In the life of a journalist there are moments that make him wonder if he chose the right profession, but also those that stigmatize him. One such was for me on the evening of November 9, 1989.
By Kostas Argyros
“The day the Berlin Wall opened”. The phrase that became a cliché to justify by politicians and analysts anything that followed, any choice they made, any postulate, on which they tried to base their decisions or even their mistakes. But the historical events bear no responsibility for their various interpretations or misinterpretations.
The truth is, that night really did change the world. And if you ask those who lived through it, they will all have to tell you even trivial details. What they had eaten that night, what clothes or shoes they wore… Because they are moments that are engraved in the memory forever, without having to work hard to recall them in your mind.
When the unbelievable happened
A lot happened together and rather unexpected that night. The cataclysmic collapse of a “model”, which for decades had moved millions of people across Europe, but also across the planet. A unique example of how a seemingly powerful regime can collapse within a few days. At the same time, it was also a proof of how unpredictable History can become, especially when the political leaderships fail to grasp the messages of society. A lesson, however, which in the meantime most politicians, regardless of color, tend to forget.
But it is also a story of multiple disappointments and denials… First, the dream of those who had risked a lot by opposing an inhumane and cruel regime and imagined that the time had come to experience “real democracy”. A dream, which was lost very quickly, when the real revolutionaries were sidelined by Bonn puppets and the masses, who once shouted “We are the people”, decided that it was enough for them to finally be happy consumers with the Western mark in their pocket. So came “We are one people”, which meant we want the same quality of life, the same wages, the same opportunities. But this dream didn’t last long either. Some have been talking since then of “annexation”, in terms of winners for the vanquished rather than true integration.
By looking at yesterday we understand today
All this may seem like distant history to some. Especially for the new generations under 30, who were “politicized” in an era largely dominated by euphoria about the end of the cold war and a surge of “end of history” obfuscation. But knowing those facts can help one understand today’s Germany, the ongoing “division within the heads,” the shudder felt by the frightened German petty-bourgeoisie when he hears of “solidarity” within the Eurozone, the vulnerability of a society in racist and xenophobic slogans.
Today in the former East German states, the majority, even a marginal one, still declares that they feel like “second-class citizens”. And she often asks to take revenge for lost expectations, to punish those who promised her, now giving a vote to far-right forces. The irony of history is that this is happening precisely where a state was supposed to be built with a cohesive fabric, ideological support and central justification for existence “anti-fascism”.
Remembering what happened in November 1989 is therefore very useful. It helps to understand the impasses and wounds of a Germany, which hastily welded together, against the concerns of its “partners”. François Mitterrand’s phrase is monumental: “I love Germany so much, that’s why I want there to be two of them.” But it also shows why what some once called an “experiment for the great unification of Europe” cannot function as a model.
As a sociologist born in East Germany in the late 1980s recently pointed out, it was a very tight, homogenized society, but isolated from the rest of the world. This peculiar “socialist provincialism” has not really been overcome even today, because no one had a recipe for “how”…
The wallpaper
“If your neighbor changes wallpaper, will you change too?” In this disarming way, Kurt Hager, head of propaganda for the ruling communist party (Unified Socialist Party – ESCG was the official name) of East Germany, had responded when, in May 1989, some foreign journalists asked him about the possibility of following East Berlin the reform policy adopted by the sister party in Moscow under Mikhail Gorbachev. The problem was, of course, that the “reconstruction” operation was not just a decorative operation of changing the wallpaper, since, as it turned out, the walls were about to collapse.
The hostile attitude towards the Soviet Union, once the reforms there began, was only a small sample of this disagreement with reality. I remember the colleague, correspondent in Berlin for a newspaper of a communist party in the West, showing me at the end of March of the following year a sheet of his newspaper, dated October 26, 1989. But it was delivered to him on February 26, ’90. “She was held by the Stasi” (state security) he told me. The cover featured the color photograph of Mikhail Gorbachev’s visit to Finland. Censors didn’t like this.
The “Iron Hand”
In the files of the Stasi, the state security service (Staatssicherheit – StaSi), one will find recorded the concern of the “party base” about the policy, which had been initiated by the Soviet Union for the press, which, it was emphasized, was strengthening tendencies towards phenomena of anarchy . The official party organ, “Neues Deutschland” would have at least one picture of “leader” Erich Honecker every day. One of the jokes circulating in the country said that the only real thing printed on its pages was the release date.
Of course, there were some within the party who saw that the morbid situation had reached an impenetrable end. They were the ones who came into daily contact with the real “base”, the ones who didn’t limit their daily life to rich villas in the suburbs and special shops with western products.
However, the party leadership, controlling with an “iron hand” a mechanism, which was anyway designed to work from the top down, took care to neutralize any different voice in time. Institutions of control of power did not exist, space for criticism is not created anywhere within a sealed and opaque circuit. The tactic of eroding or integrating anyone who dares to say something more is systematically used.
The wrong people
Such a regime could not lack repression. Dark shadows follow step by step those marked by the “anti-socialist” action, many of them are forced to leave the “German Democratic Republic”, others will remain imprisoned for years. But the regime seems to be beginning to sense its insecurity, and some are openly flirting with the idea of even more authoritarian solutions. Chilling way of presenting the events of those days in Tiananmen Square in China. The characterization of the murdered students as “counter-revolutionaries” is an indirect threat, which one can hardly fail to decipher. Fortunately, things turned out differently.
As East Germany’s penultimate prime minister, Hans Montreux, would later say, Erich Honecker and his company kept saying “we are here for the people, but basically they wanted another people, because they couldn’t get by with that one.”
*Excerpt from my book “The Fall of the Berlin Wall”, which was released 30 years after the events, in November 2019.
Source :Skai
With a wealth of experience honed over 4+ years in journalism, I bring a seasoned voice to the world of news. Currently, I work as a freelance writer and editor, always seeking new opportunities to tell compelling stories in the field of world news.
