Berlin Wall

The

20 years later
The new home of Germany's Reichstag, or parliament, completed in 

1999. Its glass dome represents the openness and transparency of 

democratic politics. Inset: the predecessor Reichstag building. It was 

damaged by fire shortly after the Nazis came to power in 1933. The 

Hitler regime nullified many civil liberties in the aftermath of the fire.
Introduction ........................................................................................................... 2

Michael Jay Friedman

Paths To 1989 ....................................................................................................... 5

Fritz Stern

A Contested Future ............................................................................................ 13

Robert J. Lieber

“I Will Remember That Day All My Life” ................................................ 21

Adam Michnik

“Those Were The Days, My Friend” ........................................................... 27

Anna Husarska

Berlin Divided... And Reunited, 1961–1989 (A Chronology)........... 32

Roundtable: 

“What Was The Significance Of November 9, 1989?” ................................... 44

Theresa Bond ................................................................................................. 46

Janusz Bugajski .............................................................................................. 48

Edwina S. Campbell .................................................................................... 50

Roy Ginsburg ................................................................................................ 52

Ronald H. Linden ........................................................................................ 54

Andreas Rude ................................................................................................ 56

Simon Serfaty ................................................................................................ 58

Manfred Stinnes ........................................................................................... 60

Jeremi Suri ...................................................................................................... 63

Contents
2 THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER

Introduction

Michael Jay Friedman

T

he Berlin Wall — symbol of a divided city 

within a divided nation within a divided 

continent — was grounded in decades-old 

historical divisions. Most proximately, Nazi 

Germany could only be subdued by the combined power of many nations, led by the democratic capitalist Anglo-Americans and the communist Soviets. Their 

joint liberation of Axis-occupied Europe naturally raised 

the question: whose system would prevail, and where?

The victors’ inability to agree on an answer also 

reflected real historical divisions. The Soviet Union 

conceived of itself as the vanguard of a global proletarian 

uprising, “waiting,” in Lenin’s words, “for the other 

detachments of the world socialist revolution to come 

to our relief.” Western governments in turn understood 

communist movements in their nations to be subservient 

to Moscow, and that far from “waiting,” Soviet leaders 

worked steadily and stealthily to hasten revolution. 

And the British and Americans remembered, (along 

with Poles, Finns, Latvians, and many others) that 

the Second World War began with a bargain among 

dictators — Hitler and Stalin partitioning Poland 

between Germany and Soviet Russia. Only with 

the launch of Operation Barbarossa, the German 

invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, and Hitler’s 

declaration of war on the United States after the 

Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, did the democracies 

and the leading communist power join forces.

The Second World War did not end with a 

definitive peace treaty. Instead, and this simplifies 

greatly, the powers whose armed forces liberated a 

nation from the Nazis ultimately shaped that nation’s 

subsequent political character and geopolitical 

alignment. Western Europe thus emerged free, 

democratic, and generally aligned with the United 

States. Eastern European nations were ruled by 

communist regimes acceptable to Moscow, their foreign 

and military policies also subject to Soviet diktat. 

Germany was a special case, Berlin even more 

so. The British, Soviets, and Americans each would 

defeat the Wehrmacht in parts of Germany. At the 

Yalta Conference of February 4-11, 1945, the “Big 

Three” agreed that Germany would be divided into four 

temporary occupation zones, France being the fourth 

occupying power. Berlin, Germany’s capital and leading 

city, lies 110 miles inside the Soviet occupation zone. At 

the Potsdam Conference (July 17–August 2, 1945) the 

Allies agreed to a similar four-power division of Berlin.

Even then, it was understood that control of 

German manpower and industrial resources would tip 

substantially the postwar balance of power. Germany 

had invaded Russia twice in forty years; the Soviets 

were determined that postwar Germany be either 

Communist dominated or else permanently weak, 

neutral, and disarmed. The western allies soon concluded 

that unless Germany and the other nations of Europe 

were both democratic and prosperous, Soviet power 

might expand throughout the rest of the continent. 

Over $13 billion in Marshall Plan aid from the U.S. 

helped to secure this prosperity. The Soviet Union 
THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER 3

and the east European nations under its sway rejected 

Marshall aid. Meanwhile, in the Soviet occupation zone, 

the Red Army began dismantling and transporting 

to Russia German factories and other industrial 

structures, as reparations for the tremendous damage 

the Wehrmacht had inflicted on the Soviet Union. 

Later, in 1962, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev 

likened West Berlin to “the testicles of the West. Every 

time I want to make the West scream, I squeeze on 

Berlin.” His predecessors might not have phrased it 

quite the same way, but they also viewed West Berlin, 

a dangerously exposed western enclave within the 

emerging Soviet bloc, as a place they could exert pressure. 

In June 1948, as the western Allies and the Soviets failed 

to agree on whether Germany should be rehabilitated 

economically, the Red Army blockaded West Berlin. In 

response, the British- and American-led Berlin Airlift 

ferried by air some 13,000 tons of food daily, until 

Stalin lifted the blockade in May 1949. A few days later, 

the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) 

was proclaimed in the western occupation zones. The 

German Democratic Republic (East Germany) was 

founded in the Soviet occupation zone that October.

For the next twelve years, Berliners possessed an 

opportunity afforded few Cold War Europeans: the 

chance to vote with their feet. Between September 1949 

and August 1961, some 2.7 million East Germans, 

the young and educated overrepresented among them, 

crossed into West Berlin and thence by plane to the 

Federal Republic. In an ideological contest spanning 

claims of which system best could meet its citizens’ 

material needs and other aspirations, this mass 

emigration (the GDR actually lost population during 

this period) represented a powerful indictment of the 

communist system, as did the suppression of the 1953 

East German workers’ rebellion, the 1956 Hungarian 

uprising, the 1968 Czech revolution, and Polish protests 

in 1956, 1970, and 1981.

In August 1961, the GDR began to construct the 

Berlin Wall. At first it was barbed wire, but soon it expanded into a 5-meter-high, 165-kilometer-long network 

of concrete walls topped with barbed wire, and guarded 

with gun emplacements, watchtowers, and mines. Willy 

Brandt, then the mayor of West Berlin, feared the wall 

would turn his city into “a concentration camp.” He 

warned U.S. President John F. Kennedy that West 

Berliners’ morale might collapse. Kennedy was sympathetic, but insisted that “a wall is a hell of a lot better 

than a war.” But Kennedy also flew to West Berlin, delivering there in June 1963 a moving address, and insisting 

to at least a quarter million Berliners (one-fifth of the 

city’s population) gathered that day “Ich bin ein Berliner.”

At one level, the Berlin Wall afforded Europe 

stability. The periodic international crises over the city 

eased. As the French man of letters Francois Mauriac 

quipped, “I love Germany so much I’m glad there are 

two of them.”

But the communist bloc was not as stable as it 

appeared. East Berliners continued to seek freedom in 

the west. As the historian David Reynolds observes: 

“the fugitives kept on coming — jumping from 

windows, cutting the wire, tunneling beneath the wall, 

even ballooning above it.” Nearly 200 died trying to 

cross. And within the Soviet bloc, communism was 

failing. East European nations fell further behind their 

western peers and knew it. New technologies proved 

more compatible with the western models of personal 

autonomy and economic entrepreneurialism. By 1989, 

the contradictions within the Soviet bloc, as an earlier 

generation of communists might have put it, had been 

heightened — higher even than the Berlin Wall itself.

This book recounts how and why that wall 

crumbled. Among the voices gathered here are those of 

leading scholars, a dissident from a time when dissent 

required real bravery, and a journalist who was there 

when the walls came down all through Eastern Europe. 

We offer this book proudly, in hopes that those who 

today enjoy freedom will treasure it always, and that 

those who do not — yet — may take inspiration from 

events now only twenty years in the past.

Michael Jay Friedman is Print Publications Division Chief 

at the Bureau of International Information Programs. 

He holds a PhD in political and diplomatic history.

THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER 5

Paths to 1989

Fritz Stern

T

he breaching of the Berlin Wall 

on November 9 was the most 

dramatic symbol of freedom 

regained in that miraculous year 

1989, when in the political life 

of Central Europe the unimaginable became 

almost routine. Millions of people in EastCentral Europe staged peaceful protests against 

the existing regimes, and communism seemed to 

be withering away. Much of the world rejoiced, 

but for Americans the end of that monstrous 

division in Berlin had a special significance. For 

half a century, the United States, consonant 

with its policy of containment, had in one way 

or another protected the freedom of West 

Berliners, as indeed that of West Germans; 

gradually and reciprocally, former foes had 

become cherished friends.

We must take a quick look at where that 

wall had come from. In their common victory 

in 1945, the United States, the Soviet Union, 

and Great Britain had divided Germany 

into three (later, with France, four) zones of 

occupation, with Berlin as the seat of an Allied 

Control Council that was to be responsible 

for major policies in all zones. The Soviet 

zone of occupation surrounded the former 

capital of Germany, and thus Berlin, itself 

divided into four sectors, became an island in 

a red sea. Allied unity, already endangered by 

Soviet moves in Eastern Europe in 1944-1945, 

gradually ended in a Cold War, an outcome 

neither side desired, yet with each contributing 

to its development. By 1948 — after the 

communist seizure of power in what had held 

out as a democratic Czechoslovakia — the 

Western Allies gave up hope that they could 

Opposite Page: 

West Germans 

attempt to tear 

down a portion 

of the Berlin Wall 

on November 11, 

1989, while East 

German guards 

try to disperse 

them with hoses.
6 THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER

successfully cooperate with the USSR in 

Germany and made what, in retrospect, should 

be considered prudent preparations for the 

creation of a West German democratic polity. 

When in June 1948 the Allies also supported 

the introduction (even to West Berlin) of a new 

German currency, the deutsche mark, Soviet 

leader Joseph Stalin responded with a total 

blockade of West Berlin, designed presumably 

to stop Western plans for a West German state 

or, at the very least, to impose Soviet rule on 

the entire city. The United States and Britain, 

eschewing a military confrontation, resolved 

on an audacious alternative: to supply West 

Berlin’s roughly 2 million people by air. The 

Berlin Airlift was a brilliant demonstration of 

Anglo-American power, peacefully employed 

for democratic ends. In this costly process, 

Americans could count on the fortitude of West 

Berliners, led by their social democratic leader, 

Mayor Ernst Reuter, the first postwar German 

politician to impress the American public. 

In May 1949, the Soviets agreed to end the 

blockade for a token reward. This was a triumph 

for the Western Allies at a time of weakness 

in their military deployment: By 1948, most 

American forces in Europe had been brought 

home, while the vast Red Army remained 

stationed all over Central Europe.

Berlin remained symbol and supreme 

danger spot during the Cold War; it was used as 

an escape hatch by East Germans who wanted 

to trade life in their ever more economically 

depressed dictatorship for a life of freedom and 

mobility in West Germany, which was then 

enjoying an “economic miracle” with a socially 

responsible market economy. (The Western 

Allies’ help promoted West German recovery, 

while the Soviet demand for reparations 

from East Germany further enfeebled that 

already depressed state-controlled economy.) 

President John F. Kennedy (1961-1963), for 

one, understood that this singular open exit, 

Above: East 

Germans riot in 

Berlin in 1953, as 

the authorities 

try to hose them 

down and Soviet 

troops arrive. 

Martial law was 

declared and 

many were killed. 

Right: West 

Berliners unload 

food that was 

flown in by 

Americans during 

the Berlin Air Lift 

in 1953.
THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER 7

from communist East Berlin to West Berlin, 

represented a genuine danger to the East 

German regime, and he also understood, as he 

said at the time of the Bay of Pigs disaster (a 

failed, U.S.-backed invasion of Cuba by exiles 

from the Castro regime) and the fear of Soviet 

retaliation, that if there were to be a Third 

World War it would begin in Berlin. Stalin’s 

successor, the volatile Nikita Khrushchev, also 

realized that East Germany’s demographic losses 

were intolerable for the East German regime, 

which was constantly badgering the USSR to 

take tough measures to close the opening. 

In 1960-1961, the flow of East German 

refugees grew alarmingly, and it was clear that 

the drain had to be staunched. On August 13, 

1961, the East Germans, finally with Soviet 

blessing, erected the elaborate, ugly wall that 

cut the city in half, leaving West Berliners 

free but hemmed in and often separated 

from friends and family, and East Berliners 

permanently unfree behind what in typical 

double speak was officially called the 

“Antifascist” wall. The immediate American 

response was relatively mild, disappointing 

Willy Brandt, the young mayor of West 

Berlin, and West Berliners generally. The two 

Berlins now became rival showplaces for the 

two rival systems. And West Berlin prospered, 

continuously helped by American public and 

private aid and protected by a token Allied 

military presence. In time, East Berlin emerged 

from Stalinist drabness, but as to its material 

well-being — to say nothing of the repression 

it endured in the Stasi-dominated society — it 

was a poor if evolving entity. 

