10 ms·

How the Berlin Wall Really Fell

52 points by johnny99 12y ago

Mithaldu 12y ago
> many Americans have come to believe that the wall fell thanks to President Ronald Reagan’s direct, personal intervention Is this truly a belief held in the USA? As an east-german this seems equal parts baffling and insulting to me. If so, i can only thank the author for correcting this belief in a quite public manner.
- blueflow 12y ago
  I feel same about that. The Americans often have issues with correct teaching of history.
  - adventured 12y ago
    If that's not a slanderous statement of 300 million people I don't know what is. Which Americans are you referring to? And in what way do they have a worse understanding of history than billions of other people?
- scrapcode 12y ago
  The word "many" leads me to believe that this is the author's opinion without substance, and even with evidence at best ad populum. I recently read "Lies My Teacher Told Me" by J. Loewen [1], and it hits on just this, being the "heroification" of American leaders. I wouldn't doubt that this is what was the popular teaching in K-12 US. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/0743296281/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1415442840&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/074...
- droopybuns 12y ago
  I think this story is wrong on many accounts. For starters, I don't think many Americans understand any details other than the anecdote that there was a wall in Germany, and it came down. Please, rest assured east Germans, we have done worse than steal your achievement- we don't give it any real thought anymore. Americans glibly joke about the fear culture around communism from that time, but we have no awareness of the irony of our current fears of isis or Ebola. Reagan's speech at the wall was iconic, but you really need to be over 35 to be aware of it.
  - flohofwoe 12y ago
    Kennedy's "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech in '63 is much more present in German culture then Reagan's in '87. If anything, we associate Gorbatchev's Perestroika process as the beginning of the end of the socialist system.
  - PinguTS 12y ago
    I am an former Est Germany. I am older than 35. I can assure you, the Reagan speech did noting. There where only one or two important speeches, may be 3 if you count Kennedy in. One of the most important was, when Willy Brand had its visit in East Germany. The only important visit by a western politician in East Germany. The other one, which was not really a speech, but very important, was the one by Genscher for the release of the people into West Germany after occupying the West German embassy in Praha, CZ.
    - hga 12y ago
      It was clearly more directed at the USSR and specifically Gorbachev. Khrushchev and Ulbricht had unwisely created the concrete, so to speak, symbol of the evil empire, a very visible wall dividing a historic, major city. Where families trying to cross it were shot at, often successfully. It had to have been terribly embarrassing to Gorbachev to be called out like that, and it strongly cut against many of his and the USSR's themes, e.g. if it's so great, why do you need that wall keeping people inside of your socialist worker's paradise? Getting back to the 1989 fall, something stayed the hands of the USSR, unlike Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. I believe it's impossible to make an honest case that Reagan had nothing to do with that.
    - droopybuns 12y ago
      Respectfully, I think you are mistaken to say that Regan's speech did nothing. The reuse of Regan saying "tear down this wall" in various pieces of remix culture is evidence of the iconic nature of the speech. By no means am I arguing that these words literally tore down a wall. But if anyone can argue that a speech can ever be important, this one was, at least for American culture. So my point here is that this author is punching at a straw man. I don't know anyone who believes this speech itself contributed to the felling of the wall. It was an event in a much larger storyline that was bigger than the wall itself: the cold war.
- hga 12y ago
