Young Angela Merkel Saunas as Berlin Wall Falls

German Chancellor Angela Merkel recalled that she had just taken her weekly sauna the night the Berlin Wall fell, on November 9, 1989. Photo by BGNES

A young East German physicist named Angela Merkel was on her way home from her weekly trip to the sauna and a beer with a friend, when she was swept up in the ecstatic crowds crossing the border at Bornholmer Street on the night of Novenber 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell.

Now, as chancellor of a reunited Germany, Mrs. Merkel is presiding over a series of events commemorating the 20th anniversary of that day. In a talk with reporters in the USA on Thursday she reminisced about that historic day and the long path Germans have taken since then to bring the two sides closer.

She balanced her comments about the events of that day with an appreciation of the struggles faced by her fellow East Germans in the period of dislocation that followed.

The celebrations and the discussion itself are complicated by profound disappointment among those left behind in the painful restructuring economy of the former East, and what many there view as a discussion dominated, like so many facets of their lives, by those from the West.

“It was a stroke of luck, but it was not ideal,” Mrs. Merkel said of what led to the opening of the wall that November night. “It was the fate of one generation that essentially had to pay for the inefficiency of the GDR economy, and whose expectations could no longer be fulfilled,” she said.

The moment was ripe for looking back on the fall of the wall “after many years of just trying to deal with the daily problems,” Mrs. Merkel said. “Our heads are now above water, and we have accomplished the most important things.”

Merkel also singled out other countries in the region for their part in the fall of Communism, like Poland with the Solidarity movement and Hungary for its relaxation of border controls with Austria, allowing thousands of East Germans to emigrate to the West in the summer before the wall came down.

“This is not just a celebration for Germany,” Mrs. Merkel said. “The Brandenburg Gate became a European symbol as well.”

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