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Fall of the Berlin Wall
What were you doing 20 years ago when the Berlin Wall fell? Personally, I was attending a state college, preoccupied with grades and my personal life. I felt fascinated, but far removed, as I watched television coverage of the fall of the Wall — what would later be identified as the event that marked the end of the Cold War.
Some years later, as a young journalist, I visited a former Stasi prison as part of a cultural exchange program hosted by the RIAS Berlin Commission. Hearing first-hand stories and being in the places I had only read about had an effect on me that's difficult to describe. The enormity of the change that had taken place began to dawn on me in a new way.
Anniversaries are an opportunity to pause and reflect, and 20 years on, there's no lack of commentators weighing in on the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. You can read commentary from public radio luminaries like Daniel Schorr and Andrei Codrescu to former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev himself.
As for us, we'll look back on history with some Northwesterners who were in Germany and Eastern Europe at the time the Wall came down. And we'd like to get your take too.
Where were you when the Berlin wall fell? Did you live in East or West Berlin or a former Soviet bloc country? How is your life different today after the dissolution of the Berlin wall and the Soviet Union?
GUESTS:
- Alexander Lungershausen: Architect at THA Architecture
- Verena Winter: Waste water engineer with HDR Engineering
- Miriam Widman: Freelance journalist
- Edgar Loesch: Owner of Fressen Artisan Bakery, a German bakery in Portland
Tagged as: politics
Photo credit: siyublog / Creative Commons
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There must be great memories associated with Berlin. I feel the same when you have to revisit or visit first time your parents native palces. This all seems really memorable.
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Many stories are associated with Berlin wall. It is an history fall indeed.
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that sounds really sweet. I hope you will visit again!
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It must be a spectacular expereince. I wish you enjoy visiting each time.antique pewter
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Thanks I really appreciate your work ... I have saved all the links that you have posted for us and I'll probably use a essay writing service or order essay help service to write an essay on this topic
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Our only son was born the year after the fall of the Berlin Wall. I reamember feeling so happy that my son was being born into a world that held more potential for peace than any world I had lived in during my life. I also remember my disappointment when the US invaded Kuwait a year later.
We have many lessons to learn from the fall of the Berlin Wall on the way non-violence can solve problems and bring freedom. I feel for the people who lived under Communism for so many years. But they did gain their freedom without a war. We need to remember and celebrate that.
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Berlin, the capital city of Germany is built around the River Spree. The city has undergone lots of changes after the war, and has emerged as the most modern and thriving city. The localities are very friendly and hospitable with the tourists.
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I was born in East Berlin and lived there when the Berlin Wall fell. I was 15 years old at the time. We didn't have a TV so we didn't get the news until the next morning when my dad heard it on the radio. My mom came into my room and said, "The wall is open." I remember how excited she looked, almost ecstatic. And I still remember feeling a total blank myself, because I had no concept of it. I knew family and friends in West Germany, but I had never been there, so all I thought in that historic moment was "And what is behind it (the Berlin Wall)?"
Now I live Portland, OR, and I'm still amazed by the miracle that I am here and that all my parents have to do to visit me is hop on the plane. I still remember my aunt, who had left East Germany and lived in West Berlin, being denied entry to East Germany to visit her brother who was sick with cancer and was also denied entry to attend his funeral.
And sometimes I'm sad that the country I was born in is gone. People helped each other back then and material stuff wasn't so important. You were happy if you had what you needed. I miss that.
But those moments are rare, mostly I feel incredibly grateful for the life I have been able to build because the Wall is no more. I found a place in the world where I feel home (yeah Portland). I have friends here who are my family. I don't constantly think, "What will happen if I say what I think?" "Can I trust this person or are they just pretending to be on my side?" I can just say what I think and the worst that can happen is that somebody gets angry at me.
The last thing I would like to share is my deep gratitude to Mr. Gorbatchev for not sending the tanks into East Germany. Having had grant parents who lived through two wars, parents who were born in war, I am so grateful that the Berlin Wall fell without bloodshed.
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I have heard many things about Berlin. Great place to visit, I might go there coming summer. If so will come back and write a review for you all :)
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I was lucky to have been in Berlin this past September. At Alexanderplatz, they had an interesting exhibit on the history of the Berlin Wall, focusing on the things that lead to its fall 20 years ago. While the fall of the wall may have seemed like a sudden and surprising event for many of us in 1989, the exhibit showed how so many citizens and leaders worked peacefully and with great commitment to get rid of the wall for many, many years. It gave me great hope in the power of activism. While it may feel like we toil away working for social justice or peace without any progress, all of our actions matter to build toward great tipping point events, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall. I hope that the celebrations will include not only stories about how people were so surprised about the fall of the wall, but also stories of the brave activists who worked to make it happen.
