In a land of few joyous moments, it was an instant of elation. For a people trapped in a century of darkness, it seemed like redemption itself.
Suddenly, unexpectedly, in the fading light of a chilly November day, the Berlin Wall had fallen and East Germans were pouring by the thousands into the West. They came from both sides and danced together on the Wall in a spontaneous national celebration that quickly spread from the streets of West Berlin to towns and cities along the entire inner German frontier from the Baltic to Bavaria.
At one of the most heavily traveled border crossings just east of Helmstedt in central Germany, excited Westerners gathered at the final checkpoint as a kind of unofficial reception committee. They applauded, they waved, they cried, as a never-ending line of East German "Trabi" automobiles sputtered by, carrying their wide-eyed occupants toward freedom.
At one point, the traffic jam of those wanting to cross into the West stretched back nearly 40 miles.
Those who lived through that night had little doubt that the collapse of the Berlin Wall carried ramifications that would extend far beyond Germany. But few could grasp either the enormity of those ramifications or the pace of the events that would quickly follow. The gradual loosening of communism's grip in more easygoing Poland and Hungary was one thing, but the de facto collapse of a hard-line regime in East Berlin that night was of another order.
Communism was dying. The Soviet Empire was crumbling. Europe was changing. It took only eight days for the winds of revolution to engulf the next hard-line Marxist government, this time in neighboring Czechoslovakia. By Christmas, the dissident Czech playwright Vaclav Havel was his country's president, and the last of Europe's Communist dictators, Romania's Nicolae Ceausescu, was dead, executed by members of his own army, which had deserted him and his cause.
Within a year, Germany would reunite, and within two, the Soviet Union would disintegrate. Moscow's leader Mikhail Gorbachev would win the Nobel Peace Prize for controlling the meltdown of his empire, but would lose power and become an object of derision at home for letting slip away an Eastern Bloc that was paid for with the blood of millions of Soviet World War II dead.
"Nobody expected it would happen," Gorbachev said recently in an interview with the British news agency Reuters. "History kicked in because Germans found each other, sweeping everything [else] away."
