

How the Berlin Wall Really Fell - johnny99
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/07/opinion/how-the-berlin-wall-really-fell.html

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Mithaldu
> many Americans have come to believe that the wall fell thanks to President
> Ronald Reagan’s direct, personal intervention

Is this truly a belief held in the USA? As an east-german this seems equal
parts baffling and insulting to me.

If so, i can only thank the author for correcting this belief in a quite
public manner.

~~~
droopybuns
I think this story is wrong on many accounts.

For starters, I don't think many Americans understand any details other than
the anecdote that there was a wall in Germany, and it came down. Please, rest
assured east Germans, we have done worse than steal your achievement- we don't
give it any real thought anymore.

Americans glibly joke about the fear culture around communism from that time,
but we have no awareness of the irony of our current fears of isis or Ebola.

Reagan's speech at the wall was iconic, but you really need to be over 35 to
be aware of it.

~~~
PinguTS
I am an former Est Germany. I am older than 35. I can assure you, the Reagan
speech did noting.

There where only one or two important speeches, may be 3 if you count Kennedy
in.

One of the most important was, when Willy Brand had its visit in East Germany.
The only important visit by a western politician in East Germany. The other
one, which was not really a speech, but very important, was the one by
Genscher for the release of the people into West Germany after occupying the
West German embassy in Praha, CZ.

~~~
hga
It was clearly more directed at the USSR and specifically Gorbachev.
Khrushchev and Ulbricht had unwisely created the concrete, so to speak, symbol
of the evil empire, a very visible wall dividing a historic, major city. Where
families trying to cross it were shot at, often successfully.

It had to have been terribly embarrassing to Gorbachev to be called out like
that, and it strongly cut against many of his and the USSR's themes, e.g. if
it's so great, why do you need that wall keeping people inside of your
socialist worker's paradise?

Getting back to the 1989 fall, _something_ stayed the hands of the USSR,
unlike Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. I believe it's impossible
to make an honest case that Reagan had nothing to do with that.

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flohofwoe
As an East-German I find this slightly offensive (edit: Reagan bringing the
wall down). It was the peaceful people on the streets, a bit of luck (no hot-
heads in the police and military who wanted to open a civil war on their own
people), a completely paralysed government and the Russians who didn't want to
intervene. Besides, we all know the only American who had a hand in this was
Hasselhof, not Reagan ;)

~~~
rolux
You may want to read the actual article. It says pretty much exactly that.

> In the decades since, many Americans have come to believe that the wall fell
> thanks to President Ronald Reagan’s direct, personal intervention. In a 1987
> speech in front of the Brandenburg Gate in a divided Berlin, he told Soviet
> leaders to “tear down this wall” — and so, we’ve been told, they did.

> This misreading of the actual fall of the wall is, at best, incomplete; at
> worst, it’s dangerous, contributing to the belief that American leaders can
> go “from Berlin to Baghdad,” shaping world events while ignoring the complex
> realities of the locals.

~~~
flohofwoe
Yes, sorry for being unclear. The article is a good thing and hopefully helps
to clean up the misconception that Reagan single-handedly liberated us. My
impression of him was more that he was a diehard cold-warrior who'd rather
start dropping the nukes. Basically the western equivalent of Brezhnev and
pretty much the opposite of Gorbatchev. But that was a long time ago, and I
was a teen in the 80's so my memory might be a bit off.

~~~
adventured
Can you provide any examples related to Reagan being a risk to start dropping
nukes? Or where he ever said or gave the impression that his preference was to
start dropping nukes?

I think you're extremely wrong in your character assessment. There are
numerous books available on Reagan in relation to what he actually said and
wrote about his time as President, none of it indicates he was eager to start
a nuclear war.

~~~
hga
I can believe that flohofwoe honestly got that impression growing up behind
the Iron Curtain (per his website, 12 in 1984). Heck, at the time most of the
US Main Stream Media (MSM) portrayed Reagan as being like that. I'll bet that
if he tuned into the BBC back then he'd had heard the same thing.

------
pcrh
I'm surprised the author makes no mention of the exodus of East Germans to the
West via Hungary, which by the time the Berlin Wall came down had been ongoing
for 6 months.

[http://www.politics.hu/20140627/hungary-austria-slovakia-
mar...](http://www.politics.hu/20140627/hungary-austria-slovakia-mark-25th-
anniversary-of-iron-curtain-opening/)

------
ghshephard
How on earth anybody can write a story about the fall of the Berlin Wall
(indeed, the entire collapse of the USSR) without discussing the economic
collapse in the face of dropping oil prices is beyond me. The details, such as
minister speeches and ignored guards are interesting in the color they lend to
the collapse, but the principle story is one of overwhelming macroeconomic
forces at play.

[http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/06/why...](http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/06/why_did_the_sov.html)

~~~
hga
From the quoted article:

" _The timeline of the collapse of the Soviet Union can be traced to September
13, 1985. On this date, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the minister of oil of Saudi
Arabia, declared that the monarchy had decided to alter its oil policy
radically._

That doesn't quite fit the _connotations_ I associate with "overwhelming
macroeconomic forces at play". That was a specific policy decision ... which I
don't believe you can isolate from things like the USSR's genocidal occupation
of Afghanistan, and the Muslim world's many reactions to it.

As I understand it, we strongly encouraged the Saudis in this policy. Visibly,
by things like selling them F-15 and E-3A AWACS planes in the early '80s
before that policy change ( _very_ controversial arms deals back then).

As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, as part of Reagan's unique
determination to _end_ the Soviet Union, we the USA did everything we could to
deny it hard currency, like obstruct and sabotage the export of natural gas to
Western Europe.

And like good capitalists, after Reagan took office, resumed making a buck in
the process by selling them grain ^_^.

ADDED: Why the _bleep_ didn't Gorbachev et. al. allow a massive increase in
household plots:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_plot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_plot)
We always expected (see for example _Red Storm Rising_ if I remember
correctly) that when things got tight, the restrictions on them would be
relaxed and the resulting productivity increase would tide them over. Or was
that attempted but failed? Or is this "oil and grains" economic picture a bit
too simple (as I've noted natural gas also played a role).

~~~
ghshephard
The argument would be that the Policy Decision was simply the reaction to
larger forces at play - in much the same way high oil prices resulting in
fracking in the US and the Oil Sands in Canada being developed, and taking
away market share from Saudi Arabia (weakening their geopolitical position),
one could say that it was a foregone conclusion that Oil prices were going to
drop in the 80s after the 1973 oil crisis.

That's the thing - every time you see a huge increase in the cost of anything,
economic forces kick in, and there is a response.

That's a long winded way of saying there were much, much bigger forces at play
than Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani in 1985, and, his announcement can be seen as
little more than the result of those forces.

------
aragot
They quote:

\- The political reform started 4 years earlier by Mikail Gorbatchev, which
was designed to reinforce the party's strength in exchange for softening very
few things.

\- The disorganization of the Party and the lack of trust within the Stasi,

\- The press conference of Nov 9., where the administrator said something
about travels, which wasn't reported acurately but which included words like
"effective immediately".

\- The massive amount of people in front of the gates.

I would love to have more details about the Perestroika and the reform
background. One does not simply walk up with a crowd to a checkpoint without
thinking about Tiananmen. I've always wondered whether Gorbatchev had desired
freedom for his people and subtely acted to make such events happen.

