Luann Brennan GIS 3991: Media in America Instructor: Moti Nissani

That wants it down….

Robert Frost, Mending Wall

Pictures of jubilant people on top of the Berlin Wall appeared on the front pages of all West German newspapers on the morning of November 10, 1989. The same faces came to life on West German television the night before and all through the next day and for weeks to come. The Berlin Wall had been breached; history was being made. Since I experienced the event in person, I wanted to see how my experiences were reported in the mainstream newspapers here in the states. Based on what I read, the American media’s portrayal of the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989 trivialized the entire event.

The Wall was erected on August 13, 1961, as a result of a mass migration of German workers from East Berlin to West Berlin. The wall literally went up overnight. It started out as coils and coils of barbed wire; the barbed wire was eventually replaced by an 11 foot high, 28 mile long concrete wall. The communist government of Walter Ulbricht explained that the wall was built to keep out western fascists and anti-communists, but it was commonly known, that it was built to keep the East German citizens from leaving a city that so desperately needed skilled workers. In 1963, President John F. Kennedy stood in front of the wall at the famous Checkpoint Charlie and challenged the Soviets to tear down the wall. In giving his speech among crowds of cheering people in the west and onlookers from nearby buildings in the east, Kennedy shouted four words that we still hear on television today; "Ich bin ein Berliner!" (I am a Berliner). The wall would remain standing for 28 years.

In researching my paper, I went to four different sources to see if the coverage was anything like what I remembered in November of 1989. I used Time Magazine, (November 20 - December 27, 1989), The New York Times from November 10-30, 1989, and to get a local feel, I chose the Detroit News from November 10-21, 1989. I also used one book, The End of the European Era, 1890 to the Present, by Felix Gilbert with David Clay Large, to see how the fall of the wall was portrayed. All in all, I read a total of 105 articles, 14 Op-ed pieces, two letters, and seven articles of historical facts. I saw a total of 68 current photos of the wall and 17 historical photos. I read one interview with Egon Krenz, head of East Germany at the time the wall fell, I looked at a total of 14 maps (the New York Times used one map four different times, so I actually saw 10 different maps), and I read part of a chapter from Gilbert’s book.

The New York Times gave by far the most extensive coverage with a total of 64 articles, not including the opinion pages. Unfortunately, after the first two days of coverage, most of the coverage was either repetition, trivialization, or conjecture of what was to come. Aside from a small amount of political coverage, the NYT seemed to portray the exodus of people from East to West as people who wanted to come and collect their Begrüssungsgeld (welcome money) of DM 100.00 and go shopping on the Kufürstendamm, commonly known as the Kudamm, Berlin’s most exclusive shopping district. A typical headline read: "A Day of Celebrations And a Bit of Shopping’" (NYT, November 11, 1989). Another headline from the same day read: "Square Is Mobbed: 800,000 East Berliner Visit West in One Day—Much Festivity," (NYT , November 13, 1989). Many more of these headlines cover the front-page of the New York Times throughout the month.

The New York Times wrote a total of six article devoted solely to historical facts. The problem was, they made them seem like scenes from a novel. Although the history lesson may have been useful to many, headlines such as "The Old Berlin: A Culture of Spies and Symphonies," detracted from the seriousness of the situation. What was once a proud European capital city had been torn asunder for 28 years and two-thirds of its population lost most of the basic human rights that we take for granted here in the United States. Now the city was coming together once again and the New York Times talks of spies and symphonies.

One of the best articles I found in the New York Time was from holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel. With everyone from Berlin mayor Walter Momper to German chancellor Helmut Kohl saying they will never forget November 9, Wiesel puts it into perspective by writing, "they forgot that Nov. 9 has already entered into history -51 years earlier it marked the Kristallnacht" [the night when Nazis went on a rampage and vandalized Jewish stores and synagogues] (NTY November 17, 1989). It was too early to see that the actual date of reunification would be October 3; someone got smart.

I think the New York Times did the event a disservice with the amount of space dedicated to this historic event. By repeating themselves over and over again, they seemed reluctant to lose the momentum of the story. Unfortunately, momentum eventually dies down on its own and the New York Times would have been better off waiting until something new came up instead of rehashing old news just to keep the story alive. Much of the momentum was already lost in the repetition of facts.

The Detroit News did an even poorer job on reporting the fall of the wall. It had a total of 29 articles in the two weeks I used and spent most of its space looking for a Michigan connection. Quotes from a Warren woman who left Berlin in 1953 really don’t portray what really went on in the city during the month of November 1989. One op-ed page even went to compare what was going on in Germany with what was going on in Detroit at the time; it led with a headline "Hope for Germany in Metro Detroit?" (News, November 15, 1989). Headlines like this one were only used to grab the reader’s attention; it had nothing to do with the actual article.

