The Day the Berlin Wall Came Down, a Chunk at a Time

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The Day the Berlin Wall Came Down, a Chunk at a Time
By: SETH LIPSKY, Special to the Sun | November 10, 2019
RE: https://www.nysun.com/foreign/the-da...hunk-at/90900/

The 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall takes me back 31 years — to an afternoon in the summer of 1988, when Amity Shlaes entered my office in Brussels and said we needed to talk. We’d been married the month before and were working together on the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page in Europe. I looked up from my desk as Amity did something unusual. She closed the door behind her. Then she turned and announced, in a loud whisper, “It’s over.”

I was stunned.

“What have I done?” I thought.

Amity put a finger to her lips.

“Gorbachev,” she said, referring to the Soviet Party boss, “has quietly decided to permit the Volga Germans to leave the Soviet Union.”

“So?”

Her voice dropped to a whisper again.

“They’re going to be sent not to East Germany but to West Germany. There is an item in a provincial paper. A reception center is being set up for them on our side of the Iron Curtain, at Friedland.”

I stood up, though I’d never heard of the Volga Germans.

“The Volga Germans,” Amity said, “have been in Russia since Catherine the Great. If they’re going to be permitted to return to West Germany, it means that the communists are conceding they’ve lost. It means the division of Europe is over. Don’t you understand? It . . . is . . . over.”

I looked at my watch. It was 2 p.m. in Brussels, 8 a.m. in New York.

“Can you get it out for tonight’s paper?” I said.

“I’ve got to get to Friedland,” Amity said — and with that, she was out the door in a flash.

Her dispatch from Friedland appeared in all editions of the Wall Street Journal on July 28. It reported that Germany was expecting that year alone to welcome 160,000 of its countrymen who’d been trapped in Russia. Their arrival, she wrote, “can’t help but represent a provocative way to pose the question of German reunification.”

Lilli, a grandmother from Novosibirsk who’d come in via Frankfurt, was quoted at the end of the dispatch: “My mother,” she said, “always told me a people belongs together.”

It took 15 months for the Wall to come down — and it couldn’t have happened in a more startling way. It was triggered by a blunder of the East Berlin party boss, Gunther Schawbowski, in a press conference he’d called on the evening of November 9, 1989, to announce a relatively minor adjustment in the rules for issuing exit visas from East Germany.

The press conference, which was attended by a knot of Free World reporters, was broadcast live in East Berlin. It had dragged on for some time when, suddenly, shortly before 7 p.m., a lanky young Englishman, Daniel Johnson of the London Daily Telegraph, got up and asked what we have called the most consequential question ever put to a press conference. It was ten words.

“Herr Schabowski, was wird mit der Berliner Mauer jetzt geschehen?”

A number of newspapermen are variously credited with asking the key question, but it was Mr. Johnson who posed the question about the wall, which translates as “Mr. Schabowski, what will happen to the Berlin Wall now?” By several accounts, Schabowski seemed suddenly off guard. He gave a rambling response, then looked at the clock and closed the press conference, without answering Mr. Johnson’s question.

Watching on live television, East Germans made the best of it. They simply stood up and began pouring into the streets and heading for the Wall. Border guards were overwhelmed and threw open the gates. By the end of the evening, the division of Europe had, in the practical sense, ended. At the time, I was in an airplane, flying from New York to meet Amity in Brussels, where I found a note saying she was remaining at Berlin.

So I raced back to the airport, getting to Berlin at 9 p.m. on the 10th, exactly 30 years ago to the hour as I type this column. Amity and I went into East Berlin through Checkpoint Charlie and met with dissidents. No one quite realized the historic scale of what was happening. We crossed back to West Berlin at 1:30 a.m. on the 11th, to discover that tens — maybe hundreds — of thousands of Germans were in the streets.

Someone handed us a rock-climbing hammer and invited us to start chipping away at The Wall, which we attacked with gusto. A chunk of it, still glazed with Free World graffiti, is embedded in the wall of our yard in New York. Every once in a while, we take our children or our guests out past the forsythia to point it out to them at the back of the garden, a little shrine to the cause of liberty in our time.