20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall

The Monkey

The Monkey

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Today it's exactly 20 years since tens of thousands of people walked through the gates of the Wall into West Berlin, by far the biggest symbol of the fall of communism in Europe. Please share your thoughts.
 
I feel like I've heard about the wall more than a million times in the past year.
 
Good thing too.


Let's just hope that in 20 years we'll be celebrating the fall of communism in Asia.
 
Reagan did it! His words penetrated the wall where they reverberated for twenty-nine months, after which it was finally weakened enough that it could be torn down by a mere army of mortal Berliners.
 
what a waste of a perfectly good wall
 
My friend, who's father was stationed there, gave me some pieces of the Berlin Wall. I guess I was 13 or 14 at the time.

Today is Inventor's Day in Germany.
 
To me it's like the Tiananmen Square tank man. One is wary of being too enthusiastic about it. It is smugly cited by western politicians as an example of their vaunted liberty winning out against oppression and ending history. It is a political event just as congenial to totally opposed ideologies, and can just as easily prop up a comfortable anti-leftism as a reasonable anti-totalitarianism.

And yet it offered so much world-changing brain-bursting fist-pumping hope to every one of the people who were there on that night - hope for god, christ, just a world where you can listen to music and get drunk with your friends, where you can have friends, without having to perform for the hidden microphone - and is ultimately so powerful a moment that those concerns are vapourised. It was the year I was born. It was a good year.
 
Yeesh, one can never end history. And the last man will live till the end of time.


Anyway, the Berlin Wall.... never thought about it much. What impacts did it have and so on. Methinks that even without its fall, the USSR would have collapsed regardless and communism die. It seems to me an event, a side-effect, so to speak, that happened because other things happened, and therefore not as important. Symbolic, yes, but it was quite forseeable, at least in my views.
 
I, too, was born in the year 1989. I didn't have any concept of walls or what it meant for them to fall during that time. But, looking back at it as a 20 year old, I view it as a highly symbolic and significant event in history.
 
15357 said:
Yeesh, one can never end history. And the last man will live till the end of time.


Anyway, the Berlin Wall.... never thought about it much. What impacts did it have and so on. Methinks that even without its fall, the USSR would have collapsed regardless and communism die. It seems to me an event, a side-effect, so to speak, that happened because other things happened, and therefore not as important. Symbolic, yes, but it was quite forseeable, at least in my views.
Click to expand...
Obviously its main value is symbolic. Many important things had already happened by November 9 1989: Hungary had opened its border to Austria, the opposition had won the election in Poland. But nothing quite symbolizes the reunification of Germany and Europe like the fall of the Berlin Wall.
 
I always imagined it as some kind of massive stone great-wall sort of thing.

Imagine my disappointment when I was 11 when I found out it was a stupid fence with guards.
 
Worth remembering. Less than 20 years ago the Soviet Union still stood and Germany was divided. No one really expected it and they definetly didn't forsee Germany being reunified within a year, most thought it would be at least 10 years before the final curtain fell on the DDR and the Soviet Empire. If nothing else we can look back on it as a symbol of how quickly seemingly immovable institutions can crumble and the world can change.
 
History Channel is having a special on this in a few days or so. Maybe today. I don't remember.
 
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