Detroit News reporter Shelby Strother wrote from West Berlin every day. His articles sounded like cheap fiction novels. Many sub-headlines read like this: "The Soup is on" or "Love of his Life," (News, November 12, 1989). I was waiting for the old Snoopy opening; "It was a dark and stormy night…" These vignettes added a quaintness to an event that was anything but quaint.

Another News headline read: "Many fear refugees will spoil the good life," (News, November 10, 1989). The article went on the explain how many West Berliners were afraid that the mass of incoming refugees would put a damper on their prosperity. This article made the West Berliners seem cold, uncaring, and selfish. What the article fails to mention is that Germans are naturally mistrustful of any kind of change. They tend to intellectualize everything and they need time to digest and reflect on the changes in their lives, especially the major changes. There was just as much cheering on the West side of the Wall as on the East. West Berliners greeted their Eastern neighbors with cheers, applause, and many even gave them cash or shared a beer with them before they turned back to go home.

I felt the Detroit News would have been better off to stick to the story in Berlin and leave out the local connections. The local connections really had nothing to do with the story itself; they were nothing more than attention grabbers and filler. There was a "Warm feeling in Frankenmuth," (News, November 12, 1989) or as Ruth Koerbel of Warren said, "It’s really a surprise – but a pleasant surprise," (News, November 10, 1989); these could have been said by anyone in the country.

Time Magazine wrote a total of 12 articles, plus there was one interview with East German president and party leader, Egon Krenz. With a huge headline of "Freedom!" in it’s November 20, 1989 edition, Time tried to capture the mood of the moment both in words and pictures. Calling the Wall "the perfect symbol of oppression," Time interviewed many people coming over for the first time. What it printed were snippets that tried hard to capture the mood: "I just can’t believe it," or "I don’t feel like I’m in prison anymore," (November 20, 1989). The people were overwhelmed with emotions, but I think you had to be there to actually feel it too.

Time also brought history into their articles and led them off with headlines such as "Is One Germany Better Than Two?" and "Wall of Shame," (November 20, 1989). These articles were filled with maps and historical photos of people fleeing East Berlin and memorials on the Western side for those who perished trying to escape. The photos, truly captured the headline "Wall of Shame."

I also read a chapter on the fall of the Wall in The End of the European Era, 1890 to the Present by Felix Gilbert with David Clay Large. I found the chapter to be a breath of fresh air after all the newspaper and magazine articles. The book stuck to the point that the fall of the wall was a political as well as an historical event. It summarizes well the political situation of glasnost and peristroika at the time. The book explains that the borders to Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia had been opened earlier and a flood of East Germans were leaving the country and going to West Germany. The political decision behind the opening of all East German borders was that if the people felt free to travel, they would not feel the pressure to leave the country for good. Gilbert sums it up well, "Amidst all the euphoria, it was easy to miss the irony that the East German government had built the wall in 1961 to keep its people from fleeing to the West, and was now punching holes in it for exactly the same reason" (p 544).

The book also does a better job at explaining the feelings of apprehension of West Germans at the fall of the wall and amidst the rushing tide of refugees. Germany was in the midst of an acute housing shortage and unemployment had risen to eight percent. West Germans, not a people comfortable with change in the first place, were a bit apprehensive. As Gilbert writes, "No wonder some West Germans, anxious about their jobs, fearful of inflation, and resentful about the privileges accorded the newcomers, quickly began to feel a bit nostalgic for the days when the Wall was really a wall," (p 545). Put in this context, the West Germans can be forgiven their fears. It is not that they were not willing to share; they feared there was not enough to go around.

Gilbert’s book also touches on the fact that Berlin was an occupied city at the time. Although some of the articles mentioned this fact, they were written in such a way as to miss the point. But not Gilbert, in bringing up the issue of reunification he mentions that "German reunification was not strictly a German question," (p 546). He goes on to explain, "Since no peace treaty had ever been signed with defeated Germany after World War II, the four Allied Powers [United States, Great Britain, France, Soviet Union] retained responsibility for Berlin and the ultimate delimitation of Germany’s borders," (p546). Berlin had been an occupied city since the end of World War II. I would have liked to have the articles bring that point up more clearly.

My feelings of the fall of the Berlin Wall are hard to explain. First of all, it happened over 10 years ago. Secondly, I’m not sure it’s an event that can be explained in words. When I first came to Berlin in 1979, I looked at the Wall in utter disbelief. There it stood, massive and covered in graffiti in the middle of streets that suddenly came to a dead end. The strip of no-man’s land between the east side of the wall, which was totally white, and the west was deserted except for guards with their submachine guns looking over at us with binoculars. I sometimes had the feeling that if I stared at them long enough, they’d get mad and shoot. I also wondered how anyone could live in such proximity to the wall. I marveled at children playing in the streets in front of the Wall and people walking past it going about their daily business as if the wall didn’t exist. How could they do it?

