The Year That Changed the WorldBy Michael Meyer Simon Schuster 235pp; £16.99
ON NOVEMBER 9th, 1989, Michael Meyer, Newsweek’s bureau chief for Germany, central Europe and the Balkans, got a “gut” feeling and caught a flight to Berlin. A few minutes after he had crossed into the eastern section, GDR police closed the border. At 11.17pm that night, the Berlin Wall came down.
Meyer has written up his account to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet bloc. The year 1989 began with round-table discussions in Warsaw between the government and Lech Walesa’s previously banned Solidarity movement; it ended with Nicolae Ceausescu’s execution by firing squad on Christmas Day. The fall of the wall is the pivotal moment but not the whole story of that year: if Meyer got a gut feeling on November 9th, it was because so much had already happened.
Why did the Berlin Wall come down? The question
recalls that favourite of under- graduate essays – what caused the French Revolution? – and demands responses as protean. In Europe Mikhail Gorbachev is generally given credit; Gorbachev himself cited pope John Paul II because he encouraged Solidarity; Czechs put in a claim for Vaklav Havel; American neocons cite Ronald Reagan for bankrupting the USSR through the arms race and for his 1987 exhortation to “tear down the wall”.
Meyer touches on Gorbachev, Walesa and Havel but his unsung heroes in the year that changed the world – the title recalls John Reed's classic on the Bolshevik revolution, Ten Days that Shook the World– are a clutch of Hungarian politicians.
This part of the story is indeed “untold” to a wider audience: I lived three years in Hungary but I never heard, once, that the first hole in the iron curtain wasn’t made in Berlin on November 9th, but at the Hungarian-Austrian border on May 2nd, when the prime minister, Miklos Nemeth, announced laconically that for fiscal reasons he could no longer maintain the electrified barrier.
According to Meyer, Hungary’s failure to celebrate this quiet revolution was because Nemeth and his conspirators were in the communist party and were unseated in the 1990 elections.
Meyer uses vivid eyewitness accounts, interviews and secondary sources to recount this riveting history. He has the foreign correspondent’s knack of being in the right place at the right time: Berlin for the wall’s collapse, Prague for the Velvet Revolution.
He is also concerned to debunk myths, particularly “the idea of the US as an emancipator”. He links the myth of Reagan routing the “evil empire” to George W Bush’s attack on the “axis of evil”: “It was a straight line from the fantasy of cold war victory to the invasion of Iraq.”
This seems an overstatement: the rhetoric in the run-up to Iraq evoked the second World War more than the cold war. Bush may have referenced the emancipation myth but to imply, as Meyer does, that Iraq would not have been invaded if Reagan hadn’t been credited with tearing down the wall is straining for a thesis.
The thrust of this book would have been very different were it published on the 10th anniversary. Writers, no less than politicians, interpret history according to the present or, as the truism has it, each generation rewrites the French Revolution. Meyer has produced a great account, which only needs to be taken with the usual pinch of salt.
Bridget Hourican is a freelance journalist and historian