People from East and West Germany reunite on top of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Photo courtesy of the Consulate General of a the Federal Republic of Germany Chicago

Freedom without Walls

Berlin Wall fell 20 years ago today, reunifying Germany.

Look for blue links throughout this story to see video of J.D. Bindenagel and Onno Huckmann, or click on the link in our Related Story tab to see the video gallery.

By Jamie Loo, First Amendment reporter

November 9, 2009

The guards did nothing.

“We were astounded the people at Bornholmerstrasse suddenly burst through walking, cheering,” J.D. Bindenagel said. “The guards had shoot-to-kill orders but they didn’t kill any body. They had water hoses laid out to repel them if they tried to go, as you saw on the television. They didn’t use them. And so we saw overnight chaos back and forth.”

Just moments before, sometime after 10 p.m., Bindenagel had passed by a crowd of people gathered at the Bornholmerstrasse checkpoint yelling at the guards to open the gate. The bright lights of television cameras were capturing every minute of this exchange and Bindenagel rushed home to continue monitoring the situation on television.

Meanwhile 200 miles away in Bonn, the capital of West Germany, Onno Huckmann also watched the scene unfold on television. Huckmann said he never imagined he would see this in his lifetime.

“It was a miracle that this happened without any military force, without any bloodshed,” he said.

The first crowd of people to burst through that gate later swelled to hundreds and thousands on November 9, 1989. It was 20 years ago today when the Berlin Wall fell, leading to the reunification of Germany, and the beginning of the end of the Cold War.

Bindenagel was serving as a deputy to American Ambassador Richard C. Barkley in East Berlin in 1989. Huckmannn, a diplomat, now serves as the Consul General for the Federal Republic of Germany in Chicago.

Huckmannn and Bindenagel both said they were amazed that Soviet forces didn’t do anything to intervene and stop East Germans from crossing into West Germany. The Soviets had used military force to suppress other uprisings in the past in East Germany, Budapest, Hungary and Prague, Czechoslovakia. After the 40th anniversary celebrations for the founding of East Germany in October that year, Bindenagel said a protest was held in East Berlin. He said about 1,000 people were arrested and held overnight. Some of the protestors were beaten and others were “simply held as a signal for worse things to come.”

But then on Oct. 9, a protest was organized in Leipzig which drew 70,000 people. Other vigils took place in Berlin and Dresden. The police did not intervene. Bindenagel said a week later that number doubled in Leipzig and, again the police didn’t attack. Two days later on Oct. 18, Socialist Unity party leader Erich Honnecker resigned, which helped set the stage for what would happen on Nov 9.

Lost in translation

East Germans wanted the freedom to travel and the government planned to respond with more liberal policies. During a press conference, East German government spokesman Guenther Schabowski, announced that there would be changes to the travel law and that East Germans could obtain visas to travel to the west. Bindenagel said NBC anchor, Tom Brokaw, reportedly asked Schabowski if this meant the Berlin Wall was open. Schabowski’s response was, “Yes.” Brokaw and other journalists began broadcasting this news around the world. Bindenagel and Huckmannn said East Germans thought this meant travel could happen immediately.

The Bornholmerstrasse checkpoint was the main crossing between the east and west, and was the first gate that was breached. As he watched the television report, Bindenagel said all the lights started turning on in the neighborhood as people heard the news. Huckmannn said he remembers seeing images of people, hugging, screaming and crying, just overwhelmed with happiness at what was happening. Bindenagel said the U.S. Embassy scrambled to get official information from the East German government. Schabowski issued no written statement from the earlier press conference, he said, and eventually they found a press statement about the visas.

The next morning, on Friday, Bindenagel went to the Bornholmerstrasse crossing and saw crowds of people gathered at the gates.

“People were coming back and forth, people who had just woken up and were trying to get out because they didn’t think it would last long,” he said.

Bindenagel said the East German government said they had suspended the visa requirement overnight and that the visa requirement would begin at 8 a.m. The government kept pushing back the time, he said, but eventually there was nothing they could do to stop people from crossing. Bindenagel said the East German government lost all of its authority that day.

By Saturday morning, East German guards were dismantling pieces of the wall and laying down track for people to walk across. Bindenagel said hundreds of East Germans were lined up for police to issue them visas. Without showing their diplomatic identifications, Bindenagel said he and his family walked across the former “death strip” which had watchtowers, a patrol road, searchlights, sand trap sensors and razor fence. A second wall was on the other side of this area. Bindenagel said in the days that followed West Germans began chipping away at the wall.

Huckmannn said there was a sense of excitement in Bonn as people talked about reunification and wondered what the future would hold. After the weekend ended, Huckmann said West Germany’s largest newspaper, Bild, ran an unforgettable headline. It read, “Good Morning Germany, It Was a Wonderful Weekend.”

“And I think this was the right expression the right feeling of the Germans in these first few days,” he said.

A few months after the wall fell, Bindenagel was talking to Uwe Gerson and his family, who were friends from their church. Gerson’s brother-in-law was among the first group to cross at Bornholmerstrasse on Nov. 9. The man showed Bindenagel his visa, which had a stamp over the man’s photo.

This invalidated the visa.

“So he was actually expelled but he didn’t tell anybody nor did anyone else that night. They simply went into West Berlin,” he said. “Television told the story. Television was the story because as I said, for an hour and a half we didn’t have any news, we didn’t have any authority, we didn’t know what was happening officially.”