The Berlin Wall continued to remind 

Western leaders and many West Germans of 

the unnatural division of Germany, but they 

tacitly accepted it and concentrated on the 

construction of a European Community. The 

Western powers were content to negotiate for 

measures to alleviate the many deprivations 

that the Wall imposed. Détente with the Soviet 

Union had become the West’s hope, and this 

policy took different forms. In 1975, the United 

States, its European allies, and the USSR and 

its allies concluded the Helsinki Accords. The 

first two accords confirmed the inviolability 

of existing borders, thus giving legitimacy 

Above: A GDR 

policeman patrols 

the Berlin Wall 

as workers make 

it higher.

Right: Soviet 

tanks arrive to 

violently quell 

the crowds 

during the 

Prague Spring in 

Czechoslovakia 

in 1968.
8 THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER

to the de facto boundary changes made in 

postwar Central Europe, while the third part, 

commonly called the “third basket,” provided 

that all signatories would respect the basic 

human and civic rights of their citizens. With 

the consequent establishment of the OSCE 

(Organization for Security and Cooperation 

in Europe), the Soviet Union gained important 

reassurances. As to the “third basket,” while at 

first few political leaders on either side realized 

its inflammatory potential, it is imperative 

to recall — especially to understand 1989 

— that it offered dissident movements in 

Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union moral 

encouragement and shreds of legal protection. 

Soviet tanks had repeatedly crushed violent 

protests against the regimes in its satellites — 

in East Germany in 1953, in both Poland and 

Hungary in 1956, in Czechoslovakia in 1968. 

But after Helsinki, groups of quiet, heroic, and 

nonviolent dissidents — as already manifest in 

Václav Havel’s Charter ’77 in Czechoslovakia — 

became a much greater force within the Soviet 

dictatorships. Here were the beginnings of civil 

societies formed from below, imbued perhaps by 

the sense of what Havel later called “the power 

of the powerless.” Admirable and important as 

these groups were, they alone could not have 

altered the repressive conditions, however. 

For that, one needed changes at the top, and 

that came with the astounding and perhaps 

historically unprecedented simultaneous 

appearance of spiritual and political leaders 

who understood the deadening effects of life 

lived in stagnation — unfree, uncreative, and 

impoverished. 

Even communists themselves recoiled from 

the rigid hand of Moscow: In 1975, leaders 

of Italy’s and Spain’s large communist parties 

concentrated their criticism of Moscow in 

something they called “Euro-communism.” In 

this new mode, the West European communists, 

who had previously been subservient MarxistLeninists even during the dominance of its 

ugliest form, i.e., of Stalinism, broke with some 

of the party’s basic principles — promising to 

cooperate with democratic political parties, 

for example, thus surrendering the previously 

enshrined dictum that the Communist Party 

would always represent the sole supreme 

authority in any communist country. Eurocommunists had already openly criticized the 

Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. 

Perhaps, as many conservatives thought, Eurocommunism was a sham, a mere ruse. At the 

very least, it was a straw in the wind.

Poland, the largest Soviet satellite, had 

its own history of unique suffering, first 

under German occupation and then under 

its Soviet “liberation.” Its earlier history of 

being partitioned by neighboring European 

powers had bred its own defiant form of 

nationalist resistance. Postwar economic misery 

had sparked open protest against its Polish 

communist rulers and their despised masters 

in Russia, the uprisings of 1956 being the most 

open manifestations of this resistance, as well as 

strikes and demonstrations in 1970. And still, as 

in the entire Soviet bloc, repression, backed by 

Soviet tanks, worked. 

Then a dramatic change occurred: In 1978, 

Cardinal Karol Wojtyła of Cracow was selected 

as pope. A Polish pope! Unprecedented in 

the history of the Catholic Church — and yet 

another sign perhaps that history had reached 

a sudden stage of openness. Pope John Paul II, 

bare of any military power, almost instantly 

mobilized new hopes among his countrymen. 

“Have courage,” he admonished the many 

millions who, in his first papal visit to Poland 

in 1979, saw and prayed with him. He became 

the ultimate moral authority in his country: 

a charismatic figure, intensely human and yet 

fortified by the aura and pomp of the Church. 

(I visited Poland for the first time in 1979, a 

month after this trip. His effect was palpable.) 
THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER 9

He wanted to liberate Eastern Europe from the 

soul-deadening rule of atheistic communism; 

that he had strong misgivings about Western 

liberal society became clearer at a later time.

All Soviet satellite states, indeed the USSR 

itself, were suffering from economic privation 

and backwardness, and economic discontent 

was often the igniting cause of protest on the 

part of peoples groping toward the construction 

of a civil society. Strikes occurred, but none as 

portentous as the strike in the Lenin shipyards 

in Gdansk that began on August 14, 1980. 

The strike leader, trade-unionist Lech Walesa, 

summoned from Warsaw, among others 

who supported the strike, two intellectuals, 

Bronislaw Geremek and Tadeusz Mazowiecki. 

From the Inter-Factory Strike Committee that 

guided the strike to its conclusion in September, 

there emerged what amounted to a national 

political movement, Solidarity (Solidarnosc), 

challenging the now insecure regime. From 

then on, Solidarnosc enveloped the country — 

the first free union in a communist country, 

governed for the first time in Polish history 

not by reckless, romantic passion but by 

political prudence and the absolute rejection of 

violence. Solidarnosc, workers and intellectuals 

cooperating, exemplified old social democratic 

hopes, and for some years those hopes briefly 

and anonymously held sway. Solidarnosc 

was civil society in nuce, claiming millions 

of members and posing a threat to the very 

existence of the Soviet system. On December 

13, 1981, the Polish head of state, General 

Wojciech Jaruzelski, imposed martial law and 

imprisoned the Solidarnosc leaders, hoping to 

expunge the danger. But continued economic 

misery and the unbroken will of multitudes 

finally forced the party into concessions, 

negotiated at a round table beginning in 

February 1989; the very shape of the table 

became a symbol of the peaceful negotiations by 

which, beginning in Poland, communist parties 

yielded power. Poland’s first semi-free elections 

resulted in Mazowiecki’s becoming the first noncommunist prime minister in what had been a 

communist country. (No doubt, the Polish pope 

was invisibly present in these historic changes.)

Karol Józef 

Wojtyła — Pope 

John Paul II — 

greets a huge 

crowd in his 

hometown of 

Wadowice, 

Poland, in June, 

1979.
10 THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER

And yet the decisive presence had yet to 

emerge. In 1985 — after years of senescent 

Soviet leaders — Mikhail Gorbachev, younger 

than the other communist leaders and radically 

different from them, was elected secretary 

general of the Communist Party. Having grown 

up in the Soviet system and risen through it, he 

had intimate knowledge of its crippling defects. 

He came to power with radically new thoughts, 

understanding the Soviet Union’s desperate 

need for reforms in the economic realm 

(perestroika) and the civic realm (glasnost). He 

envisioned a reformed communist Russia taking 

its place in what he called the “Common House 

of Europe.” That this broke with communist 

dogma about the inevitable conflict between 

socialist and capitalist systems was clear. 

Gorbachev understood the power of the United 

States; he knew that President Ronald Reagan 

(1981-1989) had denounced the “evil empire” 

and started his ill-fated Strategic Defense 

Initiative; and he had heard Reagan’s defiant 

“tear down this wall” demand. It is a tribute to 

both men that, fearful of a nuclear holocaust, 

they reached important agreements concerning 

disarmament in 1986 and 1987. Also in 1986, 

Gorbachev brought the great astrophysicist and 

civil-rights champion Andrei Sakharov back 

to Moscow from his internal exile in Gorky, a 

gesture that was an electrifying recognition of 

his commitment to human rights. And two 

years later, he withdrew Soviet troops from 

Afghanistan, reducing the military element 

in Soviet policy. From the very beginning 

tacitly and ultimately explicitly, he abandoned 

the Brezhnev doctrine, which had prescribed 

Soviet intervention in satellite countries in 

which the position of the Communist Party 

was threatened. What opened the road to 1989 

was Gorbachev’s hope that the satellites would 

find their own way to a reformed communism, 

free of either promise or threat of Soviet tanks. 

In the end, Gorbachev failed as a reformer 

in his own country, but he made possible the 

liberation of the satellite nations. 

The unrest in the Soviet bloc that had 

become manifest in Solidarnosc made its 

appearance elsewhere as well, even in the 

German Democratic Republic, whose orthodox 

leadership continued to be fearfully suspicious 

of any liberalizing tendency (to the point of 

censoring Gorbachev’s speeches). Peace vigils 

beginning in the fall of 1989 in East German 

churches were quickly extended to peaceful 

protest marches in a number of big cities. On 

October 9, some 70,000 citizens in Leipzig 

marched peacefully under placards proclaiming 

“We are the people” and demanding democratic 

Below left: 

Mikhail 

Gorbachev 

(left) applauds 

after he and 

Ronald Reagan 

(right) signed 

the landmark 

intermediaterange missile 

(INF) treaty of 

1987. 

Below right: 

One thousand 

East German 

pro-democracy 

supporters build 

a human chain 

through East 

Berlin in October, 

1989.
THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER 11

reforms — and they did so knowing that 

the regime had mobilized troops and given 

additional blood supplies to local hospitals, 

and knowing, as protesters everywhere knew, 

that communist regimes still had the means to 

liquidate protest; this had been evident in the 

massacre of Tiananmen Square in Beijing only a 

few months earlier. 

But the people’s wish for freedom was 

contagious and no longer to be repressed. In 

June, the Hungarian-Austrian border was 

virtually opened, and this meant that East 

Germans, who could easily travel to “fraternal” 

communist Hungary, now could reach West 

Germany, via Austria, without surmounting 

the Wall in Berlin. Other East Germans fled 

to the West German embassies in Prague and 

Budapest, determined to remain on embassy 

grounds until the means to get to West 

Germany were provided. At obvious risk, East 

Germans were on the march, either abroad or, 

even more impressively, on the streets at home. 

On November 9, the opening of the Berlin 

Wall signified the triumph of the first peaceful 

and ultimately successful German revolution, 

a triumph perhaps not sufficiently honored by 

their West German brethren. 

By the end of 1989, the satellites of the 

Soviet Union had been freed. What very few 

had thought possible — that Soviet rule could 

actually be overthrown peacefully — had 

occurred. Historians will long debate what 

all contributed to this liberation and how, but 

that it was a concatenation of unforeseeable 

processes seems clear: I find it tempting to think 

of it as a silent conspiracy of decency. The events 

in Berlin were symbol and reality of the triumph 

of Western and, therefore also, American ideals. 

I have only hinted at the subterranean 

connections, which remain to be explored. 

Two hundred years after the great French 

Revolution, a very different revolution tried 

to create a new Europe, and for once, by 

the benevolent cunning of history, the right 

leaders and brave, prudent citizens appeared 

simultaneously. Perhaps never before or after 

was there so much hope in the air, and perhaps 

it was too good to last. For many reasons, such 

as the return of violent nationalism, reality in 

some places very quickly turned ugly and bloody 

again. But a precedent was set, a successful 

precedent that affirmed the “power of the 

powerless.” I doubt that the sparks of those 

days are extinguished forever: Might one see 

that under radically different conditions and for 

radically different purposes, millions of Iranians 

on the streets of Tehran, demanding a different, 

better life, are following that precedent?

Fritz Stern, University Professor Emeritus at 

Columbia University, is an historian of modern 

Europe, particularly Germany. Recipient 

of international honors and prizes, he has 

published widely in the U.S. and abroad; his 

most recent work is Five Germanys I Have 

Known (2006). He served as senior adviser to 

the U.S. Embassy in Bonn, 1993-1994, while 

Richard Holbrooke was U.S. Ambassador there.

Near a rebuilt 

section of the 

Berlin Wall 

and a museum 

at the former 

Checkpoint 

Charlie, a man 

walks through a 

field of wooden 

crosses that 

commemorate 

those who were 

killed at the wall.

THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER 13

A Contested Future

Robert J. Lieber

Momentous events take on 

a life of their own. The 

American Revolution 

in 1776, the French 

Revolution of 1789, the 

outbreak of World War I in 1914, the Russian 

Revolutions of 1917, and the end of World War 

II in 1945 all continue to stand as watersheds, 

marking the boundaries of old and new eras, 

and as the subjects of continuing debate as 

to their political, cultural, and historical 

significance. The opening of the Berlin Wall 

rightfully merits inclusion in this list, and 

two decades later the event still reverberates 

in terms of its meaning and consequences. 

The joyous throng of East Berliners pouring 

into West Berlin on the night of November 9, 

1989, represents not only an indelible memory 

for people of that city, but it symbolizes a 

more profound transformation: the peaceful 

reunification of Germany; a Europe whole and 

free; the end of a worldwide Cold War that had 

threatened to plunge the United States, the 

Soviet Union, and their respective allies into 

a catastrophic conflict; and — arguably most 

important of all — compelling evidence for 

the proposition that given the opportunity to 

choose, people will demand political freedom.

Almost anyone who lived through the 

Cold War, and not just in Germany, will still 

remember key moments: the Berlin Airlift 

of 1948-1949; the Korean War (1950-1953); 

Khrushchev’s 1956 secret speech denouncing 

the crimes of Stalin; the Soviets’ launching of 

Sputnik — the first space satellite — in 1957; 

erection of the Berlin Wall in August 1961; 

the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962; 

the Vietnam War; the Soviet-led invasions of 

Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968); 

and the transformation of the Soviet Union 

under Mikhail Gorbachev beginning in 1985.

