November 9, 1989 – The Fall of the Wall

All the news about the 20th anniversary of the fall of Die Mauer, as the Germans called it had me thinking about where I was that day.

I had lived in Germany in the late 1970’s working both as a technician and with a side job. The job took me all over Europe, which I loved. I would occasionally have to go into East Germany or Czechoslovakia, and saw what communism was all about. It wasn’t pretty and it  was evil and huge armies stood on each side of the German border waiting for Armageddon and sometimes the Cold War wasn’t so cold. There is a small army of anonymous dead on both sides.

Later, after I came home, my job would take me back to Germany, sometimes several times a year, but always every other November to Messe Muenchen for a massive electronics trade show. I’m a factory junkie, so I would always visit suppliers and customers before and after the show.

Since I had spent time in the East, the protests in Leipzig and Dresden that began in early Fall were stunning. The GDR simply did not allow freedom of expression. But Poland had already seen a loss of control by the state as President Reagan, the Pope and Margaret Thatcher had both overtly and covertly supported Solidarity, and then Gorbachev enacted Glasnost. The Poles were never the best of communists, and nationalism was strong but suppressed in the East Bloc.They were the first to fall away, even before Glasnost.

East Germany was more communist than Stalin, they used to say. The Stasi were everywhere and the country was Orwellian in its dedication to communism with a German face. So when the demonstrations broke out and nothing happened there was some slight hope for greater freedom there as well. What happened next stunned the world.

As the rest of Eastern Europe began to liberalize, the East German people began to leave. Thousands were escaping to the West via Hungary, and that border was closed. Others went to Prague. The border with the West was the most heavily armed and patrolled real estate on the planet at the time and so was no outlet. Huge fences and razor wire and machine guns. Passing through the check points was scary for the Westerners who did so, and there was very little traffic the other way except Westerners going home.

The pressure within East Germany had risen, but no one expected the protests. First a few thousand and then more. Honecker was losing control. In mid October, Gorbachev visited Honecker who had had issued shoot to kill orders, which were never carried out. Gorbachev actually had to pressure Honecker into allowing some reform. The old Cold Warrior wouldn’t change though, and was replaced by Egon Krenz, nothing more than an apparatchik in the right place at the right time.

3 Weeks before November 9th, he took over. The protests kept on growing and there was a sense of change, but even then no hint of what would happen. The protests continued until the government called a special session of the Politburo, where things started to go to hell and 2/3 of the members resigned on the 7th. It was anyone’s guess what would happen next.

The radio in Europe generally sucks. When driving I would usually flip the dial every few minutes trying to find something, anything, to listen to.  Germany is a funny place. A very high population density, but on certain autobahns on a weekday morning there’s not much traffic. I had a big Benz on the morning of the 9th and was probably cruising at 110 and the highway to Boeblingen, near Stuttgart, was empty. I had to be at Hewlett Packard by 11 for an engineering meeting, and then IBM afterwards.

It was probably 10:00 or so when I dialed in Westdeutsche Rundfunk or another channel and heard an announcement that Krenz was speaking to the Politburo. I had a feeling it was very important, as did the radio network obviously. It wasn’t an especially long speech, maybe 15 minutes, but I had to pull over because I began to cry for a moment. I could not believe my ears. Krenz announced that he was opening the border effective as soon as possible. German is not my native language, so I had to listen to the announcer confirm what I had just heard.

To someone who had seen the Cold War up close and knew  the implications of a hot war in Germany, I was simply stunned. I realized, “It’s over and we’re still alive”. There were times when it was close. The Army kept the ammunition close at hand and the trip wire units were always ready to go. The Air Force planes that you saw on the rare clear day were sometimes armed and there were planes sitting on runways across Europe armed and crewed and ready. One phone call could set it all off. Large numbers of civilians and military would die very quickly and in the worst possible manners. And it was over. East Germany was the last possible pillar of aggression, and one man had made the decision to turn his back on the past.

I walked into HP half an hour later, and told everyone I met what I had just heard. No one believed me. I got to IBM later in the afternoon and got the same reaction. I got to the airport that night and the Avis desk clerk knew nothing. By the time I got to the terminal, I was seriously thinking of flying to Berlin to watch what happened next, but I had business in London the next day and got on the plane. It was eerie, even spooky.  The Germans I met simply could not comprehend what Krenz had just done. It was impossible, unbelievable.

By the time I got to my hotel and turned on the television sometime around 10:00pm, the scenes from Berlin were on CNN and BBC. Massive crowds of West Berliners and Easterners were tearing the wall down with their hands or a hammer or even heavy construction equipment. It was a spontaneous and joyous and riotous and somewhat (or maybe a lot) drunken celebration of freedom and repatriation. Family members on each side sought each other out, East German soldiers and border guards joined in and everyone was yelling or crying or both. The Russians quietly stayed in their Kasernes.

We must never, ever forget. The world got lucky that day. Great and good things do come out of nowhere sometimes.