Zuckerman: Joy and Question Marks as the Berlin Wall Fell

Twenty years ago this week, Mortimer Zuckerman was in Berlin when the Wall fell. This was his report, which appeared in the Dec. 11, 1989, issue of U.S. News & World Report:

The most popular postcard in Berlin today has four pictures on it, three of them East Berlin's Brandenburg Gate: in 1950, unobstructed; in 1961, obscured by the Wall; in November, 1989, as background to thousands standing triumphantly on the Wall. The fourth space is white, with just a red question mark. What will happen to Germany and to Europe, the Berliners are asking, now that Communism is dying?

The question mark hangs over us all. We struggle to grasp the historical moment, but we hardly know what to feel or to think, even though everything is somehow changed, and changed utterly. The Berlin Wall is the quintessential image of the Iron Curtain, the city on both sides of it once the center of Nazi evil, the place where a hot war ended and a cold war began. Now, it is a symbol of joy, of the futility of repression—and of uncertainty.

The Wall, 99 miles long, visually reveals two different systems—its Western side covered with colorful paintings, graffiti and the political slogans of a free people, its Eastern side gray and blank, forever stained with tears and the blood of those seeking freedom. Now, people power has forced Communist power to yield, driving out the gang that built the Wall and ordered the killings. There is poignancy in the triumph. At Checkpoint Charlie, one graffito reads: Charlie has retired, Nov. 10, 1989.

Hundreds attack the Wall with hammers, chisels, picks, screwdrivers—anything to break off a piece of it, just as American football fans demolish the goal posts after a victory. The air is filled with this triumphant timpani, discordant but pleasing. So is the street party in West Berlin where hundreds of thousands of East Germans spend the "greeting money," about $55, given to them by the West German government, smothering themselves in chocolate and the goodies of an advanced consumer society. They have seen the West, and it works.

They stroll down the Kurfürstendamm, the principal thoroughfare of West Berlin, where they can view the bombed-out ruins of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, symbolizing the destruction of World War II, juxtaposed against a campanile topped by a cross and a high-rise office building topped by a Mercedes emblem—the latter testimony to West Germany's transformation since the war. The Wall, parts of it at least, should be retained as a symbol of its own time.

In East Germany, new leaders such as famed spymaster Markus Wolf, the model for John Le Carré's Karla, speak out for reform—for socialism with a human face. Wolf acknowledges his doubts about whether the Communist Party can survive after 40 years of brutality, corruption, and incompetence. His government has lost its legitimacy, unable to retain either that which was God's or that which is Caesar's. He now says he hopes for a reformed socialist system but understands that "hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper." He fears that reformers will not be given time to change the system now that working people are caught up in their "dreams of Mercedes." The spy who came in from the cold cannot beat an East German in West Berlin with a shopping bag.

The Communists still hope that opening the borders will eventually diminish the pressure for revolutionary change. But East Germans, Czechoslovaks, Hungarians, and Poles are motivated by an instinct for freedom first, material comfort second. The astonishing scenes in Prague are testimony to something more than a desire for VCRs. We are witnessing a spiritual event. The Communism that entered this century with a bang is leaving it with an ideological whimper. It is now possible to imagine that by the beginning of the next millennium there will be only one Europe—not an Eastern or a Western one, but a Europe of parliamentary democracies, even creating new communitywide political and economic institutions—a Europe that will not need America for the balance of power and its security.

That is what is in the hearts and minds of Europeans, East and West. That is the moment that awaits them as a dumbfounded world watches while they transform European politics. It will need leadership, a Bismarck or a Churchill. But it is the popular will that has created the possibilities of the blank quarter on the postcard from Berlin.

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