Lessons from the Berlin Wall

The fall of the Berlin Wall belongs to history, but its lessons do not. Across many countries today, including established democracies such as the United States, we see political forces challenging constitutional constraints, weakening independent institutions, concentrating executive power, or treating political opponents as enemies rather than legitimate competitors. Elsewhere, authoritarian governments have become more confident in suppressing dissent and restricting individual freedom. The forms differ, but the question confronting citizens remains familiar: what do we do when those in power gradually erode the institutions that protect our freedom?

My experience in Berlin in 1989 taught me two lessons that seem particularly relevant today. The first is that political systems shape individual behavior more profoundly than we often realize. They influence whether people speak openly or remain silent, whether they trust strangers or suspect them, whether they take responsibility for their own lives or learn to navigate permissions and patronage. The second lesson is more hopeful: individuals can change political systems. Authoritarian governments may appear formidable, but their power ultimately depends on millions of people continuing to comply with them. Once enough people stop doing so, apparently permanent structures can become surprisingly fragile.

We learned that in Germany within a few extraordinary months.

If you had asked me in the summer of 1989 whether Germany would soon be reunited, I would have dismissed the idea as wishful thinking. The Berlin Wall had stood for twenty-eight years, the Soviet Union still dominated Eastern Europe, and the East German regime appeared firmly in control. Most West Germans had adapted to the existence of two German states, and even in Berlin, where the Wall was part of everyday life, few expected fundamental change.

When I moved to West Berlin in 1983 to study Chinese, I entered a city on the fault line of the Cold War, where the consequences of different political systems were difficult to ignore. One of my classmates had escaped from East Germany hidden inside a bus, while a co-worker had been tortured by the East German police so brutally that he had lost all his teeth. Their experiences taught me that political systems do not exist only in constitutions, ministries, or economic statistics. They shape how people live, what they fear, what they expect from others, and ultimately how they behave.

Yet the East German system seemed permanent. These were dangerous years, dominated by the nuclear confrontation between East and West. NATO’s decision to deploy additional nuclear weapons in Europe triggered mass protests in West Germany, and, like many young people, I joined them and was arrested during a sit-in outside an American barracks in Berlin. On the other side of the Wall, small groups gathered in churches for peace prayers. Few of us understood their importance at the time, but in an authoritarian society, simply creating a place where people could speak freely and discover that others shared their concerns was already a political act.

In 1987, I left for China to study economics. China was opening parts of its economy while maintaining strict political control, and on our campuses in Shanghai, I watched student activism grow. We did not yet know that it would culminate in the demonstrations at Tiananmen Square.

I returned to Berlin in April 1989, just as history began to accelerate. East Germany still looked stable: border guards checked documents, the security apparatus remained intact, and the government projected confidence. Beneath the surface, however, dissatisfaction had been growing while the Soviet Union’s willingness to enforce communist rule across Eastern Europe was weakening.

Then East Germans discovered a way out of that country through Hungary and Austria. Thousands left, and every successful escape encouraged others while demonstrating that the state was losing control. At the same time, another movement was emerging among those who wanted to stay and change their country.

On September 4, around one thousand people demonstrated in Leipzig after a peace prayer. Their message was remarkable because they were no longer asking for permission to leave. “We won’t leave,” they declared, followed by the more powerful assertion: “We are the people.” For forty years, the regime had claimed to govern in the people’s name; now the people were reclaiming that authority.

The demonstrations continued every Monday, bringing together people concerned about environmental destruction, travel restrictions, political repression, and many other grievances. Increasingly, however, they shared a more fundamental demand: they wanted to be treated as citizens rather than subjects. Within five weeks, one thousand demonstrators had become seventy thousand.

The tension was intense. Only months earlier, the Chinese Communist Party had crushed the Tiananmen demonstrations by force, and we wondered whether East Germany would choose the same “Chinese solution.” A violent crackdown seemed entirely possible, and certainly more plausible than the peaceful disappearance of the regime.

I remember going to see a movie with a friend during those weeks and taking a transistor radio because events were moving so quickly that we felt unable to disconnect even for two hours. Anything could happen.

Then came November 9.

That evening, Politburo member Günter Schabowski held his famous press conference and, confused about new travel regulations, appeared to announce that East Germans could cross the border immediately. People began gathering at the checkpoints, the crowds grew, the border guards hesitated, and eventually they opened the barriers.

What I remember first is not celebration but disbelief. The Wall had defined Berlin for almost three decades; governments had negotiated around it, armies had defended it, and people had died trying to cross it. Yet within a few hours it had become irrelevant.