Moving in fast forward

On October 3, 1990, East and West Germany were reunited to form the Federal Republic of Germany. The change happened in less than a year, much faster than Bindenagel or Huckmannn anticipated.

Free elections were held in East Germany on March 18, 1990. East Germans voted to have a democratic government and to reunify with West Germany. Huckmannn said West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, with the help of U.S. President George H.W. Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, worked through negotiations quickly. The United States, Soviet Union, France and Great Britain-which each had controlling powers in Germany-along with the East and West German governments signed the Two-plus-Four-Treaty. The treaty set the conditions for German unity and included conditions regarding security and foreign policy. The reunification became official in October.

“I’ve often remarked that I felt like we, at the U.S. Embassy, were stuck in a video. A video that was set on fast forward with no pause so that every time that you turned, everything that you did, you found yourself far into another scene,” Bindenagel said.

People had to adapt to an entirely new way of life, Huckmannn said, and every day things were changing rapidly. West German currency, the deutschemark, was introduced in East Germany. Huckmannn said a 5.5 percent solidarity tax on income was enacted to fund new roads, telecommunications, building rehabilitation and other infrastructure for East Germany which had no infrastructure under Communist rule. Bindenagel said the roughly 100 billion marks a year generated by the tax, also helped to fund pensions, unemployment compensation, and work re-training programs. Bindenagel said he remembers when one of his friends went to a famous department store in West Berlin to buy tea.

“He went into this room as big as a house that had thousands of kinds of tea and he came back home and was totally nervous and shaking. He said ‘I saw all this tea and I couldn’t decide, it was too much, too much to decide I couldn’t choose.’ There were a lot of issues like that,” Bindenagel said.

Now that 20 years have passed, Huckmannn said many young Germans today were too young to remember when the Berlin Wall fell or were born after it. He said he and his wife tell their children, who are in their 20s about what it was like to live in a divided country. People in this generation identify themselves as Germans, he said, which is a shift from older generations who thought of themselves as East or West Germans. Huckmann said young Germans learn about the Berlin Wall in school, through stories from relatives, history books and television footage of the wall.

Huckmann said the fall of the Berlin Wall was the beginning of the enlargement of European Union, a political and economic union between European countries. EU members collaborate on foreign and defense policy and judicial and internal affairs. In 1999, the euro was launched and became a common currency among some of the member states.

“Now, more than 60 years after the end of World War II, Europe is living peacefully together and we are 27 member states,” he said. “This is the most important transformation after the fall of the wall.”

Bindenagel said after the 1989 revolution, East Germany joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a political and military alliance between countries for freedom and security. This security arrangement was important for a number of reasons, he said. Bindenagel said in the 1990s, Germany sent combat troops and military units to the Balkans and German diplomats played a key role in the Dayton Accords negotiations to end the Bosnian conflict. German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer and U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright led charge to have NATO forces bomb Kosovo to end ethnic cleansing in Serbia in 1999. Bindenagel said German troops are also serving in Afghanistan.

“Germany bears its share of NATO’s obligations to bring peace to the world,” he said.

‘Freedom without walls’

It’s essential to teach about “freedom without walls,” Huckmann said, so that people can remember what happened in Germany and to learn not to take freedom for granted. He said he learned this lesson working as a diplomat behind the Iron Curtain in the 1980s.

Huckmann served as the cultural attaché to the West German embassy in Bucharest, Romania from 1983 to 1985 where he saw fundamental freedom denied to people. Huckmannn said Romanian writers had to register their typewriters with local police so that if an article was published that was critical to the regime, authorities would have an idea of where it may have come from. Bucharest was “dark” and “gray,” and he would often see people begging for bread.

“There was nothing to buy. I remember during winter time we went to a market in Bucharest, and there were only some rotten apples and nuts. You could buy some cabbage. That was all. No meat, no eggs, nothing,” he said.

The story of the Berlin Wall and Germany offer important lessons in freedom, Bindenagel and Huckmannn said. Both noted that at the Leipzig protests in 1989 the crowds shouted “We are the people,” which eventually evolved to, “We are one people.” Huckmann said people can shape the world’s destiny and in East Germany it was the people going to the streets in a peaceful revolution that helped them gain freedom.

“It’s a symbol for me how you can reform society, how you also can confront a regime,” he said. “I’m also convinced no dictatorship will prevail in the end. I think history has proven that, I think it’s always the people who are the driving force behind it.”

Bindenagel said although a government “can achieve much at the end of the barrel of a gun” it cannot stop the quest for freedom. He said the essence of German government is rooted in Article 1 of the German constitution, known as the Basic Law. It says that the government must “protect the inviability of human dignity.” East Germany didn’t have this, Bindenagel said, and respect for human dignity comes with the quest for freedom.

With globalization and technology, Huckmannn said it’s even more difficult to suppress freedom as people connect with others through social media networks to spread ideas and organize themselves. Bindenagel said governments should pay attention to the human desire for freedom and give people the power to choose how to govern themselves in a peaceful way.

“You have this human desire to be free and that’s the first lesson that comes out of this. That you can have in East Germany 40 years of repression but you can’t hold the people forever, and even in the Soviet Union, for 70 some years,” Bindenagel said. “That search for freedom is very, very powerful.”