While we were breaking for lunch - I swear I would move to Berlin for the falafel alone - we happened to hear a traffic report on the restaurant’s radio. Well, to be honest, I wasn’t aware at the time that it was a traffic report. To me it sounded more like “Deutschdeutschmoredeutschreallyfastdeutschaaarrghh”. But luckily I was with Guido, who said “They’re closing off streets so that Angela Merkel can give a speech on a bridge across town. Let’s go see her!”
So we set off to Bösebrücke, a bridge over the river Spree that used to be an East-West border crossing. It was the first checkpoint where GDR guards allowed people to go west that night in ‘89. It was also the bridge across which Angela Merkel herself stepped into West Berlin for the first time (she was living at the time in the East Berlin district of Prenzlauer Berg). So it was very fitting for her to give a speech there 20 years later, as reunified Germany’s first East German (and female) chancellor. She’s a symbol of all the promise that night held.
Approaching the bridge, we started to see police vans and barriers set up on the streets. There were already hundreds of people standing patiently in the rain waiting for Angela to arrive. It was all very German, there was zero jostling for position, people were just craning their necks and apologising to each other if they accidentally bumped someone in the process.
Finally the chancellor arrived and as a bonus, she had brought along Mikhail Gorbachev, Lech Walesa, Klaus Wowereit (the mayor of Berlin), and a man who I later found out was Joachim Gauck, a former East Berlin dissident who was put in charge of all of the Stasi’s records after reunification. Quite a star-studded line-up, in other words!
As the official party, flanked by dozens of cameramen, made their symbolic walk across the bridge, people began to cheer and yell “Gorbi! Gorbi!” Although the way Nov 9th actually played out was due to a bureacratic mix-up, Gorbachev is widely credited as the politician who, in the big picture, really brought down the Iron Curtain. So he was very warmly received. There was also one particularly vocal Polish man who ran up and down the bridge waving the flag of Poland yelling “Polska! Polska!” as Lech Walesa walked by. That made everyone chuckle.
The first person to speak was Joachim Gauck. He made a very metaphorical speech in which he said that although East Germans had studied all their lives to be obedient and fearful, they had passed their examination in freedom. I was lucky I had Guido there to translate the German for me, or I would spent the rest of the afternoon wondering confusedly why that guy was talking about exams on a big day like this. Mein Deutsch ist ein bisschen schlecht. Interestingly, he also gave a shout out to Barack Obama, comparing “Wir sind das Volk”, the slogan used by pro-democracy demonstrators in East Germany, to “Yes we can!” A catch cry that appeals to the heart and the mind, he said.
Next, Angela Merkel gave her speech. She thanked Walesa and Gorbachev for their role in paving the way for German reunification. She also expressed how happy she was to see that the post-wall generation no longer identified themselves as from the east or west, but simply as Germans. It was interesting to hear that after all the Ossi/Wessi hang-ups I had heard and read about. I don’t know whether she was just being politically correct,or whether these views mainly exist among older people who lived through those times, while younger people really have less of a complex about it.
All through the speeches the crowd stood hushed and attentive, unconcerned with the rain and the cold. There was no pomp or pyrotechnics here, just a bunch of people to whom this day obviously meant a lot. It felt special to be there.
Once the speeches were done, the dignitaries started to head off the bridge. That’s when everyone lost all pretence of politeness and headed for the barrier… me included. This was a once-in-a-lifetime event for me, after all. Here is my photo proving I saw Gorbi and Angela Merkel in person :)
Oh, btw. Before the dignitaries all exit this scene, I would like to list several reasons why Klaus Wowereit, the mayor of Berlin, is awesome.
- When he announced his candidacy for mayor in 2001, he said "Ich bin schwul, und das ist auch gut so" ("I am gay, and that’s a good thing"). Matter closed, all stupidity pre-empted.
- When he was leaving the bridge, someone asked for his autograph and he obliged. As he began to write the date next to his signature, he said “Uh, what date is it again? Oh… right. November 9th.” causing several hundred people on the bridge to crack up.