Right: Berliners 

watch in 

anticipation as 

American planes 

fly in supplies 

during the Berlin 

Air Lift, which 

lasted from June 

1948-May 1949. 

Opposite Page: 

East Berliners 

atop the Berlin 

Wall, near the 

Brandenburg 

Gate, December 

22, 1989.
14 THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER

As a young graduate student, I vividly recall 

a trip on foot through Checkpoint Charlie on a 

cold, dreary late December day just a few years 

after the Wall had been built. The barriers, 

warning signs (“Achtung, Sie verlassen den 

Amerikanischen Sektor”), and taciturn and wary 

East German border guards and volkspolitzei

created an atmosphere worthy of a John 

LeCarre novel. (Indeed, LeCarre’s The Spy Who 

Came in From the Cold captures the temper of 

those times.) I recall, too, meeting East German 

students while visiting the eastern half of the 

city, including an ambitious, talented young 

physics student who believed in the ideals of his 

system but yearned for socialism with a human 

face. Less than two years later, he and his 

friends would be arrested and imprisoned after 

they sought to protest East German troops’ 

participation in crushing the Prague Spring, 

and I would not see him or his family again 

until more than two decades later after the Wall 

had miraculously opened.

The Wall came down for reasons large 

and small, though none of these diminish the 

surprise, even shock that this could happen so 

suddenly and peacefully. At one level, people 

had voted with their feet. Ever since the 

creation of the communist German Democratic 

Republic (GDR) in the eastern sector of 

Germany occupied by the Soviet Union at the 

end of the Second World War, large numbers 

of people seized the opportunity to move from 

Above: American 

and Soviet tanks 

face off during 

an especially 

tense Cold War 

confrontation. 

Right: Decades 

later, Berliners 

walk freely below 

a sign demarking 

a border that no 

longer exists.
THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER 15

Clockwise from top: Women and children 

refugees arrive in West Berlin; (Left to right 

at front) Soviet Communist Party Chief Nikita 

Khrushchev, Premier Nikolai Bulganin, and 

Deputy Premier Anastase I. Mikoyan welcome 

delegates to the 20th Communist Party Congress 

in Moscow; West German Chancellor Konrad 

Adenauer (second from left) joins the other 

NATO representatives in 1956. 
16 THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER

East to West (as another friend of mine and 

his family did by riding the S-Bahn in a not-yet 

divided Berlin). After August 1961, those who 

fled did so under dangerous and sometimes 

deadly conditions. They left homes and friends 

in search of a better life, the material attractions 

of the West, and personal freedom on the 

other side of the Wall. In the final months, as 

Czechoslovakia and Hungary liberalized, East 

Germans fled by the tens of thousands through 

those neighboring countries, in a flood the 

GDR authorities were incapable of stopping 

without bloodshed and that the 400,000 troops 

of the Red Army stationed in East Germany 

would not stop, not in 1989, and not to save a 

tottering regime.

In reality, the opening of the Wall 

represented just one of four historic 

transformations compressed into a remarkably 

short time: the end of a divided Germany and 

a divided Europe; the end of the Cold War, a 

conflict that had begun in Europe; the collapse 

of Soviet communism and almost all of its 

imitators; and the dissolution of the USSR into 

its 15 constituent republics. These extraordinary 

transformations stimulated enormous 

enthusiasm and optimism.

An “End of History”?

The post-Berlin Wall events marked the 

start of dramatic changes in Eastern Europe, 

the Caucasus, and Central Asia, as well as Latin 

America and Africa. Transitions to democracy 

and away from state-controlled economies took 

place in the former Warsaw Pact countries, 

most notably Poland, the Czech Republic, and 

Hungary, but also throughout the region. The 

Russian Federation and many of its 14 former 

republics also adopted democratic forms of 

governance and economic transformation, 

though many with disappointing results. 

Elsewhere in the world, a flood tide of political 

opening and economic reform seemed to portend 

The Prague 

Spring, 1968. 

Czech protestors 

surround a Soviet 

tank. Their 

protest would 

be violently 

suppressed but 

disillusionment 

with Communism 

would deepen.
THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER 17

a bright future. This optimism is captured in a 

widely cited essay and book, The End of History, 

by the political theorist Francis Fukuyama. He 

argued that in view of these epic changes, it had 

become evident that liberal democracy and a 

market-oriented economic order were the only 

viable options for modern societies. 

Unfortunately, the predominance of these 

political and economic models proved more 

contingent than seemed to be the case in the 

initial heady days and months of the postBerlin Wall era. For some, the creation and 

stabilization of these new systems became far 

more problematic than expected. Many of the 

countries of Eastern Europe as well as the Baltic 

states successfully implemented wrenching 

political and economic transitions, though the 

process itself was at times long and arduous. But 

in the Balkans, as well as parts of the Caucasus, 

Central Asia, and also Africa, the process was 

fraught with difficulty. Ethnic conflicts erupted, 

driven by appeals to extreme nationalism, and 

elections sometimes brought the veneer of 

democracy without the substance.

In Russia itself, the initial forms of 

democracy under Presidents Gorbachev (1985-

1991) and Boris Yeltsin (1991-1999) were 

burdened by a chaotic transition and economic 

collapse. From 1999 onward, the country’s 

institutions became more stabilized but 

increasingly took on a semi-authoritarian form 

in which, despite the appearance of democracy, 

President Vladimir Putin (1999-2008; prime 

minister, 2008-present) and his colleagues 

presided over what The Economist magazine 

termed one of the most “criminalized, corrupt, 

and bureaucratized countries in the world.” 

Currently, the Russian people possess much 

more autonomy in their daily lives than they 

had under Soviet communism, but they do so 

within a system that stifles independent political 

parties and the rule of law, lacks an independent 

judiciary, gives its cronies control of leading 

companies, and dominates television and the 

major media.

Even where liberal democracy and the 

market economy have taken root, initial 

enthusiasms and boundless optimism have 

Czechoslovakia’s 

1989 “Velvet 

Revolution” 

liberated 

that nation 

from Soviet 

domination. 

Here, 200,000 

crowd the streets 

of Prague. The 

white banner 

reads “Free 

Elections.”
18 THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER

waned. In some places, for example Bulgaria 

and Romania, the problems have been those 

of corruption and of inadequate state capacity 

to carry out successfully the functions for 

which it is responsible. The ardent desire of 

Eastern European countries to gain entry 

to NATO and the European Union helped 

significantly in the early post-Cold War years 

to keep democratic and economic transitions 

on track. Requirements for rule of law, civilian 

control of the military, minority rights, political 

freedoms, and accountability proved to be real 

assets during these transition periods and when 

applicant states found themselves buffeted by 

competing priorities and claimants at home 

and abroad. 

Here it is important to understand the 

differences between liberal and illiberal 

democracy. Liberal democracy requires not just 

elections and some of the formal institutions of 

democracy (parliament, president, courts), but 

a free press, rule of law, independent judiciary, 

minority rights, freedoms of speech and 

assembly, the ability of parties and individuals 

to seek office peacefully through competitive 

elections, and the functioning of civil society 

institutions in which people’s livelihoods and 

way of life do not depend exclusively on the 

government. Illiberal democracy (a term coined 

by the prominent journalist, editor, and scholar 

Fareed Zakaria) denotes a system in which 

elections take place, but in which civil liberties, 

civil rights, and the multiple dimensions of 

a genuinely democratic society are severely 

limited or altogether absent. Societies emerging 

from dictatorship and affected by deep ethnic 

and sectarian divisions have been especially 

vulnerable to these internal conflicts.

Even where corruption and government 

performance have not been major factors, 

lingering doubts can remain. A recent opinion 

poll in the former East Germany revealed 

that a shocking 57 percent of respondents 

defended the former GDR, with even those 

acknowledging its bad sides now claiming 

that “life was good there.” Certainly there is 

misplaced nostalgia, driven by the predictable 

frustrations of daily life, especially at a time of 

recession and high unemployment. Attitudes 

and history matter too. Explaining this kind of 

apology for dictatorship requires an empathetic 

understanding of attitudes and historical 

experience. The population of East Germany 

had been unaccustomed to the challenges, 

the risks, and the opportunities of life in a 

free society. They had lived for 56 years under 

dictatorships: from 1933 to 1945 under the 

Nazis and then until 1989 under a Sovietimposed communist regime. Adapting to life in 

a liberal democracy and market economy may 

thus require generational change as well.

We like to think that all good things go 

together: liberty, popular sovereignty, equal 

opportunity, equality of condition. But as 

Professor Michael Mandelbaum has noted in 

Democracy’s Good Name, the idea of democracy 

itself has historically combined two related 

but sometimes competing notions: liberty, 

i.e., freedom of the individual, and popular 

sovereignty. These notions can and do come 

into conflict, for example if majorities favor 

policies that restrict individual freedom or even 

repress or limit the rights of some members 

of society. Stable liberal democracies resolve 

this contradiction through constitutionally 

mandated rights protected from majoritarian 

restriction and through maintaining an 

independent judiciary to which individuals 

can appeal. 

More broadly, the combination of liberal 

democracy and a market economy also embodies 

a certain inbuilt tension. A market economy 

helps to preserve individual liberty, but it also 

can give rise to substantial economic disparities. 

This inequality, in turn, can conflict with 

notions of popular equality and social solidarity.
THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER 19

Challenges come from external sources 

as well. As the political scientist Azar Gat has 

described in a provocative and widely cited 

Foreign Affairs essay, the rise of authoritarian 

capitalist powers poses a renewed threat to 

the predominance of liberal democracy. They 

represent an alternate path to modernity, 

and just as the defeat of their 20th-century 

precursors, Imperial Germany, Nazi Germany, 

and Imperial Japan, depended on the United 

States’ coming to the aid of the European 

democracies, so too the future requires active 

and sustained American engagement on behalf 

of liberal democracies and societies.

In this competition, differences of outlook 

among the democracies remain an ongoing 

problem. They often disagree among themselves 

on important policy choices, such as democracy 

promotion, international economic policies, 

and how best to respond to threats from 

proliferation, failed states, ethnic conflict, and 

human rights abuses. Despite calls for a League 

of Democracies to offset the weaknesses of the 

United Nations, the European Union, and 

other international institutions in confronting 

common world problems, the criteria for where 

to draw the line between liberal and illiberal 

democracies remain problematic, and few 

countries are willing to prioritize such a new 

grouping above their existing commitments 

to regional bodies, other institutions, or more 

narrowly defined national interests.

In short, two decades after the opening 

of the Berlin Wall, rather than the end of 

history and a foreordained triumph of liberal 

democracy and the market economy, the 

future remains contested. Despite this, there 

are reasons for optimism. To some extent, the 

Bosnians 

celebrate in 

the streets of 

Sarajevo in 1995, 

days before the 

Dayton Peace 

Accords officially 

ended the war 

in Bosnia.
20 THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER

information revolution and the development of 

modern knowledge-based societies appear to 

create a propensity, i.e., a receptive environment, 

for liberalization and democracy. Looking to 

the past but also the future, not only the fall 

of the Wall itself, but the collapse of Soviet 

communism, the end of the Cold War, the 

success of velvet revolutions in Ukraine and 

Georgia, the halting but nonetheless real 

progress of democratization in many parts 

of the world, and massive demonstrations for 

freedom by the Iranian people suggest there 

is something deep-seated, profound, and 

fundamental in the desire for political freedom. 

Its success is not inevitable, but as presidents 

from Franklin Roosevelt to Harry Truman, 

John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, 

George W. Bush, and Barack Obama have 

proclaimed, the aspiration for liberty and 

democracy is an intrinsic human longing. 

The challenge for the world’s democracies 

today is foreshadowed in a remark by one 

of America’s Founding Fathers, Benjamin 

Franklin, after the historic Constitutional 

Convention of 1787. When asked by a passerby 

if the new United States would be a republic 

or a monarchy, he replied, “A republic if you 

can keep it.” Much the same might be said 

about the global future for free societies and 

market economies. Their prevalence may not be 

foreordained, but with effort and commitment, 

the likelihood of sustaining and extending them 

remains promising.

Robert J. Lieber is Professor of Government 

and International Affairs at Georgetown 

University and the author or editor of fifteen 

books on international relations and U.S. 

foreign policy. He publishes and lectures 

widely and has appeared on U.S. and foreign 

television and radio networks.

Above: After 

a fraudulent 

2003 election, 

Georgians 

launched the 

Rose Revolution. 

Right: Hungarian 

women cast 

ballots in 2009. 

Below: A rural 

Romanian 

family expresses 

its political 

allegiance.
THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER 21

“I Will Remember That Day 

All My Life”

BY Adam Michnik

I

n 1989 nobody anticipated the fall of 

the communist regime — no one in the 

world. When U.S. President Ronald 

Reagan (1981-1989) called in West Berlin, 

“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” 

people took it as an echo of Cold War rhetoric 

and not as a realistic political project.

And yet, the Wall was torn down.

I will remember that day for the rest of my 

life. It was during an official visit of the leaders 

of the Federal Republic of [West] Germany 

to Poland, which was already governed by the 

cabinet of Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the first noncommunist prime minister in the Soviet bloc. 

