Our 1989

On October 7, 1989, East Germany celebrated its fortieth anniversary with a military parade down Karl-Marx-Allee—an old-fashioned display of state power as protests against Communist rule spread across the country. Opponents of the regime were galled by the phalanxes of goose-stepping soldiers and columns of tanks. That same day, representatives of East Berlin’s theaters gathered secretly in the side foyer of the Volksbühne, which had opened in 1914 as part of a socialist effort to break the upper-class monopoly on education and the arts. Built in a rounded, modernist style, the Volksbühne famously promoted a program of “Art to the People,” a sentiment that should have been in line with the country’s ideals. Instead it was in this theater for the people that opposition against the people’s government coalesced, helping to lead to the huge November 4 demonstration on Alexanderplatz, when hundreds of thousands turned out to demand change. Hanging over the protests was the possibility of a “Chinese solution,” as people at the time put it: the East German government had supported Beijing’s bloody suppression of the Tiananmen demonstrations that June, and many feared it might respond si...