US engineer Martin Cooper holds the world’s first handheld cellular phone, which he invented in 1973, alongside his current mobile phone at a conference in Oviedo, Spain. The original allowed 35 minutes of talk time and weighed 1kg

Europe

Who really brought down the Berlin wall?

There was an undignified moment in November’s celebrations of the fall of the Berlin wall, when two Nobel peace laureates seemed poised for a full-scale war over who had been most influential in 1989. Talking to German magazine Der Spiegel, Polish Solidarity leader Lech Walesa downplayed Moscow’s role in the thaw and called Gorbachev a “weak politician”—leading the former leader of the USSR to denounce Walesa for wanting “a bigger slice off the pie.” (President Sarkozy, meanwhile, was busy scraping egg off his face as his claim to have been in Berlin on the big day turned out to be less than entirely accurate.)

The debate could have thundered on but, fortunately for all involved, clarification was at hand in the form of Daniel Johnson, editor of the British monthly Standpoint and, in 1989, foreign correspondent for the Telegraph. In a lengthy November cover story for his magazine, Johnson reveals that it was, in fact, him who brought down the wall. At least, he says, the question that he asked—“what will happen to the Berlin wall now?”—at the press conference on 9th November earned him, in the words of one author, “a measure of credit for bringing down the wall.” Strangely enough, several other journalists (including the German Peter Brinkmann and the Italian Riccardo Ehrman) have claimed that their questions, asked after a statement on free movement from the East German central committee, were more vital. But Johnson—who compared his role as an observer to TS Eliot’s in 1942—sets the record straight, pinpointing the failure to answer his query as “the moment when the cold war ended.”

By a remarkable coincidence, Prospect’s own editor David Goodhart was also in East Berlin that night—although his rather more unworldly location was a conference on rock music promotion hosted by East Germany’s culture ministry. As he explains on Prospect’s blog, this meant that “I am the only British journalist who witnessed that great evening in the company of pony-tailed American pop music impresarios.” Not quite the hand of history—but a striking image nonetheless.

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