20 Years Of Reunification

Darren Cooper, travel editor for Beige Magazine reflects on the 20 years since the Berlin Wall came down and why it still has relevance for the worldwide LGBT community today.

It's hard to believe that it’s been 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. I can still vividly remember watching events unfold on TV in 1989 and the sense of a new age dawning. At 17 it was hard not to be caught up in the swing of things. Young and idealistic at the time it seemed that at the dawn of this, a new decade, change like at no other time in history was afoot and of course it was.

Back at home things seemed a little less optimistic, the Poll Tax was introduced in Scotland, Iran had broken off diplomatic ties with the UK over Salmon Rushdie’s Satanic Verses and, perhaps most worryingly of all, Kylie and Jason topped the charts with ‘Especially for You’. So the fall of the Berlin Wall, reunification of Germany and the imminent end of the Cold War was definitely something worth celebrating.

In fact it wasn’t just in Germany in 1989 that people were rejecting the old and standing up to tyranny and oppression. Poland’s first free elections ushered in the Solidarity Party and Hungary dismantled the first section of the iron curtain to fall along a 150 mile stretch of their border with Austria. The impetus for the Velvet Revolution, also in 1989 in the Czech Republic came in part at least from East German’s catching the train to Prague and then on to West Germany. The fall of the wall in November may have made this detour redundant, but the images of Czech citizens facing up to heavily armoured riot police are still as relevant today as they ever were.

In still more troubling protests, innocent and peaceful demonstrators were killed in both Tiananmen Square and Tbilisi's central square in Georgia, simply for demanding the human rights that we now take for granted. This kind of struggle is surely not lost on the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender communities. For most of us at least those images of someone offering a line of riot police a flower, or a single student standing with arms outstretched in the way of a tank is something that we as a community can and should especially identify with.

The fall of the Berlin Wall wasn’t something that just happened on its own, and of course while this was part of a much larger transformation that was happening all over Eastern Europe, Berlin seemed to solidify the feeling that was taking place all over the world. This was the start of something big, the aftershocks of which are still being felt all over the world today, people matter.

There’s something further about the events of 9 November 1989 that should also resonate with the LGBT community today too. The first people to arrive at the wall on that day 20 years ago were few, but what started as a trickle soon developed into a deluge. Normal, every-day people started to turn up in their hundreds, then thousands to protest against injustice and division and changed history, sound familiar?

I think that it’s no coincidence that gay rights group Stonewall was also founded in 1989, an organisation that sought to take down the walls of intolerance and bigotry brick by brick starting with the notorious section 28. It’s no secret that Margaret Thatcher was in favour of keeping the Berlin Wall, as well as denying equality for everyone. Thankfully though what happened in Berlin gave hope and showed that a few ordinary people, a trickle can turn into a deluge that changes the world despite what politicians and regimes think.

As I watched the celebrations that took place in Berlin this November I couldn’t help but look back at the optimism I felt 20 years ago and reflect on how both I and the world have changed over the last 2 decades. I’ve now been to Germany, many times and have found it to be one of the least divided places in the world to travel as a gay tourist. There’s not only a great scene to be enjoyed all over the country, which is one of the most progressive and avant-garde in the world but also great culture, art, history, nightlife and people too.

Germany has taught us all something very important; walls are for houses, not for people. The unification of Germany wasn’t just about connecting people geographically; it was also about connecting people socially and integration too, something that everyone ultimately benefits from.

Visit GayGermany.co.uk - the official gay and lesbian site of the German National Tourist Office
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