- Unlike the other pollies who rushed off quite promptly after the proceedings were over (to the dismay of much of the crowd), he was stopping every few metres to pose nicely for everyone’s cameras and banter with the crowd. He was obviously basking in the attention and the interaction with people.
The climax of the evening was to be the toppling of these dominoes in a chain reaction, symbolising the fall of the communist regimes across Europe during the tumult of 1989. But this wasn’t happening for another couple of hours, and it was cold and raining. I attempted to warm myself up with some fruit punch. Germans seem to like this hot wine concept a lot, and they have the right idea in my opinion. The punch stall was lined with huge glass bowls of red and white wine, each containing different fruit mixes – melon, berry, tropical, and so on. I got some hot white wine with strawberries floating in it, which staved off the chill a little, and got me sufficiently tiddly to make the wait in the rain a little more interesting.
Waiting next to me by the dominoes was the gentleman I referred to in my previous post, who had fled East Berlin with his family as a child. After almost forty years living in West Germany and Australia, he had returned to Berlin after reunification and brought his Australian wife with him. It was quite special to spend the evening with someone for whom it personally meant so much.
Finally, things started to happen at the spectacularly lit but heavily barricaded Brandenburger Tor. Placido Domingo sang an aria. The Berlin State Orchestra played something stately. Bon Jovi played something awful (why didn’t they pick a German band?).
Big wigs from all the Allied countries – Nicolas Sarkozy, Gordon Brown, Hillary Clinton and Dmitry Medvedev – joined Angela Merkel on the stage to make rousing speeches. My brain was doing somersaults as Sarkozy spoke in French and I tried to distinguish the German translation that was going out at the same time over the loudspeakers.
I have to say, I was surprised that Obama didn’t attend personally (although they screened his video address). I would have thought all this anniversary hoop-la would have been right up his alley. All that hopey, changey, inspiration-y stuff.
And finally, after a couple of false starts, the dominoes fell. Here is my video, my first ever Youtube contribution! Apologies, my filming skills leave a lot to be desired. Spielberg still refuses to return my calls.
Some really interesting news features came out around November 9th about what reunification has meant to different people (I’ve listed a selection of them below). Having grown up in a capitalist country far from Europe, I had always had seen Germany’s reunification portrayed as an unequivocally positive event. In reality there seems to be a broad spectrum of views within Germany on whether it was such a good thing – ranging from unbridled optimism, to extreme pessimism, to complete apathy.
I think in a lot of cases, what people hoped for in ‘89 was simply greater democratic freedoms for the people of the DDR – not necessarily the end of communism or the reunification of Germany. Whether the communist regime could have survived within a truly democratic framework is another can of worms I’m not going to open in this entry. I also think maybe people hoped that bringing in capitalism would be a silver bullet for all of society's ills. But no system is perfect, so when people saw that capitalism comes with its own set of problems, they got disillusioned. - My amateur theory. It's hard to get into someone's head when they've been inculcated with all the opposite theories to what you've grown up with.
History is written by the victors, as the pomp and ceremony of the official celebrations show. But it certainly looks like it will be a while before the ghosts of divided Germany are completely gone.
- Berlin Wall: voices of the revolution – fascinating interviews by the Guardian with Angela Merkel, Margot Honecker, Egon Krenz, Klaus Wowereit and more
- Homesick for a Dictatorship: Majority of East Germans Feel Life Better Under Communism – Der Spiegel article, East German perspectives on reunification
- The Myth of Deutschland Über Alles – Foreign Policy article, a West German perspective on reunification
- The Fall of the Berlin Wall: A Negligible Anniversary – NowPublic story, a West German perspective on reunification
- The Berlin Wall Through Time – a very cool NYT feature overlaying pictures of the wall with pictures of the exact same locations today
- Transcripts of Angela Merkel’s and Joachim Gauch’s speeches on Bösebrücke – German only – crude English translations here and here
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