It was man who ended the Cold War in case you didn't notice. It wasn't weaponry, or technology, or armies or campaigns. It was just man. Not even Western man either, as it happened, but our sworn enemy in the East, who went into the streets, faced the bullets and the batons and said: we've had enough. It was their emperor, not ours, who had the nerve to mount the rostrum and declare he had no clothes.
John le Carre, The Secret Pilgrim, 1990.
The opening of the Berlin Wall, on 9th November 1989, wasn't the end of the Cold War. That was still over two years away. Neither was it the beginning of the end. That had begun, barely noticed, in the previous decade, when the cardinals of the Catholic Church had elected a Pole as the Vicar of Christ on Earth, thereby setting up the death knell of Polish communism and starting a contagion in the Eastern Bloc. The whole opening of the Berlin Wall turned out to have been a colossal, unplanned, blunder anyway, rather than a planned piece of historical theatre.
But it was the moment when it became obvious to the world how seismic the changes underway were. As the divided capital of a divided Germany, Berlin was the ultimate symbol of the Cold War. West Berlin was an island of capitalism amidst a sea of communism. It had been the flashpoint for earlier clashes between the USA and USSR, such as during the Berlin Blockade and Airlift of 1948-49, the ultimatum to leave in the early 1960s, the building of the Wall itself in 1961, and the tank standoff at Checkpoint Charlie that same year. When the inner German border was split wide open, in the autumn of 1989, it was clear that something momentous was underway.
The opening of the Berlin Wall, on 9th November 1989, wasn't the end of the Cold War. That was still over two years away. Neither was it the beginning of the end. That had begun, barely noticed, in the previous decade, when the cardinals of the Catholic Church had elected a Pole as the Vicar of Christ on Earth, thereby setting up the death knell of Polish communism and starting a contagion in the Eastern Bloc. The whole opening of the Berlin Wall turned out to have been a colossal, unplanned, blunder anyway, rather than a planned piece of historical theatre.
But it was the moment when it became obvious to the world how seismic the changes underway were. As the divided capital of a divided Germany, Berlin was the ultimate symbol of the Cold War. West Berlin was an island of capitalism amidst a sea of communism. It had been the flashpoint for earlier clashes between the USA and USSR, such as during the Berlin Blockade and Airlift of 1948-49, the ultimatum to leave in the early 1960s, the building of the Wall itself in 1961, and the tank standoff at Checkpoint Charlie that same year. When the inner German border was split wide open, in the autumn of 1989, it was clear that something momentous was underway.
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