Twenty years ago, I was there when the Berlin Wall was coming down. What I witnessed about human aspiration in those magic November days in 1989 thrills me even now. But what it showed me about politics may be even more important.
“What is freedom?” I began asking people as I waded through the crowd gathered at the Brandenburg Gate.
To a middle-aged nurse it meant the flight of her co-workers to the West. There were 17 nurses left on her floor. There had been 50. “It’s bleeding us to death.”
She didn’t blame those who had left for better jobs and a better life in West Germany. The solution was free, multiparty elections in East Germany, an end to the communist dictatorship.
“If we keep working, doing demonstrations, maybe we’ll get them soon. We really do believe in democracy. Let us have a chance.”
She was standing in the rain on this drizzly night as were dozens of other East Germans. Just days before the authorities had allowed some of her countrymen to pass through the Berlin Wall. There was a rumor that they were about to open the Brandenburg Gate, the historic symbol of east-west division.
Hearing my question and her answer, other East Germans began to gather around.
I suppose the sight of an American with an opened notebook and that wide-open question, “Was ist freiheit?” was quite a novelty for those who’d spent decades worried about the secret police, the notorious Stasi.
A rump town meeting began to form around us. Opinions began to fly.
“I want the freedom to earn what I have worked for and not be forced to do something because I am told to,” said one man.
“We want a socialist country even if we don’t have reunification,” countered another.
A young woman suggested a compromise: Western-style economic freedoms combined with “the caring for the people” of socialist societies.
“We want a united Germany where the people can make the choice,” someone trumped them all.
It was then that I noticed a serious young man in his late twenties. He was wearing an army surplus jacket, very much in the style of an anti-Vietnam war protester of the 1960s.
“This is freiheit,” he declared, “this standing in a public place arguing openly about such things as democracy, capitalism, and socialism.”
"Four weeks ago,” the nurse who had spoken before chimed in, “we couldn’t to it.”
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