A Euphoria That Quickly Changed to Uncertainty

In a land of few joyous moments, it was an instant of elation. For a people trapped in a century of darkness, it seemed like redemption itself.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, in the fading light of a chilly November day, the Berlin Wall had fallen and East Germans were pouring by the thousands into the West. They came from both sides and danced together on the Wall in a spontaneous national celebration that quickly spread from the streets of West Berlin to towns and cities along the entire inner German frontier from the Baltic to Bavaria.

At one of the most heavily traveled border crossings just east of Helmstedt in central Germany, excited Westerners gathered at the final checkpoint as a kind of unofficial reception committee. They applauded, they waved, they cried, as a never-ending line of East German “Trabi” automobiles sputtered by, carrying their wide-eyed occupants toward freedom.

At one point, the traffic jam of those wanting to cross into the West stretched back nearly 40 miles.

Those who lived through that night had little doubt that the collapse of the Berlin Wall carried ramifications that would extend far beyond Germany. But few could grasp either the enormity of those ramifications or the pace of the events that would quickly follow. The gradual loosening of communism’s grip in more easygoing Poland and Hungary was one thing, but the de facto collapse of a hard-line regime in East Berlin that night was of another order.

Communism was dying. The Soviet Empire was crumbling. Europe was changing. It took only eight days for the winds of revolution to engulf the next hard-line Marxist government, this time in neighboring Czechoslovakia. By Christmas, the dissident Czech playwright Vaclav Havel was his country’s president, and the last of Europe’s Communist dictators, Romania’s Nicolae Ceausescu, was dead, executed by members of his own army, which had deserted him and his cause.

Within a year, Germany would reunite, and within two, the Soviet Union would disintegrate. Moscow’s leader Mikhail Gorbachev would win the Nobel Peace Prize for controlling the meltdown of his empire, but would lose power and become an object of derision at home for letting slip away an Eastern Bloc that was paid for with the blood of millions of Soviet World War II dead.

“Nobody expected it would happen,” Gorbachev said recently in an interview with the British news agency Reuters. “History kicked in because Germans found each other, sweeping everything [else] away.”

The sheer speed of these developments propelled Europe and the United States into new and uncharted waters with virtually no preparation. Ten years later, leaders on both continents still struggle to come to grips with what flowed from that night.

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For the United States, the great global adversary, communism, was gone as a major threat, but so too was the central underpinning of America’s involvement in world affairs. The reasons for Washington’s military commitments to defend Western Europe, South Korea and Japan all suddenly seemed less certain. A Rand Corp. political scientist named Francis Fukuyama wrote a provocative essay titled “The End of History” contending that the West’s Cold War triumph effectively resolved the last great issues of world affairs. It seemed to capture the geopolitical void in which the United States suddenly found itself.

Today, America remains unchallenged as the globe’s lone superpower, but seems unsure how to use that dominance in a world filled with more diffuse, less predictable threats ranging from nuclear proliferation and international crime to rogue states equipped with long-range missile technology.

For Europe, the fall of the Berlin Wall also brought new and unforeseen problems. Waves of migrants and cheaper industrial products from the former Communist East threaten the prosperity of the rich social democracies of the West, while the hopes of eastern countries for quick access to the European Union still languish unfulfilled a decade later. The end of communism also unleashed long-dormant but virulent ethnic tensions that have ignited four wars in the Balkans. Today, it remains an unstable region filled with hate and political uncertainty.

And for Germany, the euphoria of that November night also faded rapidly. In the sober light of day, Germans found that the years apart had left them sharing far less in common than they had believed. Westerners resent the massive infusion of subsidies into the East, while Easterners bridle at being treated as second-class citizens.

In Berlin, the wall that snaked through the city for nearly three decades has all but disappeared, but for many, it might as well still be there. Easterners and Westerners tend to stay in their own part of the city. Even taxi drivers prefer to stick to “their own” side.

“They’re just different,” explained a Western resident talking of his Eastern cousins. “It will take another generation before things begin to change.”