine, or at least can think they can imagine, what it is like to land on a Normandy beach, under Wehrmacht machine-gun fire, dodging mines, knowing that every moment might be your last. What we end up picturing in our mind’s eye may be more Tom Hanks than the historical reality – a reality which, when I interviewed him towards the end of his life, my father also found it difficult to evoke, or perhaps could not bring himself to describe – but the drama is obvious. Hence the endless films and video games based on the second world war.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Thousands of people rushed to the Berlin Wall in the first few days after its opening on 9 November, 1989. Photograph: Robert Wallis/ /Corbis

The true drama of 9 November 1989 is harder to recapture. For a start, it is not the one you see on the vast majority of photographs and video clips, which show the side of the Wall covered in colourful graffiti. For that was the western side, the free side, the one that already enjoyed freedom of expression – hence all the colourful graffiti.

Of course this was a big moment for West Berliners, and for West Germans altogether, but it was not the day of unification. That came nearly a year later, on 3 October 1990, after a majority of East Germans had voted to join West Germany, and Helmut Kohl and George HW Bush had skilfully negotiated it with Gorbachev. Wall’s fall was the day of liberation, for those behind the Wall, not the day of unification for those in front of it.

It was the other side of the concrete barrier that mattered, the side that people had risked their lives to climb over

So it was the other side of the roughcast concrete barrier that mattered, the side that people did not spray with aerosol cans but had risked their lives to climb over. The emotional quality of this liberation can only be captured if you can imagine what it was like to live behind that “anti-fascist protection rampart” (its mendacious official name) for all your life, never setting foot in the western half of your own city, and with the expectation that this would continue for years to come.

Here is the other thing that even the finest historians struggle to recover: the sense of what people at the time did not know. To those who lived behind it, the Berlin Wall had become something almost like the Alps, a seemingly unchangeable fact of physical geography. Even when things began to change so dramatically in Poland and Hungary, most people just did not believe the Alps could crumble. After all, there was a nuclear-armed empire holding them up. In summer 1989 I came hot foot from Warsaw and Budapest to visit a small circle of dissident friends in East Berlin, having finally been granted an East German visa after long exclusion. “Well,” the gloomy dissidents said, “it may be possible in Poland and Hungary, but not here.”

However much the historian warns against the pitfalls of hindsight, you simply cannot un-know your own and your readers’ knowledge of what came afterwards. So even if you do not fall into the trap of writing history as if that which actually happened somehow had to happen – what Henri Bergson called “the illusions of retrospective determinism” – it is almost impossible to recreate the emotional intensity of the moment of liberation. For that intensity came from having lived for most, if not all, your life with the aching certainty that something like this was, precisely, impossible.

My East German friend Werner Krätschell came closest to capturing it. Having heard the “strange piece of news” from a French journalist, he scooped up his 20-year-old daughter Konstanze and her 21-year-old friend Astrid, who had never been in the west. They leapt into his Wartburg car and puttered down to the Bornholmer Strasse border crossing. As he wrote soon afterwards, in a piece for Granta: “Dream and reality become confused. The guards let us through: the girls cry. They cling together tightly on the back seat, as if they’re expecting an air raid.” West Berliners greet them, waving, cheering, shouting. “Astrid, suddenly, tells me to stop the car at the next intersection. She wants only to put her foot down on the street, just once. Touching the ground. Armstrong after the moon landing.”

* * *

The German equivalent of the phrase “hindsight is 20:20” is im Nachhinein sind alle klüger – in retrospect everyone is wiser. And so they are. The multitude of those who recall that they somehow foresaw these events has grown like the relics of the true cross. But they didn’t: not the spooks, not the pundits, not the politicians, not the diplomats, not the political scientists – and not me either. To be sure, some insisted the Wall would come down and Germany would be united, but none foresaw when and, above all, how; and the how was everything.

A former MI6 man once told me that on the very evening of 9 November he had been meeting with his colleagues from the West German foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst. The West German spies were in the middle of telling the British spooks, clearly on the basis of their excellent East German sources, that change in East Germany would only come very slowly, perhaps in a matter of years, when someone put his head round the door and said: “Turn on the television: the Wall’s open!”

But one person I knew did foresee these events, precisely as they would happen. When I first went to live in West Berlin, in 1978, I ended up camping on the floor of the slightly run-down flat of a delightful, white-haired old lady called Ursula von Krosigk. The dusty old sofa next to which I pitched my sleeping bag was propped up by a prewar Baedeker guide to Dresden, and I remember thinking, as I nodded off to sleep, that this was probably all a prewar Baedeker of Dresden was good for, given the devastation of that city by Allied bombing raids. (These days, after a wonderful effort of reconstruction, the old guidebook is probably quite usable again, as is the map of central Berlin in my 1923 Baedeker, which back then was also a historical curiosity.)

