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One more Berlin Wall post for tonight

Bill Dawson — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 21:51:03 +0000

Before I lay me down to sleep…

I find the CNN overview of the night’s festivities to be very good: lots of videos and a slideshow.

Sehenswert, as the Germans would say. (“Worth a look”.)

Today is the 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall

Bill Dawson — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 13:57:51 +0000

Well the day has finally come, the 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall.

We’ve put up a lot of Wall-related posts over the last several weeks in preparation for today, including our Fall of the Berlin Wall Resources page, as well as several individual entries in our Berlin Wall content category.

Now it’s just time to sit back and enjoy the celebrations on the telly. Those of you in Germany and Austria should tune in to Phoenix for the most coverage. Others around the world will no doubt be checking out major international networks such as CNN and the BBC.

Enjoy the coverage and see you back here soon!

Bill Dawson

Photo Credit: The lead photo accompanying this blog post is from the German Federal Archives, which has made it available under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license via Wikimedia Commons.

“Someday the Wall will fall” – Letter from an East German Penpal (Hausarchiv)

Bill Dawson — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 02:23:21 +0000

Amateur history nerd that I am, I’m quite pleased to have married into a family which has retained all sorts of books, newspapers and magazines dating from about 1920 onwards. The “In the Hausarchiv” series gives an occasional look at the things I’ve come across in our own “house archive”.

(More Berlin Wall resources.)

Last time I featured a letter from an East German penpal of my wife. I’m going to do the same again in this post, though this letter comes from a different young man in East Germany.

The first thing that caught my eye was the postage stamp. It commemorates the 50th anniversary of what has commonly been referred to as “Kristallnacht“, or “The November Pogrom”. On this East German stamp it is called the “Fascist Pogrom Night”. This is factually true, but I had to laugh a bit because it’s a very, very East German (communist) way of putting it. The regime in East Germany went to great lengths to define itself as anti-fascist. The Berlin Wall itself was officially named the “Anti-Fascist Protection Wall.”

But now let’s get to the good stuff, the words written by this young man. If you look at the bigger version of the note (click on it), the top of the right-side reads as follows:

A week ago we had a very nice yet sad farewell party. Two couples whom I know well have finally received their permit to emigrate to West Germany, after three years of waiting.

…

Such a farewell was definitely sad, but we’re all agreed that someday the walls will fall and we’ll all see each other again. I’m so looking forward to that.

I confess that those words stirred me emotionally. The letter is undated and the postmark is unclear, but from the content (he speaks of the “new year”) I assume it was written in January of 1989. Fortunately he only had another 10 months to wait before being able to go to the West and visit his friends.

I hunted through other letters from this particular young man and found one which stirred me even more. It contains this fantastic passage:

On 18 and 19 June [1988], Fisher-Z, Marillion, Heinz-Rudolf Kunze, Big Country and the absolutely awesome BRYAN ADAMS played in East Berlin. And so I went with my friends to Berlin for the very first time. I was absolutely overwhelmed and I’m still processing it all now. It started even before we reached Berlin. There I was driving comfortably in the car and all of a sudden there was a deafening roar above us: a Pan Am jet landed at the airport next to the Autobahn. I’ve seen it a thousand times on television, but when you actually experience it it’s really something.

Then we went with the S-Bahn [regional train] and suddenly there were giant white skyscrapers. Jan nudged me and said that that was West Berlin. I said loudly, “You’re crazy, that’s not West Berlin. They would never let us get so close!“ A woman across from me smiled and said, “Just wait, young man. In a second you’ll see the Wall — it really is West Berlin.”

And then I saw it, the Wall and watchtowers, and shivers ran down my spine [mir lief es eiskalt den Rücken runter]. Dani, I’m sure you’ve heard much about the Wall just like I have, but when you’re standing right in front of it — you just can’t imagine what a feeling it is, you can hardly believe it’s real: freedom so close, yet so far. [so nah die Freiheit und doch so weit].

…

I’ve never seen such a concert live; it was a beautiful high point of my life.