  For those of us old enough to remember the events, no, not at all. The story is of course much more complicated, and from my recollection the events in Eastern Europe really got started with Solidarity in Poland sometime before. But we also know that Reagan was the first US president who was determined to end the USSR, not "contain" it (compare to e.g. G. H. W. Bush's later Chicken Kiev speech), and we did all sorts of things to help bring that about, and this included parts of our civil society like our much more industrial and to the right back then unions. The actual events resulting in the very quick fall were something of a surprise, we didn't expect that, especially how relatively peaceful it was. But it was something we'd strived to help bring about.
- rtpg 12y ago
  I have never heard anyone imply that the US tore down the wall, so to speak. Common opinion seems to be that East Germany was shitty, and people wanted to leave, and with the changes from the USSR, popular movements made it fall.
- mikeash 12y ago
  There's an American conservative sect that believes Reagan was personally responsible for the fall of Communism, including both the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakup of the USSR. I don't know just how common it is, but it's not entirely uncommon among the "government is evil, taxation is theft, global warming is a hoax" fringe crowd.
  - hga 12y ago
    Name some members of it. Of course not counting those of us who note, as I noted in another posting in this sub-thread, that Reagan just happened to be the very first President who tried to end vs. "contain" the USSR. I.e. the difference between giving it a strong push into "the dustbin of history" as he put it, vs. "personally responsible".
    - mikeash 12y ago
      My father, for one.
      - hga 12y ago
        I think you'll have to do better than that to establish the existence of a "sect". I.e. you need to name some of its leaders, the ones making statements, speeches, etc. propagating this program.
        mikeash 12y ago
        I know he didn't come up with this idea independently. I haven't paid enough attention to know precisely who it came from, but given his reading and listening habits, I'd expect the names to be found on a list of contributors to National Review and the list of top talk radio hosts. You seem awfully defensive about this, given that I said nothing that indicates you are a member, or indeed that anyone in particular is a member until you asked. Are you that uncomfortable with the idea that there are crazy people in the world who hold some opinions similar to your own? That's true of all of us.
- jbuzbee 12y ago
  No. That's not a view that I've heard over the years. We hear that Reagan's policies led to severe economic pressure on the USSR which in turn led them to have a more hands-off position with the Eastern-Bloc countries.
aragot 12y ago
They quote: - The political reform started 4 years earlier by Mikail Gorbatchev, which was designed to reinforce the party's strength in exchange for softening very few things. - The disorganization of the Party and the lack of trust within the Stasi, - The press conference of Nov 9., where the administrator said something about travels, which wasn't reported acurately but which included words like "effective immediately". - The massive amount of people in front of the gates. I would love to have more details about the Perestroika and the reform background. One does not simply walk up with a crowd to a checkpoint without thinking about Tiananmen. I've always wondered whether Gorbatchev had desired freedom for his people and subtely acted to make such events happen.
pcrh 12y ago
I'm surprised the author makes no mention of the exodus of East Germans to the West via Hungary, which by the time the Berlin Wall came down had been ongoing for 6 months. http://www.politics.hu/20140627/hungary-austria-slovakia-mark-25th-anniversary-of-iron-curtain-opening/ http://www.politics.hu/20140627/hungary-austria-slovakia-mar...
flohofwoe 12y ago
As an East-German I find this slightly offensive (edit: Reagan bringing the wall down). It was the peaceful people on the streets, a bit of luck (no hot-heads in the police and military who wanted to open a civil war on their own people), a completely paralysed government and the Russians who didn't want to intervene. Besides, we all know the only American who had a hand in this was Hasselhof, not Reagan ;)
