But then, once in a lifetime

The longed-for tidal wave

Of justice can rise up

And hope and history rhyme.

The night the Berlin Wall opened was like that. Thirty years on, I know people who were there and whose eyes fill with tears when they try to talk about it. Seamus Heaney understood how the “moment of rhyme”, when the right thing suddenly and unexpectedly and enormously happens, can last for a lifetime. The unrepeatable shock of recognition.

I have always liked the story of the English girl who flew to Berlin one winter evening to see her German lover. He lived in Kreuzberg, in the west part of the city but near the wall. After a happy night and day, she said: “Aren’t you starving? I must go out and find us something to eat.” It was late and dark. But she was back in a few minutes, saying: “It’s weird. The street’s full of shabby people all laughing and eating bananas.” “Oh, my God!” said her man. “Oh, my God! I know what’s happened…”

Some voices, print and broadcast, have started talking about how the wall was overthrown by a popular rising. They use the pictures from the next days and nights, as delirious young men and women took pickaxes and hammers to the wall while the guards looked on. But it wasn’t quite like that. It was Heaney’s “longed-for tidal wave”, brimming up, overflowing obstacles and sea-walls, seeping into steel-hard party minds and turning them to waterlogged bundles of uncertainty.

When the government spokesman Günter Schabowski gave his idiotic press conference that day, mumbling to the foreign correspondents that new orders sort of meant that new crossing-points from the German Democratic Republic were probably sort of open, he was already afloat in that wave. Everything was disintegrating around him. Who’s in charge? Don’t tell me it’s up to me now. But the labels were washing off all the tins. There had indeed been a popular rising, but earlier and elsewhere. Hundreds of thousands of people had defied the state with weekly protest marches through the main streets of Leipzig. “We are the people!” The state’s armed forces turned out. Once, they would have obeyed the order to open fire. This time, they didn’t. Somebody decided not to give the order. Soon, millions were gathering in Berlin, talking about free speech, free elections, punishment for criminal tyrants. Some had begun to chant: “We are one people!”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Demonstrators form a human chain in Leipzig, then part of East Germany, in 1989. Photograph: Focus / Tar / Rex Features

The tide was European. Long before the wall opened, the Soviet empire had begun to liquefy. In Poland that June, the Communist party had been defeated in almost-free elections and a gentle Catholic intellectual had become prime minister. In August, the peoples of the Baltic republics formed a human chain from Vilnius to Tallinn, calling for independence. The astute Communist leadership in Hungary had seen what was coming and – for a time – hijacked the movement for change; they surfed the rising tide in a hasty ark built to carry liberal dissidents as well as repentant Stalinists.

But the moon that dragged the tide forward was Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev. “Life itself teaches,” he loved to say. Life was teaching him that the gigantic Soviet presence in eastern Europe, military and political, was nothing but an obstacle to his plans to end the arms race and reform the Soviet Union. Life itself, on the other hand, seemed to be teaching some Communist leaders absolutely nothing.

What creeps they were, Gorbachev plainly thought: Erich Honecker, General Jaruzelski, Miloš Jakeš… ? By making it clear that the Soviet Union would no longer rescue them if they got into trouble, he doomed them to open their societies or perish. Some did both, drowned by reforms they had permitted. Others, like the Czech and East German leaderships, merely perished.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mikhail Gorbachev, centre, and Angela Merkel join the commemorations on the 20th anniversary of the fall on the Berlin Wall on 9 November 2009. Photograph: Herbert Knosowski/AP

When the wall went up in August 1961, the western allies – the US, Britain and France – were hotly criticised for doing nothing to knock it down. In reality, they were vastly relieved. The sheer cruelty of the wall, dividing families and holding a population captive, made excellent propaganda. But, more importantly, the west’s nightmare had been that flight through the open Berlin frontier would lead to the collapse of the East German state. Then the West Germans would try to intervene, which would draw in Soviet armed forces, then Nato… then Armageddon. When the East Germans odiously boasted that their “antifascist defence wall” was preserving the peace of Europe, western diplomats – deep in their souls – didn’t entirely disagree.

Nobody likes to remember that. In the same way, nobody likes the suggestion that within the cold war there was a cold civil war – between the two nations. The Berlin Wall only helped the slow alienation of one Germany from the other. The easterners (Ossis) longed to travel to the west but, after 40 years under a different social system, had only a diminishing wish to live there. West Germans grew increasingly ignorant and patronising about the east. It was as if two nations were emerging: twins, but not identical twins.

Unification in 1990 only intensified the “cold civil war” parallel. It recalled – eerily – the “reconstruction” period after the American civil war: the West German “victors” took over and exploited the “losers” until it felt more like an annexation than a reunification. The whole economy and social structure were purged and pillaged. “Carpetbaggers” crowded in from Hamburg and Frankfurt to loot the closing factories and public utilities of East Germany, decayed and unsustainable as they were. Even the local trade unions were now staffed by bright young things flown in from the DGB, West Germany’s union confederation.

I remember travelling about Mecklenburg in those months. Big Audi and BMW saloons rushed past on the potholed roads, carrying pink-cheeked young men and women on their way to shut down another power station. Silently watching in the rain stood men and women holding their bicycles – people who until a few weeks ago had been in secure work.

Is it any wonder that, like the American south, the German east has settled into sullen alienation? Extreme rightwing politics flourish. There’s a sense of a lost social culture, which was certainly founded on lies and a police state but offered a sort of identity. What remains is resentment, a sense of disrespected difference, a deeply conservative worldview. Willy Brandt, when mayor of West Berlin, said that walls might come down but walls in the mind took much longer to demolish.

• Neal Ascherson reported on the events of 1989 for the Observer