Standing with tens of thousands of others on Bernauer Strasse in Berlin last Sunday evening, as 7,000 large, illuminated, helium-filled balloons were set free into the dark sky and the crowds cheered and clapped for joy, one could be pardoned for being overwhelmed. News outlets reported that a million people were out in Berlin that night, taking part in what Berliners called "25th Mauerfall," the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall. The balloons were spaced about 10 feet apart all along the 14-kilometer path of the wall through central Berlin; people had been walking the route all weekend, and various displays recounted the sad history of the DDR, the East German state, and the euphoria of Nov. 9, 1989, when one of every four East Germans crossed into the West.
It took an hour to reach Bernauer Strasse from any place in the city Sunday, and while there were more people at the Brandenburg Gate to listen to Daniel Barenboim conduct a performance of Beethoven's rendering of Schiller's "Ode to Joy," broadcast on Jumbotrons all along the route, Bernauer Strasse was the place to be. There were tunnels under the street, dug mostly from the west into cellars in the east, where people lacking faith in the communist experiment and sick of being spied upon, who could not travel outside their own country and who hungered mightily for freedom crawled through the mud, mothers carrying their babies, to the free air of West Berlin.
It was on Bernauer Strasse that a young East German border guard, having signaled those on the other side of his intentions, climbed and then leaped over the barbed wire and fled to the safety of a West German police van. It was on Bernauer Strasse that a West German policeman, with two civilian accomplices, on a moonless night distracted the East German guards, placed explosives, and blew a huge hole in the wall. It was, tragically, on Bernauer Stasse that young men and women were gunned down by the East German border police, as elsewhere in the city, desperately trying to run and climb to freedom, in essence daring the guards to shoot. Bernauer Strasse was the place to be last Sunday night, to feel the full meaning of the wall, and its breaching and destruction, and the beginning of the reknitting of the German state and the German people. It was an extraordinary experience, at once horrifying in memory and exultant in realization.
Earlier in the day, a French journalist conducted an impromptu interview of one visitor who had come for the celebration and was found watching the crowd as they walked along the former concrete no-man's land between the 10-foot wall and the official East German border along Bernauer Strasse. What reflections would the visitor care to share, she asked.
The Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the European Union two years ago, the visitor noted, was entirely appropriate, and the celebration of the fall of the wall should be seen in the context of the prize. The prize commemorated something entirely new in history: 60 years of no war in western Europe. The western Europeans, and most Europeans, have adopted the view that collective, mass violence as a way to resolve conflict is unacceptable. That doesn't mean there's been no violence. But it's viewed now as unacceptable in a way it was not before 1945. Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel has said as much to Russian President Vladimir Putin, and it's had some effect.
Lt. Col. Harald Jager, East German commander of the Bornholder Strasse crossing, who was the first to open the wall, at 11:30 p.m., told reporters later he wept, for the failure of the communist state but also for joy that there was no bloodshed. Merkel, who crossed at Bornholder that night, said in a talk Saturday that it was a miracle not a shot was fired. Jager could have ordered violence but he found that unacceptable. He acted on his own judgment, and changed history.
So it's not just that the wall fell, extraordinary as that was, but that it fell without violence, as did the former communist satellites. This is cause not just for celebration but for jubilation, for something entirely new.
Steve Haycox is professor emeritus of history at the University of Alaska Anchorage.
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