1989 revisited

1989 revisited

I'll be in Germany this week to report on the celebrations marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The amazing events of November 9th, 1989, were the highpoint of a largely peaceful revolution that swept across Eastern Europe that autumn, and changed our world. Twenty years on, Europeans are looking back, and wondering how it all happened.

I was a student in England in 1989.  The day the Wall fell, a group of my friends set off to Berlin, "to see history being made". Stupidly, and to my enduring regret, I chose not to go with them. Somehow, finishing my weekly essay, or playing in a football match, (I can't even remember the exact reason), seemed to be more important at the time.

How wrong I was. I'm hard-pressed to remember another historical event in my life time that has been so dramatic, uplifting and consequential as the fall of the Wall. (One contender might be the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990, which I did watch live on television, although, of course, you might argue that if the Wall had not fallen, Mr Mandela would not have been walking free a few months later).

Der Spiegel has an interesting article, arguing that our vivid memories of the fall of the Wall have tended to overshadow dramatic changes that had already taken place in other eastern European countries that year.

But in a sense, it was all too good to be true. The year 1989 did ultimately end in blood-shed.

A few weeks after the Wall fell, Romania's revolution was chaotic and violent. Nicolae Ceausescu, the most brutal of all the last generation of European Communist dictators, ordered his army to fire on protestors. Hundreds of people were killed, before Mr Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, were executed on Christmas Day.

Later, in the early 1990's, Eastern Europe's convulsions were to culminate in the bloody tragedy of the break-up of Yugoslavia.

German reunification, meanwhile, has not always been easy or straightforward. and it's certainly been very expensive. But this weekend in Berlin people will be celebrating; for the overwhelming majority, this is a happy anniversary of a wonderful event.

And this time, I'll be there.