At first, adventurous East Berliners crossed over to explore the West. By the following day, it seemed as though the entire population had arrived. I lived near a subway station, where crowds overwhelmed the entrances and filled the surrounding streets. A pregnant woman in our apartment building could barely get outside, while directly below us people gathered around the windows of a fruit shop, staring at goods that West Berliners hardly noticed.

Those scenes revealed another way in which political systems shape individual behavior. Decades of scarcity had taught East Germans that ordinary consumer goods could not be taken for granted, while dependence on state allocation encouraged habits that were difficult to abandon overnight.

The West German government quickly offered every East German citizen 100 Deutschmark in “welcome money.” Despite the freezing November weather, people began queuing outside banks shortly after midnight because they feared the money might run out, although there was no reason to believe it would. Friends brought coffee and chocolate to those waiting and expected people at the front to take some and pass the rest along. Instead, some took everything.

At the time, I found this disturbing; today, I understand it better. A society of chronic shortages teaches people to secure what they can when it becomes available. A state that makes citizens dependent on permissions, connections, and access changes incentives and behavior. Trust becomes harder, hoarding becomes rational, and people learn to navigate the system rather than rely on open institutions and predictable rules.

Change is not inevitable when people stand up to their authoritarian leaders. East Germans, Hungarians, and Czechoslovaks had previously risen against communist rule. Each time, Soviet military intervention crushed their aspirations. So did the Chinese leadership when it suppressed the Tiananmen demonstrations in June 1989. Yet only months later, communist regimes across Eastern Europe collapsed when Gorbachev was no longer willing to use Soviet military force to preserve communist rule in Eastern Europe.

The lesson is that courage alone cannot guarantee political change. Successful resistance also depends on divisions within the ruling elite, the loyalty of security forces, and international circumstances. Citizens can weaken authoritarian systems by building independent networks and encouraging others to question their obedience. Such efforts may take decades without visible success. But when a regime’s foundations begin to weaken, individual acts of resistance can suddenly trigger a cascade of change.

After reunification, I began working in development cooperation. I witnessed the transition of Central and Eastern Europe toward democracy and market economies. The transformation was difficult because the old institutions could disappear much faster than the habits and expectations they had created. As a young program officer, I worked alongside a former East German ambassador who now held the same professional rank as I did, while a former local head of the German-Soviet Friendship Society had started again as a secretary. The political system had collapsed remarkably quickly; its effects on individual lives sometimes took much longer to settle out.

This is why I remember November 1989 as more than when the Wall opened. It demonstrated both the power of institutions to shape human behavior and the capacity of individuals to break free from them. It also taught me something about authoritarian regimes that remains relevant wherever political power is becoming less constrained: we should neither accommodate authoritarianism as inevitable nor assume that those who wield power are as secure as they appear.

East Germany had an army, border troops, police, informers, prisons, and an extensive surveillance apparatus. In the summer of 1989, almost nobody I knew expected the regime to disappear. Yet beneath its apparent stability, millions of individual calculations were changing. One person decided to leave and another followed; a few hundred attended a peace prayer, then a thousand marched, and soon there were seventy thousand. People who had been afraid discovered that their neighbors were afraid too, and then discovered that together they no longer needed to be.

In his 1978 essay The Power of the Powerless, Václav Havel argued that resistance begins when individuals stop participating in the falsehoods of the authoritarian narrative and start “living within the truth.” The peace prayers and demonstrations of 1989 showed how such individual decisions could become a collective force. Havel’s lesson remains relevant today: defending freedom begins with our willingness to speak truthfully, act independently, and refuse conformity, even when doing so carries personal risks.  

Authoritarian power depends heavily on the expectation that others will continue to obey. Once that expectation breaks down, apparent stability can disappear with remarkable speed. Each person who speaks out makes it easier for the next; each demonstration that survives makes the next one larger; each retreat by those in power reveals that another may be possible. What begins as an isolated act becomes collective action, and collective action can become a cascade.

We did not understand this in the summer of 1989. By November, we were watching it happen before our eyes.

That is why the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall should be more than an occasion for nostalgia. It should remind us not to resign ourselves to authoritarian rule, whether it arrives through an established dictatorship or through the gradual erosion of democratic institutions. Political systems shape us, but they are also shaped by what we are prepared to accept, resist, and change.

The experience of 1989 gives me reason for hope. Systems that appear entrenched can be more fragile than they seem, while individuals who initially feel powerless can discover considerable strength when they act together. Once fear begins to give way to courage, and once people realize that others are prepared to stand with them, change can acquire its own momentum.

I saw that cascade happen once. There is no reason to believe that future generations won’t have the capacity to make it happen again.

Image Credit: Public domain via Wikimedia Commons, used without modification.