IT’s a little-known fact, by which I mean it’s a fact I didn’t know until Sunday, that the Berlin Wall came down because of two questions at a press conference. An elevated understanding of the consequences of these two questions suggests something sonorous, such as “the pen is mightier than the sword”.
The more likely understanding is there are moments when the press decides not what the truth is, but what it should be. And as the events leading to the fall of the wall 20 years ago show, this is not something to be sneered at.
The reason I now know about the two questions is a long, entertaining piece by former Daily Telegraph correspondent Daniel Johnson, in which he argues that although some consider Mikhail Gorbachev, Pope John Paul II or Ronald Reagan to have caused the wall to fall, in fact it was him.
There is reason to be cautious about his portrayal. As historian Timothy Garton Ash points out, there is danger in imposing a modern understanding on historical events. For example, different groups of people tend to differ about who true heroes were: Americans tend to regard Reagan’s invocation to “tear down this wall” as the turning point. Poles tend to root for Solidarity leader Lech Walesa. Catholics vote for Pope John Paul II. Russians blame Gorbachev.
Likewise, we still struggle to truly understand the full significance of the fall of the wall, even as the events become gradually clearer. Yet, at the very least, the fall of the wall shows us history is a complex, jumbled, disputed, effervescent set of events.
Leaving aside the greater geopolitical significance, the fall of the wall demonstrates this point because it can really be understood only in a minute- by-minute sort of way. No other explanation does justice to this extraordinary revolution.
This is why I think the two questions so important. The questions were: “Herr Schabowski, don’t you think this draft travel law you announced a few days ago was a big mistake?” and “Mr Schabowski, what will happen to the Berlin Wall now?”
Apparently, Gunter Schabowski, the new spokesman for East Germany’s ruling politburo, was on his way to his daily press briefing. He stopped at the offices of Communist Party boss Egon Krenz, and asked if there was anything to announce.
Krenz gave Schabowski a two-page memo on new travel regulations, saying: “Take this, it will do us a power of good.”
Italian journalist Riccardo Ehrman asked the first question, and was in fact been tipped off to ask it by the head of East German news agency ADN.
Krenz had evidently already decided to allow controlled movement to the west, and did not intend the wall to be breached permanently.
But this crucial detail was obviously not made clear to Schabowski, and so he announced a new set of travel regulations, which would allow East German citizens to emigrate. He read from the regulations, and someone asked when this would start. “As far as I know,” he said, “immediately, without delay.”
When Johnson asked his question, Schabowski said: “The permeability of the wall from our side does not yet and exclusively resolve the question of the meaning of this fortified state border of the DDR.”
No one knew what this meant, so the journalists decided what it meant. He had an opportunity to defend the existence of the wall, but had declined to do so. Hence, the wall was down.
In seven minutes, unknowingly and unwittingly, Schabowski had ended the Soviet Union.
“Schabowski’s answer to Ehrman’s question and his failure to answer mine proved to be the moment when the Berlin Wall — and the Iron Curtain that divided Europe — became history. It was the moment when the Cold War ended,” Johnson writes.
Thanks to this timeless moment in Berlin, German history, seemingly mired in crime and punishment, made sense. The hollowness of communist ideology, its false promise of an omniscient state, was laid bare. Far from being omnipotent, its impotence was manifest in that moment of truth, Johnson concludes.
The fall of the wall is a moment in history, but as these events demonstrate, history is now.
-Cohen is a freelance journalist.