THE FALL: Water cannons didn't
stop Berliners from destroying the Wall
Nov. 9, 1989
Taking Down the Wall
By Daniel Eisenberg
"What
shall I do? Order you to shoot?" As a crowd of 20,000 of his countrymen
implored him to "Open the gate!" on that chaotic Thursday evening,
Harald Jäger, head of passport control at the Berlin Wall's Bornholmer
Strasse checkpoint, kept shouting that rhetorical question at the guards
under his command.
What happened in Berlin last
week was a combination of the fall of the Bastille and a New Year's Eve
blowout, of revolution and celebration Š West Berliners pulled East
Berliners to the top of the barrier along which in years past many an
East German had been shot while trying to escape; at times, the Wall
almost disappeared beneath waves of humanity.
—Nov. 20, 1989
It was nearly 11 p.m., four hours since Jäger heard the stunning news
on TV: the East German Politburo, responding to weeks of peaceful
demonstrations and a flood of refugees fleeing through Hungary and
Czechoslovakia, had announced that all citizens could leave East Germany
at any crossing "immediately." Suddenly Jäger, 48, held in his hands the
fate of thousands of people—as well as that of the Wall he had so
faithfully watched over for all 28 years of its existence. His orders
were to turn the protesters back unless they had proper documents, but
he knew that attempting to do so would result in bloodshed.
So, as
recounted in The Wall: The People's Story, shortly after 11 p.m.
Jäger told his men at the gates to "open them all." By dawn, an
estimated 100,000 delirious East Germans had slipped past him on their
way to a raucous celebration in West Berlin. Over the next few days, the
revelers hammered away at the most notorious symbol of Soviet communist
repression and toasted their newfound freedom with bottles of champagne.
But joy was soon dampened by the daunting burden of rebuilding the
backward East. More than a decade after Germany officially unified in
1990, the country is still suffering the hangover.
TIME Cover
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