Ursula had seen a lot of German history. Her uncle was Hitler’s finance minister, and she remembered driving out to his country estate on the morning after that other 9 November: Kristallnacht in 1938. They drove past pavements covered with glass from the shattered windows of plundered Jewish shops. “What did the people in the car say?” I asked. “No one said a word.”

The multitude of those who recall that they somehow foresaw these events has grown like the relics of the true cross

A Prussian noblewoman in her bones, but also bohemian, warmhearted and unconventional, Ursula’s own wartime friends had included some of the German resistance leaders who ended up trying to assassinate Hitler. Her family estate was now in East Germany, expropriated. Ursula had a way of tossing her head when she was about to say something she considered a little risky or original. At breakfast one day – Leonid Brezhnev was still in the Kremlin, and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia a recent memory – she tossed her head and, after a slight, shy hesitation, confided: “You know, last night I had a dream.” She had dreamt that, by accident, just for one night, the Berlin Wall was opened. And in the course of that night so many people went to and fro, embracing each other, with tears in their eyes, that the Wall could never be closed again. A dream, you understand, just a dream.

* * *

Five years ago I participated in extensive and exhaustive celebrations of the 20th anniversary of the velvet revolutions of 1989 – yesterday Munich, today Prague, tomorrow Warsaw – and when they were over, I breathed a sigh of relief. Well at least, I thought, I can put that aside for another 10 years, until the 30th anniversary in 2019, and get back to writing my book about free speech. How wrong I was. Just three or four years later, the emails started crawling in. A lecture here? An article there? Of the marking – and marketing – of the Wall’s fall there shall apparently be no end. The scale of commemoration both reflects and buttresses the scale of the event.

1989 has become the new 1789: at once a turning point and a reference point. Twenty-five years on, it has given us what is, politically, the best Germany we have ever had. (Culturally, other Germanies have been more interesting, but if I have to choose between Wagner and democracy, I’ll choose democracy.) It has made possible the Europe we have today, with all its freedoms and all its faults. There is no corner of the world its consequences have not touched. Those consequences have been of two kinds: the direct results of what actually happened, and the ways in which people read and misread it, which themselves produce unintended consequences.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest US President Ronald Reagan makes his ‘Tear down this wall!’ speech in Berlin in 1987. Photograph: Mike Sargent/AFP/Getty Images

The fall of the Wall has become a kind of master metaphor (or meta-metaphor) of our age, used especially by western politicians, not just to represent, but to predict, the forward march of freedom. “The Wall is gone,” intoned a recently inaugurated President George W Bush on 1 May 2001, conjuring a sunlit international landscape. (This was, needless to say, before 9/11.) “A wall came down in Berlin,” President-elect Barack Obama said, in his acceptance speech in Chicago on the night of 4 November 2008, evoking wonders past, present and to come. “The Berlin Wall symbolised a world divided and it defined an entire era …” declared Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in her speech about internet freedom in 2010, “but even as networks spread to nations around the globe, virtual walls are cropping up in place of visible walls.” The great firewall of China, for example. Where Ronald Reagan had stood in front of the Berlin Wall and cried, “Mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”, Clinton stood in the Newseum in Washington and cried, in effect, “Mister Hu, tear down this firewall!” But Xi Jinping succeeded Hu Jintao, and China’s internet firewall – sorry, “Golden Shield” – is still there. Everyone drew their own lessons from the fall of the Wall, and China’s Leninist leaders learned not to let power slip from their fingers by making the mistakes of Gorbachev and East European communist leaders.

The metaphor has led us astray in other ways. There is no doubt that for at least some neo-conservatives, such as Paul Wolfowitz, the image of what happened in Eastern Europe in and after 1989 played a part in their hopes for a post-invasion Iraq. A generation of journalists, formed by the personal experience or collective media-memory of Europe’s velvet revolutions, greeted the Arab Spring of 2011 as if it might be 1989 in sandals. (I plead guilty to sharing those hopes.) Meanwhile, a former KGB officer who had resentfully witnessed the emergence of people power while serving in East Germany, one Vladimir Putin, is trying to roll back the wheel of history and restore as much as he can of the Russian empire, by violence and lies.

