We fall the wall

Submitted by Vox Bikol on Mon, 11/16/2009 - 10:11

November 9, 2009. Paris is singing for freedom. Thousands have gathered on the Palace de la Concorde to celebrate Germany and Europe. In Los Angeles a wall is being torn down. In Warsaw people are dancing on a wall and another wall is bricked up on the Spanish Stairs in Rome. In London a wall of ice bricks is gradually fading, melting till disappear. November 9 is a day the world celebrates with Germany.

It is the day the Berlin Wall fell.

It was November 4, 1989 when the Prague government gave permit to East German citizens to pass the boarders between Czechoslovakia and West Germany, and 10,000 people a day did. The German Democratic Republic (GDR) was endangered of crumbling and the wall was ridiculed. The pressure in the GDR kettle increased by the day and the SED government fell into serious considerations on what was to be done to ease that very pressure. It was in the evening of November 9, 1989 that the central committee let an incredible enormity through on a nod: A temporary solution which should create time for the leadership to breathe and which should be effective the following day, November 10. Scharbowski, member of the politburo, was the one to inform the media about the travel regulations "...which make it possible for every citizen of the GDR ... ahh ... via GDR boarder crossing points ... ahh ... to leave." And upon being asked when this regulation was to be effective he said: "..- this is to my .... knowledge ... it is immediately ... instantaneously..."

Instantaneously however meant to the politburo that it would be effective the following day, as people would have to first approach the offices to gain their documents of approval. But what neither Scharbowski nor Krenz nor anyone else in power anticipated was that people no longer wanted to wait for any approvals, but directly ran to the wall that very evening, November 9.

Thousands from the East came to the boarder crossing at Bornholmer Bridge, but the boarder guards there had no order to open gates. Resentments rose and the mob started crying "Tor auf! Tor auf" (Open gate! Open gate!) At the Brandenburger Tor West Germans started climbing onto the wall, which in fact was part of GDR territory. The situation became precarious, the tension grew.

Seen that situation from today it was genuine fortune that not a single person there cracked. All these guards stood there for years, decades even. It was their state, their ideology, and they got flooded, flooded by people. It was 11.30PM when the Bornholmer Bridge finally surrendered and outpoured East Germans to West Germany. Germans from here and there fell into hugs, shed tears of unbelievable happiness and began dancing all their joy through the night. These pictures travelled the world.

On November 9, 2009, the wall symbolically fell once again. A wall of 1000 dominos made of styrofoam, each about 20 kilos heavy, coloured with paintings by artists to who the real wall was history even before they were born. This symbolical wall fell with the beat of seconds. And once again the world looked on Berlin and together with Germany it remembered that November 9 twenty years ago, when pictures of freedom and hope spread the world.

A peaceful revolution made a monstrous building tumble down without a single bullet fired. It was the people who went outside, who by gathering and being there, all united, all together and present there in tens of thousands, streaming the streets went to express their protest. It was their number and their shared aim, their presence and their getting onto their feet that left opposing forces deedless and helpless.

In the West Germans were given freedom by the allied forces, but in the East they fought for it all by themselves. Their contribution to the German reunion is the very gift of the ordinary peoples' democratic break-up.

It all began with a lie, Walter Ulbricht's "No one has the intention to build up a wall" and it ended with a truth, the East Germans': "We are the people!" We, the ordinary people make a difference to the world. The fall of the Berlin Wall is our calling to fight all walls of separation, injustice and oppression. "Where ever we are in our world, we are the people! And we fall the wall!"