We skipped a day yesterday, but here we are with links for 29 October 2009 concerning that very important moment in German History (and world history), the fall of the Berlin Wall. The 20th anniversary of that momentous event is coming up on 09 November 2009.
If you missed them, consider reviewing other recent entries containing links regarding the anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall. And don’t forget our special page dedicated wholly to Fall of the Berlin Wall Resources.
- The first is a bit humorous, though it’s not meant to be. At Russia Today we learn that Vladimir Putin may have “significantly contributed to reuniting the German state, but this stage of Putin’s biography is still classified and no specific facts can be obtained.” Riiiiggghhht. Russia Today is run by the “Autonomous [tee hee] Nonprofit Organization ‘TV-Novosti'”. [“tee hee” mine.] The journalist for the documentary that is mentioned in the article works for NTV, which is controlled by Gazprom, the state gas industry.
- At the New York Times appears a Reuters article about the “Stasi files”: massive amounts of paperwork kept by the East German Ministry of State Security, detailing extraordinary amounts of information about the citizens on whom they were spying. Authorities in the re-unified Germany had originally thought they could honor all requests by private citizens to view their files within ten years.
But thousands of people, mainly from former East Germany, are still applying every month. In the first half of 2009, applications were up nearly 11 percent on 2008.
“We have had more applications this year because of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Wall,” said Martin Boettger, who heads a regional branch of the Stasi archives in Chemnitz, formerly Karl-Marx-Stadt.
“Many films and books are being made, events are being held, so it is in the public consciousness,” said Boettger, whose own file contains 3,000 pages, detailing even the most trivial facts of his life and branding him a “religious fanatic.” (my emphasis)
It really makes you wonder: what on earth could this particular citizen – Mr. Boettger – have done that could have been interesting enough to fill up 3,000 pages?
Today’s video is a report from Reuters about where pieces of the Wall have ended up:
Bill Dawson
P.S. We’re now just 11 days away from the 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall. I’m going to be cutting back on these daily links — they won’t be daily anymore, because I almost feel like I’ve been spamming my own blog! 
So they’ll be a bit less frequent, and with some other bigger blog posts interspersed.
Bill Dawson is an American citizen who, having married an Austrian, lives and works in Vienna, Austria. A programmer by trade, he studied history as an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley. 
