Where were you when the Wall fell?

Posted By Daniel W. Drezner Monday, November 9, 2009 - 6:07 PM Share

With the fall of the Berlin Wall twenty years ago today, there's going to be a lot of navel-gazing about What It All Means.

It occurs to me, however, that the Fall of the Wall is one of those rare Good News Events in which people remember where they were and what they were doing when it happened. For a multitude of cognitive reasons, I think most of these transcendent events -- the Kennedy assassination, the Challenger explosion, the 9/11 attacks -- are calamitous events. Beyond the fall of the Wall, I can only think of the Moon landing as a similar good new focal point.

So, my question to readers -- what were you doing when you heard the Berlin Wall had been breached? What was your reaction?

I'll go first -- I was a senior in college, and found out when I was in the coffee shop. My first thought was a profound desire to get on a plane and go to Berlin -- I had been there six months earlier, and here was no inkling of what was going to happen.

My second thought was unadulterated joy -- because the Cold War had been so omnipresent for my entire life, and it looked like it was headed for the dustbin.

What about you?

EXPLORE:GLOBALIZATION, COLD WAR, HISTORIC MOMENTS

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BRETT

7:02 PM ET

November 9, 2009

I was pretty young, and while

I was pretty young, and while I have a memory of the adults being excited over something while I was playing with a globe of the pre-1991 world (which I still have), I don't know if that was when the Berlin Wall fell, or when the Soviet Union came crashing down two years later.

ZATHRAS

2:47 AM ET

November 10, 2009

On the road

I was in the middle of my backpacking period when the Berlin Wall fell. As Germans were flooding through new gaps in the long-detested barrier, I was tramping around Lake Toba in northern Sumatra, photographing Batak tombs and quite oblivious. A copy of the New Straits Times (as I recall) back at my guesthouse on Samosir Island caught me up enough to tune into BBC broadcasts that told a little more of the story.

As it happened, Germany was on my itinerary anyway, for early 1990, so I felt in no hurry to get there. Headline followed headline in the English language press I checked daily, or almost daily, as I made my way up the west coast of Malaysia and the Thai hill country -- the Russians leaving, Czechs and Hungarians in the streets, Ceaucescu shot. Incongruously, because the Romanian dictator had long had a strained relationship with the Soviets who dominated the rest of Eastern Europe, it was that last headline that confirmed for me that the Cold War was really, finally, ending.

I left Bangkok for Germany in mid-January on an Aeroflot plane, a piddly little Ilyushin that looked like a puddle-jumper sitting next to the giant Cathay Pacific and Lufthansa 747s at the airport. Subtle the symbolism was not, and it didn't end there. Aeroflot had to stop in Bombay on its way to Moscow, as the plane couldn't go directly from Bangkok over the Himalayan Mountains; I bought a snack at an airport cafe there where change was made using an abacus. I changed in Moscow for the flight to Frankfurt, and landed in a new world.

Months later I made my way to Berlin, with a group organized by the Goethe Institute. The Institute very thoughtfully provided the sledgehammers, so I got my pieces of the Wall -- it had been a massive damned thing, and took months to disassemble completely. I still have them, but what I remember is our group's driver, a native of the East returning to visit the sisters he hadn't seen since fleeing when the Wall went up all those years ago.

He got his turn with the sledgehammer; he may have gone first, actually, in fact I think the group insisted on it. The pictures I took don't quite capture the look I remember on this man's face as he chipped away at the great barrier. I don't know that words can either. Satisfaction, loss, fury, triumph, regret; a sense of something evil having ended, and of something...else having begun. A sense, perhaps, of the price and glory of history, all in the face of one man with a sledgehammer, chipping away at the remnants of a great, grey wall.

ESTENIEAU JEAN

12:25 PM ET

November 10, 2009

I was still in elementary

I was still in elementary school and kids stuff had more meaning to me than the world news. As I grew up, I started to appreciate the meaning of that historical event. It was one of the biggest events if not the biggest event of the 80's.But my question now, what advantages do the world have from that event? It is certainly better for some and worst for others.Who benefits from that historical event?

DANIEL W. DREZNER

1:44 PM ET

November 10, 2009

Really?

Who was made worse off by the event, beyond a few members of the communist elite in these countries?

JASON SIGGER

2:35 PM ET

November 10, 2009

In the Army

As a lieutenant in the US Army, I remember thinking, "okay, this changes our plans just a little bit." We had been so focused on the European "Fulda Gap" scenario that it was impossible to think about what the future might be for the deployment and use of military forces.

Thank goodness Saddam Hussein provided us with a rationale just a year later. (sarcasm)

DON K

5:10 AM ET

November 11, 2009

At Work

I was at work, in the Treasurer's Office of my company, where we had access to Bloomberg and Reuters feeds, when the news came across.

I was seven when the Wall was built (I remember seeing the National Geographic article soon after it was built), and I was just glad I was alive to see it come down. The Cold War had been a fact of life for me for 35 years (I was part of the "duck and cover" and regular air raid drill generation of school kids), and it was clear it was over at last.

And well, I shared vicariously the joy of the Germans who hacked apart the Wall.

GEORGE BUCHANAN

11:37 AM ET

November 26, 2009

I remember...

I remember President Reagan telling Gorbachev to tear down the wall with authority. It was almost like "I dare you not to, Gorbe." The other thing I remember is the sight of German citizens on top of the wall celebrating this victory. It was the threat of the United States military capability that forced Gorbachev to give up. He knew he could not win a full scale war.

THECARDINAL

2:21 AM ET

November 14, 2009

This is going to sound nuts....

I remember Peter Jennings reporting on Reagan's Speech on the general mocking tone of it moreso than the actual Wall coming down. For me the much bigger event was when the East Germans started to stream out of the shattering East Bloc and making their way to the West. The Wall was already a moot point when it came down. It had been effectively circumvented - it was just a question of when it would come down at that point.

What had a much more profound affect on me was the Massacre of Innocents in Beijing. Not a happy event but one that marked me for years - to the point it influenced my vote in the Presidential election.