Remember, remember the 9th of November. But who does? Did you instantly know I was referring to the day the Berlin Wall came down 18 years ago? Dates age faster than we do, said the poet Robert Lowell, and most of the time that is true. For an older generation, the 9th of November meant Kristallnacht, the "night of broken glass" in 1938 when Nazi thugs left German and Austrian streets strewn with the smashed glass of Jewish shop windows. For those still older, it recalled Hitler's attempted putsch in 1923. Each 9th of November supplants the last.
Earlier this week, I spent an afternoon with a long-time East German friend showing my younger son, who was 3 in 1989, the places where the Wall used to be. There's not much left: a few stretches of old concrete and raked sand (once the "death strip," where would-be escapers from East Germany were shot), grainy museum photos, a stark and rusty memorial. For those of us who were there, the experience - both the taste of our friends' long imprisonment and the magical moment of liberation - is seared in memory; but to explain it to someone who was not there requires a novelist's effort of evocation.
This remoteness is not merely a function of age or physical distance. Over dinner, I asked my German friend's eldest son, who, as a 21-one-year-old, escaped through the perforated Iron Curtain from Hungary to Austria in the summer of 1989, and is now a priest in west Berlin, what his parishioners would make of it if he preached a sermon based on his experience. Not much, he said. The congregation would probably think: There he goes again, with his eastern reminiscences.
But imagine the case of a young woman born on the morning of Nov. 9, 1989, in east Berlin. How would she reflect on her coming of age? "Just like someone in Spain or Britain," said my friends. Spain is probably a better comparison. There is a general sense that there was a dark and gloomy past somewhere back there, before one was born - like the shadow of the Franco dictatorship for a young woman in Madrid. But it's only marginally relevant to your own life today.
So why has this epochal event faded so rapidly from lived experience? Perhaps because it did not start a big new thing that is still with us: It was more a great ending than a great beginning.
On the morning after, there were huge questions in the air. Could (and should) Germany be peacefully united? Could (and should) communism, which had abolished virtually all private property, emasculated the rule of law and supplanted democracy with the "dictatorship of the proletariat," be transformed back into capitalism? As the joke went: We know you can turn an aquarium into fish soup, but can you turn fish soup back into an aquarium? Eighteen years on, these questions have been answered. Yes, you can.
Driving into the centre of east Berlin, I noticed a hippie-style shop that had on its front door a parody of the famous Cold War Berlin signs that used to say, "You are now leaving the American sector." This parodic notice read, "You are now leaving the Capitalist sector." But it isn't true. Even among the incense and beads behind that alternative front door, capitalism rules okay.
The ultimate proof of capitalism's triumph is to be seen in a full-colour advertisement that has graced the pages of The Economist and the Financial Times in recent weeks. It shows a thoughtful-looking Mikhail Gorbachev sitting in the back of a car through whose rear window you can see one of the few remaining stretches of the Berlin Wall. Beside him is a leather bag by Louis Vuitton, for which luxury goods manufacturer this world historical figure and hero of our time is now serving as an ad. Eighteen years on, that seems to be a perfect icon of the age we're in.
What, then, remains of that incredible November night when people made their own history as they danced through the Wall? Apart from our fading memories, there is at least one thing that survives with a future. The fall of the Wall is perhaps the world's most famous image of the triumph of what we call "civil resistance" - that is, popular non-violent action. It followed massive peaceful demonstrations in Leipzig and other East German cities. As one East German worker told me at the time: "You see, it shows Lenin was wrong. Lenin said a revolution could succeed only with violence, but this was a peaceful revolution."
The East German "revolution of the candles," as some dubbed it at the time, had predecessors, from the non-violent campaigns of Gandhi and Martin Luther King to Poland's Solidarity. It has also had many successors, from the Velvet Revolution in Prague to South Africa, Ukraine and, most recently, the protests led by Buddhist monks in Burma (too hastily tagged the "saffron revolution") and sober-suited lawyers in Pakistan (expect a "lawyers' revolution" tag).
Why did the use of civil resistance work in some cases, and fail in others? Courage, imagination and skilled organization of peaceful protest is not enough, if other factors of power (the army and police, a colonial power, neighbouring states, international media, economic forces) are not sufficiently present, benign or amenable. You need your Mikhail Gorbachev, your Helmut Kohl, your Western TV cameras and, not least, your party leaders who give up without firing a shot. But you also need the citizens on the streets, with their candles, their banners and the sheer peaceful force of numbers. Without them, there is no revolution. With them, you can change the course of world history. So the date may fade, but the example lives on.
