Yesterday, Jean Rogers reflected on her memories of East Germany, which included confiscations of local currency and 5-year olds marching in circles and singing for the guests from the West. We decided to ask a few more people here at CIPE on their memories of 1989 and the Berlin Wall. Throughout this week, we’ll post their answers to a number of questions.
Question 1: What’s your most interesting personal memory associated with the fall of the Berlin Wall?
John Sullivan
I was in Poland for a meeting of the US-Polish Business council in the summer of 1989. At this point, the round table negotiations were going on between Poland’s last Communist government and the Solidarity movement. One of the government officials come to our Business Council meeting to announce that they had just passed the first law on “Private Economic Enterprising” which would legalize small private business.
This new law was to be one of the centerpieces of their efforts to win election as a re-born post-Communist political party. However, one particular sentence in the law struck me.
It said, “anything that is not explicitly forbidden shall be allowed.” For those raised in a market democracy, such a sentence seems quite redundant. Upon asking my Polish colleagues, including some members of the Solidarity movement, why such a passage was needed, I learned that in fact, in Poland and in other communist regimes, whatever was not explicitly allowed was forbidden.
It was at that moment that I realized the real magnitude of the changes facing all the countries attempting to make a transition from a Soviet style system to a market oriented democracy. Essentially, the entire thought structure and operational procedures of an society would have to be re-oriented at the most basic level.
Andrew Wilson
I had lived in Eastern Europe and gone to graduate school (Sovietology) during the mid-eighties, and I can say that nobody expected the fall of the wall. All eyes were fixed on Perestroika and it’s political cousin Glasnost, but most expectations were that the authority of the centrally planned state could tolerate a little openness and economic freedom.
There were a few clues as to the perilous condition of the Soviet Union (Moscow was pretty shabby looking, not looking like the capital of the evil empire), but the debate focused on communist reform, not collapse. I recall that central to that debate was that the success of reform was ultimately doomed to failure without what was euphemistically referred to as “price reform”, what we would call today “market reforms”.
Yet there was some belief that ultimately the Communists would find a solution as the Chinese were doing. No one really estimated the depth of Soviet bankruptcy, and therefore the collapse of the system in 1989 was a surprise. I recall naively thinking that the transition to a market society would be brief (5 years), here we are 20 years on and we still are dealing with the residual effects. The Soviet decline was a long time coming, and it will take a long time to correct.
Marc Schleifer
Growing up, my family and I traveled nearly every year for a week or so at the end of the school year, frequently to Europe, moving progressively eastward with each trip. Our first foray into the Eastern bloc was a day visit from West to East Berlin, crossing through Checkpoint Charlie; later, we did Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania; and at the end of the 1980s, we finally made it to the Soviet Union.
We also went on a tour of China one of those summers. So all in all, it’s safe to say I had a pretty good understanding of first, the deep split between theoretical ideals on paper and the reality of life behind the Iron Curtain; second, the potential for disaster if the West and East could not peacefully resolve their differences; and finally, peoples’ yearning to escape that system. On top of that, I had been studying German through junior high and high school, which also gave me some insight into the politics and history of post-war Europe.
Having had even a small glimpse of that world, it was impossible not to feel the significance of the events of 1989. It was a feeling of living “in” history, in a changing world, watching as young people threw off the fears and suspicions of our parents’ generation, the threats and gloom of the Cold War that had hung over us like a threat since we were born. It was an exciting time to be a teenager, everything seemed full of promise.
That spring, we’d suffered while watching the crushing of the Tienanmen demonstrations, and were transfixed as Solidarity remade Poland, and then as Hungary opened up, and so when the Wall fell – the speed with which it all unraveled – it all somehow felt natural. Just the continuation of a wave that wasn’t going away. The televisions at school were all tuned to images of people streaming across the border in Berlin…. And later, as Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Romania got swept up in the wave, it was clear that the writing was on the wall for the Soviet Union too. 1991 seemed to flow out of 1989, and just like that, the world we’d grown up in was gone.
Aleksandr Shkolnikov
For me, the memories of 1989 are associated with 1991. Growing up in the Soviet Union, my family wasn’t the lucky one to travel abroad, not even to East Germany. I vividly remember August 1991 – that month, public demonstrations swept Moscow as a group of KGB insiders tried to remove Gorbachev and sideline the inevitable.
To stop the demonstrations, the KGB leadership brought in the military. Trying to stop the tanks that were rolling into the city by laying down on the ground in their way, three people died. These three lives shocked the country and have probably prevented the additional violence. I always remember this because the border guards in Berlin refused to use force against the people who began to cross the border two years earlier, even though they used it on so many occasions before.
Published Date: November 10, 2009