A Once in a Lifetime Experience and Challenge: The Fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago
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- Roger Cohen, Jochen Wolter, Tim Aeppel and Elizabeth Pond at the event
- (© Sonya Fry, OPC)
Unlike any other event and edifice, the Berlin Wall stood as a symbol not only for a separated Germany, but also for the division of East and West. Its fall, twenty years ago, led to the reunification of Germany one year later in 1990. The collapse of the Iron Curtain also paved the path towards the end of the Cold War period.
Of the five panelists who came together at the German House on Monday, November 9, three personally experienced the night and days the Wall came down in Berlin. Moderated by Roger Cohen, columnist for The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune, the panel featured Tim Aeppel, currently Pittsburgh bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal and Bonn/Berlin correspondent in 1989; the photographer David Burnett, co-founder of Contact Press Images; Michael Meyer of Newsweek, who was the Bonn/Berlin bureau chief for the magazine from 1988-1992; and Elizabeth Pond, a noted scholar on European-American relations.
In his address, the Consul General Horst Freitag highlighted the important and helpful role of the media for ensuring that all events before and after November 9 remained peaceful and positive. It was, the Consul General said, especially the American journalists’ continuous reporting of the unfolding events that created a worldwide public awareness, making sure that a return to the status quo before the fall of the Wall would be impossible. He also thanked the Americans for their support in 1989 and during the 2+4 negotiations as well as during the decades before the fall of the Wall.
Tim Aeppel (Wall Street Journal) was at Checkpoint Charlie on November 9, 1989. He remembered that East German borderguards tried to hand out cards to the over 700 people that had gathered at one particular place. He said, instead of accepting this procedure, the East Germans threw the cards to the ground, showing that they were finally fed up with what they had to endure. Eventually, the guards let them through. “The crowd was firm, but they weren’t hostile,” Aeppel recalled. He said the fall of the Berlin Wall was, “the biggest thing I could have been covering other than a war.”
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- One of the pictures taken by David Burnett on November 10, 1989
- (© 2009 David Burnett/Contact Press Images)
Michael Meyer (Newsweek) also was at Checkpoint Charly on November 9, 1989. He said that next to him, a massive crowd of people suddenly swept through the Wall into West-Berlin. At that moment in the late evening, he said, “I scratched in my notebook ’11:17pm., the wall comes down.’”
On the next day, November 10, David Burnett arrived on the scene in Berlin. A professional photographer for over three decades, he said: “There was a spirit unlike anything else I have seen in my years of photographing.” He also told that the mood of the crowds along the wall were peaceful and euphoric. Seconding Mr. Aeppel and Mr. Meyer, he said that he was sure that an outbreak of violence was unlikely. Mr. Burnett also showed a series of photographs he took on November 10, 1989. His pictures vividly expressed the joy and exasperation Germans felt on that day. The audience at the German House, of whom many were in Berlin on November 9 themselves, were especially touched by the photograph of a woman Mr. Burnett captured with a tear rolling from her eye as she watched people climbing up the wall.
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- Panel discussion with David Burnett, Elizabeth Pond, Roger Cohen, Tim Aeppel and Michael Meyer
- (© GKNY)
Elizabeth Pond, author of “Beyond the Wall: Germany’s Road to Unification,” who has written extensively on European affairs, said that it was immediately clear that the fall of the wall signified the beginning of a new era. “It was the end of fear,” she said. Mrs. Pond also thought it was, for many Germans, the first time they were really proud to be German.
The panel discussion was followed by a “Q& A.” Many people in the audience recalled their experiences of November 9, 1989 and as one guest said “this shows that walls are not for ever.”
