EDITOR’S NOTE: This piece by Bennett Owen appeared in the December 22, 1989, issue of National Review. (You can dig into NR’s archives anytime here.)
West Berlin – It began as a trickle. On East German TV, a government spokesman had ended an evening press conference by saying that citizens of the GDR could travel freely, and by 9:30 p.m. on November 9, the first East Berliners strolled across a bridge at Bornholmer Strasse. They’d heard the news in a bar and walked down to the nearest crossing to see if it was really true. It was. A small crowd greeted them as they reached the Western side. “May I come in?” asked one politely.
“To walk across this bridge into West Berlin is the most normal thing in the world,” one man said — and then added, “Things haven’t been normal here for 28 years.” A youngster coming across pointed to the Wall he’d just passed through and commented, “This used to be the end of the world for us.” At first, most said they just wanted to come over and walk on the Kurfurstendamm, Berlin’s answer to Fifth Avenue. But as the news spread, the border crossings quickly became jammed with people. The soldiers who once had orders to shoot to kill were reduced to stamping passports and directing traffic. They laughed when asked if they’d been handed their pink slips yet. By midnight, the celebration had begun in earnest. Thousands of Germans from East and West gathered at the Brandenburg Gate, drinking cheap champagne just steps away from crosses commemorating those whose dreams of freedom couldn’t wait this long.
“I have seen the future and it runs through the heart of Berlin.” Through that kind of graffiti the Berlin Wall spoke with cynical eloquence, and last January, in the icy half-light of winter in Berlin, it appeared to say that the Cold War was as cold as ever. George Shultz, on a final tour of Europe as secretary of state, declared the Wall should come down. East Germany’s Erich Honecker defiantly replied that it would be standing 100 hundred years from now, and at the same time a series of incidents dramatically underscored his words. Two young men who tried to flee across the Wall in the southern part of town were shot (one of them fatally), and in the days following, more shots were heard at border crossings in other parts of the city. In late January a man tried to swim to the West across the River Spree in the center of town. He made it to the western shore but was exhausted, and as he tried to pull himself from the water East German soldiers pulled him into their patrol boat by the hair. The border guards were taking their orders from the East German chief of security, a dedicated Marxist by the name of Egon Krenz.
Despite the show of force, escape attempts were a daily occurrence. Of the dozens who tried through the winter and spring of this year, two spectacular attempts come to mind. In one, a would-be escapee was killed when he fell from a makeshift hot-air balloon. In another, two brothers living in West Germany flew two ultra-light planes into East Germany, where they picked up a third brother and flew him back to freedom. By the end of summer, though, that kind of desperation had evaporated as East Germans by the hundreds of thousands made an end-run through Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Egon Krenz became the new leader of East Germany, but, as a West German magazine put it, he is a shepherd without a flock. Desperately (and futilely, as later events have shown) seeking to regain control of his people, he threw open the Berlin Wall.
And so, on a crisp autumn night, a newspaper headline screams, “Berlin is Berlin again.” Just after midnight on November 10, a very stout and very drunk reveler climbed onto the wall and, with the Brandenburg Gate as a backdrop, withstood the East German water cannon that tried to force him off. In freezing weather, he turned his back to the jets of water, and when the guards finally gave up, he turned toward them, unzipped his fly and . . . well, you know. As dramatic symbolism it doesn’t quite equal staring down a tank in Tiananmen Square, but the Germans applauded wildly.
By Friday evening, Berlin was pure and simple chaos, its population swollen by a half-million East Germans with more pouring in every minute. At Checkpoint Charlie, a seemingly unending river of champagne poured over the cars as they came through, and the mood was euphoric. On the dark and muddy pathway that follows the Wall from Checkpoint Charlie to the Brandenburg Gate, there was a constant clinking of claw-hammers against cement as Berliners chipped away souvenirs. In the morning, jackhammers would take their place, opening up new crossings and making old roads and rail lines whole again. The surest sign that history was being made was at the Brandenburg Gate, where, 30 feet above the throngs of people in a cherry-picker, stood Dan Rather speaking into a video camera. Back on earth were ABC and NBC, and CNN seemed to be everywhere at once. By Saturday, more than a million guests had invaded Berlin-a newspaper cartoon showed an East German family running through a checkpoint, with a caption that read, “Quick, before the West Germans build a wall.”
The most emotional event took place Sunday, when the Wall fell a Potsdamer Platz. The rest of the world sees the Brandenburg Gate as the symbol of Berlin, but those who live here remember Potsdamer Platz as the heart of the old city. It was there where, in 1945, Soviet tanks crushed the last life out of the Third Reich, and where, in 1953, the uprising of June 17 was quelled. Now, the army that built the Wall is busy tearing holes in it. As Mayor Walter Momper declared, “The heart of Berlin will soon beat again.”