{"id":6167,"date":"2009-11-09T21:00:25","date_gmt":"2009-11-10T02:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=6167"},"modified":"2009-11-10T08:38:49","modified_gmt":"2009-11-10T13:38:49","slug":"the-night-history-ended","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=6167","title":{"rendered":"Das War Den Moment Andem Wir So Lange Gewartet Haben<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"

I started watching Youtube vids from twenty years ago tonight – and I couldn’t stop.<\/p>\n

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

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More about the extended, but brief and dramatic, collapse of East Germany:
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…including the delicious irony that the actual motivation for the crashing of the Wall was an on-camera flub by East German Politburo<\/em> 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.<\/em><\/p>\n

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 <\/em>gate decided to disobey a direct order and opened the crossing – is almost too powerful to watch.\u00a0 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).\u00a0 As the gate opens, as the people stream past the confused border guards (East and <\/em>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.\u00a0 And then the weight of numbers dispels all doubt.<\/p>\n

Another documentary about the schwehrpunkt <\/em>at Bornholmerstrasse:
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If Obama wins in 2012, then I have a hunch election night 2016 will look a lot like that.<\/p>\n

The Bundestag<\/em> (West German Parliament) breaks into the German national anthem:
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German TV’s report:
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Margaret Thatcher<\/p>\n

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It was a great time to be alive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history-and-its-making","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6167"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6167\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6204,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6167\/revisions\/6204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}