Editorial

It is never easy to pinpoint when an event actually takes place. Today, when we celebrate with Germany the fall of the Berlin Wall, are we simply rejoicing over what happened 20 years ago or are we recalling an era when an idea-less ideology imploded by virtue of its cultural, spiritual, social bankruptcy?

We do both; we remember that extraordinary day when a wall tumbled down not because of trumpet sounds but because it was built on a quicksand of lies. For what wall was ever built to prevent its inhabitants walking out? The wonder is that its loathsome creators thought it could stay there forever, depriving the residents of East Berlin from the infectious air of freedom on the other side of that wall.

Built in August 1961, it was to divide East Berlin from West Berlin for 28 years and 19 days. It was a murderous division; guards and tanks patrolled the wall day and night in East Berlin and death lanes prevented the wall from being scaled. Many dared and were shot dead.

But the wall would not have fallen quite so easily if Hungary had not opened its borders with Austria in May of that year. This led to an exodus from East Germany into Hungary. East Germans were on the march, not against the West but in a bid to reach the West. A staggering 50,000 of them had voted with their feet by the end of October 1989.

In May, too, rigged elections sparked off protests in Germany and, sometime after June, the month China was massacring demonstrators on Tiananmen Square and receiving the blessing of the East German regime, evening prayers for peace started to take place in the church of St Nicholas in Leipzig,. The numbers attending rose to 70,000 and it was touch and go, as they continued to gather at the Karl-Marx-Platz in autumn unperturbed by the prospects of being gunned down by the security forces. By the end of October, their numbers had reached 500,000. Leipzig's writing was, so to speak, on the Berlin Wall. Their prayers were heard.

Ministers were resigning in droves. Then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev informed the East German leadership not to expect Soviet help. Demands were made for free elections, for free travel, for the leadership to parade past the people(!) and, one day, suddenly, 20 years ago, the loathed Berlin Wall crumbled and East Berliners were once more free to walk into West Berlin - without being shot. The journalist-historian Timothy Garton Ash described what happened then as the greatest street party in history. And indeed it was.

Over the first weekend, two million people had already crossed into West Berlin. They each collected, courtesy of the West German government, 100 Deutschmarks in "greetings money" and, of course, did some shopping. The first edition of the Bild newspaper after the wall ceased to be a barrier carried the banner headline Good Morning, Germany.

All good fairy tales end with the words "and they lived happily ever after". Twenty years later, not every German would echo these words. The financial cost to West Germany in rebuilding East Germany was astronomic; the psychological cost to some East Germans remains high. But one of them joined the Christian Democratic party and, as if to demonstrate the stuff of which East Germans are made, Angela Merkel made it to the top in the European Union's most powerful country.

We wish her and Deutschland well.