OPINION: The promise from one night in Berlin, 20 years ago
Ross Daly, a former editor for Newsday, lives in Yaphank and teaches journalism at Purchase College SUNY.
We sat together, a group of international and German students in West Berlin, trying to understand what was being said. We were watching a televised announcement by East German officials early in the evening of Nov. 9, 1989.
They were saying with some confusion that the borders would be opened, but that couldn't be right. It couldn't mean truly free travel. It must be a temporary measure. It can't apply to East Berlin. Our bewilderment was matched by that of the reporters at the meeting.
The conference ended and, still uncertain about what it all meant, we headed toward the Wall. Much of West Berlin had the same idea. People were standing atop the Wall at a section wide enough to support a crowd.
Standing on the Berlin Wall! An act of suicide earlier in 1989, now a celebration. We climbed up and joined the chants: "Die Mauer muss weg!" The Wall must go. Our minds couldn't quite keep up with events. If we were standing on the Wall chanting that it has to go, then it had already gone.
The past 20 years have not brought to life every promise of that chill night in November. Unemployment in the German east is nearly double what it is in the west. Resentments still flow along the former Iron Curtain. And right-wing extremism and barely reformed communism, from time to time, have found fertile soil in the east.
And while Nov. 9 spelled an end to the great ideological struggles of the 20th century, the 21st was barely born before it forced new conflicts upon us.
But the fall of the Wall brought events simmering throughout 1989 to a full boil. The Soviets showed clearly that they would not intervene in East European affairs as they had so often in the past, and by the end of the year, communist governments had toppled in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and - in the year's one spasm of violence - Romania.
Also by year's end, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl had momentum for the unification of East and West Germany that would be complete before the first anniversary of the Wall's opening.
Looking back, some observers believe that effort was rushed. But that's hindsight. At the time, no one knew if the door to this historic opportunity would remain open.
Divided Berlin had been the key to the division of Germany, just as divided Germany had been the key to the division of Europe. What we think of today as "Europe" - the European Union and to a lesser extent NATO - stretches deep into the former Warsaw Pact territories.
"Because of your courage," British Prime Minister Gordon Brown told a German crowd marking the anniversary Monday, "two Berlins are one, two Germanys are one, and now two Europes are one."
World events affect individual lives. Because the Wall is gone, no one since has suffered the fate of Chris Gueffroy. He was shot and killed trying to cross the Wall nine months before it fell, the last to die there. He was 20 years old.
A young German physicist was able to wait longer than Gueffroy. She crossed into West Berlin with the crowds Nov. 9. That scientist, Angela Merkel, is the chancellor who led the German commemorations this week.
I briefly met a young East German woman at Checkpoint Charlie that joyous night. Belching cars, Trabants and Wartburgs, were inching through the thronged checkpoint. The line stopped long enough for me to ask her what her first trip to the West meant to her. "Es list wie ein Traum." It's like a dream.
One woman's dream, and the end of a city's nightmare.