Until next time,

Bill Dawson

P.S. Don’t forget to check out my Berlin Wall resources page!

P.P.S. The concert is mentioned in an interesting English-language article at the website of the German magazine Der Spiegel.

Fall of the Berlin Wall – 20th Anniversary – links for 03 Nov 2009

Bill Dawson — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 14:23:21 +0000

Here are links for 03 November 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 in just six days, 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.

And now to today’s links:

Deutsche Welle shows us “What’s Left of the Berlin Wall”. Though it’s a fairly simple slide show featuring 16 photos, it has quickly become one of my favorites because of the excellent descriptions (in English) of each photo. Very, very interesting, particularly the parts about cemeteries being affected by the border fortifications.
“I have never had such a gifted pupil since,” says German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s former teacher, according to an interesting article at the Independent which gives not only a brief biographical sketch of Chancellor Merkel, but also a glimpse at the town in which she grew up in East Germany.

Unfortunately, today’s video is not “embed-able” in my page, so you’ll have to head on over to the BBC to watch it. It’s part of native German Franz Strasser’s trip through the areas of his former country, East Germany. In this episode, Strasser talks with German students who belong to the first generation that grew up during reunification. Interesting!

I hope you enjoyed today’s links. Keep coming back for more!

Until next time,

Bill Dawson

P.S. Chancellor Merkel is right at the top of the list of the world’s most powerful women. She’s very modest in public and comes across as a bit of an intellectual (which she is); words like “dynamic”, which we often like to ascribe to leaders, don’t necessarily apply to her. But this makes her no less of an extraordinary woman, one who has a very interesting biography, as that Independent article suggests.

There are English-language biographies of this “Power-Frau“, such as the one I’ve highlighted here. Check it out!

Photo Credit

The lead photo accompanying this blog post shows German Chancellor Angela Merkel and comes from Wikimedia Commons, where it was graciously made available by Jacques Grießmayer under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 license.

3 Links to Get You Up to Speed on the Berlin Wall

Bill Dawson — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:30:57 +0000

So you vaguely recall hearing something about an upcoming anniversary in Germany, but you’re embarrassed to admit that you don’t really know what all the hoopla is about. Sure, you know Berlin is the capital of Germany, and you’ve come across the notion of some kind of “Wall” being there, but that’s about the extent of your knowledge.

That’s what I’m here for, to help you learn a bit o’ history. Here are three links to help you understand what this upcoming anniversary is all about:

The BBC maintains a series of pages dedicated to helping British students study for their GCSEs (General Certificate for Secondary Education). For their history coverage they include a set of pages on the Berlin Wall. This is a very short (a few paragraphs) summary of why the Wall was built. If you wish to go further in understanding the historical context, view the other pages in their “Back to International relations 1945 – 1991″ series.
The website of the German Mission to the United States features a page titled Looking Back at the Fall of the Berlin Wall”, which is a nice, succinct, single-page summary of the Berlin Wall. A short timeline covering 1945-1990 is also provided, as are several suggested links to other pages.
Last but not least, there is always Wikipedia and their comprehensive entry concerning the Berlin Wall. This makes for longer reading than the links above, but provides a great deal of historical context.

And now for a little bonus. Do you want to “feel” the Berlin Wall, in an emotional sorta way? I find the video below to be absolutely goose-bumpy! It features video clips concerning the Wall, accompanied by the song “Wind of Change” from the German band The Scorpions. The song is relevant: it was written with the revolutions of 1989 in mind. Put on your headphones, turn up the volume, kick back and immerse yourself in the Berlin Wall experience:

No excuses! Now you know about that infamous Wall and you’re prepared to talk about it in the coming week!

Until next time,

Bill Dawson

P.S. You can always read a book, too, if you find yourself more interested! Here is one wholly dedicated to the topic of the Berlin Wall. The book came out this year specifically because of the 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, which is celebrated on 09 November.