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This is one of the events that reminds me how dificult it is to convey the atmosphere of decades past. The wall and Soviet nuclear weapons shaped our world images for years. It seems we are still adjusting to the Eurasia map that is stii suffering political shockwaves of the reshaping of Russia. My father's family is an example. The region of his ancestors has been called Austria, Czechosovakia, and Slovakia within my lifetime.
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As a school student in India (then a Soviet ally), I was in the middle of my social studies project work regarding how great socialism and communism was. I received some official propaganda from the GDR embassy in Delhi and the USSR embassy. Halfway through my work in november, the wall was gone and so was my 8th grade project! Even as an 8th grader, I was aware I was watching history unfolding on TV.
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A great living example of the social evolution of Germany is their current president who is not only a woman but also a from East Germany.
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The end of the wall and, eventually, the Soviet Union, allowed our countries to establish a relationship that allowed us to adopt two children from eastern Europe (Ukraine and Russia). Hooray!
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I was a photographer for the US Army in Germany. When the wall fell, we got a call to jump on a helicopter for a photo mission. We flew to a town called Hof. When we landed, we saw a line of trabant cars waiting for the wall to come down so they could drive across the border. We were inside the 1 Kilometer zone where a week before we would have been arrested by the US. Then, we walked to the actual Border post where a week before we could be shot by either side. Then, a bulldozer came by and cut a hole in the fence and laid a path for the cars to travel over. There we were face to face with the East German Military and the East Germans waiting to travel over to the West. I was one of the first Americans to stand there in almost 3 decades.
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This is not a comment about the fall of the Wall, per se, but rather about the former East Berlin. Though I am not German, I did experience the Fall of the Wall, through my brother who lived in Germany at the time, and still does. Though I have been fortunate to travel around the world, and to live in Europe, it was not until 2006 that I visited Berlin for the first time. I stayed with my brother and devoted most of my time to the former East Berlin, with some forays into West Berlin and beyond, to historic sites such as Potsdam. My comment is this, all Portlanders would love the former East Berlin. Unlike most other major European cities, it is not dominated by any one aspect, neither the architecture, nor the history, nor the tourist trade, nor its beautiful museums. What left the most striking impression was its low key DIY culture, its anti-wealth, anti mainstream attitude towards just about everything. A thriving, funky, street level visual and performing arts culture, a thriving wine bar & coffee shop culture, beautiful, though somewhat shabby parks, an unbelievable amount of creativity in the food arena. There is chic if you want it and can afford it, but by and large that is not representative of East Berlin. Hip, yes, and trendy in some respects. The $ is still mostly in the former West Berlin, and that is where the chic department stores and the like can be found, if you need it or want it.
If you haven't been, Portlanders, do visit the former East Berlin...it is an eye opening place. If you want history, the entire city of Berlin of course has it in spades. But if you want to feel right at home with kindred spirits, just hang out in the former East Berlin. You will love it, and the Germans and others (including many immigrants of course, from Turkey and elsewhere) might just defy your stereotypes of what is a German personality...
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How has the process of East-West German integration proceeded in the past 20 years? Is there still lingering differences? What are the particular successes and failures and what are lessons learned for other 'future wall breaches' like the unification of North and South Korea and the opening of Cuba, or the US/Mexico border?
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My girlfriend was descended from German/English grandparents who had to flee England and Germany after WWI in order to marry. At the time the wall came down, my girlfriend was glued to the television -- she had cousins in East Germany whom she'd never met, and cousins in West Germany that she saw on television dancing on the wall. My girlfriend cried with joy, while I watched, happy for the results but disconnected personally because my family has been on this continent for over 350 years.
Reid
Portland, Oregon
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I interviewed Cynthia Harriman of Oldways for an E Mag article on eating seasonally. She was in the Czech Republic when the wall fell and remembers it was watermelon season. "Rather than complain about the lack of variety, people really appreciated the melons having their moment in the sun."(The article's posted at www.measurefree.com)
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I was born when the wall went up. I knew it would fall one day as it just goes against human nature to live behind a wall. I lived in the Netherlands during the fall of the Berlin Wall. I visited east Berlin a few months before the wall fell. I wanted to experience loosing my freedom for a day before it fell. It was indeed drab and gray. My girl friend and I finally found a place to spend our 25 East German Deutchmarks, at the opera house. We had tea and a pastry. I'll never forget how the people watched us, a happy young couple in love, and how they resented our happiness. They, and we, knew that we were going back to freedom later that evening. While they had to stay in their drab and grey world.
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Oh, don't be so arrogant. We knew happiness like everybody else.
The reason that people watched and resented you was that in our culture we don't portray affection publically in the same way that you do in your culture. Nothing good or bad about it, just different.
