Socialism’s novel brand of nomenclature

On Nov 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall collapsed. On a very ordinary night, thousands of East Germans started crossing the dividing barrier between the communist East and capitalist West Berlin after the East German regime had suddenly opened tightly controlled border crossings. In a matter of hours, history was made. Throngs of people soon swamped the Wall and then started smashing the hated communist barrier into concrete rubble.

- John J Metzler

The Joshua trumpet had sounded, and the freedom tsunami surged throughout Central Europe.

The unbelievable road to German unity in peace, liberty and freedom had begun. Indeed, only months earlier in Poland and Hungary, the socialist regimes had fallen.

The German Democratic Republic, the part of Germany occupied by the Soviets following World War II, soon began to crumble. What was proudly called the socialist state on German soil, the red jewel of the Soviet Empire, just over a year later, would fall into the ash heap of history.

Millions of people fled from socialist East Germany to the Free West. Comparing the two sides of the once divided metropolis of Berlin was, in a sense, contrasting a drab grey place with a colourful and vibrant city.

Having been to Berlin both before and after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the difference was strikingly black and white, say between a smoke-belching East German Trabant auto and a West German Mercedes-Benz. The key was, of course, political liberty and economic freedom.