It’s Jeffrey Engel’s The Fall of the Berlin Wall: The Revolutionary Legacy of 1989. That link is for Amazon.com, but the book is also available via Amazon UK, Canada and Germany.

Photo Credit

The photo of the Berlin Wall that accompanies this blog post is from Flickr user “vivaopictures”, who has graciously made it available to all of us via the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license. The suggested attribution is as follows:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/vivaopictures/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Fall of the Berlin Wall – 20th Anniversary – links for 29 Oct 2009

Bill Dawson — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 22:06:08 +0000

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.

And now to today’s links:

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:

Until next time,

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.

Fall of the Berlin Wall – 20th Anniversary – links for 27 Oct 2009

Bill Dawson — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 22:59:18 +0000

Here are links for 27 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.

And now to today’s links:

One of the things I have noticed during the past few weeks of scouring the web for Fall of the Berlin Wall articles is that not much of the content is emanating from the U.S. national media, with the exception of the Wall Street Journal. I have frequently, however, come across articles from the States that have a local angle. I’ve ignored a lot of it, probably unjustly. Today I will remedy that with something from the Jefferson City (Missouri) News Tribune, which announces Westminster College’s plans for 09 November. Westminster has a special connection to the Iron Curtain that was symbolized by the Berlin Wall: it was there that Winston Churchill gave the famous “Iron Curtain” speech.

Staying with the local theme, we have the Pocono Record informing us that East Stroudsburg University is marking the 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall by showing two films, one of which is “The Lives of Others”, the film we highlighted in yesterday’s links.
The BBC has an absolutely fantastic story to tell, that of Miklos Nemeth, who was Hungary’s prime minister in 1988. As Prime Minister, Nemeth used his power over the country’s budget to almost single-handedly dismantle Hungary’s border with Austria, leading to an opening of the dike (so to speak) and the trickling out of several East Germans into Austria via Hungary. The BBC story highlights the risks that Nemeth faced.

Today’s video is a bit of a mystery. It’s a very well done production using the metaphor of the birth of a baby on November 9, 1989, to describe the birth of a new Europe. It looks very much like it could have been produced as an official advertisement for 20th Anniversary celebrations, but the person who posted the video did not provide any information at all concerning its origin. But that doesn’t make it any less enjoyable!

Europe celebrates – 20th Anniversary of Democratic Change @ Yahoo! Video

Until tomorrow’s links,

Bill Dawson

P.S. Speaking of Churchill, he’s featured in this collection of famous great speeches. Now I know it’s time for you to start thinking about holiday gifts for your history buff friends, and this DVD looks like a great choice! It includes speeches by Churchill (the famous wartime speeches), Roosevelt, John F and Robert F Kennedy, all the way up into more recent times with speeches from President Clinton and others.

Fall of the Berlin Wall – 20th Anniversary – links for 26 Oct 2009

Bill Dawson — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 22:59:10 +0000

Here are links for 26 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.

And now to today’s links:

Here is another link from Guardian.co.uk: an interactive map of 5 points along the Berlin Wall. It’s a bit quirky, in the sense that when you click on one of the 5 points you get one of the series of 5 videos that the Guardian produced for the anniversary, and the video is not necessarily related to the point you just clicked on. But have a look anyway, as it’s a good page to find all of those five videos in one go.
Our second link for today is to an AFP article about The Scorpions and their hit song, “Wind of Change.” One of our Fall of the Berlin Wall link entries last week featured this song as a kind of soundtrack to what I believe is a home-made video about the Wall. Now you can learn more about that song — and The Scorpions — in the AFP article.

Today’s video is from Sony Pictures Classics’ account at YouTube and features the trailer for the film “The Lives of Others” (Das Leben der Anderen), a German film concerning the Stasi and how it spied on East German citizens, particularly (as in the film) prominent authors or other artists who were seen as politically unreliable or even subversive.

Fall of the Berlin Wall – 20th Anniversary – links for 23 Oct 2009

Bill Dawson — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 15:20:54 +0000

Here are links for 23 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.

