It Was Never Just a Wall

For anyone who saw it firsthand, as I did, the Berlin Wall was never just a wall. It was half a century of epic global conflict distilled into impenetrable concrete. In the city that had launched the bloodiest war in history and been reduced to an enormous pile of rubble, the 12-foot-high rampart snaking its way through spottily rebuilt streets marked the exact spot where the armies of capitalist democracy and communist totalitarianism had dug in for their nuclear-armed standoff. Divided here was not just a city, but the world my generation had grown up in.(Article continued below...)

Standing on one of the rickety wooden viewing platforms erected on the western side, you could look east across the floodlit death strip and see the guard towers, barbed wire, tank traps, and People's Army patrols, with their Kalashnikovs and attack dogs. The place was lethal to the end. As late as February 1989, those patrols pumped three bullets into a 20-year-old East German named Chris Gueffroy as he tried to make a run for freedom. They left him to die on the death strip. The wall was ground zero, where nearly half a century of Cold War began and where, one cold gray day in November 1989, I watched it end.

 

It Was Never Just a Wall

Young Russians’ About-Face From the West

Three Authors on Why the Berlin Wall Fell

Five American Presidents at the Berlin Wall

Berlin Never Recovered after the Wall Fell

The Berlin Wall Was Not the First to Fall

Economy: Stuck In a 1989 Mindset

Archival Footage: Building the Wall

Archival Footage: The Wall Comes Down

Photos: The Walled-Off World

 

We're told every day that the world is changing, but these changes are incremental and largely imperceptible. (How, for example, does one experience the rise of a global middle class?) But being in Berlin in those days meant being in a singular moment and place where you knew that all the world's history had, in an instant and in front of your eyes, changed forever. The Cold War was all my generation had ever known. We'd grown up in its frozen, ultrastable confines. As obviously contrived and artificial as the Berlin Wall was, people who'd known nothing else found it hard to imagine any other world, least of all the Germans, most of whom had long given up on the reunification of their country. With the wall, four decades of global political order collapsed, visibly, starkly, monumentally.

When the world changed, I was actually watching Batman. Even a news-junkie grad student in political science needed a break from waiting for history to unfold. (Apparently, so did Germany's future chancellor Angela Merkel, who spent the evening in an East Berlin sauna.) I had spent the previous days hanging out in the East with demonstrating East Berliners, watching the communists install a new, reformist leadership in a last-ditch effort to avert their regime's collapse. I'd seen a growing stream of East German escapees who'd made it West via the increasingly open border in Hungary.

On the news that monumental evening of Nov. 9, 1989, the East Germans had announced that their citizens would in the future be permitted to travel to the West. We knew something like this was coming—they needed to stop the growing exodus of their people via Hungary, though it was unclear exactly how and when the new rules would go into effect.

My architect friend Ted and I had just watched Jack Nicholson and Michael Keaton slug it out at the Odeon, a grimy arthouse cinema and the only place in town that showed undubbed American movies. But as soon as I stepped out of the movie, I knew something was happening. Down the deserted street came a cloud of blue fumes and a tinny sputter that signaled the passing of a Trabant, the Communist-made, two-cylinder plastic car that East Germans had to spend 25 years on a waiting list to buy. We'd seen them before, but only in the East (Westerners could travel east but not vice versa). The driver rolled down his window and in a thick, unmistakably East German dialect, asked for directions to Eisenacher Strasse, before sputtering on.