* * *

Most people know the famous story, beloved of conference speakers the world over, in which the Chinese premier Zhou Enlai, asked at a meeting with President Richard Nixon in 1972 about the consequences of the French Revolution, replied that it was “too soon to say”. But the story is wrong: the American diplomat who was interpreting for Nixon, Charles W Freeman, says with confidence that the subject of conversation at that point was clearly the protests in Paris in May 1968, not July 1789. Less than four years later, it simply was too soon to say. So Zhou Enlai’s famous reply was actually quite banal – yet is now universally reinterpreted as a gem of sempiternal Chinese wisdom.

If he had said it, however, it would have been wise. For the meaning and implications of very large events do take decades and even centuries to unfold. The historian François Furet caused a furore in France when he declared, in 1978, that “the French revolution is over”. Over? So soon? How dare he. This year, we have seen many reinterpretations of 1914, not least in the light of Vladimir Putin’s behaviour in 2014. The kaleidoscope never stops turning. So it will be with the fall of the Wall. To my mind, there are few if any big questions left about what happened, and how, although the battle of historical interpretations will surely continue for decades to come. (For example, Russianists will forever highlight the role of Gorbachev, Central Europeanists, that of dissident leaders like Václav Havel.)

There remain, however, big questions about what it means and where it leads. Among these, one stands out for me: where are the 89ers? In my lifetime, there have been only two utterly distinctive generations – the 68ers and the 39ers. The 39ers were formed by the experience of the second world war and its aftermath: men like my father, a generation instantly recognisable wherever you find them. Then there are the 68ers, entirely different in style, initially rebelling against the 39ers, much given (at least in their youth) to wine, sex and weed, but also full of idealistic determination to change European society, making it socially and culturally more liberal. Yet 1989 was clearly a much bigger historical event than 1968. So where are the 89ers?

The 39ers and 68ers were defined by their experiences during and after 1939 and 1968; those who were most active in the events of 1989, by contrast, had arguably been shaped to a greater degree by earlier experiences. (Not a few of them were 68ers). There is, to be sure, a cohort of people who were in their late teens or early 20s when the Wall came down, and now play a leading role in European debates. Yet theirs is nothing like as sharply defined a generation as the other two.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mstislav Rostropovich in 1989. Photograph: Action Press/Rex Features

I have my own theory about this – or perhaps it is just an illusory hope. I believe that the 89ers may not be those who were active then, or youthful witnesses at the time, but those who were born in or around 1989, and are only now moving from the university of learning to that of life. The world they enter is in many ways less promising than the one we espied as dawn rose over the Brandenburg Gate on Friday, 10 November 1989. Then, Europe and freedom seemed to be marching forward as never before, arm in arm, to the strains of Bach’s Sarabande, played by Mstislav Rostropovich in front of the Wall – and subsequently to Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. Twenty-five years on, Europe is in crisis. Free countries are threatened by violent Islamists (a threat partly – though only partly, it is important to emphasise – attributable to the “Berlin to Baghdad” hubris that took us into Iraq). Chinese-style authoritarian capitalism – itself a product of lessons learned by China’s Leninist leaders from the Wall’s fall – looks more attractive to many people outside the traditional west, while unbridled, unequal western financial capitalism (also partly attributable to post-1989 hubris) looks less so.

So where are the 89ers? It is not that this generation has been silent, interested only in private life, eyes and thumbs down on the screen of a smartphone, as grey-haired old 68ers sometimes moan. 89ers have camped out on the streets of cities from New York to Madrid, to demand back a future that the post-Wall world seemed first to promise, and then bankers and politicians to have stolen from them. 89ers have been in the forefront of protests against bad laws that threatened to curb internet freedom. Edward Snowden, who was six when the Wall came down, can be seen as both a voice and a hero of 89ers.

But it is not yet clear what broader political vision this generation represents, how it will change Europe and whether it will appeal to a wider world. Indeed, if it is to succeed, this cannot just be a western generation, in the way the 39ers and 68ers largely were. As important, probably more so, are the 89ers in Beijing, Delhi and São Paolo.

I don’t know whether the 89ers will come together as a defining political generation, how they will act and – as important – how they will react when “stuff happens”, as stuff will. But one thing is clear: their action (or inaction) will determine how we read the Wall’s fall on its 50th anniversary. On them will depend the future of our past.

Timothy Garton Ash’s eyewitness account of 1989, The Magic Lantern, is reissued as an e-book by Atlantic Books. He will be lecturing about Germany’s 25 years at the British Museum on 28 November.



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