It was in the afternoon. I had been invited for a 

talk with the West German Foreign Minister 

Hans Dietrich Genscher. We were discussing 

the prospects for the next few months. During 

our conversation an aide entered the room and 

handed the minister a piece of paper. Genscher 

read it, looked at me, and said: “The border 

crossing in the Berlin Wall has been opened.” 

That was the conclusion of our interesting 

conversation. I ran to the office of Gazeta 

Wyborcza [the democratic newspaper founded 

by Michnik and other journalists and political 

activists — Ed.] and penned a few sentences 

of commentary to be published on the first 

page. I wrote it was a great holiday: In the 

perennial struggle between man and barbed 

wire, today man triumphed and the barbed 

wire was defeated.

I was under the impression that all of 

Poland was rooting for the Germans, who were 

walking towards freedom. We kept repeating: 

"Ich bin Berliner... Ich bin Berliner.”

In all appearance, East Germany (the 

German Democratic Republic, or GDR) was 

a communist state, and yet it was somehow 

unique. It had a typically incompetent 

government run by a party nomenclature, 

corruption, ubiquitous police surveillance, 

and a deepening economic crisis. What was 

atypical, however, was the existence of the other 

— democratic and rich — German state and 

the presence of Soviet garrisons on the GDR’s 

territory. It used to be said about Prussia that 

it was not a country that had an army, but an 

army that had a country. The GDR was not a 

country with Soviet garrisons; it was a country 

for Soviet garrisons. That was the reason for and 

the guarantee of the GDR’s very being. 

THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER 23

In 1989 the Soviet garrisons, which in 1953 

had saved the GDR regime by suppressing a 

workers uprising, received new instructions. 

The new rulers in the Kremlin had launched the 

policy of perestroika, in fact a retreat in internal 

and foreign policy from the logic of the Cold 

War. GDR leader Erich Honecker refused to 

accept this new policy. His cronies used to say: 

“Should we have to change the wallpaper in our 

home only because our neighbor changes his?” 

But East Germans also did not like the old 

wallpaper. When on June 20, 1989, Hungarian 

foreign Minister Gyula Horn, together with his 

Austrian counterpart, cut the barbed wire on 

the border between their two countries, East 

Germans began pouring through Hungary 

into Austria. A little later, those who did not 

want to emigrate started to demonstrate in the 

streets of East Germany — the new policies of 

Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev emboldened 

people, and Lutheran churches in the GDR 

served as meeting places for the protesters. West 

German President Richard von Weizsaecker 

accurately defined the two sources of the demise 

of Honecker’s regime: Gorbachev and churches. 

During Gorbachev’s visit to Berlin in 

October 1989, people shouted “Gorby!” and 

chanted, “We are the nation!” Later, the slogan 

changed into “We are one nation!”

The Berlin Wall thus fell in the German 

people’s minds even before the actual event, 

which followed soon thereafter. On October 

22, 1989, Erich Honecker was deposed and on 

November 9 Gunter Schabowski, the chief of 

propaganda and member of the Politburo of the 

SED, the East German ruling communist party, 

said in a press conference: “Today we reached a 

decision to issue an ordinance that allows every 

citizen of the GDR to leave the country through 

any border crossing.” After a moment, he added 

that the ordinance is effective “immediately.” 

If Schabowski misspoke, it was the most 

important and most beautiful slip of the tongue 

in the history of Germany. Right after the 

announcement, Berliners armed with mallets 

and chisels set about to dismantle the Wall. 

What was unimaginable became real. The 

German circle was squared.

The fall of the Berlin Wall contributed 

greatly to the downfall of the communist system 

in the whole bloc, but it was not the first decisive 

event. The process — as seen from Warsaw 

— had started in a big way in August 1980, 

when a large strike in the Gdansk shipyard 

delegitimized the dictatorship of the communist 

party, which claimed to be the “dictatorship 

of the proletariat.” It was an exceptional event 

— the proletariat issued a stern warning to 

the dictatorship of the proletariat. It was the 

utmost moral defeat of communism. The real 

dismantling of the Berlin Wall began right 

there, right then. The Polish Round Table 

compromise and the subsequent semi-free 

elections in June 1989 were themselves heavy 

hammer blows against the Wall. 

Other events contributed. The policy of 

U.S. President Jimmy Carter (1977-1981), 

who put human rights on his banner and 

sought “détente with a human face,” started 

a confrontation the Soviet Union could not 

Below: The 

last Soviet 

leader, Mikhail 

Gorbachev, 

shakes hands in 

Bonn in June, 

1989.

Opposite Page: 

East Berliners 

atop the Berlin 

Wall, near the 

Brandenburg 

Gate, December 

22, 1989.
24 THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER

win. Neither could it prevail against the policy 

of President Reagan, who challenged the “evil 

empire,” engaging the Soviets in an arms race 

they could not win. The pontificate of John 

Paul II also played an immense role, with the 

pontiff setting the Christian message of human 

freedom and dignity against a communist 

doctrine based on violence and lies. The 

whole sequence of events — as well as the 

Soviet failure to keep up technologically with 

the United States and the misadventure in 

Afghanistan — led to Gorbachev’s new policy, 

one in which Soviet troops no longer would 

prop up the communist GDR regime. Probably 

no one did so much for the world as the last 

general secretary of the Soviet Communist 

Right: Lech 

Walesa speaks 

to striking 

workers at the 

Gdansk Shipyard 

in 1980. The 

milestone Gdansk 

Agreement 

led to the first 

independent 

labor union in 

the Eastern Bloc, 

Solidarity. 

Below: Adam 

Michnik (center) 

casts his vote 

during the first 

partially-free 

elections within 

the Soviet bloc. 

Solidarity won a 

sweeping victory 

over the Polish 

Communists.
THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER 25

Party, although abolishing communism was 

certainly not part of his plan. 

The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end 

of post-Yalta Europe; it marked the end of faith 

in the communist utopia and in the perpetuity 

of the Soviet regime; it marked the end of the 

punishment imposed on the Germans for 

unleashing Nazism and starting the war; it also 

marked the end of humiliation for democratic 

Europe, which tolerated the image of a great 

city tortured day after day with barbed wire and 

border towers. 

But the tearing down of the Berlin Wall 

and the end of communism had more than 

one facet. Just as the massacre in the Square of 

Heavenly Peace in Beijing counterpoised the 

Polish elections of June 1989, which brought the 

defeat of the communists, the velvet revolutions 

in Central Europe had their darker parallel 

in the bloody events in Romania and the long 

war in the former Yugoslavia. The velvet was 

stained with blood. The smell of this blood still 

lingers in Europe. I felt it in many places — for 

example, in the refugee houses set aflame in 

several German cities. Those houses burned 

after the fall of the Wall. A whole library 

was written about the paradoxes of German 

unification and I can add little to the subject. 

But I remember an anecdote I once heard from 

one of my German friends. Shortly after the 

unification, an Ossie and a Weissie meet in 

Berlin. The Ossie says, “Welcome! We are one 

nation.” The Weissie replies laughing, “We too!”

Although I am a Pole free of 

Germanophobia, this laughter still rings in my 

ears, especially when I observe how numerous 

German politicians and intellectuals abandon 

critical reflection on German history and choose 

preoccupation with harm done to Germans, 

usually accompanied by a morally relativistic 

view of the harm done by Germans to Poles. 

The ease with which some see a symmetry 

between the expulsion of Poles and Jews from 

their homes and their cities after the aggression 

on Poland in 1939 and the expulsion of 

Germans decreed by the Allies after Germany 

lost the war both worries and saddens. The 

embarrassing opportunism and conformism 

of some German elites that accompanies this 

mental shift saddens, too.

I notice similar phenomena in other 

European countries, including my own. But 

nowhere are they as dangerous as in Germany. 

To put it differently, although Europe 

changed a lot — and for the better — after 

the destruction of the Berlin Wall, it did not 

become an Arcadia of flourishing tolerance, 

respect for the dignity of others, and unfettered 

love of one’s neighbor. Our continent is still full 

of minefields, booby traps, and threats with 

which we must reckon. 

And yet — after those 20 years — 

I remain an optimist. Why? Because I have no 

other option.

Adam Michnik is the editor-in-chief of Gazeta 

Wyborcza, the largest Polish daily. In 1968-

1989 he was one of the leading organizers of 

the democratic opposition in Poland. Historian, 

essayist and political publicist, he was the 

editor of several underground “samizdat” 

periodicals and was arrested and imprisoned 

several times for his pro-democratic activities. 

In 1980-1989, he was an adviser to the 

independent trade union Solidarity and its 

leader, Lech Walesa. In 1989 he participated 

in the Round Table Talks that brought about 

the end of the communist system in Poland. 

Michnik is the author of several books, 

including Letters from Freedom, The Church 

and the Left, and Letters from Prison and 

Other Essays.

THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER 27

“ Those Were the Days, 

My Friend...”

by Anna Husarska

Your point of view depends on 

your viewpoint” goes an old 

Polish saying, and the way we, 

in Eastern Europe, saw the 

coming down of the Berlin Wall 

is a perfect illustration of this proverb. Here 

is my view — one shaped by a sympathetic 

understanding of the Polish historical 

experience.

First: What was the Berlin Wall?

Among other things, it was a metaphor. 

The difference between what one saw from 

either side of the physical structure tells us 

much about a Europe divided into Soviet and 

non-Soviet zones, a fate sealed at the Yalta 

Conference in 1945.

From the West you could come up to the 

wall, you could touch it, scrawl graffiti on it, 

watch “the East” from an elevated platform. 

The Berlin Wall was a stage for American 

presidents: John F. Kennedy proclaiming his 

solidarity with the encircled city, “Ich bin ein 

Berliner”; Ronald Reagan pounding at the Soviet 

leader, “Mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

From the East, the Wall was gray and 

depressing. We knew (but could not see) that 

behind the concrete structure topped with 

barbed and razor wire was the seven-meter-wide 

post way of raked gravel and — so we were told 

— a minefield. 

And while the Wall was an enclosure 

around West Berlin (the French, British, and 

American sectors), metaphorically it encircled 

and enslaved half the continent.

For us in Eastern Europe, perhaps the most 

oppressive and difficult indignity was the wall 

of denials:

The wall of communist laws forbidding 

free travel to the democratic part of the world 

“

Right: The “Big 

Three” (front 

row, left to 

right) of Winston 

Churchill, Franklin 

Roosevelt, and 

Joseph Stalin 

shaped postwar 

Europe at the 

Feb. 1945 Yalta 

Conference.

Opposite Page: 

The Berlin Wall 

blocks access to 

the city’s famed 

Brandenburg 

Gate.
28 THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER

collectively (still today!) called “the West” — lest 

we see through the regime’s lies. 

The wall of communist censorship making 

it nearly impossible to read anything other than 

propaganda — lest we be infected by bourgeois, 

capitalist ideology. (Uncensored books, 

magazines, and newspapers had to be smuggled 

in, but we devoured them when we could.)

The wall of communist “ jamming” of 

foreign radio stations, such as BBC, Radio Free 

Europe, and Voice of America, with a persistent 

buzzing noise — lest we hear the truth about 

events in the world and in our own country.

 But even worse was the wall inside each of 

us, the one that made us live a schizophrenic 

existence in two worlds — homes and company 

of family or friends where one could be oneself 

and a second world, false but increasingly 

familiar, in which we would wear a mask of 

obedience. The apprenticeship into this double 

life started early, around kindergarten, where we 

learned political slogans while reading Winnie 

the Pooh and made hammer-and-sickle paper 

cuts while playing with teddy bears.

Second, the date — or dates — the Wall 

fell also contributes to our understanding.

November 9, 1989, is the date most 

potently associated with the end of the unjust 

oppression of half of Europe. But the Wall 

began to crack back in 1980 when the Polish 

trade union Solidarity was created at the Lenin 

shipyard in Gdansk and it won the right to 

strike. Also one might conclude that only with 

the 2004 admission of eight East European 

countries into the European Union was the 

Europe created at Yalta truly undone, although 

not just yet if one lives in Belarus.

Even within the annus mirabilis 1989, many 

East European events competed for attention 

and significance: the first talks between a 

communist regime and its political opposition 

(April, in Poland); the first semi-free elections 

(June 4, in Poland, eclipsed by the tanks 

crushing the dreams in Tiananmen Square 

that same day), the historical rehabilitation of 

Imre Nagy and his companions from the 1956 

Budapest uprising (June 16, in Hungary); the 

Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, itself 

grounded in the Charter 77 movement 12 years 

earlier, began in earnest that November. A 

month later, the former dissident writer Václav 

Havel was president. Finally, Romania — until 

then seemingly the most solid communist 

regime — proved the bloodiest in its sudden 

fall, also in 1989.

Meanwhile, that year’s German history 

can be framed within characteristically orderly 

brackets: a January 19 pronouncement by East 

German leader Erich Honecker that “The Wall 

will be standing in 50 and even in 100 years, 

if the reasons for it are not yet removed,” and 

an improvised speech by West German head 

Right: East 

Germans queue 

up at a state-run 

store. 

