David Tuffley
It has been observed that Berlin during the Cold War (1945-89) was a "barometer" of world politics. Events occuring there were a reliable predictor of how events would play out globally. So it was that after 45 years of ideological tensions between Capitalism and Communism, the beginning of the end began in Berlin.
The Berlin Wall was begun in 1961 to stem the flow of skilled East Germans leaving without permission for the West. From around 2,500,000 "Republikflucht" before the wall (between 1949 and 1962) to a mere 5,000 between 1962 and 1989.
In the second half of 1989, after years of growing unrest, a revolution occurred in East Germany (DDR). The people of Soviet-backed East Germany would no longer obey a Government that ordered its militia to fire on its own citizens. In Moscow, Mikhail Gorbachev had begun the restructuring process that would ultimately bring the Soviet Union undone. East Germany could no longer count on Russian backing to maintain its regime. In the absence of this backing, the East German people rose up.
A vast crowd assembled in Berlin and the result, ultimately, was that the Wall that had been built to stop East Germans from fleeing to the west was brought down.
We were among that crowd gathered near the Brandenberg Gate a few weeks later (shown below), and joined with the hundreds of people symbolically chipping away at the wall. The chipped section is visible on the lower half of the wall seen at the left of the photo.
There was a powerful collective thought. The crowd of maybe 10,000 people was united in their desire that the wall should come down and families be reunited after 45 years of seperation. I have never felt so immersed in a group consciousness.
The demolishing of the Berlin Wall signalled the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union. At no time in the history of mankind did the world come so close to annihilation as we did when the Soviets and the Americans for decades kept the world balanced on a knife's edge of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). Each side had 1000 times more nuclear weapons than would be needed to destroy all life on earth, and they postured and said they weren't afraid to use them. And the rest of the world looked on with horror, held their breath and hoped fervantly for an end to the MADness.
The event shown below is an answer to that hope. Surely one of the most significant events of the 20th Century.
The same section of wall six months earlier (below). Anyone climbing on the wall at this time would have been machine-gunned. Over a forty year period, thousands of East Germans were shot trying to cross from East to West Germany.
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