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My mother's family was orginally from Dresden Germany, and my Aunt had gone there to visit a few years before the Wall came down. As a result of that visit, a cousin from Dresden was permitted to visit our family in the summer of 1989. She was completely mind-blown by the culture shock of visiting the USA. We took her to a supermarket and she couldn't believe we could just buy olives and oranges every day. When she was walking down streets with us she was worried that we might walk into a forbidden area. We told her there was no forbidden area. A few months after her visit, when we heard that the Wall came down, we celebrated by going out into the street and lighting sparklers and banging pots and pans to celebrate the freedom our relatives were now gaining.
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I was very young at the time, and I think for many it was easy to romanticize the wall and its awkward, austere and novel severity. It was really the only potent, physical symbol our generation had for what past generations faced. Perhaps, it is easy to be sentimental about the wall, not just because of its implications, but because it really did symbolically represent an end to a period in our history. And end to a struggle. And end to how many defined good and bad---at least politically. When that categorization ends, when a cause is overcome, when a division is united, it can leave many feeling directionless. The fight often becomes part of your life; it can give your life purpose, and once you succeed, you can be left feeling empty.
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Hey, man, just wanted to post here because I wasn't sure if you read posts from previous shows...
I was joking too Friday... No worries. It's funny I come off as taking myself too seriously. I'll have to work on that because I really don't.
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I was living in the People's Republic of China at the time having arrived six weeks after Tiananmen Square. I have to think that the Chinese response helped inform the East German response. Needless to say, living in Harbin, PRC I had limited access to information about the fall of the Wall. The BBC World Service was a life line. My students cautiously listened with me keenly aware of the previous June.
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My dad lives/ lived close to the former border between East and West Germany. He would tell stories about how East Germans now working in West Germany would leave work because they had heard about a sale ... the notion of goods being available in abundance even after the sale was foreign to East Germans at the time as was the fact that you don't just leave work to go shopping. Initially there was a lot of animosity from both sides. It took several years for those to pass.
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I lived in the Netherlands for a number of years. My first year was in 1989. Two friends and I went to Berlin for a long weekend. There were protests in the streets. We spent time in East Berlin and I walked from Check Point Charlie to the Reichstag and wrote every quote I could find in English in my journal. I took photos and listened to U2 as I walked. Five days later the wall opened.
When we took the train back to NL it was full of people being able to travel to the West for the first time perhaps in their lives. We had one seat for the three of us. We stood in the hallway with others talking about the 'age of change' in Europe.
I ended up getting a MS in International Relations in the UK and worked in International Education for years due to my year in Europe in 1989-1990. I returned in 1991-1992 and in the late 90s.
THanks, Audrianna Joy
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I guess it is too late to get this on the show, but what do the people here think about Israel's wall? Similarities, differences?
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I would like to see the fall of the wall that Israel has built around the the Gaza ghetto.
Israel has ghetto-ized the Palestinians just like the Nazis did to the Polish Jews and that is a horrible historical irony.
Shameful. -
Yeah, that's pretty much the way I look at it. The Israeli Wall is definitely a much more vile symbol to me than the Berlin Wall. The Berlin Wall, like the Cold War itself, seemed more childish than anything. Obviously, that is a detached observation from a person born in the US in 1979 and whose only knowledge of life in the GDR comes from "Das Leben der Anderen."
It's definitely disturbing to me to watch the actions of the Israelis after World War II. I wonder if they really understand their own history when they throw the Holocaust around.
Similarly, I wondered what African-Americans took from their experiences when I watched African-American churches came out in droves against gay rights...using the same book some used to justify the injustices committed against them.
I just wonder why the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall is cause for celebration. It meant something in that moment, but it is obvious it does not mean anything in the broad view of history.
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As holes were being bashed through the Berlin Wall for the first handshakes between East and West in early November, two dozen of us, Lewis and Clark College students, were gnashing our teeth in anticipation of our departure during orientation to a comparative program between East and West Germany scheduled to begin in January 1990. How shocked were we that we would be arriving in Germany with our professors to participate in the crumbling of the Wall? My first night delving into the fray was New Years Eve 1989. After arriving in Berlin I met three Germans from Leipzig on the Wall as millions celebrated at the Brandenburg Gate. We spent the rest of the night together exploring the city taking in the amazement everyone seemed to feel. We had dinner in a West Berlin restaurant and loaded our bags with champagne and beer. Ultimately our revelry landed us on the East side were we finally fell asleep in a Trabant. As the sun rose we scoured East Berlin for something to eat. After the bounty of the West the night before we felt the difference in our bellies. When we parted company I was interrogated by the border guards because my visa for the East had not yet gone into effect. What was I doing there? I explained about the mountain of glass that had already been swept up on the east side of the Brandenburg Gate. Guards at the checkpoint looked like they'd been up all night ... it was clear that like an iceberg in the open sea boundaries were rapidly melting away as the floodgates between east and west dissolved. I was released and sent on my way and for the next six months my classmates and I lived the euphoria of history unveiling German reunification.