- hga 12y ago
  Heh. A lot of US Presidents did have a hand in bringing it about, from Truman and the Berlin Airlift. without which there wouldn't have been a wall in the first place, to JFK's "Ich bin ein Berliner", to of course Reagan. But in the end it came down to a lot of brave people on the scene. We just helped set the stage. Hmmm, along with Khrushchev and Ulbricht in creating the concrete, so to speak, symbol of the evil empire.
- rolux 12y ago
  You may want to read the actual article. It says pretty much exactly that. > In the decades since, many Americans have come to believe that the wall fell thanks to President Ronald Reagan’s direct, personal intervention. In a 1987 speech in front of the Brandenburg Gate in a divided Berlin, he told Soviet leaders to “tear down this wall” — and so, we’ve been told, they did. > This misreading of the actual fall of the wall is, at best, incomplete; at worst, it’s dangerous, contributing to the belief that American leaders can go “from Berlin to Baghdad,” shaping world events while ignoring the complex realities of the locals.
  - flohofwoe 12y ago
    Yes, sorry for being unclear. The article is a good thing and hopefully helps to clean up the misconception that Reagan single-handedly liberated us. My impression of him was more that he was a diehard cold-warrior who'd rather start dropping the nukes. Basically the western equivalent of Brezhnev and pretty much the opposite of Gorbatchev. But that was a long time ago, and I was a teen in the 80's so my memory might be a bit off.
ghshephard 12y ago
How on earth anybody can write a story about the fall of the Berlin Wall (indeed, the entire collapse of the USSR) without discussing the economic collapse in the face of dropping oil prices is beyond me. The details, such as minister speeches and ignored guards are interesting in the color they lend to the collapse, but the principle story is one of overwhelming macroeconomic forces at play. http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/06/why_did_the_sov.html http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/06/why...
- arto 12y ago
  Thanks for that. And another economic perspective as well: http://mises.org/daily/6956/The-Economics-Behind-the-Fall-of-the-Berlin-Wall http://mises.org/daily/6956/The-Economics-Behind-the-Fall-of...
- hga 12y ago
  From the quoted article: "The timeline of the collapse of the Soviet Union can be traced to September 13, 1985. On this date, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the minister of oil of Saudi Arabia, declared that the monarchy had decided to alter its oil policy radically. That doesn't quite fit the connotations I associate with "overwhelming macroeconomic forces at play". That was a specific policy decision ... which I don't believe you can isolate from things like the USSR's genocidal occupation of Afghanistan, and the Muslim world's many reactions to it. As I understand it, we strongly encouraged the Saudis in this policy. Visibly, by things like selling them F-15 and E-3A AWACS planes in the early '80s before that policy change (very controversial arms deals back then). As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, as part of Reagan's unique determination to end the Soviet Union, we the USA did everything we could to deny it hard currency, like obstruct and sabotage the export of natural gas to Western Europe. And like good capitalists, after Reagan took office, resumed making a buck in the process by selling them grain ^_^. ADDED: Why the bleep didn't Gorbachev et. al. allow a massive increase in household plots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_plot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_plot We always expected (see for example Red Storm Rising if I remember correctly) that when things got tight, the restrictions on them would be relaxed and the resulting productivity increase would tide them over. Or was that attempted but failed? Or is this "oil and grains" economic picture a bit too simple (as I've noted natural gas also played a role).

