1989, Then and Now

For the world, 1989 was a momentous year. East Germans take to the streets in weekly protests. Poland's Solidarnosc is legalised, and later wins the Polish elections. Hungary defortifies its border with Austria, sparking a wave of defections from Eastern bloc nations to the West. Czechoslovakia's velvet revolution ends decades of communist rule, and Václav Havel is elected president. Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu is forced from power. And the Berlin Wall comes down, quite literally, in small pieces and large chunks. Also that year, Chinese troops crush the Tiananmen Square protests. George Bush the elder becomes US president, Ayatollah Khomeini dies, and Kurt Waldheim becomes president of Austria, while the last Soviet tanks leave Afghanistan and the rise of Slobodan Milosevic's nationalists begins in Yugoslavia. And in Australia, Andrew Peacock succeeds John Howard as opposition leader. That, at least, is what the history books and annual digests will tell you.

For me, 1989 was a tumultuous year. My father died, suddenly and unexpectedly, in April, but there was little time to grieve. By May, I was preparing for my final high school exams, a week of gruelling six-hour examinations in maths, physics, Ancient Greek, and history. Before the end of the month, thirteen years of school were finally over, and come June I had begun my compulsory 15 months of service in the West German army. As I've written elsewhere, I was drafted into the EloKa, the electronic warefare division, based close to West Germany's border with the East, where I spent the next few months on the army's Thurau tower listening into the radio transmissions of the Soviet Red Army on manoeuvre in East Germany. Our unit leaders told us at the time that in the event of war, the Soviets would class us as spies rather than regular units, and execute us if caught, but I don't buy it - our tower would have been targetted in the first minutes of any hot war; we would have been among the first casualties, not prisoners, of any conflict.

The night in 1989 that they opened the Berlin Wall, that 9 November - an all too ominous date in German history, marking as it does both the day in 1918 that German democrats forced the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II and declared the short-lived Weimar republic, and the day in 1938 that Hitler's thugs conducted their anti-semitic pogroms against Jewish citizens and businesses - that night I spent in my army barracks, I think, but I don't remember it that well. I remember the pictures of Berlin, of course, of people from the East and West standing on the Wall and chipping away at it with anything they could lay their hands on; I remember being aware of the Monday demonstrations which had taken place in Leipzig and other East German cities each week in the preceding months, and of the wave of refugees entering West Germany's embassies in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and other Eastern bloc nations when those countries were beginning to break away from the Soviet empire. I remember watching East German party functionary Günther Schabowski's press conference in the evening of 9 November 1989, and the way that he bungled his historic announcement that borders to the West would be opened without conditions, to such an extent that it took the reporters present a couple of minutes to realise the significance of those words. But with everything else going on in my life at the time, the rest of it is a bit of a blur, I'm afraid. Hindsight is always clearer, but I don't think I understood then in full detail what was happening around me (and I don't think I was alone among my compatriots).

For some reason, though, I've thought a lot about those days recently. Perhaps it's the upcoming 20th anniversary; perhaps it's the fact that I've spent more time in Germany over the past couple of years than I have in many years before, and that I've got a couple more trips over there lined up in coming months (more of that soon); perhaps it was the few days walking through a Berlin whose scars from 40 years of division are now healed yet still clearly visible; or perhaps this was triggered also by a conversation last week with my colleague Lee Duffield, then an ABC radio journalist who was at Schabowski's press conference, and my PhD student Thomas Petzold, whose parents took place in the Monday demonstrations in Leipzig. Perhaps it's the fact that during one of my upcoming trips to Germany, I'll have the opportunity to attend my 20th anniversary high school reunion. Whatever the reason, I've found myself exploring aspects of those days in recent times - I've traced the former border between the two Germanies, and explored the main highway checkpoint at Helmstedt, on Google Earth; I've browsed through Flickr's collection of images from the divided Berlin between 1945 and 1989; and I've searched for other footage from the time. I'm not looking for a concise history of those days, really - I understand the overall historical narrative of 1989 well enough. What I've been after is original footage of the time, journalism's famed 'first draft of history', to re-experience the complex mixture of hope and uncertainty, of important steps and irrelevant distractions, as events unfolded simultaneously in so many locations at the same time.

It took a while, but I've found the perfect set of resources for this. While sadly there is no direct access to the bulging news archives of Germany's public broadcasters (though I have a hunch that there'll be a few retrospectives coming out in this 20th anniversary year), I'd known already that the regional TV channels of the premier public television station ARD had a late night series screening the Tagesschau TV news from 20 years ago each night - I still remember watching surprisingly gripping reports from the aftermath of 1973's Yom Kippur War, a few months before I left Germany in 1994. And although those shows aren't available directly from theTagesschau Website: as always with these things, in a time beyond broadcasting, crowdsourcing is your friend - there's a user on the German YouTube clone MyVideo.de who has faithfully uploaded each nightly 15-minute broadcast of the main Tagesschau bulletin, going back to the early 80s and (hopefully) continuing through 1989 as 2009 unfolds.

As Europe remembers the year that the Iron Curtain fell, I think I'll be doing the same by following this series, watching through television lenses two decades ago how the stirrings of democracy across Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, the Baltic states, Romania, and East Germany grew through to their climax on 9 November. Those of you who understand German might want to check it out too - if you don't, I'd recommend at least having a look at the English-language timeline of events and collection of resources at Chronik der Mauer. 1989 was a remarkable year - and I hope that now, 20 years later, I'll finally get to appreciate it more fully.

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