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• Warren Breckman

  The Wall Came Tumbling Down

  Tags:

  Berlin,

  Berlin Wall,

  Cold War,

  Communism,

  Germany,

  Warren Breckman

  It is twenty years since the Berlin Wall fell, and the city of Berlin is well into a year of commemorations, exhibitions, and conferences to mark the occasion. Perhaps the most moving of these is an exhibition at the Museum for Film and Television in Potsdamer Platz. Conceived and executed by, Rainer Rother, the museum’s director, and the art historian Ulrike Schmiegelt, the core of the exhibition features 300 photographs and about an hour’s worth of video shot by amateur photographers in East Germany from summer 1989 through autumn 1990. Among the curators’ selection are certainly images that resonate with the iconic professional pictures and film footage that emerged in those days and indelibly stamped these events in the world’s memory. Few people could resist photographing the euphoric masses streaming across the newly-opened border crossings on November 9, the crowds atop the Berlin Wall, the determined individuals taking down the Wall blow by blow with hammer and chisel, and the East German guards peering awkwardly through the ragged gaps opened and growing in the concrete.

  Yet, the truly striking and moving images touch on the public events only obliquely or not at all; thus, they grant us glimpses into the mix of normalcy and exception, the everyday and the extraordinary, that marked the collapse of Communism in East Germany. Frequently, the images are so intensely personal that they yield their meanings only when accompanied by narratives supplied by their makers. A wedding photo, for example, takes on larger meaning when we learn that the groom was a West German who met his future bride when he was on a study grant in the East; with this knowledge, we suddenly start to read the photo for the differences between the families arrayed before us and begin to imagine the ambivalences that might have coursed through the party that day. Or, take one of my favorite images: in a suburban backyard stretched with clotheslines stands a circle of empty kitchen chairs and wooden planks perched on plastic buckets. The caption reads: “Founding place of the New Forum in Zeuthen.” The wall’s text tells us that neighbors decided to gather for cake and coffee to discuss issues of local concerns while the kids played in the backyard. To everyone’s surprise, the garden filled to capacity, seating had to be improvised, and by the afternoon’s end, the community had formed a local chapter of the Neues Forum, the democratic reform movement. Grassroots, indeed!

  Among the video clips, one in particular moved me: a married couple sits down at the living room table, and video recorder has been placed before them. It is May 1, 1990, May Day. They remember the previous May Day, which was full of the customary ritual celebrations of the Workers’ State. Now, they tell the camera, they are celebrating May Day with a salmon dinner, a luxury undreamt of a year earlier, when their diet seemed a dreary course of bockwurst at best relieved by ersatz salmon. They toast the remarkable year that has passed and to a future of good food, wine, and fine automobiles.

  It is hard not to be touched by this video clip and to hope that these folks got their Mercedes. Yet their wishes for the future underscore some of the fine ambiguities contained in the exhibition’s title, Wir waren so frei … Momentaufnahmen (Snapshots) 1989/1990. Translated literally, this would mean, “We were so free”; but it is also an expression that might better translate as, “We took liberties.” This more colloquial meaning captures the idea of the spontaneous, contingent actions of many thousands of East Germans. Historians are now debating what to call the result—a “revolution” a “peaceful revolution,” a reform, or, to trot out a recently coined neologism, a “refolution”—whatever we call it, millions took liberties and brought down a regime. Yet the ambiguities begin to appear when we confront another of the photographs in the exhibit: it is March 1989, in a condemned building in the East Berlin district of Prenzlauerberg, then known as a haven of nonconformists. On the wall of a shabby room full of the detritus of a party, is written: “Ich hab geträumt/ Der Winter ist vorbei/ Du warst hier/ Und wir war’n frei” (“I dreamed that the winter is passed. You were here and we were so free.”) This elegiac and ambivalent tone is present in the photos, videos, and personal commentaries, and I don’t mean the “Ostalgie” that periodically wells up for the good old days of the GDR. Rather, what emerges is nostalgia for the brief moment of boundless optimism, the inchoate hope for something new and unprecedented that accompanied the events of 1989. To have been so “free” then meant to dream of something impossible.

  I was a doctoral student researching my dissertation in Berlin when the Wall fell on November 9. From that first night, the comment that remains most vividly in my memory came from an East German woman, arm-in-arm with her teenage daughter, deep in the crowd streaming across the border. Asked by a journalist where she would go, she called back over her shoulder, “Einfach rüber” (“Simply over”). What better expression of a stunning moment of openness, of plunging, of the contingency of a rare moment when the world is truly left agog? That euphoric sense didn’t last long, as sober economic realities began to cast their gray light; as both West and East Germans began to develop resentments toward each other or, at least, an awareness of the gulf that separated them emotionally and existentially; as hopes for a new political dispensation yielded to dreams of material prosperity and the mechanical process of absorbing East Germany into the political order of the West. To say this is not to diminish the magnitude of the positive gains made in 1989 and 1990, but perhaps to point to the melancholic tones that so frequently shadow the memory of revolution.

  Yet it may be that the exhibition’s title points in still a different direction. That is, twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is extremely difficult to separate that experience from canonical images and historical narratives that have cast it into a more or less rigid form and assigned it a meaning within History, written with a capital “H.” Alexis de Tocqueville once described the French Revolution as “so inevitable yet so completely unforeseen.” In that spirit, it is an important achievement of this exhibition to remind us of a time before anything looked inevitable or necessary, before the coagulation of historical meaning, when people were not only participants in events of great significance, but were themselves trying to give meaning to events as they happened. Even more radically, it reminds us that there is a kind of freedom that can come before the “event,” at that moment when people are already launched onto a transformative tide, but do not yet know that their world is about to be swept away.
  

  August 18, 2009
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