52 points by johnny99 12y ago

> many Americans have come to believe that the wall fell thanks to President Ronald Reagan’s direct, personal intervention Is this truly a belief held in the USA? As an east-german this seems equal parts baffling and insulting to me. If so, i can only thank the author for correcting this belief in a quite public manner.

blueflow 12y ago
I feel same about that. The Americans often have issues with correct teaching of history.
- adventured 12y ago
  If that's not a slanderous statement of 300 million people I don't know what is. Which Americans are you referring to? And in what way do they have a worse understanding of history than billions of other people?
scrapcode 12y ago
The word "many" leads me to believe that this is the author's opinion without substance, and even with evidence at best ad populum. I recently read "Lies My Teacher Told Me" by J. Loewen [1], and it hits on just this, being the "heroification" of American leaders. I wouldn't doubt that this is what was the popular teaching in K-12 US. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/0743296281/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1415442840&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/074...
droopybuns 12y ago
I think this story is wrong on many accounts. For starters, I don't think many Americans understand any details other than the anecdote that there was a wall in Germany, and it came down. Please, rest assured east Germans, we have done worse than steal your achievement- we don't give it any real thought anymore. Americans glibly joke about the fear culture around communism from that time, but we have no awareness of the irony of our current fears of isis or Ebola. Reagan's speech at the wall was iconic, but you really need to be over 35 to be aware of it.
- flohofwoe 12y ago
  Kennedy's "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech in '63 is much more present in German culture then Reagan's in '87. If anything, we associate Gorbatchev's Perestroika process as the beginning of the end of the socialist system.
- PinguTS 12y ago
  I am an former Est Germany. I am older than 35. I can assure you, the Reagan speech did noting. There where only one or two important speeches, may be 3 if you count Kennedy in. One of the most important was, when Willy Brand had its visit in East Germany. The only important visit by a western politician in East Germany. The other one, which was not really a speech, but very important, was the one by Genscher for the release of the people into West Germany after occupying the West German embassy in Praha, CZ.
  - hga 12y ago
    It was clearly more directed at the USSR and specifically Gorbachev. Khrushchev and Ulbricht had unwisely created the concrete, so to speak, symbol of the evil empire, a very visible wall dividing a historic, major city. Where families trying to cross it were shot at, often successfully. It had to have been terribly embarrassing to Gorbachev to be called out like that, and it strongly cut against many of his and the USSR's themes, e.g. if it's so great, why do you need that wall keeping people inside of your socialist worker's paradise? Getting back to the 1989 fall, something stayed the hands of the USSR, unlike Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. I believe it's impossible to make an honest case that Reagan had nothing to do with that.
  - droopybuns 12y ago
    Respectfully, I think you are mistaken to say that Regan's speech did nothing. The reuse of Regan saying "tear down this wall" in various pieces of remix culture is evidence of the iconic nature of the speech. By no means am I arguing that these words literally tore down a wall. But if anyone can argue that a speech can ever be important, this one was, at least for American culture. So my point here is that this author is punching at a straw man. I don't know anyone who believes this speech itself contributed to the felling of the wall. It was an event in a much larger storyline that was bigger than the wall itself: the cold war.
hga 12y ago
For those of us old enough to remember the events, no, not at all. The story is of course much more complicated, and from my recollection the events in Eastern Europe really got started with Solidarity in Poland sometime before. But we also know that Reagan was the first US president who was determined to end the USSR, not "contain" it (compare to e.g. G. H. W. Bush's later Chicken Kiev speech), and we did all sorts of things to help bring that about, and this included parts of our civil society like our much more industrial and to the right back then unions. The actual events resulting in the very quick fall were something of a surprise, we didn't expect that, especially how relatively peaceful it was. But it was something we'd strived to help bring about.
rtpg 12y ago
I have never heard anyone imply that the US tore down the wall, so to speak. Common opinion seems to be that East Germany was shitty, and people wanted to leave, and with the changes from the USSR, popular movements made it fall.
mikeash 12y ago
There's an American conservative sect that believes Reagan was personally responsible for the fall of Communism, including both the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakup of the USSR. I don't know just how common it is, but it's not entirely uncommon among the "government is evil, taxation is theft, global warming is a hoax" fringe crowd.
- hga 12y ago
  Name some members of it. Of course not counting those of us who note, as I noted in another posting in this sub-thread, that Reagan just happened to be the very first President who tried to end vs. "contain" the USSR. I.e. the difference between giving it a strong push into "the dustbin of history" as he put it, vs. "personally responsible".
  - mikeash 12y ago
    My father, for one.
    - hga 12y ago
      I think you'll have to do better than that to establish the existence of a "sect". I.e. you need to name some of its leaders, the ones making statements, speeches, etc. propagating this program.
      - mikeash 12y ago
        I know he didn't come up with this idea independently. I haven't paid enough attention to know precisely who it came from, but given his reading and listening habits, I'd expect the names to be found on a list of contributors to National Review and the list of top talk radio hosts. You seem awfully defensive about this, given that I said nothing that indicates you are a member, or indeed that anyone in particular is a member until you asked. Are you that uncomfortable with the idea that there are crazy people in the world who hold some opinions similar to your own? That's true of all of us.
jbuzbee 12y ago
No. That's not a view that I've heard over the years. We hear that Reagan's policies led to severe economic pressure on the USSR which in turn led them to have a more hands-off position with the Eastern-Bloc countries.

aragot 12y ago

They quote: - The political reform started 4 years earlier by Mikail Gorbatchev, which was designed to reinforce the party's strength in exchange for softening very few things. - The disorganization of the Party and the lack of trust within the Stasi, - The press conference of Nov 9., where the administrator said something about travels, which wasn't reported acurately but which included words like "effective immediately". - The massive amount of people in front of the gates. I would love to have more details about the Perestroika and the reform background. One does not simply walk up with a crowd to a checkpoint without thinking about Tiananmen. I've always wondered whether Gorbatchev had desired freedom for his people and subtely acted to make such events happen.