Far right: Lech 

Walesa, leader 

of Poland’s 

Solidarity union, 

casts his ballot in 

a 1989 election 

as his son Bogdan 

looks on. Walesa 

later would serve 

as President of 

Poland.
THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER 29

Helmut Kohl to the citizens of the eastern 

German Democratic Republic (GDR) gathered 

in Dresden on December 19 as the crowd 

shouted, “Germany, Germany” and “We are 

one people.” 

Third, the actual, physical crumbling.

The Wall was not merely 106 kilometers 

of concrete elements and 68 kilometers of 

metal lattice fence with 302 watchtowers 

bisecting a German city. It was instead the 

most conspicuous part of the physical and 

metaphorical Iron Curtain dividing free and 

unfree Europe.

When exactly did this Curtain come down? 

Cracks appeared when Hungarian officers 

removed the barbed wire on their border with 

Austria. This was in May 1989. That summer 

thousands of East Germans drove their telltale Trabants (a notoriously unreliable, locally 

manufactured East German car made, some 

Clockwise 

from top left: 

November 

1989, happy 

East Germans 

on their way 

to new homes 

in the West. 

The displayed 

license plate has 

been defaced 

to indicate 

“Germany” 

rather than 

the GDR; at a 

Dresden rally in 

December, 1989, 

East Germans 

display a banner 

calling for “One 

Germany”; with 

the Wall down, 

East Germans 

pass through 

“Checkpoint 

Charlie” into 

West Berlin.
30 THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER

alleged, of cardboard) to Warsaw and Prague 

and from there to Budapest, hoping to make it 

to “the West.” And so when on September 11, 

1989, the Hungarians opened their border for 

citizens of the GDR to exit freely, some 15,000 

Germans voted with their feet. That was one 

dent in the dam-like Berlin Wall, and a big 

one. Three weeks later, citing “humanitarian 

reasons,” the GDR authorities allowed a 

special train to leave Warsaw with almost a 

thousand East German refugees, transit the 

GDR, and continue on to the Federal Republic 

of Germany. More such trains left soon from 

Poland, carrying a total of 7,600 refugees. By 

November 3, 40,000 East German refugees 

had left for West Germany via Czechoslovakia. 

Now the dam really was leaking. The Wall 

looked far less sturdy.

Given the precise procedural formalism 

and stiffness of the GDR, the ultimate irony 

of November 9, 1989, was how the Wall at last 

opened that day: It was a bureaucratic screw-up. 

Not having been properly briefed, Communist 

Party leader Günter Schabowski famously 

announced in a live, televised press conference 

that all rules for traveling abroad were lifted. 

When pressed by journalists, he stated that it 

was “immediately,” not for the next day as it was 

planned. As for the rest, well, we all saw it.

No, I was not in Berlin the night the Wall 

fell. On November 9, 1989, I was in the editorial 

offices of The New York Times. The editor, 

Max Frankel, had granted me a short-term 

internship. I would acquire some experience 

about independent newspapers and apply it in 

the newly democratized Eastern Europe, where 

I had a journalist job waiting for me. That such 

a position was even possible in Poland tells us 

much about the rush of events.

A few days before the Wall came down 

a Polish actress declared on the TV news, 

referring to our semi-free elections: “Ladies and 

gentlemen, on June 4, 1989, communism ended 

in Poland.” It did. And the Gazeta Wyborcza

(Electoral Gazette) daily newspaper, created as 

part of the decision to hold those elections, was, 

as the saying went, “the first free newspaper 

between Berlin and Vladivostok.”

I came back to Poland in the spring of 

1989, after 15 years of living abroad, to join the 

editorial staff of that daily. I found the newly 

secured freedoms almost unbelievable, but my 

colleagues not only knew it was for real, they 

also expected a domino effect soon would bring 

the crumbling of the entire Soviet bloc. Surely, 

they argued, the Poles could take the credit for 

that? The patriot in me agreed.

Bucharest, 

December, 1989: 

Civil Defense 

members 

deliver food to 

revolutionaries.
THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER 31

The reporter in me wanted to see it all. In 

1989, the Gazeta Wyborcza foreign desk was 

as privileged a seat as they come to observe the 

demise of communism.

For the rest of 1989 and well into 1990, 

I reported for Gazeta as the domino pieces 

fell: from Czechoslovakia, Romania, and 

Nicaragua, then — writing for a newly created 

weekly — from Albania and from the Baltic 

States. Having participated in the Solidarity 

movement, I had very high expectations for the 

other movements across Eastern Europe.

Reporting from Czechoslovakia was 

probably the most exciting. It was the cleanest, 

smoothest, and most elegant of the “revolutions.” 

It was also a swift one. Graffiti in Prague that 

winter featured this simple list:

Poland, 10 years.

Hungary, 10 months.

East Germany, 10 weeks.

Czechoslovakia, 10 days.

It took a little bit longer than 10 days, but 

still it was a time when everything seemed 

possible, when we Eastern Europeans thought, 

as the song went, “We’d live the life we choose, 

we’d fight and never lose.” 

Moving almost directly from reporting 

on the “velvet revolution” in Czechoslovakia to 

Romania’s “bloody revolution,” took me from 

the seventh cloud of heaven to hell on earth.

In my notebooks from that time I find 

these entries:

Dec 12, 1989, Prague: 

People on Václavské náměstí square 

dance and sing “For Christmas we want Havel 

president” and they stick flowers in the barrels of 

the rifles of the puzzled policemen.

Dec 25, 1989, Bucharest:

Palace Square smells of wet ashes from 

the burnt out building of Communist Party 

and people repeat “Today is Christmas, the 

madman is gone” as they watch the replay of the 

execution of Nicolae Ceauşescu.

Dec 28, 1989, Bucharest:

State Romanian television broadcasts a film 

with Charlie Chaplin, that was forbidden until 

now... “The Great Dictator.”

 “Oh, yes, those were the days...”

Anna Husarska worked as an editor and 

translator in the office of Solidarity abroad 

(Paris) and was a journalist at the Polish daily 

Gazeta Wyborcza. In the U.S. she was staff 

writer at The New Republic and The New 

Yorker magazines reporting from conflict 

and post-conflict situations, Senior Political 

Analyst at the International Crisis Group 

and is currently Senior Policy Adviser at the 

International Rescue Committee. The opinions 

expressed here are her own.

A Hungarian 

border police 

officer checks 

travel documents 

at the HungarianAustrian border 

in 1996. What 

was once the 

first open border 

between Soviet 

Bloc countries 

and the West 

is now among 

the many open 

borders in a 

united Europe.
1961

MARCH 13 — President John F. Kennedy meets with 

West Berlin’s Mayor Willy Brandt, reassuring him of 

continued U.S. support.

JUNE 3-4 — At their Vienna conference, President 

Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev find 

themselves in stark disagreement over German selfdetermination. Khrushchev threatens after six months 

to negotiate a separate peace treaty with East Germany, 

a measure that would unilaterally change the post-war 

status quo, and threaten western access to divided 

Berlin. In response, Kennedy promises a “cold winter,” 

announces plans for a substantial buildup of U.S. 

conventional military forces, and declares he will defend 

Allied access to West Berlin.

JULY/AUGUST — In response to the large number 

of refugees fleeing East Berlin and the GDR (as many 

as 2,000 each day from August 1-12), the East German 

government gravely warns of “measures to safeguard the 

security of the German Democratic Republic.”

AUGUST 13 — Before dawn on a Sunday morning, East 

German police officers and soldiers begins barricading 

the Eastern sector of Berlin from the three Western 

sectors, preventing any further migration. Two days later, 

the GDR begins construction of a mammoth concrete 

wall. Refugees attempting to flee westward to freedom 

are shot dead by border guards. The British Foreign 

Office calls the move “contrary to the four-power status 

of Berlin and... therefore illegal.” The New York Times

Berlin Divided...and reunited, 1961-1989 

(A Chronology)

Above: Before the Wall: a 1952 Berlin border crossing. 

Opposite Page: in August, 1961, two young girls speak 

with their grandparents in East Germany...over a 

barbed wire fence. So close yet so far.

32 THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER
THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER 33
34 THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER

Clockwise from top: After 

learning that the GDR was 

sealing off Berlin with barbed 

road blocks and walls, these 

East German citizens flee 

while they can with only a few 

belongings; West Berliners 

watch as Eastern workers divide 

their city in August, 1961; A 

West Berlin guard stands watch 

as East German workers add 

blocks to the wall.
THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER 35

editorializes that those who fled to the West did so 

“because they could not endure the shame and misery of 

living under the so-called German Democratic Republic.”

AUGUST 26 — All crossing points are closed to 

West Berliners. The East German government restricts 

passage to only West Berliners with a special permit, 

then effectively shuts down access entirely by refusing to 

issue these permits.

1962

JANUARY 24 — Twenty-eight men, women, and 

children escape to West Berlin by tunneling their way 

under the fortified Wall. Among them were a 71-yearold paralyzed woman and an 8-year-old girl.

JUNE 8 — Fourteen East Berliners, including a woman 

with a baby in her arms, seize control of a passenger 

ferry on the River Spree and brave gunfire from GDR 

border guards to reach the West Berlin bank unharmed. 

“Today is my dream come true,” said the ship’s steward. 

“This is the happiest day of my life.”

AUGUST 17 — Eighteen-year-old Peter Fechter 

becomes the Wall’s 50th casualty when he is shot by 

border guards during an escape attempt. His bulletriddled body is left unattended on the eastern side of the 

Wall as West Berliners screamed at the “murderers” on 

the other side.

1963

JUNE 26 — President Kennedy invigorates Germany 

and shook the world with a powerful speech from 

West Berlin. He concludes with the words: “All free 

men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and 

therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words: Ich 

bin ein Berliner.”

Left: GDR border 

guards check cars 

at the Helmstedt 

Checkpoint in Berlin 

in December, 1961. 

Below: President 

John F. Kennedy 

greets Soviet 

Premier Nikita 

Khrushchev as they 

meet for the first 

time in Vienna on 

June 3, 1961, two 

months before the 

erection of the 

Berlin Wall. 
36 THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER

Left: West German construction workers stop 

for a chat directly next to the Berlin Wall 

in September, 1967. Above: British soldiers 

watch the border in November, 1968. On the 

other side, East Germans are extending the 

Berlin Wall. 

Left: An East German police officer crawls through a 

tunnel built in West Berlin — the GDR claimed it was 

built for Western spies, while the West claimed it was 

built to help refugees. Above: Two men open an oil 

drum that had been used to smuggle their girlfriends 

over to West Berlin in 1965.
THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER 37

Clockwise from top left: West 

Berliners queue up for pass 

certificates to visit relatives in the 

East. East Berliners did not have 

this option; Families return to the 

West after visiting relatives in East 

Berlin. The sign reads “See you 

again in the capital of the GDR!”; 

An aerial view of the Berlin Wall 

from the East; An East German 

border guard watches the fortified 

border. East German guards were 

ordered to shoot on sight anyone 

who attempted to escape. 
38 THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER

DECEMBER 17 — Just in time for the Christmas 

holiday, an agreement between the West German and 

East German governments enables West Berliners 

to obtain short-term permits to visit relatives in the 

Eastern part of the city for the first time since the 

border was closed.

1964

OCTOBER 5 — Fifty-seven East Berliners successfully 

reaches West Berlin through a 145-yard tunnel dug 

under the basement of an abandoned pastry shop. It 

took over six months to build the tunnel and was the 

largest escape to date.

1965

DECEMBER 26 — About 800,000 West 

Germans take advantage of a special twoweek holiday relaxation of restrictions to 

visit friends and relatives in East Berlin. 

East Berliners were not permitted to travel 

to the west. One was killed and another 

wounded attempting to do so.

1967

FEBRUARY 2 — East 

German parliament 

establishes a separate East German citizenship, 

encompassing residents of East Berlin. This implies that 

the division of Germany will be permanent.

FEBRUARY 3 — East Germany releases four 

Americans imprisoned since 1965 on charges of helping 

East Berliners escape to the West.

1970

MARCH 19 — Former West Berlin mayor and now 

West German Chancellor Willy Brandt meets with 

the chairman of the GDR Council of Ministers, Willi 

Stoph, in Erfurt, East Germany.

MARCH 26 — The U.S., Great Britain, France, and the 

Soviet Union begin negotiations on a Berlin Agreement.

1971

JANUARY 31 — Berliners can make telephone calls 

across the Wall for the first time in two decades.

President Ronald Reagan waves to the crowd after a 

famous June, 1987 speech in which he declared “Mr. 

Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” He is applauded on 

the right by FRG Chancellor Helmut Kohl and on the 

left by FRG President Philipp Jenninger.
THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER 39

MAY 3 — Erich Honecker, the mastermind of the 

Berlin Wall, takes over from Walter Ulbricht as East 

German leader.

SEPTEMBER 3 — Representatives of the U.S., 

France, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union signs 

the Four Powers Agreement, reaffirming that all four 

powers retain rights and responsibilities with regard to 

Germany and, by implication, to Berlin. 

1972

DECEMBER 21 — West German minister Egon Bahr 

and GDR State Secretary Michael Kohl take a major 

step toward reconciliation, signing the Basic Agreement 

on Relationships between the Federal Republic and the 

German Democratic Republic. It provides for enhanced 

commercial, diplomatic, cultural, and tourist ties.

