WHEN THE WALL CAME DOWN
30 years ago, demolition officially began on brutal symbol of the Cold War
Anyone old enough to remember that explosive and optimistic time will quickly recall then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s pointed and passionate words to Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” Reagan said during a 1987 speech at the Brandenburg Gate in divided Berlin, which was celebrating its 750th anniversary, echoing President John F. Kennedy’s defiant “ich bin ein Berliner” (I am a Berliner) statement in 1963.
It took another three years but the Soviets finally gave their blessing for the Berlin Wall, the post-war symbol of oppression that split a city — and country, really — in two, to be dismantled.
And on June 13, 1990, almost 30 years ago, work officially began on the destruction of the wall by East German border guards, even though the process had begun seven months previously on Nov, 9, 1989.
The beginning of the end came less than a year after East German leader Erich Honecker stated boldly that the wall would “be standing in 50 and even in 100 years,” calling it an “anti-fascist protection barrier.”
The Berlin Wall, which was built in 1961 to prevent East Germans from fleeing to freedom in West Berlin, became a tragic footnote in history in 1992, nothing but dust and 1.7-million tonnes of rubble nearly two years after the reunification of Germany.
“The Berlin Wall, ladies and gentlemen, is history, and it teaches us: No wall that keeps people out and restricts freedom is so high or so wide that it can’t be broken down," German chancellor Angela Merkel, who grew up in East Germany, said in November on the 30th anniversary of the start of the destruction of the Berlin Wall.
“It proves that no wall is so high and so strong that we could not break it.”
But the end of the Berlin Wall came about, in part, because Gunter Schabowski, the leader of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany that ruled communist East Germany, misspoke during a press conference in November, 1989.
Schabowski, the party’s spokesman after the ouster of Erich Honecker a month earlier, announced what had been meant to be temporarily loosened travel restrictions as new law.
The error effectively opened the border in Berlin, the first time that had happened since the end of the Second World War in 1945, and caused crowds of East Berliners to gather at crossing points.
Confusion reigned as the dictatorial East German government refused to order the use of force to prevent its citizens from leaving East Berlin. The barriers finally went up at one crossing and East Berliners flowed across the border into the waiting arms of West Germans.
Seven months later, the wrecking balls began taking down the 265-kilometre long symbol of communism — an iconic image of the Cold War — that divided Berlin for 28 years. Hundreds of people were killed or wounded trying to go over, under or around the wall and escape communism, many cut down by East German border guards in the barren killing zone known as the “death strip.”
The fall of the Berlin Wall led to the end of the German Democratic Republic in October, 1990.
“The wall was an edifice of fear. On Nov. 9 (1989) it became a place of joy,” former German President Horst Kohler said during a speech in Berlin to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the wall.
Small sections of the wall remain today, however, as powerful symbols of its divisiveness.