What a momentous day!--and what a noticeable absence of celebration and perspective on the fall of the Berlin Wall and the new world it ushered in.
To be sure, there are many events in Germany; why so few in the USA and elsewhere?
Perhaps one reason is then-President George H.W. Bush's prudent course, avoiding proclaiming "victory" at the end of 1989--enhancing his administration's diplomacy to help re-unify (or, as the Germans understandably prefer to say, as if to efface history, unify) Germany. That achievement, too, remains awe-inspiring.
Neither the first President Bush nor President Clinton conveyed a clear vision of the changed world after 1989. Each would, doubtless, dispute the assertion. And yet, can you summon it from memory?
Some commentators emphasize the inadvertent opening of the Wall by an artless spokesman for the now-defunct East German regime. The implication is that the fall of communism in Central Europe was in significant part accidental.
In fact, there is no great story of leadership--from presidents and prime ministers to ordinary people everywhere, from America, to the Vatican, to Winston Churchill (yes, he had prescient insights on this, as so much else) to unions, to dissidents, to writers and musicians and poets and playwrights, culminating in the extraordinary mass assertion of freedom that welled up simultaneously, flooding the citadels of communism, rendering impotent their massed might and familiar force.
As in other historic moments, at the moment of truth, the will of those holding power simply gave way.
It didn't just happen.
As one privileged to be in Berlin for the extraordinary New Year's celebrations of 1989-90, I can attest to the aptness of the coda from Anne Applebaum, in the Washington Post:
'Too many of us forget that there are few historical precedents for the past two decades. "Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven." When Wordsworth wrote those words about the French Revolution, the post-revolutionary terror was a recent memory, the Napoleonic wars were still raging and his poem was an ironic comment on the naivete of youth. But we are now as far from the events of 1989 as Wordsworth was from 1789, and here in Central Europe there is no need for irony at all: Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.'
A celebration today, a challenge tomorrow: will our generations build on the spirit of 1989 in a way that our successors will similarly recognize and celebrate?
