BERLIN WALL ANNIVERSARY
As we in America, western Europe, and most places outside of Germany make a big celebration about the dismantling of the infamous Berlin Wall in 1989, I reflect on my personal experiences in Berlin...
I visited West Berlin several times in the early 1960s. I had lunch in the newspaper chain Springer building right on the wall. Several stories above the ground I could see the East Germans with their sub-machine guns peering out from their guard huts and German Shepherd dogs roaming up and down "no-man's land" between East Berlin and the Wall. I spoke at a university in West Berlin. I had lunch at a stop on the commuter train, in a station-hut called Oncle Tom's Cabin. I met with Gunter Grass, Germany's most famous author of the 20th century. I taped an interview with Klaus-Schutz, the mayor of West Berlin. And I simply roamed the city. I was the guest at the Deutsche Oper to see "Der Rosenkavalier." However I had a dangerous and threatening meeting also...
One night, a friend of mine took me to a secret meeting with members of the Bader-Meinhoff Gang. They had been terrorists in West Berlin, had blown up buildings, killed innocent citizens, and were feared as communist crazies. Sitting in a living room in a building that I had no way of knowing its location, I was originally greeted with respect and cordiality. As the evening progressed and I defended democracy, social democracy, the U.S., etc., things turned quickly confrontational. At this point I was not certain that I would ever leave that living room alive. But I stuck to my guns about my political-social-economic beliefs. I heaved a sigh of relief when I left that meeting and got into a cab late at night with my friend.
West Berlin at that time still showed evidence of the destruction from the end of World War II. The intense bombing had destroyed 80% of Berlin. Berlin was divided up after the War into four zones: Russian [East Berlin], French, British, and American. On my visits I landed at Templehopf Airport in the American sector. Looking across the Wall I could see a gray, dismal East Berlin, while West Berlin was starting to show very lively signs of exciting night life, bustling businesses, and people walking the streets openly in much better clothing than East Germans had. The German government in Bonn subsidized flights for West Berliners so they could occasionally get away from the ever-present danger that the Russians and East Germans might come blitzkrieging into West Berlin and take it over. So one could, for example, get a round trip flight from West Berlin to Hamburg for about twenty-eight dollars. On one of my trips out of West Berlin I took the train to Kassel in West Germany where the man who was my college roommate in my freshman year lived. So I had a good look at East Germany as we chugged along through the communist countryside. It was bleak.
The number one reason the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and not 1979 or 1999 was the man who came to power in the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorvachev. He allowed the opening of East Germany, and the dismantling of the Wall. He never expected things to move as quickly as they did, but he kept the USSR from intervening. That was a tremendous change in Moscow. And Gorbachev himself evolved as a social democrat. No military might, no tanks, no bombing, not anything like that caused the Wall to come down. It came down because Gorbachev allowed it to come down.
