Fall of the Berlin Wall.

Day the Wall came down: History, what history?

A German historian who witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall explains why it did not feel like a momentous event at the time
By Roland Pietsch
FIRST POSTED NOVEMBER 9, 2009

It was revealed this week that Angela Merkel went for her regular Thursday evening sauna with a friend on the night the Berlin Wall came down on November 9, 1989. While thousands of her fellow East Germans poured into West Berlin, the young physicist who would become an MP a year later and one day rise to be German Chancellor relaxed in an East Berlin steam room and went for a beer afterwards with a friend. "I figured if the Wall had opened, it was hardly going to close again, so I decided to wait," she told the Guardian.

As a West German, brought up on the other side of the Berlin Wall, I too was a little nonchalant that day.

I was 18, in my last year at school. The next morning, November 10, I climbed onto the Wall with some of my classmates and the pictures have entered the history books. "Sir, we didn't know you're already that old!’" was one the many excited responses when I pointed myself out in the photos to my students at Queen Mary University of London during a recent history lecture.

Those photographs have become iconic images of the 20th century. But was it really such a unique moment in my life?

Born in West Berlin, I lived with the Wall for my entire youth. My generation did not know anything else. We questioned the existence of the Wall as often as the British question the water around their island: never.

In fact, we hardly ever noticed the Wall in our everyday lives. West Berlin was our world, a village behaving like a metropolis. Though Westerners were allowed to cross the border into East Berlin by buying a visa, few were interested in what happened on the other side, in dull grey Socialism. In our eyes, the Wall was the Easterners’ own doing. To most West Berliners, the East was just a foreign wasteland we had to drive through to go on holiday in western Europe.

My own knowledge of the East was slightly more detailed, since my mother had absented herself from East Germany and her parents just before the Wall was first erected in 1961. So we spent our holidays visiting grandparents, aunties and cousins on the Baltic Sea coast.

In 1989, our lack of interest was suddenly overtaken by a buzz of daily news about the changes in Eastern Europe. Historic events became a regular occurrence, which is one of my explanations for the inexplicable calmness with which I watched the confused East German government spokesman reading out the press release about free travel for Easterners on the evening of November 9.

I was not alone: most of my friends went to bed that night surprisingly unbothered by it all. Limited free travel for the Easterners had already been debated a week before.

But perhaps we were also slightly stunned. Was there a misunderstanding? Surely free travel GDR-style would include long visa waiting lists, only one family member at a time, and similar restrictions? Nobody guessed that the Easterners would so dramatically exploit the communication breakdown and power vacuum in their government that night by simply overrunning the border.

In the pre-mobile-phone age, millions slept through an historic event undisturbed. My two cousins, by the way, had decided to flee East Germany via Hungary's opened border a few days earlier. By the time they eventually arrived at our home, half of East Germany had already been once to West Berlin and back.

The next morning at school the historic dimension of the event sank in. Our headmaster was talked into closing the school and instead collectively visiting the Brandenburg Gate. Not many pupils eventually made it to the Wall, the majority clearly preferring to enjoy their unexpected holiday by sneaking off elsewhere.

The atmosphere around the Gate was funfair-like; there was an apolitical light-heartedness that serious history books never grasp. Nevertheless, when my students ask me today how it felt to personally be there, then I have to admit: yes it was fun, yes the event was about to change my life. But I also have to say that there are endless events in my life that have had a bigger emotional impact. Even at the time, preparing for a school exam, or being dumped by a girlfriend, were more important.

Nothing illustrates this inferior importance of historic events for the life of a teenager better than the photo taken of me and my classmates (above). I am looking down at my camera. Just at that moment my film was finished. I had deliberately taken only one film with me – digital cameras were still a way off - not wanting to 'waste' too many photos. The result is I have 36 photos from the day the Berlin Wall came down - and 144 from my previous summer holiday.

Yet I also sense a little despair in my barely visibly face. It must have dawned on me that this was not the best moment to be saving money on film. How could I have guessed that my lacking sense of history would thus be preserved for eternity, leaving me having to justify my stupidity to my students today?

I finished my recent lecture by showing clips from a BBC documentary, a standard mixture of emotional images and music arranged in a way that fitted the dramaturgy but was historically not always accurate.

Yet at this point even I could not help being overcome by the power of the images and music. I thought how much heavier the events must have weighed in my mother's life. And I hoped that in the darkness of the lecture hall, no student realised that my eyes were becoming a little wet.


MY CANDID COMMENT :-


Today marks the 20th anniversary for the Fall of Berlin Wall. Since Nov, 1989, the Berlin Wall was torn down and it's today, only after 2 decades, East and West Germany both stand in one and proudly to show to the whole world how they would have proven to the world peoples that – through their borderless co-operation and merger, they are able to excel together as a whole! And Germany has become one of the world largest economic bloc, amidst the world’s most advance Countries!

Whereas here in Bolehland, we see only all the splits, apartheid policies, down the list, to further sub-divide the Country into sectarians! All due to not only the mediocrity of the mediocre leaderships, but also their lunatic and stuck up mentality!

How truthful is the one Malaysia concept and whether it’s based on the Rakyat’s agenda, or still is the self-seeking Najibised agenda, the N2EP in disguise is yet to be seen!

Mahathir gave more than 2 decades time frame for Malaysia to excel into one of the Asian (5th?)Dragon, until now, we see only all the tadpoles and frogs! Where to find a baby dragon, or its embryo?! Given another 10 years until 2020, I believe there’s still no baby dragon, only all the ‘cacing’ and suckling worms!

I personally have no faith in their leaderships and had been disenchanted by all their flip-flop hypocrisies and claptrap!