Well, if you live with anything long enough it becomes part of your daily life. And so it was with me. Ten years after I had arrived in Berlin, I no longer thought much about the Wall. It was something I took visitors to see. Then all of a sudden on November 9, 1989, it was announced on television that border crossings from East Berlin to West Berlin would be opened. All travel restrictions were being lifted. None of us could believe it. All of a sudden, those feelings of disbelief that I had had the first time I saw the Wall, came flooding over me again. My brother, who was also there as the wrote this in his journal, "Barely possible to communicate my utter astonishment at the sight. A year ago, a month ago, I would have laughed off the suggestion that such a thing could happen. Now here I am watching it." My sentiments exactly.

I didn’t join the crowds that night because my two children had been very small at the time. I did, however, go out the next day with them to see the flood of people coming through the wall just for a taste of the West. We were just a small part of a massive crowd that lined up at the Wall and, we cheered the people driving through in their funny little East German trabants [typical East German car]. There was a strange kind of energy in the air, both a quiet religious like feeling and one of euphoria. Everyone in Germany, both East and West, were fully aware of the historical significance of the events taking place within our city. We were not only watching them but actually participating in them. This is something the media could not quite capture, although television did a better job of showing the mood of two countries than the newspapers and magazines ever could. Moving pictures was just a better venue for capturing moods and emotions.

As the weeks passed, I walked around the city trying to digest all that was going on at the time. The streets were filled even more than usual, especially the Kudamm, Berlin’s equivalent of 5^th Avenue. Although most East Berliners had not set foot in the West, all knew about the Kudamm and had to see it for themselves. Most stopped in front of the KaDaWe, Berlin’s most expensive store, to look in the windows and go to the top floor to see its world renown gourmet food section. This is a tourist attraction in and of itself and one of the places I took visitors to see, although I never shopped there any other time. East Berliners instead chose to spend their DM 100.00, that they received from the West government on simpler things like chocolate and newspapers. But the street was so crowded that you had to go with the crowd. Most of the tourists chose to window shop and pocket the money to use in the East. Since East marks were about one-tenth the value of West marks, East Berliners were able to buy certain hard to come by goods if they had western currency to purchase them. But most newspapers reported all the shopping going on. Crowds pouring out of the East and into the stores. Again my brother had this astute observation: "It prompts an untimely question: what kind of revolution is it that frees people to go window shopping?"

Another scene I remember is the part of the Wall in front of the Brandenburg Gate. It was hard to get anywhere near it because of the crowds and the crowds of reporters with their cameras. There were so many flashes, it felt like fireworks going off. But watching the crowds standing and dancing on top of the wall sent chills up and down my spine. The air around the wall was always one of quiet, sort of like being in a library or a church. Now with the parties going on in front of the wall and on top of the wall, the atmosphere was more like a huge outdoor concert. No more reverence, it was time to party.

It is ironic that the wall came down on November 9. The fall of the Berlin Wall is not the only historic event that happened on November 9. Germany was defeated in World War I on Novermber 9, 1919; November 9, 1938 is known as Kristallnacht. This is the night when Nazis throughout Germany destroyed Jewish businesses and synagogues. The amount of broken glass is what gave the name to this night. It was an eerie suggestion that this night go down in history as a German holiday to commemorate the Fall of the Wall and of communism in East Germany. The Germans came to their senses and chose another date to mark the reunification of Germany But no newspaper, except for the essay by Elie Wiesel in the New York Times, mentioned this fact. Was it ignorance? I don’t know but, I find is strange that all the newspapers quoted JFK’s famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech over and over again; they mentioned the DM 100.00 and the shopping sprees at least once a day. But no one felt the necessity to draw the historical comparisons. I find that to be poor journalism. We rely on television to show us the moods of the events and moments that shape our lives but, it is the written media’s responsibility to bring these events into their historical contexts. Both newspapers and the magazine failed to do just that. The book also failed to draw the comparisons.

All in all, I feel the media could have done a better job of covering this historic event. Although, I’m not sure anyone who had not lived in Berlin before the wall came down and then actually lived in the city to see it fall, could actually sum up the true feelings of the people at the time. It was one of the moments where you had to be there to feel the true significance of the event. I truly feel blessed to have lived through that moment with all the other citizens of Berlin, both East and West. It is a moment I will never forget.

Gilbert, Felix, with David Clay Large, The End of the European Era, 1890 to the Present, W. W. Norton Company, Inc., New York, 1991.

Detroit News, November 10-21, 1989.

New York Times, November 10-30, 1989.

Time, November 20, 1989 – December 27, 1989.

Acknowledgment: I would like to thank my brother, Jerry, for the use of his journal entries of November 9 & 10, 1989.

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