Where Were You When The Wall Came Down?
Posted by Rebecca Teti in News on Monday, November 09, 2009 2:00 PM
Twenty years ago today, the Berlin Wall came down.
Follow this link to watch the late Peter Jennings interrupting programming to break the news.
My father more or less dedicated his life to bringing down Communism, so of course our family followed such things with marked interest.
I remember very clearly a summer Saturday morning when Dad was sitting in bed reading his papers and I came in to talk to him and he said, looking up from the New York Times, with cautious hope, “I think the Soviet era might be over.”
He wasn’t yet certain, and he had many caveats, but he dared to think the Soviet Union’s head of state, Mikhail Gorbachev, might be sincere. And even if he weren’t, “perestroika” and “glasnost” had opened flood-gates that might not admit a reversal of course.
It was a momentous summer. First Hungary clipped its electrified fence and permitted free travel to Austria; then its government permitted a massive peace demonstration called the “pan-European picnic”; Poland, submitting to the growing Solidarity movement, had its first non-Communist prime minister since World War II; the leader of East Germany was compelled to resign. Across the nations of the Iron Curtain, massive demonstrations for peace took place. It was exciting and frightening—pressures were building and no one knew whether they might in fact end with a roll out of tanks and brutal suppression. (Really, it seemed more like a question of when.)
Then, suddenly, it was over—and not the way anyone expected.
By the end of the summer I was in Rome, doing the first of two years of volunteer work overseas. I mildly regret not being able to share the moment of the Wall coming down with my padre, but it was exciting to be in Europe at that time. The whole world seemed giddy not only with freedom, but with the sense that somehow God’s Providence was behind this outpouring of liberty, led spiritually and morally by Pope John Paul II, with secular and political help from our own Ronald Reagan, the Polish Union leader Lech Walensa, Great Britain’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and other heroes of the peaceful revolution.
Some of my young friends on the Rome campus of the University of Dallas that semester were actually among those pictured here in Berlin helping to chip away at the Wall, and I recall watching the Italian news coverage and seeing footage of some of them.
I think it’s healthy for us to remember the blessing of the Wall coming down not only to recall the joy of the occasion and to celebrate with our European brothers and sister, but also to recall how unlikely and even impossible the event once seemed—even on the night before it happened.
Here is a nice account of the celebrations in Germany today. And if you have 5 minutes, here’s a moving video history of the wall from its erection to its razing.
Do you remember where you were and what you thought?
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