pcrh 12y ago

I'm surprised the author makes no mention of the exodus of East Germans to the West via Hungary, which by the time the Berlin Wall came down had been ongoing for 6 months. http://www.politics.hu/20140627/hungary-austria-slovakia-mark-25th-anniversary-of-iron-curtain-opening/ http://www.politics.hu/20140627/hungary-austria-slovakia-mar...

flohofwoe 12y ago

As an East-German I find this slightly offensive (edit: Reagan bringing the wall down). It was the peaceful people on the streets, a bit of luck (no hot-heads in the police and military who wanted to open a civil war on their own people), a completely paralysed government and the Russians who didn't want to intervene. Besides, we all know the only American who had a hand in this was Hasselhof, not Reagan ;)

hga 12y ago
Heh. A lot of US Presidents did have a hand in bringing it about, from Truman and the Berlin Airlift. without which there wouldn't have been a wall in the first place, to JFK's "Ich bin ein Berliner", to of course Reagan. But in the end it came down to a lot of brave people on the scene. We just helped set the stage. Hmmm, along with Khrushchev and Ulbricht in creating the concrete, so to speak, symbol of the evil empire.
rolux 12y ago
You may want to read the actual article. It says pretty much exactly that. > In the decades since, many Americans have come to believe that the wall fell thanks to President Ronald Reagan’s direct, personal intervention. In a 1987 speech in front of the Brandenburg Gate in a divided Berlin, he told Soviet leaders to “tear down this wall” — and so, we’ve been told, they did. > This misreading of the actual fall of the wall is, at best, incomplete; at worst, it’s dangerous, contributing to the belief that American leaders can go “from Berlin to Baghdad,” shaping world events while ignoring the complex realities of the locals.
- flohofwoe 12y ago
  Yes, sorry for being unclear. The article is a good thing and hopefully helps to clean up the misconception that Reagan single-handedly liberated us. My impression of him was more that he was a diehard cold-warrior who'd rather start dropping the nukes. Basically the western equivalent of Brezhnev and pretty much the opposite of Gorbatchev. But that was a long time ago, and I was a teen in the 80's so my memory might be a bit off.

ghshephard 12y ago

How on earth anybody can write a story about the fall of the Berlin Wall (indeed, the entire collapse of the USSR) without discussing the economic collapse in the face of dropping oil prices is beyond me. The details, such as minister speeches and ignored guards are interesting in the color they lend to the collapse, but the principle story is one of overwhelming macroeconomic forces at play. http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/06/why_did_the_sov.html http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/06/why...

arto 12y ago
Thanks for that. And another economic perspective as well: http://mises.org/daily/6956/The-Economics-Behind-the-Fall-of-the-Berlin-Wall http://mises.org/daily/6956/The-Economics-Behind-the-Fall-of...
hga 12y ago
From the quoted article: "The timeline of the collapse of the Soviet Union can be traced to September 13, 1985. On this date, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the minister of oil of Saudi Arabia, declared that the monarchy had decided to alter its oil policy radically. That doesn't quite fit the connotations I associate with "overwhelming macroeconomic forces at play". That was a specific policy decision ... which I don't believe you can isolate from things like the USSR's genocidal occupation of Afghanistan, and the Muslim world's many reactions to it. As I understand it, we strongly encouraged the Saudis in this policy. Visibly, by things like selling them F-15 and E-3A AWACS planes in the early '80s before that policy change (very controversial arms deals back then). As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, as part of Reagan's unique determination to end the Soviet Union, we the USA did everything we could to deny it hard currency, like obstruct and sabotage the export of natural gas to Western Europe. And like good capitalists, after Reagan took office, resumed making a buck in the process by selling them grain ^_^. ADDED: Why the bleep didn't Gorbachev et. al. allow a massive increase in household plots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_plot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_plot We always expected (see for example Red Storm Rising if I remember correctly) that when things got tight, the restrictions on them would be relaxed and the resulting productivity increase would tide them over. Or was that attempted but failed? Or is this "oil and grains" economic picture a bit too simple (as I've noted natural gas also played a role).