Greg Hands is MP for Hammersmith and Fulham and a shadow Treasury minister. Here he gives a very personal reflection on the events leading to the fall of the Berlin Wall twenty years ago today.
When ConservativeHome asked me to write a piece on the 20th anniversary of the day the Berlin Wall was opened, I decided on two things. First, especially given the number of reminiscing articles in recent days from leaders and politicians from the time who were necessarily looking at the issue from above, that my piece would view things from the bottom. It will also be personal, however. All of the photos here are taken with my camera. Second, so much attention has been given to how the Wall was opened on this day, that we are in danger of overlooking what happened in the preceding 40 years of East German communism. In other words, the fall of the Wall has become too much an event in itself, and not enough the demise of a four-decade long system.
Between March 23rd 1985 and its abolition on 3rd October 1990, I visited the GDR (East Germany) 48 times. I also lived in Prague for a summer, but for much of those five years, I lived in West Berlin, which was a remarkable place for reasons many readers will be familiar with. Perhaps its most striking feature was the ability of a visitor to cross from our free market, democratic system, to a Communist dictatorship within the short space of about 20 minutes, by walking perhaps 20 metres across a border, in a way which in 2009 is simply not possible. The Korean Demarcation Line probably comes closest, but there it is only a very selected few who can cross.
In those years, I did work from time to time for the West Berlin based “Arbeitsgemeinschaft 13. August” and the Frankfurt-based, “International Society for Human Rights”. My role was to meet dissidents, generally people who had no international recognition, often very ordinary people. Like Heiko in East Berlin, who was a cook, with a Berlin accent so strong as to be almost incomprehensible, who had spent time in the notorious East German jail in Bautzen, and remained defiant faced with Stasi-sponsored break-ins to his flat on almost a weekly basis. His crime? Making a legal application to leave the country.
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