Das Versprechen (The Promise)

Abstract

9th November 1989 is etched onto the German national consciousness as the day on which the Berlin Wall fell. Televised images of the euphoria experienced by the inhabitants of this divided city, of their seemingly infinite delight and disbelief, provoked unprecedented sympathy worldwide for a people long respected for the economic success and political stability of the two states in which recent history had determined that they should live, but for whom few outsiders had been able to muster any real affection. The Wall had been erected on 13 August 1961 by the communist rulers of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), ostensibly to ‘protect’ their East German population against the ‘imperialism’ of the capitalist west. Berlin thus embodied the global division into two competing power blocs after the Second World War. The collapse of the Wall thirty-eight years after its construction inaugurated the final chapter in the Cold War following the ‘velvet revolutions’ that had swept across eastern Europe at the decade’s end, and a new beginning for Germany, which was unified almost a year later on 3 October 1990.