The sinister echoes of November 9

Germans might not celebrate the day the wall came down, but they are secure in their unity, writes David Binder.

David BinderNovember 5, 2009 05:30Updated May 30, 2010 12:12

Plastic garden gnomes with their arms outstretched in the stiff-armed Nazi salute, are pictured on the main square in Straubing, south eastern Germany, as part of the art installation "Dance with the Devil" by German artist Ottmar Hoerl, Oct. 15, 2009. (Michael Dalder/Reuters)

EVANSTON, Ill. — Anniversaries are the times to remember where we were when something significant happened. For Germans, Nov. 9 recalls 1989 when the Berlin Wall suddenly opened a crack and swiftly crumbled.

That ended the division so painfully imposed on their nation at the end of World War II. It also signaled the imminent collapse — like a huge house of cards — of the mighty Soviet satellite empire that spread across the eastern half of Europe under the Red Army in 1945.

Thus ended the Cold War.

But in Germany that day also had sinister connections. On Nov. 9, 1923, Adolf Hitler launched his Nazi putsch (which failed) in Munich. On Nov. 9, 1925, he formed the first 280-man unit of the black-shirted SS. After Hitler gained power in 1933, Nov. 9 was celebrated by his National Socialist German Workers Party (the abbreviation was "Nazi") as the holiest of days throughout Germany. And on Nov. 9, 1938, his Nazi Storm Troopers attacked and burned 191 synagogues and hundreds of Jewish-owned stores across the country. That campaign foreshadowed the Holocaust.

East German workers, protected by 10,000 lightly armed border guards, began in August 1961 what the Communist leaders called the "Anti-Fascist Protective Barrier" — first with barbed wire, later with cement blocks — that would come to be called the Berlin Wall. I was there then and again 28 years later when the wall opened, to witness the fact that both events came as huge surprises.

Speaking on that 1989 evening at a televised press conference, Guenter Schabowski, a member of the ruling Communist Party Politburo, was asked when travel between East Berlin and West Berlin might be eased.

He inadvertently blurted: "Immediately, right now!" Thousands of East Berliners heard him on TV and rushed to crossings like Checkpoint Charlie, overwhelming nonplussed border guards.

It was a made-for-television moment. Soon people from East and West Berlin were dancing on the wall, painting graffiti, pounding chunks out of it for souvenirs. The images flashed to Prague, Sofia, Bucharest, Warsaw and beyond, where they had an instant galvanizing effect.

For the Germans, Willy Brandt pithily summarized the night's significance: "Now grows together what belongs together." As West Germany's Chancellor from 1969 to 1974, Brandt's policy of respecting the Communist East as neighbors had paved the way to the end of the wall.

However, because of the earlier Nazi connections, neither East nor West Germans celebrate Nov. 9 as a holiday. (The old "unity day" of West Germany had been June 17, the day in 1953 that workers on East Berlin's Stalinallee rose up against the Communist regime. For the long-term holiday, Oct. 3, the day the two parts of Germany were legally unified by an act of parliament in 1990, was chosen.)