In these four decades, as I have said, you Berliners have built a great city. You’ve done so in spite of threats—the Soviet attempts to impose the East-mark, the blockade. Today the city thrives in spite of the challenges implicit in the very presence of this wall. What keeps you here? Certainly there’s a great deal to be said for your fortitude, for your defiant courage. But I believe there’s something deeper, something that involves Berlin’s whole look and feel and way of life—not mere sentiment. No one could live long in Berlin without being completely disabused of illusions. Something, instead, that has seen the difficulties of life in Berlin but chose to accept them, that continues to build this good and proud city in contrast to a surrounding totalitarian presence that refuses to release human energies or aspirations. Something that speaks with a powerful voice of affirmation, that says yes to this city, yes to the future, yes to freedom. In a word, I would submit that what keeps you in Berlin is love—love both profound and abiding.
Perhaps this gets to the root of the matter, to the most fundamental distinction of all between East and West. The totalitarian world produces backwardness because it does such violence to the spirit, thwarting the human impulse to create, to enjoy, to worship. The totalitarian world finds even symbols of love and of worship an affront. Years ago, before the East Germans began rebuilding their churches, they erected a secular structure: the television tower at Alexander Platz. Virtually ever since, the authorities have been working to correct what they view as the tower’s one major flaw, treating the glass sphere at the top with paints and chemicals of every kind. Yet even today when the sun strikes that sphere—that sphere that towers over all Berlin—the light makes the sign of the cross. There in Berlin, like the city itself, symbols of love, symbols of worship, cannot be suppressed.
As I looked out a moment ago from the Reichstag, that embodiment of German unity, I noticed words crudely spray-painted upon the wall, perhaps by a young Berliner, “This wall will fall. Beliefs become reality.” Yes, across Europe, this wall will fall. For it cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom.
And I would like, before I close, to say one word. I have read, and I have been questioned since I’ve been here about certain demonstrations against my coming. And I would like to say just one thing, and to those who demonstrate so. I wonder if they have ever asked themselves that if they should have the kind of government they apparently seek, no one would ever be able to do what they’re doing again. Thank you and God bless you all.
Reagan later wrote in his diary that “I got a tremendous reception—interrupted 28 times by cheers.” Yet other witnesses reported that the audience seemed surprisingly low-keyed. Some of Reagan’s top aides later that day voiced disappointment at the lukewarm turnout and reaction; throughout most of the speech, there was only polite, scattered applause. However, as Reagan said the words “Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate,” the crowd applauded more strongly. Reagan, with his skilled sense of timing, then repeated the Soviet leader’s name twice, to emphasize what was coming: “Mr. Gorbachev, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” With those words, the crowd cheered lustily.6
As Reagan spoke, several hundred East Berlin residents gathered on the other side of the wall, trying to hear or at least see what was happening. They knew from West German television and radio that the American president would be speaking at 2 p.m. In the hour beforehand, they had strolled in groups down Unter den Linden, the main boulevard of East Berlin that runs to the Brandenburg Gate. When they reached Pariser Platz, the open square connecting the boulevard and the gate, they found that it had been sealed off. Many East Berliners congregated just to the east of this new barrier, listening to the music that preceded Reagan’s speech. East German police, the Volkspolizei, arrived.
At 1:58 p.m. a loudspeaker warned, “You are asked to continue on your way. Do not remain standing.” The message was repeated. Police officers wandered into the crowd, urging people to leave the area and, in one case, asking several young people for their papers. But most of the crowd stayed put; several people told the police officers they didn’t understand why they had to leave.
The East German authorities were not eager for a confrontation. The crowd had assembled in virtually the same location where the clashes had broken out the previous weekend as East Berliners gathered to hear the rock concerts on the other side of the wall. Those earlier protests had attracted international press coverage, and Honecker’s regime was reluctant to call attention to itself by cracking down once again. The police took no further action.
For the following hour, while Reagan was speaking, the East German crowd stood there, in a strange, silent tableau. They could not hear the speech; the barrier erected at Pariser Platz put them too far away. Through the arches of the Brandenburg Gate, they could see in the distance, from time to time, the American flags being waved during Reagan’s speech. Some peered through binoculars toward the West, and others put children on their shoulders to see the flags. After an hour, as they saw the crowds in West Berlin beginning to disperse, the East Berlin onlookers began to wander off too.7
Some of the residents of West Berlin were not nearly as subdued. West Berlin officials put ten thousand policemen on the streets to help keep the city quiet during Reagan’s visit. Nevertheless, both before Reagan’s speech and in the hours after it, there were violent street battles between protesters and the police. Young West Berlin residents, wearing masks, threw paving stones at the police and smashed the windows of banks and department stores. Police cordoned off Kreuzberg, the area of the city where most of the demonstrations took place. The final words of Reagan’s speech—“if they should have the kind of government they apparently seek, no one would ever be able to do what they’re doing again”—were a hastily added reaction to the intensity of these West Berlin demonstrations.
Reagan left for Tempelhof Airport, where he took part in the event that had first prompted his visit to the city: an American-sponsored birthday party, complete with cake, in honor of the 750th anniversary of the founding of Berlin. He was following President François Mitterrand and Queen Elizabeth, who had already taken part in similar anniversary celebrations during the previous month. The American president viewed a display of the Berlin Airlift, shaking hands with three U.S. Air Force pilots who had taken part in the operation nearly four decades earlier.
The Reagans flew on Air Force One to Bonn, carrying Helmut Kohl and his wife along with them. The stopover was a formality: Bonn was the West German capital and the American president needed to put in an appearance there. It lasted only about ninety minutes, and Reagan did not leave the airport grounds. He stood with Kohl for the playing of national anthems, reviewed the troops, and talked with the German chancellor for about forty-five minutes in a room at the airport. Then he returned to his airplane for the long trip back across the Atlantic. At 9:47 p.m. Washington time, Reagan was back inside the White House. He was never to return to Berlin for the remainder of his presidency. He had said what he wanted to say.
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WHY NOT “MR. HONECKER”?
Reagan’s appeal to tear down the wall had little impact in East Germany, at least at the time. Quite a few East Germans knew what he had said—they had heard the speech on West German radio and television—but nobody thought it would lead to any change. “No one believed that the wall would come down any time soon,” Bettina Urbanski, a journalist in East Berlin, remembered many years later. “Young people couldn’t even remember the time before the wall existed.”1