“Hans, Hans, wake up!” we shouted. “Hans, Hans, just open your window!”
Hans was a German medical colleague of my friend and neighbour in Connecticut, Helmuth. Hans lived in Berlin, in an apartment close to the notorious wall, on its western side. From his third-floor windows you could see the actual wall, the guards, the barbed wire, the dog run — and the apartments on the eastern side, just 400 yards away. It had been like that for decades, since the wall went up in 1961. But now it was 1989, and it was tumbling down, or rather opening up, to everyone’s surprise. And Hans was in bed, exhausted after a day of hospital surgeries, while we were awake, six time zones away in New York, watching Tom Brokaw and an equally amazed NBC camera crew capture the scenes of hundreds of East Germans clambering, unhindered, over that wall. Hans had to wake up, as he eventually did. “My God,” he said, “this is unbelievable.”
Within a short while, of course, Hans himself was down on the street, mingling with the crowds, cheering, wondering, shaking his head, before running back into his apartment to make many phone calls — to his son studying in London, to college friends, to an elderly uncle in a small village inside East Germany. The latter refused to get out of bed and declined to believe what had happened in Berlin. A “world-historical” event, to use Hegel’s term, had occurred, and he didn’t want to be part of it. Well, he had to be, of course, just like those tens of thousands of monks and nuns who did not want to be part of King Henry VIII of England’s abolition of the monasteries in the 1530s, or those maharajas and princes who did not wish to see the end of the British Raj in India. Change happens.
Afterwards, naturally, most people said that the collapse of Soviet Communism — for that was what the fall of the wall meant — was inevitable; that there had been many signs that its antiquated, top-heavy and undemocratic system was wearing thin; that the currents of change washing around it would one day carry it away; and that the only question would be “when?”
Still, if the East German regime was wobbling in late 1989, unable to control the surge of its people leaving via Hungary and Czechoslovakia, deserted by the new leadership of Gorbachev in Moscow, something, someone, had to give it the final push.
The “someone,” as University of Southern California professor Mary Elise Sarotte shows in a new book called ‘The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall’, was actually a few people of that day and evening of November 9: a tired and confused East German Communist Party secretary who mistakenly thought the words on the briefing paper in front of him said that those wishing to leave could do so “ab sofort” (right away), an exhausted and frustrated police officer at one crossing point along the wall who finally told his men to let people go through, and some East German activists who found another place in the wall empty.
Then, suddenly, it had happened: Berliners of either side were walking on the other side, and hundreds of them were actually sitting on the wall. The dam had burst.
This is the week when we will read so many accounts of that event of a quarter-century ago, so many articles on how it led to the end of the Cold War and dissolution of the Soviet Union itself only two years later, so many “I was there” stories, so many opinions on what the collapse meant. (As someone who’d had to make long archival stays in that dreary, uninviting East German state some years earlier, I greatly rejoiced at its fall.)
Turning away from that particular historical event, we might ponder on the broader questions: “When do we sense that things are going to change, when do we feel that present structures are soon going to collapse, and how do we distinguish the immediate explosion from the broader pressures?”
When the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan told the South African Parliament in 1960 that the “wind of change” was sweeping that continent, he wasn’t referring to any specific upheaval. He was warning his conservative Afrikaner audience that the present circumstance wasn’t going to last. In retrospect, it always seemed that the end of white rule over Africans was inevitable, but it wasn’t all that clear at the time — and it was to be strongly resisted in places like Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and Algeria. Sometimes, our hopes are premature; sometimes, they may not be realised at all.
Five months before the Berlin Wall fell, Chinese authorities had swept the protesters from Tiananmen Square. In fact, the record suggests that revolutions seem just as likely to go wrong as to go nicely. The calm transfer of power in England’s “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 contrasts sharply with the bloody events of the French Revolution a century later.
“Be careful what you wish for,” cautious analysts tell us about today’s turbulent, unpredictable world. When Putin finally goes, for example, will he be replaced by liberal reformers, or by Russian reactionaries? And would regime change in today’s Iran mean a tilt towards the West, or against it? And who would be so bold as to tell us where China will be in 10 years’ time?
In truth, we are much more the observers than the makers of events. When Gorbachev — who was a maker — confided to President George H.W. Bush in 1991 that the USSR would be dissolved, the latter whispered to his close adviser, Brent Scowcroft: “Did you hear what I just heard? Is this really happening?”
And when Hans looked out of his window, he, too, surely asked himself if what he saw was really happening. As we all know, it really was. History was undergoing a major change, the results of which we are still grappling with.
All of us carry memories of certain important and decisive moments in our lives; this writer certainly does. But I always feel that, for Helmuth’s friend in Berlin on the night of November 9, 1989, well, that was indeed a night to remember.
— (C) 2014, Tribune Content Agency Distributed by Tribune News Services
(Paul Kennedy is Dilworth Professor of History and director of International Security Studies at Yale University. He is the author/editor of numerous books, including “The Rise and Fall of The Great Powers” and, most recently, “Engineers of Victory.”)
