Peter Millar - 1989, the Berlin Wall: My Part in its Downfall

One thing needs saying before anything else, at least for those unfamiliar with the autobiographical works of Spike Milligan: I make no claim whatsoever to having been instrumental in the fall of the Berlin Wall any more than any other of the millions of people who experienced life behind it and the tremendous exhilaration of seeing its ugly scar removed from the face of a much-loved city. And a tumour excised from the heart of Europe.

From 1981 until 1989 and beyond I was an eyewitness, albeit a highly involved one, to the events that shook the communist Soviet empire to its foundations, eventually toppling it, bringing down the Iron Curtain and leaving the way open for a fresh start in a new century. Like Milligans account of his World War II soldiering in the wonderful Adolf Hitler, My Part in His Downfall, I have tried to take the reader from my own version of square bashing (in the boozers of Fleet Street) to the trenches of the Cold War, where I was, if not exactly a foot soldier, then a front-line reporter.

I am not a comic writer in the vein of the late, great goon, and this is not primarily a funny story, although it does have more than a few comic moments. I have always firmly believed that, to the appreciative eye, history has a sense of humour, even if it is sometimes black humour.

This is not primarily a history book but the story of the curious love-hate relationship between events and journalists, a relationship that ends up as history. It is in particular the story of this journalist and this story is one which I did not so much report as live. East Berlin wasnt just a place I went to write about, but an inseparable part of my life. The people whose lives were forever changed by the events of November 9th, 1989 were not interviewees, but close personal friends, people I considered almost part of my family.

East Berlin was where my wife and I made our first home together as a married couple, a home we had to share with a secretary and a housekeeper, one of them possibly in the employ of the secret police, with microphones in the walls, and men in unmarked cars on our tails as we went about our daily business. It was where we learned the difference between acquaintance and friendship, about the value of freedom and the curious sweet-and-sour taste of life when it is limited, about how the tide of history can all of a sudden sweep over people and places. And how all that really matters is to keep standing when it does. This is a story in which the politicians take a back seat and everyday life springs to the forefront, for even journalists have everyday lives. And the people they meet especially in totalitarian societies are often more interesting than the events they are sent to report on.

In these pages, I have tried to introduce you to some of those people and convey a taste of the lives they led, in many ways so foreign to those of Britons or Americans in the second half of the twentieth century, yet every bit as typical of those decades. Between the affluence of the West and the poverty of the Third World, was a second world, rarely referred to as such. Even those who lived there dared not speak its name: a world of making do, getting by, of living with the shadow of the past, a darkness in the present and little hope for the future. A world that shattered like a glass ceiling in those chaotic days of the autumn of 1989.

I have tried also to answer at least in part one of those questions journalists are so often asked: how do you get the news? And another one that should be asked more often: what do you do with it when you get it? This is a short ride on a rollercoaster of a profession that many people wish they could get into and a good many others wish they could get out of. An insiders look at the [frequent] nuts and [often missing] bolts of the news business, in particular the ups and downs of being a foreign correspondent in the pre-internet days: from shouting, No love, its the Warsaw Pact, not the Walsall Pact, over a crackly phone line to Sunday Times copytakers recently moved from the News of the World, to the joys of punching endless seemingly identical rows of holes in telex tape, of vandalising hotel telephone sockets to fit crocodile clips to bare wires, and standing in phone boxes in the rain with acoustic couplers clamped in an armpit.

The only message of my story is that people make the world. For better or worse. And that accidents happen. All the time.

The fact that the twenty-first century has so far failed to live up to the promise of the end of the twentieth is a depressing reality. All the more reason why we should look back on the events of 1989, the road that led up to them, and savour once again the taste of those moments of euphoria when it seemed the problems of the world were over once and for all.

Because the taste of hope is one none of us dare lose.

Peter Millar, London and Berlin, 2009

East Germany and West Germany plus the exclave of West Berlin