1975

OCTOBER 29 — Despite lingering tensions, the FRG 

and the GDR agree that either side can rescue drowning 

victims in bordering rivers and canals. This issue arose 

after West German firefighters were forced to watch a 

boy drown in the Spree river—which separated East 

from West—when GDR border guards refused to let 

them try to save him.

1980

OCTOBER 9 — Attempting to re-impose travel 

restrictions, the GDR raises the fee for visitors from 

West Berlin to twenty-five deutsche marks per day.

1982

JUNE 11 — During his first visit to West Berlin as 

president, Ronald Reagan calls on the Soviet Union 

to work proactively toward long-term peace. During a 

speech to American soldiers, he asks “Why is this wall 

here? Why are they so afraid of freedom on this side of 

the wall?”

1984

JANUARY 20 — The U.S. Embassy in East Berlin 

arranges for six GDR citizens to cross into West Berlin 

as political refugees.

JANUARY 24 — A dozen more East Germans seek 

refuge at the Permanent Representation of the Federal 

Republic in East Berlin. Much to the consternation of 

the GDR, they too were granted asylum in West Berlin.

MARCH 14 — Frustrated by its inability to stem the 

flow of East Germans to the West, the GDR erects 

a second wall between the Brandenburg Gate and 

Potsdamer Platz. West Germany initially attempts 

to take advantage of this development and adjust the 

borders of Berlin. The New York Times opined that 

“neither the United States or the Soviet Union is 

exercising much control” in Berlin. In its 23 years of 

existence, the Wall had already claimed at least 70 lives.

1985

MARCH 11 — Mikhail Gorbachev, youngest member 

of the Soviet Politburo, is elected secretary general of 

the communist party. The New York Times calls him 

As tourists look on, East Germans are held at rifle point “A Leader With Style—and Impatience.”

after a failed attempt to escape to the West.
40 THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER

Clockwise from top: 120,000 

East Germans demonstrate 

in Leipzig in October, 1989; 

A lone East German soldier 

shakes his fist at a mass of 

West German protesters 

who had thrown bottles at 

guards and a newly-erected 

barrier at Checkpoint 

Charlie on October 7, 1989; 

Hundreds of East German 

citizens race through the 

woods into Hungary on 

their way to the open 

border with Austria and the 

West in August, 1989. 
THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER 41

1986

Gorbachev ends economic aid to the Soviet satellite 

states in Eastern Europe. This eventually produces new 

policies on military aid and political interventions in 

the region, and ultimately to Soviet acquiescence when 

revolutions spread throughout Eastern Europe. 

1987

JUNE 7-8 — A large open-air rock concert by the 

British band Genesis is held in West Berlin, and draws 

East Berlin youth to the Wall to listen. As GDR state 

police try to disperse the crowds, 3,000-4,000 young 

Berliners chant “The wall must go!” Countless East 

Berliners are injured as they were beaten by police and 

thrown into vans. 

JUNE 12 — President Reagan speaks in front of 

the Brandenburg Gate, exclaiming “Mr. Gorbachev, 

tear down this wall!” Some Reagan advisers deemed 

the phrase too provocative. Reagan decided to say it 

anyway. Berliners roared approval.

DECEMBER 8 — Ronald Reagan and Mikhail 

Gorbachev sign the landmark Intermediate-Range 

Nuclear Forces Treaty. The linchpin phrase that Reagan 

insisted upon was “trust but verify.” The increased trust 

between the Cold War adversaries makes diplomatic 

solutions over Germany increasingly plausible.

DECEMBER 10 — East German state police thwart a 

planned protest by the “Initiative for Peace and Human 

Rights.”

1989

JANUARY 18 — Honecker defiantly asserts that the 

Wall would stay “for fifty, even a hundred years,” as long 

as capitalist forces opposed his regime.

FEBRUARY 6 — A final East German citizen is shot 

dead attempting to flee West. He was the last of 79 

recorded victims. The wall would ultimately come 

down later that year.

FEBRUARY 27 — East German Communist theorist 

Otto Reinhold gives a speech denouncing the reforms 

of Gorbachev. Soviet analysts summarized his views 

by saying “there was no need to repair one’s walls just 

because a neighbor was doing so.”

MARCH 8 — A young East German citizen attempts 

to fly a homemade hot air balloon out of Berlin. He died 

when the balloon crashed in Zehlendorf, West Berlin.

MARCH 12 — A dispute over fishing rights near 

Szczecin, in Western Poland, reveals a rift in the East 

Bloc dating to World War II. This would later become 

a diplomatic hurdle during the German reunification 

process.

JUNE 7 — Demonstrators protest in East Berlin 

after a series of allegedly fraudulent local East German 

elections. One hundred twenty were temporarily jailed.

AUGUST 8 — Outside of the Permanent 

Representation of the Federal Republic in East Berlin, 

GDR citizens gather to seek asylum. So many came 

and refused to leave that the building had to be closed 

Berliners sing and dance atop the Berlin Wall on the 

morning of November 10, 1989 — the day after the 

wall fell.
42 THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER

when it could no longer accommodate people “under 

dignified, humane conditions.” 

AUGUST 19 — Approximately 900 East German 

citizens escapes into West Germany via Hungary to 

Austria. They were attending a picnic event entitled 

“Tear It Down and Take It With You,” where attendees 

were encouraged to clip off pieces of the barbed wire 

running along the border. About 100 Germans shows 

their way through a closed gate while Hungarian police 

looked away. Three thousand refugees escaped by this 

means during the month of August. In the coming 

weeks, these numbers would increase mightily.

SEPTEMBER 11 — The “New Forum” is founded in 

East Berlin by critics of the GDR; Hungary opened its 

border with Austria with a ceremonial cut of barbed 

wire. Ten thousand East Germans crossed into West 

Germany via Austria that month.

OCTOBER 7 — Official celebrations of the 40th 

anniversary of the GDR commence. Thousands 

demonstrates in Berlin, demanding democracy and 

freedom. Mikhail Gorbachev lectures the regime of 

Erich Honecker, urging it to embrace reforms and to 

recognize the groundswell of discontent in East Europe. 

Gorbachev prophetically adds that “Life punishes those 

who come too late.”

OCTOBER 9 — Mass demonstrations of 70,000 in 

Leipzig, home to much grassroots opposition to the GDR.

OCTOBER 18 — Erich Honecker is forced from office 

after 18 years as state and party chief. He attributes 

his resignation to the effects of gall bladder surgery. 

Honecker later is brought to trial in Germany. His 

successor is Egon Krenz, a conservative whom The 

New York Times calls “no Gorbachev.” Krenz promises 

reforms, but they proved too little, too late. 

OCTOBER 21-30 — In Berlin and other major 

German cities, hundreds of thousands of protestors 

mass in demonstrations against the government.

Left: November 9, 1989, the night the wall came down. 

Berliners crowded atop the Berlin Wall and demanded 

its destruction. Above: A traffic jam along 17th Street on 

November 11, 1989, leading through the Brandenburg 

Gate and into the West. Thousands of GDR citizens fled 

west after the wall came down. 
THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER 43

NOVEMBER 7 — The entire East German 

government resigns, followed closely by the entire 

Politburo. Demonstrations continue, refugees increase.

NOVEMBER 9 — After a vague announcement lifting 

travel restrictions, the GDR government unexpectedly 

opens its borders in the evening. While some border 

guards insisted that one had to “read between the lines,” 

and that citizens would need special permission to pass, 

the guards were overwhelmed by the number of citizens 

who appeared. Orders were not issued to stop them. 

Tens of thousands flood into West Berlin. 

NOVEMBER 10 — Border guards began dismantling 

the Wall to create more transfer points. Berliners 

—both East and West — enthusiastically participates 

in the destruction.

NOVEMBER 11-12 — Three million East German 

citizens visits West Germany to look, shop, or visit 

with family and friends; some sought new lives in the 

FRG. Tens of thousands fill the Kurfilrstendamm, 

overwhelming the streets. West German newspapers 

run a special supplemental listing of more than 4,000 

jobs — many with rooms included — to provide a 

reason for East Germans to stay.

NOVEMBER 13 — Hans Modrow is elected prime 

minister by the People’s Parliament of the German 

Democratic Republic. Meanwhile, in Leipzig, 200,000 

demonstrate for reform, as others do so in other 

major German cities. The “Monday Demonstrations” 

continue for weeks. The Soviets do not intervene.

DECEMBER 3 — The entire Socialist Unity party 

leadership, led by Egon Krenz, resigns. Along with 

many other top party functionaries, former state and 

party chief Erich Honecker is expelled from the party 

in disgrace. What power remained in East German 

government was in the hands of Hans Modrow, a 

reformist politician from Dresden.

DECEMBER 22 — The Brandenburg Gate reopens for 

the first time in 28 years. It had been a potent symbol 

of the division of Germany. Helmut Kohl, Chancellor 

of West Germany, called it “one of the happiest hours of 

my life.”

DECEMBER 31 — On New Year’s Eve, around 

500,000 people from around the world gathers at the 

Brandenburg Gate to celebrate a new era.

Left: East and West Berliners stand together in the 

rain on December 22, 1989, to see the opening of the 

Brandenburg Gate Park after 28 years. Above: East 

German border guards greet the West German police 

as the GDR removes pieces of the wall to create a 

public throughway. 
44 THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER

ROUNDTABLE

We asked a number of thinkers to share their responses to a single question: 

“What was the significance of November 9, 1989?”

44 THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER
THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER 45
46 THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER

Theresa Bond

Theresa Bond is a pseudonym for a respected political analyst specializing in closed societies.

November 9, 1989. The iconic photo 

captures the crowded crest of the 

Berlin Wall as people celebrate its 

crumbling. It is a globally recognized 

symbol of the end of a world divided by 

oppressive communist regimes.

Or is it?

Twenty years after the event, not one single 

photograph of this event was legally viewed by any 

of the 23 million citizens of North Korea. This is 

ironic because the closest thing to the Berlin Wall’s 

Checkpoint Charlie is the Panmunjom border post 

between North and South Korea. There, soldiers of the 

last nation divided by communism look menacingly into 

each other’s eyes. Hardly anyone, including the North 

Korean regime, favors a wall between the two Koreas, 

but the North’s dynastic and paranoid dictators are 

particularly difficult to handle.

Cuba’s regime is another that clings to communism 

and oppresses its people in the name of that ideology. 

The Wall in Cuba is personified by a wall of Malecón, 

the seaside boulevard in Havana where Cubans come 

to look at the sea and the world beyond their island, a 

free world to which they cannot freely travel. Not one 

picture of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, has 

ever been legally published in Cuba.

These two are extreme cases of totalitarian 

communist dictatorships. Remnants of the Wall linger 

on in several parts of the former Soviet Union — 

Belarus, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan among the 

most prominent examples — but few people in Minsk, 

Ashgabat, or Tashkent ignore the wrong that victimizes 

them. They have dissident opinions — they just cannot 

voice them. 

When asked about “dissident opinions,” people 

in Havana may not know what the word “dissident” 

means. But in Pyongyang they will know neither the 

word “dissident” nor “opinion.”

Cold War tensions linger on the Korean peninsula. 

Here, South Korean soldiers closely watch North Korean 

soldiers in the border village of Tention.
THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER 47

Clockwise from top: Cuban dissidents 

demand freedom and democracy, 2003; 

Female members of Turkmenistan’s People’s 

Council; An Uzbek woman examines foreign 

newspapers and magazines.
48 THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER

Janusz Bugajski

Janusz Bugajski holds the Lavrentis Lavrentiadis Chair in South East European Studies and 

is the director of New European Democracies at CSIS.

T

he Iron Curtain disintegrated long 

before the Berlin Wall was dismantled 

in November 1989. The communist 

system in Eastern Europe had been in 

terminal decay for several years. The 

single-party regimes stifled human rights and political 

freedoms and were unable to deliver on the core 

justification for communism: economic performance. 

The disparities between East and West grew starker 

during the 1980s, especially as market integration 

boosted West European prosperity and the Sovietdominated Warsaw Pact proved not to be a credible 

alternative to an integrated Europe.

Protest movements against communism 

periodically rumbled across the region, but in the 

summer of 1980 an earthquake shook Europe with 

the formation of Poland’s free trade union Solidarity. 

Although Solidarity was temporarily stifled and 

driven underground, its mass membership and farsighted leadership demonstrated that the days of 

Soviet-imposed communism were numbered. The only 

unknown was whether the system would disappear with 

a bang or a whimper.
THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER 49

Fortunately, communism no longer had the 

strength to resist its own expiration. Ideologically 

bankrupt, economically incompetent, and politically 

primitive, Marxism-Leninism proved another 

experimental dead end. Moreover, the Soviet regime 

that had propped up proxy governments throughout 

Eastern Europe no longer had the conviction or 

resources forcibly to suppress the “fraternal” peoples’ 

yearnings for pluralism and national independence.

By the time the Berlin Wall was formally breached, 

Poland already had achieved a democratically elected 

government, while Hungary and Czechoslovakia were 

steadily moving toward political pluralism as leaders 

there realized that systemic change was unavoidable.