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I watched the wall being taken down piece by piece on CNN while staying at the Peace Hotel in Shanghai, China. Very surreal.
The changes in Eastern Europe during 1989 had given hope to far too optimistic students who led a revolt that ended in the Tiananmen tradegy.
Twenty years on China is an economic powerhouse that has changed more than a unified Germany, all within the confines of the communist system.
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I am a refugee from the former East Germany. My parents and I escaped, but my sister and her family remained. My sister's husband, a prominent physician, felt he owed it to his patients to remain. Allowed to return to my home town to visit my sister, I was able to smuggle in countless forbidden items. My sister's home was becoming a central meeting place for like-minded friends - musicians, actors, writers, etc. - all looking for honest conversation, news from the West, forbidden literature. I brought in books, magazines, western currency, medications for my brother-in-law's practice and thankfully remained undetected year after year.
As I was writing my thesis on a prominent East German writer in 1978, I was able to visit him and pursue my research. His house was already under surveillance, and after my visit with him, I left with the 'proper' Stasi escort who followed me for days.
In August of 1989, my American fiancé and I decided to get married in my hometown in E.G. After visa and other bureaucratic matters had been obtained, we drove from W.G. to E.G. Arriving at the border the usual ordeal took place. Papers, passports, get out of the car, papers, payment of daily quota for stay in E.G., lift out back seat, search under the cars, being asked endless questions designed to intimidate. As they approached the car in which my baby grandson was sleeping on the back seat, I told the border guards not to disturb the baby. The baby had to be taken out anyway, the back seat was dismantled, the inside of each car door was unscrewed, and so on. However, the border guards' efforts didn't seem as intimidating this time. Everyone felt a big change coming.
I have many hair-raising accounts of similar border crossings from 1961 until 1989. They are also part of a book I am writing. I am currently writing my memoir, an account of one refugee family (my mother, father and me) as seen through the eyes of a child. The memoir depicts the child's life before fleeing, the flight itself, and one refugee family's attempt to find a new life in western Germany.
I am looking forward to tuning in more often to other topics, and I commend your staff on how very intelligently and sensitively they dealt with today's topic.
Thank you for what you do for our community.
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What will the title of your book be?
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I first visited West Berlin in 1983 and spent a memorable half-day in the other Berlin. It was the height of Reagan's new tough guy image with the Soviets, and a new bunch of Pershing II Balistic Missiles had just been stationed in West Germany, so cold war tensions were running high. We had to pass through the checkpoint at Friedrich Strasse, and I can still remember the armed Guards standing with their guns in silhouette in front of the arched windows of the train-station.
I went back again in '85, and once again felt the suffocation in the East. I also remember how, travelling by train, to West Berlin, the whole train seemed to breathe a huge sigh of relief when we left the DDR and arrived at West Berlin's Bahnhof Zoo. But I will never forget hearing of the fall of the wall itself, on a sunny November afternoon in Portland, Or., half way across the world. I will remember excatly where I was. And I thought...man, I'm totally in the wrong place here, and I thought about my college entrance essay which I had written about the wall, and sighed with relief that I no longer had to devote my energy to dismantle the wall, as I had said I would do in the essay, but could now focus on other seemingly impossible flights of fancy.
A year before, in December 1988, I was in West Germany, filling out an application to go on the Lewis and Clark Overseas trip to East and West Germany, and a family friend had said to me..." the only problem I see for you in going is that you might fall in love with an East German girl." Eleven months later, nothing could have stopped me, or her.
The events of the night of November ninth became real to me when, while on a train from Bonn to West Berlin, I looked out the train window and saw a Trabant zipping along in the West German country-side. Only a year before that would have been totally impossible.
Michael Winans, New Haven, CT.
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I looked in my 1989 diary and there's no mention of the Berlin Wall's removal. My grandfather died shortly before the wall's fall. The first anniversary of my exciting new job coincided with the wall's fall. I remember hearing Raygun's (President "Star Wars" Reagan) "tear down that wall" words to Mr. Gorbachev, and thinking: "It's great for the citizens of Germany. It's symbolic to those of us who live far from the wall. We really need is to get rid of these pesky nuclear weapons."
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I was still a little child at that time. I knew this event on the class. It's nice to share your thought on this event.
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Lets hope that this wall is no longer exist in the future. This is the worst time in germany history. I knopw they have been a bad times that time. But at last that wall is fall.. That is good for all of us.
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I vividly remeber when the Berlin Wall, setting the stage for the end of the cold war. Life has been really different, for the better.
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It made my uncle (construction business in West Germany) a multi-millionaire as he helped to rebuild the mess that was the East (he lives in the east now). It enabled me to visit a lot of the places my parents remembered (and told me about) from before the war. It enabled a family friend to see her relatives for the first time since the late 50's.