Let’s stop the hagiography

For several years now, some students at Muhlenberg and other colleges across the country have followed the national Republican party playbook to participate in decontextualized performance art. They erect sheets of fiberboard or plywood, cover them with spray paint, and then break them down with hammers. The event allegedly celebrates freedom as symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall. The motivation for this performance is the delusion that the Berlin Wall came down because of President Ronald Reagan’s 1987 sound bite, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” This speech was a non-event that has become part of Reagan hagiography. Attendance at this photo-op was roughly 10 percent of the number present during John F. Kennedy’s equally ineffective “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech. Ineffective because neither speech changed the political situation. Reagan had nothing to do with the fall of the Berlin Wall. But Reagan did a lot to demoralize the citizens of West and East Germany during the 1980s.

During those years, a ubiquitous graffiti slogan expressed a collective fear: “Wir wollen kein Euroschima” (We want no Euroshima). At that time, young people referred to themselves as the no-future generation, which resulted in marriage and birth rate declines. Why? Both the United States and the Soviet Union had nuclear missiles aimed at Germany. The United States was deploying Pershing II missiles on West German soil, and Reagan stated repeatedly that the United States could win a limited nuclear war against the “evil empire.” But where would this so-called limited nuclear war take place? Germany would be ground zero. No wonder that the younger generation saw itself as having no future. Reagan’s escalation of the Cold War had only one positive effect: the growing peace movements in both West and East Germany.

Reagan is correctly given credit for engaging in talks limiting nuclear weapons with Mikhail Gorbachev. However, these talks began only because his friend Margaret Thatcher, the prime minister of the United Kingdom, had met Gorbachev and then told Reagan, “We can do business with this man.” If anyone is to be credited with inspiring the East Germans, it would be Gorbachev with his policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring).

By the mid-1980s, East Germany was financially bankrupt. The people had been gathering in the churches (most notably in the Nikolaikirche in Leipzig) on Monday evenings to pray for peace. These peace vigils evolved into mass demonstrations for more personal liberties, political reforms, and the freedom to travel outside the Soviet bloc. (As Alex says in the film Goodbye, Lenin!: “We wanted to take a walk and not be stopped by a wall.”) Because of this intense popular pressure, the East German government finally agreed on November 9, 1989 that its citizens would be free to travel to the West. Hearing the news, East Germans gathered at crossing points between East and West Berlin, and the border guards let the people through. That was how the Berlin Wall fell. Reagan had nothing to do with it.

Toward the end of John Ford’s film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the newspaper editor states: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” Readers want their myths, not the truth. However, Muhlenberg College believes in the collective search for truth. In this case, students need to go beyond the myth and discover the truth about the fall of the Berlin Wall. Deluded by their travesty of history, the Republican students failed to see the obvious irony when they voted for their candidate who supports the building of a new wall.