And the Walls Came Tumbling Down

November 9th is an ambiguous day for Germany. On November 9, 1938, the Nazis killed 400 Jews, arrested about 30,000 more, destroyed over 800 synagogues and thousands of homes and businesses in the Kristallnacht, a pogrom against German and Austrian Jews.

About half a century later, on November 9, 1989, Germans in East and West Berlin stormed the Berlin Wall, the symbol of the Cold War, and brought down the Iron Curtain, literally with their own hands. I lived in East Germany when people started going out into the streets, chanting "We are the people" and demanding more freedom from the communist government. In September 1989 the first so called Monday Demonstration brought people out onto the street in Leipzig, first to pray for peace, then to demand freedom. I remember the exhilarating feeling when those demonstrations spread through other cities and drew more and more people until hundreds of thousands of East Germans protested - peacefully, without violence - for their rights.

I often hear people - from Western Europe - saying that the fall of the Berlin Wall was the result of elite negotiations. In some respect that may be true, without the Russian and the U.S.-American governments agreeing to end the Cold War, things would have gone much less smoothly. But I posit that it was the people all over Eastern Europe that had worked at undermining their regimes for decades, until they finally fell like dominos when the Wall in Berlin came down.

Civil disobedience in the Soviet bloc had started pretty soon after World War II. In 1956, the Hungarian people rose up against the Stalinist government of their country and its soviet-imposed policies. What had started as a student demonstration in Budapest quickly spread throughout the country. The government fell, and new leaders promised democratic changes. The revolt was crushed by a large Soviet force invading the country, killing 2,500 Hungarians. About the same time, workers in Poland stood up and voiced their opposition to their government, for a limited time actually achieving some thawing of the rigid communist rules. In 1968, the Czech Communist Party, led by Alexander Dubcek, tried to initiate a reform to democratize the dictatorial communist government structure that had been set up under the aegis of the Soviet Union. An increasingly critical public, led by an intellectual elite, demanded a reform of socialism, including loosening restrictions on freedom of speech, freedom of the media, and freedom of travel. The traumatic end of the Prague Spring is well known: About half a million soldiers of the Warsaw Pact marched into Prague, claiming many civilian victims.

There were numerous big and small opposition movements all across the Eastern European countries. The Protestant Church provided a sanctuary for regime opponents, building a network that worked across borders. Small groups practiced civil disobedience by refusing to participate in elections, disseminating intellectual material from the West, and advising young men how to avoid the draft. Many people were jailed or suffered other repercussions. I know a woman, a mathematician and software pioneer in East Germany, who was banned from working in her profession because she refused to vote for the ruling communist party. She washed dishes in a Kindergarten instead. There are thousands of stories like hers.

In 1989, the ice had become pretty thin for the communist regimes of Eastern Europe. Gorbachev's Perestroika and Glasnost didn't help. The constant civil disobedience and unrest, the refusal of the people to give up hope for freedom culminated in the night of November 9, bringing down the most formidable of Walls. The color revolutions followed, and in all countries the revolutionaries were able to build upon a foundation of civil courage, of small groups of people, individuals, intellectuals, priests who had done their bit to destabilize communism.

November 9 is an emotional day for me as an East German. It is an ambiguous day. It makes me angry to think of the atrocities that oppressors can commit. But it also makes me hopeful to know that the people's power can indeed triumph over oppression. There are many oppressed countries in the world, and many oppressed people. It is the responsibility of those that are free to build the capacity to free themselves of those who are not.