I started watching Youtube vids from twenty years ago tonight – and I couldn’t stop.

Here’s an excellent, contemporary report from the CBC that shows some of the immediate background – but still reports on the Deutsche Democratische Republic as a going concern.

More about the extended, but brief and dramatic, collapse of East Germany:

…including the delicious irony that the actual motivation for the crashing of the Wall was an on-camera flub by East German Politburo member Guenther Schabowski, who muffed the announcement of the opening of the border, causing immense confusion between the crowds and the East Germany border police.

In the above video, the part between three and four minutes in – about the first break in the dam, where the East German commander at the Bornholmerstrasse gate decided to disobey a direct order and opened the crossing – is almost too powerful to watch.  It’s the first video I’ve seen in twenty years of the very first group to be allowed to cross from the communist East to the free west, freely and without bureaucratic buncombe (much less dogs and machine guns chasing them).  As the gate opens, as the people stream past the confused border guards (East and West), they look like kids tiptoeing down the stairs on Christmas morning; the first ones through walk gingerly, as if they expect the whole thing to get yanked away from them.  And then the weight of numbers dispels all doubt.

Another documentary about the schwehrpunkt at Bornholmerstrasse:

If Obama wins in 2012, then I have a hunch election night 2016 will look a lot like that.

The Bundestag (West German Parliament) breaks into the German national anthem:

German TV’s report:

Margaret Thatcher

It was a great time to be alive.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Monday, November 9th, 2009 at 9:00 pm and is filed under History And Its Making, World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.