And now to today’s links:

Today, the 23rd of October 2009, is itself an anniversary of some significance. In 1989, the 23rd of October fell on a Monday, which means the special and now famous Monday prayer service was taking place at the Nikolaikirche (St. Nicholas’s Church) in Leipzig. As had already become tradition, a peaceful protest followed the prayer services. The Wall Street Journal Online reminds us that over 300,000 took part in those Leipzig demonstrations on 23 October 1989.
At Guardian.co.uk, Will Buckley remembers the DDR-Oberliga, the top football (soccer) league in communist East Germany. His tagline: “When the Berlin Wall came down 20 years ago this month, it took with it one of the world’s weirder football leagues.” He describes the four types of teams in the league, starting with the first:

The Dynamos: Connected to the secret police. Every club with the Dynamo prefix (eg Berlin, Dresden) was directly answerable to the head of the Stasi, Erich Mielke, who had little difficulty jumping the “fit and proper person” hurdle.

It’s a fine article to remind us how utterly bizarre dictatorships sometimes are.

Today’s video is a bit humorous. It’s a segment from Intrepid Berkeley Explorer’s “Septemberfest” series. Watch those tourists hammer away at The Wall!

(Berlin Wall, Germany @ Yahoo! Video)

That’s it for this week. Come back next week for more links concerning the Fall of the Berlin Wall

Fall of the Berlin Wall – 20th Anniversary – links for 22 Oct 2009

Bill Dawson — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 22:59:24 +0000

Here are links for 22 October 2009 concerning that very important moment in German History (and world history), the fall of the Berlin Wall.

If you missed them, consider reviewing other recent entries containing Berlin Wall / GDR links. And don’t forget the Berlin Wall Resources page.

At CNET News, Tim Leberecht praises the Berlin Twitter Wall. I tweeted to #fotw, did you?
Marcus Walker of the Wall Street Journal Online addresses the doubts about which reporter elicited the history-changing response from Günter Schabowski at the press conference (see lead photo of this blog post) on 09 November 1989. Today’s video (see below) shows this press conference and gives you the background of what I’m talking about. Was it, in fact, Italian reporter Riccardo Ehrman? He received Germany’s highest honor for doing so, but a West German reporter is claiming it was he, not Ehrman, who opened the Berlin Wall. A fight for journalistic honor!

Today’s video is another in the Guardian’s series, “Berlin Wall: 20 Years On.” Unfortunately, the Guardian does not provide any embed code for this video, so you will actually have to visit that link to see it. This part — part four — of the series recalls 09 November 1989 itself. It includes a bit of trivia that I think a lot of people don’t know about: Günter Schabowski‘s mistaken belief — which he uttered aloud at a press conference — that the checkpoints were to be opened immediately. This was not, in fact, what the East German government had intended.

The transcript of Schabowski’s screw up can be seen at this PDF link from wilsoncenter.org. The critical part:

Schabowski: (um…)(reads:) “Permanent exit is possible via all GDR border crossings to the FRG. These changes replace the temporary practice of issuing [travel] authorizations through GDR consulates and permanent exit with a GDR personal identity card via third countries.”
(Looks up) (um) I cannot answer the question about passports at this point.
(Looks questioningly at Labs and Banaschak.) That is also a technical question. I don’t know, the passports have to … so that everyone has a passport, they first have to be distributed. But we want to…

Banaschak: The substance of the announcement is decisive…

Schabowski: … is the …

Question: When does it come into effect?

Schabowski: (Looks through his papers…) That comes into effect, according to my information, immediately, without delay (looking through his papers further).

Labs: (quietly) …without delay.

Beil: (quietly) That has to be decided by the Council of Ministers.

Question: (…Many voices…) You only said the FRG, is the regulation also valid for West Berlin?

Schabowski: (reading aloud quickly) “As the Press Office of the Ministry … the Council of Ministers decided that until the Volkskammer implements a corresponding law, this transition regulation will be in effect.”

And that, as they say, was that.

Until next time,

Bill Dawson

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