Looking back on November 1989, it is often 

overlooked that while these historic events signaled the 

collapse of communism, they also heralded the national 

liberation of Central and East European states from 

Soviet overlordship. While communism is but a fading 

nightmare in these nations, their struggle to maintain 

state independence from an increasingly assertive 

Russian government continues to this day. 

Indeed, officials in Moscow seek to revise the 

significance of 1989 by asserting that the Soviet Union 

did not occupy half of Europe after World War II 

and by underplaying how Soviet arms imposed there a 

repressive totalitarian system that stifled political and 

economic progress for almost half a century. Some of 

Russia’s spokesmen claim that the Kremlin benevolently 

dismantled the Soviet bloc and that the Cold War 

ended in a draw, rather than admitting that the Soviet 

system proved an abject failure and that it disintegrated 

from within.

Unfortunately, this notion of a benign or even 

progressive Soviet system is offered to justify current 

and future assertiveness. For this reason, both 

Europeans and Americans must vigilantly defend the 

real historical legacy of November 1989.

Above: On the eve of the October 1989 GDR elections, 

East Germans sit in front of the Palace of the Republic in a 

peaceful demand for democratic reforms.

Opposite page: Pro-Solidarity banners, September 1988.
50 THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER

Edwina S. Campbell

Edwina Campbell has served on the United States Air Force Air University faculty since 2003, 

and before that in a number of academic and analyst positions. She has served as a U.S. 

diplomat, specializing in political-military affairs, and her publications include Consultation and 

Consensus in NATO and Germany’s Past and Europe’s Future. The views expressed in Campbell’s 

essay are hers alone and not those of Air University, the United States Air Force, or the 

U.S. Department of Defense.

On November 9, 1989, I was on a 

speaking tour in West Germany for 

the United States Information Agency. 

I spent the day in Saarbruecken, took 

a train to Frankfurt, read for a while, 

went to sleep early, and woke up the next morning 

without having heard about events in Berlin. No one 

mentioned them over breakfast. When I finally turned 

on the television mid-morning, on every channel, 

reporters stood in front of the Wall while people 

behind them chipped away at it. I sat down on the bed, 

dumbfounded, and stared at the TV.

What do you do on a bright, cold day on which 

the world’s strategic tectonic plates are shifting? I 

visited Frankfurt’s Paulskirche, which in 1848 had 

witnessed the failed attempt to create a unified, 

democratic Germany. A lot of schoolchildren were 

touring the church, but no guide explaining the events 

of 1848 deviated from the script to mention the path 

to unification being carved in the Berlin Wall at that 

moment. I heard no conversation about the opening 

of the Wall until that evening, at the political science 

conference I was attending at the university.

I’ve been grateful ever since that I never did get to 

Berlin on that trip; the atmosphere there was unique. 

Throughout West Germany in the coming days, 

I had the same experience that I’d had in Frankfurt. 

I encountered a huge divide between academics, 

politicians, and diplomats, on the one hand, and most 

West Germans, on the other, in the interest they 

showed in the opening of the Wall. When I did engage 

people in conversation, some were nervous or even 

fearful about unfolding events, but many professed to 

be simply indifferent.

My experience that long-ago November says 

something important about the rocky course of 

German-American relations since the mid-1990s. 

Perhaps the greatest difference between the two 

countries, culturally and politically, is their attitude 

toward change. The opening of the Wall ushered in a 

period of global political change unprecedented, at least, 

since 1918, and perhaps simply unprecedented. The 

transatlantic paradigms of the 20th century became 

inadequate, but an understandable desire to cling to 

them persisted in Germany.

West German foreign policy was built on two 

virtues: stability and predictability. In 1989 these were 

the pillars, of Bonn’s Ostpolitik, pursued since the 1970s 
THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER 51

and of its even more long-standing ties to the NATO 

alliance. On November 9, 1989, that era of stability 

and predictability ended, and the West Germans I 

encountered that month instinctively seemed to know it 

and to shy away from the reality of what was happening 

in Berlin.

Americans have a different history. We tend to view 

moments of political unpredictability and instability as 

opportunities to seize, not crises to be feared. This can 

make us overly optimistic about our ability to deal with 

change, and the transatlantic crises of the last few years 

reflect that, as well. The American belief that a problem 

can be solved inevitably clashes with the German 

conviction that situations must be managed.

Both are right. On November 9, 1989, the fourdecades old Cold War was solved because the Allies had 

collectively managed their often tense relationship with 

the Soviet Union. The answer to “the German question” 

similarly emerged from a decades-long transatlantic 

strategic dialogue. Both countries need to remember 

that answers to today’s global political questions 

can only emerge from a willingness to continue that 

dialogue in the century ahead.

A new era. Above: German Chancellor Angela Merkel 

and U.S. President Barack Obama, April 2009. 

Left: Once rivals, now allies. German and Polish 

soldiers serve together in the NATO alliance.
52 THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER

Roy Ginsberg

Roy H. Ginsberg is Professor of Government at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, 

New York, and author of Demystifying the European Union: The Enduring Logic of 

Regional Integration.

T

wenty years after its fall, the Berlin Wall 

still evokes a variety of painful images. 

Berliners and the world remember those 

killed trying to escape and families and 

friends kept apart after 1961 when the 

communists erected the Wall to preserve their failing 

system. After all, no one ever tried to escape from 

freedom in West Berlin to tyranny in East Berlin.

The Wall was another manifestation of the wartime 

Allies’ failure to agree on what to do with a defeated 

Germany. Twice brutalized by German armed forces 

in the 20th century, the Soviets wanted a neutral, 

weakened, and dependent neighbor. Conversely, the 

Americans and their allies wanted a democratic and 

free Germany as a bulwark against the spread of 

communism and to prevent the return of fascism. 

Since the wartime Allies retained occupation 

rights in Berlin after 1949, both the western Federal 

Republic of Germany (FRG) and the Soviet satellite 

German Democratic Republic remained independent 

but not fully sovereign. Not until 1989-1990 when the 

Wall came down, the wartime Allies relinquished their 

residual occupation rights, and the two German states 

were united, was World War II finally concluded.

The Wall represented an artificially divided 

Germany and a dangerously bifurcated world. It was in 

that world that I visited East Berlin as a student in 1974. 

What I most remember as a citizen of a free country 

was the sense of foreboding I felt when entering and the 

sense of freedom I felt when leaving — and the sadness 

of knowing that others left behind could not follow. 

Fifteen years later, I rushed into my classroom to 

share my joy at the news that the Wall was being torn 

down. My students were intrigued but not exhilarated. 

Their experience differed from that of my generation. 

Children and grandchildren of those who fought 

to defeat fascism, my generation was more directly 

connected to these wartime heroes and to the postwar 

leadership of the United States and its allies. From the 

Marshall Plan, Truman Doctrine, and Berlin Airlift 

of the late 1940s to the containment of communism 

in the 1950s and 1960s, the West stood down 

communism. Diplomat and Russia scholar George F. 

Kennan predicted communism would atrophy from 

within, which it did, while containment limited Soviet 

expansionism to Eastern Europe.

Postwar West Germans must be congratulated 

for constructing a democratic polity and a beacon of 

hope for the East. West Germany had two advantages 

over the Weimar Republic, its doomed democratic 
THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER 53

predecessor. It had the economic security to prosper 

and democratize as part of what became the European 

Union (EU). It had physical security through the 

North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO); thus 

the FRG would no longer threaten or be threatened by 

other European powers.

Today’s united Germany, a recipient of security 

from the EU and NATO, promotes democracy and 

stability in a world far more dangerous to many 

civilian populations than the world of 1989. If Germany 

can assume leadership through the EU, NATO, and 

the United Nations to further enhance stability and 

security in a world in need of both, it can give back to 

those who helped it to be secure and free. 

Above: German paratroopers 

prepare for a 2001 

peacekeeping mission in 

Macedonia. 

Left: A German Court clears 

the way for ratification of 

a European Union reform 

treaty.
54 THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER

Ronald H. Linden

RONALD H. LINDEN is Professor of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh. A Princeton 

PhD (1976), he was Director of the Center for Russian and East European Studies at Pitt from 

1984-89 and 1991-98. From 1989 to 1991 Dr. Linden served as Director of Research for Radio 

Free Europe in Munich, Germany. He is the author of numerous works on Central and Southeast 

Europe and is the Associate Editor of Problems of Post-Communism.

Nineteen eighty-nine began with Europe 

divided, as it had been since the end 

of World War II. More than one 

hundred million people lived in states 

dominated by the Soviet Union and 

national communist parties of Eastern Europe. Václav 

Havel, a renowned playwright and proponent of human 

rights, languished in jail in Czechoslovakia; Nicolae 

Ceauşescu and Todor Zhivkov were in their third 

and fourth decades of tyrannical rule in Romania and 

Bulgaria, respectively. And in Germany, a 12-foot-high 

wall cutting through and around the city of Berlin 

symbolized most poignantly the real and symbolic 

division of the continent.

By the end of the year, Václav Havel was president 

of Czechoslovakia, dictatorships from the Balkans 

to the Baltic Sea were overturned, and the people of 

Eastern Europe, having regained their sovereignty, 

began the task of building democracies and free 

economies. The opening of the Berlin Wall on the night 

of November 9, 1989, was emblematic of the end of the 

separation of Europe.

Apart from the breathtaking speed and scope of 

these events, several features make them remarkable. 

First, while analysts and political actors had noted 

the deficiencies of communist regimes, their nearly 

simultaneous fall in Eastern Europe was unexpected. 

Previous challenges usually had been confined to a 

single country. This time the demonstrations and 

societal demands were infectious — and the results 

sped from the replacement of the communist prime 

Mikhail Gobachev discusses agricultural management 

reforms with Soviet farm equipment workers. 
THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER 55

minister in Poland at the end of August to the execution 

of Nicolae Ceauşescu in Romania on Christmas Day.

In addition, with the exception of Romania, the 

revolutionary changes were nonviolent. The regimes 

were challenged not by foreign armies but by their own 

peoples, convinced that the governing doctrines of the 

past 40 years had brought not liberation but repression. 

But the upheaval went beyond mere dissatisfaction 

with failed policies. These events also demonstrated 

the importance of governing legitimacy, the idea that 

governments have the right — not just the power — 

to rule. From the beginning, East Europeans viewed 

local communist rulers not as “theirs” but rather as 

the product of Soviet domination. When Mikhail 

Gorbachev, the Soviet leader who had been pushing 

reform in his own country, removed the threat of 

intervention, the derivative regimes of Eastern Europe 

were swept away.

Two other factors made possible the end of 

communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall. One was 

the spread of information, both about the West and 

about the real situation in Eastern Europe. Knowledge 

about how West Europeans and Americans were 

governed, and how they lived, enhanced the appeal of 

alternative models. While notions of democracy and 

freedom in Eastern Europe may not have been fully 

specified, the knowledge that these concepts worked 

elsewhere proved a powerful motive.

None of this would have mattered had the people 

of the region not shown the courage and vision to seize 

the moment, to recognize that their time had come to 

undertake the tasks of both tearing down — as they did 

the Berlin Wall in 1989 — and building up — as they 

do now every day in newly democratic societies.

Clockwise from top left: Former dissident Václav Havel 

greets crowd on December 29, 1989, his first day as 

President of Czechoslovakia; Over 100,000 answered the 

call when the dissident group Civic Forum called for a 

demonstration against Czechoslovakia’s communist 

rulers; A Bulgarian man reads about 

election returns, June 2001.
56 THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER

Andreas Rude

Andreas Rude is a Public Affairs Specialist at the U.S. Embassy in Copenhagen with special 

focus on security policy. He is also a freelance writer and columnist whose work has appeared 

in most major Danish newspapers.

“Let’s go find a pocket calculator!” 

I

n the summer of 1989, a few months before the 

Berlin Wall came down, I worked at a small 

think tank in Copenhagen devoted to security 

policy. Every day the staff would convene for an 

informal luncheon discussion of current affairs, 

and in August of that year something astonishing was 

happening. The East German government was allowing 

its citizens to cross the border from the German 

Democratic Republic into Czechoslovakia and Hungary 

en route to Austria, and we all watched as the crowds 

leaving grew bigger every day. The situation was fluid 

to say the least, and one particularly excited colleague 

wanted to estimate the point at which a much-feared 

neighbor would be completely empty of its 16 million 

inhabitants. Hence the urgent request for a calculator. 

The flippancy showed the mood. It was unbelievable 

— a fairy tale in the cynical world of international 

politics. When the Wall fell in November, the 

excitement swept everywhere, and as one peaceful 

revolution after another caught on in Eastern and 

Central Europe, somber predictions of anarchy and 

violent reprisals gave way to real optimism. The catalysts 

seemed all of a distinct moral nature: human rights, 

concern for the environment, and authoritarian regimes 

collapsing under the weight of their own lies and 

worthless slogans. History was being put right. 

Perhaps the greatest consequence of the fall of that 

strange monument was the birth of a different mindset. 

No longer suspended by the logic of superpower 

confrontation, the main currents of European culture 

and politics were set free, and Europeans began to think 

about themselves in ways they had not for half a century. 

