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11/09/2009

Berlin is gearing up for a massive public festival on Monday to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and media commentators have hailed that historic night of Nov. 9, 1989 as a peaceful revolution that heralded freedom from dictatorship and oppression in Central and Eastern Europe.

Conservative Die Welt writes:

"Calling it the fall of the Wall is misleading. What we're celebrating today should instead be called: Twenty years of peaceful revolution for freedom. It's nothing other than that. A revolution in which people risked life and limb. A peaceful revolution, which was a happy sensation given what we know today about how close Germany came to a violent suppression of the demonstrations. It was peaceful revolution for liberty and against violent dictatorship, the suppression of human rights and inhumanity. In Leipzig, Berlin and elsewhere, candles and songs kept silent the tanks that had been brought into position. The will of the people was stronger than the power of officialdom. We're celebrating the courage of the people who put freedom above everything else, who risked everything and won everything. The Wall didn't fall, it was brought down."

Center-right Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung writes:

"The communist dictatorship was far more brittle than its sympathizers in the West wanted to believe. But such a system in its death throes was unpredictable. Errors in judgment, arbitrary acts and mistakes in communication led to a premature opening of the border but they could just as easily have triggered shootings and deaths. The peaceful revolution and its happy ending weren't the inevitable course of history. The fact that this is hard to imagine 20 years on is one of the successes of unification that isn't listed in any statistics."

Center-left Süddeutsche Zeitung writes:

"One of the great diplomatic achievements of the statesmen of 1989 was to lay the foundations for a European order that rewards peacefulness and balance. This new order wasn't a given, even Helmut Kohl spent weeks considering a confederate model for a neutral Germany after the fall of the Wall. The momentum for Germans to unify in one state that was committed to the European Union and NATO was driven by the people of eastern Germany, who had no patience for new experiments and alternative routes. This impatience had a domino-style impact on neighboring countries of Central and Eastern Europe for whom the prospect of joining Western alliances sparked more reforming zeal than any domestic revolutionary momentum."

Left-wing Berliner Zeitung writes:

"The extent of the celebrations we will see at the Brandenburg Gate today fits well into this interim period in which the event is no longer part of everyone's collective memory but hasn't yet passed into history. People who are 20 years old today didn't know East or West Germany, and anyone aged 25 will have barely any recollection of it. A whole generation doesn't know what happened on that mad night and will at best give a sympathetic smile when the veterans of Nov. 9 talk about it. We're far removed from a common view of life in unified Germany because there are still Easterners and Westerners. We're further removed from it than ever because there's a generation that knows neither East nor West Germany. This is the key generation. If we're lucky, they will one day show an interest in what the demonstrators meant when they called out 'We are the people.'"