The Cold War was a fact of life.
My parents had grown up during it; I had grown up during it. And I had little doubt my children would grow up during it. From before my parents were born, the Soviet Union and the United States of America were the premier powers on two sides of a chessboard. On America’s side, we had friends like France and Britain. The Soviets had allies like Poland and Czechoslovakia. China was off doing its own thing, Soviet in policy, but more on America’s side than not. Still, the chess pieces were controlled by the Americans and the Soviets, and smack dab in the center of the board were the twins — West and East Germany.
Yes, I know that is a simplistic, America-centric view of what was a difficult, confusing, and dangerous time in human history. But it was the view we were sold — not for nothing was the president referred to, as far back as my memory goes, as “Leader of the Free World.” And while America’s NATO allies were far more independent than was suggested at the time, America played an outsized role in the alliance for the same reason the Soviets did. We were armed to the teeth, armed with weapons that could destroy humanity a dozen times over, in a myriad of horrific ways.
It was these weapons that transformed the Cold War from a mere struggle for national prestige to the potentially suicidal confrontation it was. Some have suggested that nuclear weapons, perversely, may have saved lives, by making the cost of direct conflict between NATO and the Warsaw Pact too dire for sane leaders ever to comprehend. But if they did so, they did so at a very high price, for every man, woman, and child in the world knew that if ever west or east found itself with a truly unhinged leader, one willing to destroy the world to save it, that all of us could be dead within minutes — if we were lucky. The unlucky — those would be survivors, forced to live in a world where burning wood for fires would unleash radioactive toxins, a world where what few humans survived would be faced with a cataclysmic nuclear winter, followed by several millennia of radioactive poison slowly killing us off, as we descended from our pinnacle to, at best, a stone-age existence. As Albert Einstein once noted, he didn’t know what weapons World War III would be fought with, but World War IV would be fought with sticks and stones.
This was our world, a world in which two sides were constantly jockeying for position, two sides that could end my life and the lives of everyone I loved in an instant. A world in which the Eastern Bloc might as well have been located on Mars. A world in which an Iron Curtain divided Us from Them.
The Iron Curtain was not just a clever metaphor coined by Winston Churchill. It had a real-world counterpart: the Berlin Wall.
The Berlin Wall was built to keep East Germans from escaping to the democratic West, as 3.5 million did between the end of World War II and the start of construction. This outflow had both direct negative affects — it cost East Germany 20 percent of its citizens — and indirect ones, as the constant movement from East to West was a propaganda coup for NATO and democratic Western Europe. It could not continue.
And so the wall was built, beginning on August 13, 1961. It began as a haphazard barrier, made up of barbed wire, chain-link fences, mine fields and unfortified areas patrolled by soldiers. It was still just a wire fence when John F. Kennedy delivered his famous Ich bin ein Berliner speech in 1963, albeit a completed one. The wall was built up over time, with concrete walls added in the late 1960s. By the time I was born, in 1974, that wall was complete, and the upgraded Grenzmauer 75 was being installed, 12 feet high and four feet thick, with significant reinforcements on the Eastern side. It is that wall that is remembered best, and the first thing I think of when the words “Iron Curtain” are mentioned.
That wall was the symbol of the Cold War, the unending, unyielding, potentially lethal war that had my parents hiding under their school desks, and that had me lying awake some nights, wondering if my home in suburban Minneapolis would be destroyed in the initial blast wave, or if I might live long enough to see the misery afterward. That massive concrete wall — the one Ronald Reagan urged Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down, as if that could happen — was a permanent fixture. It would stand throughout my lifetime. Because countries don’t simply decide one day to let their citizens be free. It doesn’t happen — even if the Soviets are mouthing pretty words like Перестройка and Гла́сность.
And yet, in the fall of my sophomore year in High School, that appeared to be exactly what was happening. In August, Hungary had opened its border crossings with neutral, democratic Austria, and quickly, 13,000 East Germans booked tours to Hungary, and didn’t return. Czechoslovakia soon followed suit, forcing East Germany to seal its border with an ostensibly aligned country. Those East Germans who hadn’t left began to agitate for their freedom. They first chanted “Wir wollen raus! — “We want out!” Then, as weeks went by, sensing that more than freedom to travel may be afoot, the protesters began to chant, “Wir bleiben hier!” — we are staying here.
On October 18, Erich Honecker, who had served as General Secretary of the DDR for eighteen years, abruptly resigned. Egon Krenz was elected to replace him, in a split vote by the People’s Chamber. Krenz said he would institute democratic reforms, but events had overtaken him. Krenz re-opened the Czechoslovak-East German border. The Politburo formally began to discuss lifting travel restrictions with the West, as they weren’t enforceable at that point.
On November 9, 1989, twenty years ago today, Günter Schabowski, First Secretary of the East Berlin Chapter of the Socialist Unity Party, was given the news that travel restrictions with West Germany were to be lifted. They were not to be lifted that day; however, the information Schabowski had did not contain the date they were to end. And so Schabowski, asked when the rules were to be lifted, replied “sofort, unverzüglich” — immediately, without delay.
East Berliners streamed to the border, and realizing that they had nothing to gain from killing people for trying to cross the border over a miscommunication, the East German government ordered its troops to let them through, unencumbered. On November 9, 1989, for all intents and purposes, the Berlin Wall fell.
The Ossis were greeted by the Wessis with open arms, and a jubilant celebration began. Within days, people on both sides of the wall arrived with sledgehammers to knock it down, piece by piece, crumbling rock by crumbling rock.
Krenz’s government did not last another month, and East Germany did not last another year. By December 6, Mannfred Gerlach, who had split with the ruling Communist Party in early October, was elected as head of the Council of State and de facto Head of State; he would be replaced when the Council of State was abolished the following April, and Sabine Bergmann-Pohl, the President of the Volkskammer, replaced him. Her government would last until October 2, 1990, the date on which East and West Germany ceased to exist, as all territory belonging to the DDR was brought into the Bundesrepublik. A nation went directly from being part of the Warsaw Pact to part of a NATO ally. And the Cold War began to end.
There were many other milestones on the way to the liberating of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, and Czechoslovakia all joined East Germany in shedding their Communist legacies in 1989. In August of 1991, an attempted coup would fail in the USSR, leading to the dissolution of the empire and the freeing of nations like the Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia.
It did not bring about, as Francis Fukuyama said it would, the “End of History.” Yugoslavia would implode spectacularly, leading to genocidal violence. In a number of former Soviet states, border disputes and ethnic divisions would foment wars and create breakaway, failed states. And while parts of the east, like the Baltic Republics and the Czech Republic, are thriving, others — including East Germany — continue to struggle with the transition from a command economy to Eurocapitalism.
But the end of the Cold War did end a period of political repression in much of Europe, and it ended the threat of global cataclysm that two generations of humans took as an enduring part of life. The worst al Qaeda can dish out today is kids playing with pop-guns next to the threat of an all-out nuclear war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact.
That threat died over several years. But symbolically, it died twenty years ago today, when people who wanted the freedom to visit their cousins, to speak their minds, and to chart their own destinies abruptly found themselves able to do so. I still remember sitting in my sophomore German class, unable to believe what we were seeing on the television that had been wheeled in for the day. Twenty years later, I have trouble believing it. But I am grateful beyond words that my daughter is not growing up in the world I did, and that throughout Eastern Europe a whole generation is growing up free.