The dark side of that feat was the violent breakup of 

Yugoslavia and the specter of “ethnic cleansing.” The 

reunification of Germany, on the other hand, was a 

logical follow-up to the fall of the Wall, and Berlin has 

since regained its former standing as a celebrated center 

for politics, media, and the arts. Significantly, it has 

also preserved and added to its richness its American 

post-World War II legacy. For Berlin was an American 

success story before it became a European one. 

The Cold War ended when the Wall was knocked 

over and long lines of modest Trabant cars made 

their way from East to West. Tremendous energies 

soaked up by that conflict were released, with Europe 

becoming more prosperous and bolder, as the European 

Union expanded across the continent and NATO 

welcomed former adversaries as new members. Think 

tanks too have grown, as challenges nobody thought 
THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER 57

of a few decades ago now bear down on us. In all this, 

the conversation about Europe reopened in 1989 

is a true asset, critical on both sides of the Atlantic 

and producing impressive results. But even as this 

conversation deepens, it is nowhere near any conclusion.

Nobody should be surprised about that. 

The rules of the game changed as if by magic in 1989. 

Twenty years later we are still catching up, making 

history as we go along.

Clockwise from top left: NATO alliance 

soldiers display their nations’ colors; an East 

European crowd masses to rally for freedom; 

former adversaries — a former U.S. army 

lieutenant at left and a former East German 

state security officer at right — read about 

the once-divided city.
58 THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER

Simon Serfaty

Simon Serfaty holds the Zbigniew Brzezinski Chair in Global Security and Geopolitics at the 

Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C. His most recent book is 

Architects of Delusion (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). 

What happened in Berlin 20 years 

ago, on November 9, 1989 — and 

what followed in Moscow the 

following year — was magical. 

The moment is not so far away 

that it cannot be celebrated now with the same emotion 

as it was lived then. So many had lived for so long 

with the “long, twilight struggle” we call the Cold War 

that they viewed its ending as a miracle rather than 

the fulfillment of a man-made vision that had dared 

anticipate the rollback of an evil empire, the collapse of a 

fatally flawed ideology, and the peaceful resurrection of 

Europe from two suicidal wars.

A vision, however, is mostly what is remembered 

after everything has worked. Lost sometimes in the 

glow of success are the components of that vision: the 

patience in the midst of occasional setbacks, prudence 

in the face of dangerous provocations, and fortitude to 

overcome the tragic burdens of history that produced 

the events of fall 1989. The many expressions of that 

vision, lived over time, deserve to be remembered, not 

only because they worked but also for their relevance 

to the new insecurity unleashed most dramatically on 

September 11, 2001. 
THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER 59

Central to the vision that shaped the Cold War and 

its final outcome was a broad U.S. understanding that 

despite the nation’s unquestioned might, the “over there” 

of yesteryear had come over here to endanger American 

interests and values — and could again. Admittedly, 

calls to disengage from various Cold War flashpoints, 

to “come home,” were heard throughout the Cold War, 

often linked to warnings of irreversible decline and 

impending disasters. But those calls could be ignored, 

and the heavy burdens of entangling commitments 

could be borne because Americans had arrived at a 

broad understanding that no nation alone, however 

peerless, could remain isolated for long — without allies 

that shared its values, interests, and goals and could thus 

contribute their capabilities, experience, and diversity to 

common, complementary, or compatible policies.

The ultimate goal of U.S. leadership, however, 

was not merely to win a war but to defeat war itself 

on a European continent that had made of war an 

unsustainable way of life. As a result, the events of 

November 1989 were not merely the triumph of the 

U.S.-led transatlantic West over the Soviet Union but 

Europe’s triumph over history: As the states of Europe 

bid farewell to arms when they surprisingly agreed to a 

gradual pooling of their national sovereignty, they recast 

themselves into an ever-closer community, now a union, 

that gave them more democracy, affluence, stability, and 

peace than ever before. 

There were those, 20 years ago, who thought 

that the end of the Cold War and the reunification 

of Germany would threaten Europe’s unity, as well 

as its solidarity with the United States. That the 

reverse instead proved true testifies to the depth of 

the vision that brought America and Europe to that 

magical moment 20 years ago and has motivated the 

enlargement and deepening of the Euro-Atlantic 

institutions that continue to define their relations. 

Admittedly, during the Cold War this vision was 

confined to “half the world” only, as Secretary of State 

Dean Acheson subsequently wrote. Today those limits 

remind us of the need to extend that vision, to afford 

others the opportunity to achieve peace, prosperity, 

and freedom.

Above: Political activists demanding greater 

transparency in government release balloons 

outside the Reichstag, 2004. Right: a NATO summit 

welcomes new members Albania and Croatia and 

celebrates the alliance’s 60th anniversary.

Opposite page: a tourist reviews one of the last 

remaining pieces of the Berlin Wall. 
60 THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER

Manfred Stinnes

Manfred Stinnes, Ph.D. (University of Minnesota, 1978), has been a Lecturer in International 

Relations at Humboldt University in Berlin since 2003.

We may all agree on the geostrategic 

consequences that followed the 

fall of the Berlin Wall: The Soviet 

empire began to disappear and 

with it the satellite countries — 

East Germany among them — emerged from Soviet 

domination. The opening of the borders between East 

and West Berlin marked an initially hesitant beginning 

to a process that culminated in the October 3, 1990 act 

of German unification — or, in correct historical and 

constitutional terms, the German Democratic Republic 

(GDR) dissolved itself and joined the Federal Republic 

of Germany. This was achieved without violence and 

should be interpreted as a diplomatic triumph of the 

Western alliance statecraft, not least for securing 

Moscow’s final approval for this fundamental reordering 

of the post-World War II political status quo.

The consequences for the continent were profound. 

Throughout the 19th and early-20th centuries, 

Germany faced real strategic rivals and adopted its 

famous “Schaukelpolitik” policy of fatally adjusting its 

orientation between East and West. With the peaceful 

reunification of the two postwar German states, 

this dilemma has been put to rest. For the first time, 

Germany is surrounded by friendly countries. Since 

1949, the Federal Republic of Germany was a Western 

country and it has remained so even after the events 

of 1989-1990. 

Germany’s new, secure Western orientation offers 

special reassurance to its European neighbors. It is 

grounded firmly in the special German-American 

relationship, a bond probably best explained by the 

anecdote in which of the German Foreign Office 

telephone operator, before connecting Foreign Minister 

East German refugees stand outside the “head 

office of provisional accommodation” after escaping 

through Hungary and Austria into West Germany on 

August 8, 1989.
THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER 61

H.D. Genscher with Secretary of State James Baker in 

February 1990, told Baker: “God bless America.” The 

German-American relationship was never as intimate 

as in 1989-1990. That was a time of great optimism. 

Experts and laymen talked about a “peace dividend” and 

expected democratic progress on a global scale.

While events in Berlin were of huge symbolic 

and practical importance, the Polish and Hungarian 

opposition movements had paved the way for the 

German events. On June 4, 1989, the Polish opposition 

achieved the first (almost-free) elections in a communist 

country, and in May 1989 the Hungarian reformcommunist government opened the border to Austria 

— months before the Berlin Wall was breached.

But the East Germans also acted bravely. Segments 

of East German Protestant churches functioned as a 

haven for protesters and opposition-minded citizens 

who saw no future in the GDR. The southern parts of 

East Germany proved an opposition stronghold, with 

Leipzig its informal capital.

As the tension between the GDR government and 

the opposition movement grew, the famous Monday 

night demonstrations in Leipzig became the focal point. 

Following the October 4, 1989 GDR 40th anniversary 

celebrations, the East Berlin government prepared 

for a final crackdown and, as many feared, was even 

ready for a “Chinese” solution to suppress the next 

Monday demonstration on October 9. Army brigades 

Even a month before the Wall fell, political 

repression remained in place in East Germany. 

Top: East German police repel pro-democracy 

demonstrators. Left: young East Germans light 

candles as a protest against political arrests.
62 THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER

and large special police forces were mobilized and they 

surrounded the historic inner city. Hospital floors were 

emptied and prepared for emergency treatment of large 

numbers of wounded. Demonstrators prepared their 

wills and many expected not to survive the Monday 

night demonstrations. A heroic atmosphere pervaded 

the city. However, when 70,000 demonstrators gathered 

peacefully to march down the streets, military and 

police officials did not dare to order the troops to shoot. 

It was the beginning of the end of the communist 

government in East Germany. For the first time in 

German history, a successful, nonviolent revolution 

occurred. By comparison, the fall of the Wall merely 

punctuated the victory of the democratic revolution. 

Twenty years later, many former East Germans 

have lost their pride in the achievements of 1989-

1990. Some even have dropped the term “nonviolent 

revolution” in favor of the bureaucratic word “turn” 

(Wende). A domestic East-West uneasiness has set 

in, mostly due to economic difficulties. While Berlin 

celebrates the November 9 anniversary of the fall of 

the Wall, the Leipzig region instead commemorates 

the nonviolent revolution and the momentous night 

of October 9. After 20 years, these divided memories 

call for honest appraisals and common understandings. 

While this comparatively modest divide is real, it pales 

in comparison with the enormous political achievements 

of the German people and their neighbors, events 

perhaps best symbolized by the passing of the Berlin 

Wall and the uniting of a free German people.

After German reunification, graffiti artists 

appropriated the remains of the Wall.
THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER 63

Jeremi Suri

Jeremi Suri is the E. Gordon Fox Professor of History, the Director of the European Union Center 

of Excellence, and the Director of the Grand Strategy Program at the University of WisconsinMadison. He is the author of three major books, most recently, Henry Kissinger and the 

American Century. Professor Suri frequently writes for scholarly journals, newspapers, magazines, 

and various web blogs, including his own: http://jeremisuri.net.

T

he fall of the Berlin Wall marked the 

end of an era — a 50-year period of 

continuous superpower confrontation, 

rigid global alliances, threatening nuclear 

arms races, and the brutal repression 

of dissenting ideologies. The Cold War was a time 

when the dominant international states grew more 

powerful and exerted leverage over distant societies on 

an unprecedented scale. The break-up of traditional 

colonial empires in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East 

only increased the influence of the U.S., Soviet, and 

Chinese governments in those regions. The strongest 

states dominated the global landscape from the last 

dying days of the Second World War through the heady 

hours of November 9, 1989, when the world opened to a 

new kind of popular politics.

Communist power crumbled in Eastern Europe 

and the Soviet Union because citizens no longer 

believed in their leaders’ professed ideals. Citizens 

also ceased to fear the consequences of repression by 

government forces that were visibly uncertain about 

what they believed and what kinds of violence they 

could legitimately deploy. Communists ruled until 1989 

in Eastern Europe and 1991 in the Soviet Union, but 

they lost real political authority years earlier.

The fall of the Berlin Wall testified to the shift 

in political momentum from communist rulers to 

educated, articulate, and newly empowered citizens. 

Václav Havel, Lech Walesa, and Boris Yeltsin emerged 

A woman laborer repairs a wall as portraits of 

Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev and East German 

political figures look on.
64 THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER

as public heroes. These figures attracted support from 

people who craved authentic leaders, climbing to power 

through independence, rather than careerism. They also 

commanded a broad international following through the 

global circulation of their words and images. The Cold 

War began in an era of intimidating radio speeches 

from aging men; it ended with the youthful energy of 

attractive figures on television. 

The new politics of television, and soon the 

Internet, were fragmented and impatient. Groups of 

people organized across societies — former political 

prisoners, religious dissidents, and labor unionists, 

among others — to challenge the grand narratives of 

authoritarian communist and liberal capitalist societies. 

They demanded that the state serve their specific 

interests. Groups of consumers, investors, and students, 

in particular, also rejected collective sacrifices and 

opted for instant gratification. They demanded political 

presentism rather than calls for a future utopia. The 

political was now the personal. 

In this context, the fall of the Berlin Wall 

unleashed a proliferation of dreams for better living 

conditions, but these remained small dreams. They 

promised freedom from lies and repression. They did 

not, however, offer a clear path to a new world. Talk of 

an “end to history” masked an inability to think about 

what might come next. The liberation that accompanied 

the end of the Cold War often produced a dangerous 

intoxication. Forward thinking grew more difficult 

with each passing day. 

November 9, 1989 opened new opportunities 

for personal freedom and organization. It also created 

new challenges for managing international relations. 

Making the freedoms that followed the fall of the 

Berlin Wall serve the needs of a more complex world — 

that is the political calling of the first global post-Cold 

War generation. 

Above: supporters of Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first postcommunist leader. Right: Angela Merkel becomes the 

first Chancellor from the former East Germany, the first 

woman, and the youngest person to hold that office.

GPS Printed by Global Publishing Solutions (A/GIS/GPS) © (09-20568-E-1.0)
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Inside front cover: lower right, Library of 

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CORBIS. 24: top to bottom, Erazm Ciolek/Reuters; 

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Executive Editor: George Clack

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U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE

Bureau of International Information Programs

2009

http://www.america.gov/publications/books/berlin_wall.html
Bureau of International Information Programs

U.S. Department of State

http://www.america.gov/publications/books/berlin_wall.html

“It was a great holiday: In the perennial struggle between 

man and barbed wire, today man triumphed and the 

barbed wire was defeated.”

— Adam Michnik