Berlin Wall « Prospect Magazine

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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.

Memories of 1989: the end of history?

David Goodhart

1989: "Ich war dabei"

I was there in Berlin on November 9th 1989. There is nothing special about this: it seems that half the world was there with me, although I don’t recall seeing them at the time. Daniel Johnson, the editor of a rival publication, even claims to have asked the vital question at an East Berlin press conference that led to the announcement that the wall was effectively defunct. But I think I am the only British journalist who witnessed that great evening in the company of pony-tailed American pop music impresarios.

The East German regime had been looking vulnerable for several weeks—even since the big East German outflow through Hungary—and we (at the Financial Times where I was working) were taking every opportunity to get into the country to gauge popular feeling. So when the opportunity came to attend a conference on rock music promotion in East Germany at a swanky East Berlin hotel from November 9th to 10th I grabbed it.

The East German government was keenly aware of the importance of rock music in keeping its young people happy and it used to attract a stream of the best bands in the world. It also had quite a thriving rock music industry of its own and was keen to export bands—at least those who could be relied upon to return. As I sat rather bored listening to East German cultural bureaucrats debating with the pony-tailed Americans I remember someone coming into the hall, in the early evening, and saying that the wall had opened.

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Prospect archive: the fall of the Berlin Wall

Elizabeth Kirkwood

The Brandenburg Gate, 10th November 1989

To mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall we’ve made several articles from Prospect’s archive free to read online.

For an overview of the complex cross-currents that fed into the collapse of the Soviet Union see historian Victor Sebestyen’s profile of its last leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, in “The accidental hero of 1989”. A man of huge and fascinating contradictions, Gorbachev, and his particular form of communism, played a far greater role in the end of the USSR than the western powers of the time may have cared to admit. And while he is revered in the west as a hero, this reputation is based on failure: his failure to reform the system he passionately believed in.