Berlin Wall: A contested history

The story of communism's fall is much longer and more complex than the one night, 20 years ago today, it took to topple the Berlin Wall.

Much self-congratulatory journalism of the “I was there … ” variety will occur in the next week as the global media descend upon Berlin to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the wall. Scenes will be replayed over and over again – of the jubilant crowds partying atop the wall on the night of November 9 to 10, East Germans rushing through the checkpoints into the open arms of West Berliners, who greeted their compatriots with food, money, and of course champagne. The obvious intermingling of hope and confusion. It was truly one of those rare turning points in history and even more rare because it was such a joyous occasion. Not a natural disaster nor mass atrocity, but something that reminds us of our better selves – of what the human condition can rise to rather than sink to.

What is troubling about much of the coverage – both then and now – is the extent to which the fall of the wall is taken out of the context of 1989, and how 1989 as the annus mirabilus is portrayed as a surprising and wondrous bolt from the blue. Indeed, the real story of the fall of communism is much longer, more complex, and still subject to scholarly debate and contestation – no wonder since there is an equal level of debate about the French Revolution (mind you, those scholars have had a 200-year head start).

Timothy Garton Ash, in a recent review essay on 1989 for The New York Review of Books, has aptly remarked that many of the scholars of the fall of communism are influenced by their geographical location, expertise, and ideological bent – confirming the truism that where you stand depends on where you sit. Thus Russian foreign policy experts stress the role of Gorbachev. Those with a Republican leaning in the United States take as seminal Ronald Reagan’s famous “Mr Gorbachev, tear down that wall!” speech. Some, still brimming with triumphalism, will claim that the U.S. “won” the Cold War; others will grimly suggest that the Cold War was “lost” by the Soviet Union, particularly given the structural failings of the decrepit and ineffective command economy. All contain a portion of the truth, but at the same time such divergence reminds us that much of history is not about truth but rather interpretation.

What often gets lost in these debates, far below the high politics of the major protagonists, is the role played by Central and East Europeans themselves. Literally millions of Germans demonstrated peacefully in Dresden and Leipzig demanding wholesale political and social reform in the weeks leading up to November 9. Tens of thousands had voted with their feet by stuffing their “Trabbis” with all their worldly goods and chugging through Czechoslovakia to Hungary from early autumn onward, where they could now travel freely across the old “Iron Curtain” into Austria. Moreover, German dissatisfaction with “really-existing socialism” had happened early and often – the demonstrations and strikes of June 1953 mark one of the earliest occasions where dissent moved from private grumbling to public action. The Wall itself was constructed in 1961 to stop the near-constant hemorrhaging of East Berliners in the Western-controlled sectors of the city. What is both magical and complicated about such social mobilization is that it cannot be mandated by politicians, or predicted and measured by social scientists. But it is a happy reminder that, admittedly sometimes only in rare and fortuitous circumstances, we really can make our own history.