The Foreign Service Journal, November 2019

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | NOVEMBER 2019 61 Soviet troops were visible, either. Amonth earlier, when Mikhail Gorbachev had visited East Berlin to help celebrate the 40th anni- versary of the East German regime, he had made it clear that the regime needed to adopt a reform program like his own perestroika in the USSR. The East German leadership had strongly resisted such reform for years, but Gorbachev’s warning was that with- out reform, East Germany was on its own. The regime remained obdurate, but the public understood Gorbachev’s message and realized that Moscow was not going to crack down on them, as the Soviets had done in 1953 following a workers’ revolt. That evening Jon Greenwald and I traveled to Dresden, where we attended a performance of Gluck’s opera “Orpheus and Eurydice” at the fabled Semper Opera House. Following the performance, the curtain parted, and all the musical and techni- cal personnel appeared on stage. The lead male singer stepped forward and proclaimed that the country’s artists and musicians were with the entire population in demonstrating for freedom. The house exploded with cheers and applause. Reflecting on what we had experienced that day, I realized that we had seen the beginning of the end of the East German regime. The people had lost their fear, and the regime had lost its nerve. Five days later the Berlin Wall was opened (it did not fall) by East German border guards, and Europe entered a new chapter of its history. The United States stood by our German friends to help make this happen. Pierre Shostal served in the Foreign Service from 1959 to 1995. In 1989 he was director of the Office of Central European Affairs in Washington, D.C. Mr. Shostal lives in Alexandria, Virginia. A Family Story Christiane Armstrong Budapest, Hungary o n the evening of Nov. 9, 1989, the phone rang in our living room in Budapest. My father was on the line from Germany: “You won’t believe this, the wall just came down.” He was right—I was completely surprised and astounded. In Budapest, our first Foreign Service posting, we didn’t have Western television, and I had not been able to follow the rapidly unfolding events in East Germany over the previous few days. Of course, we knew what had happened that summer in Hungary. We knew that the West German embassy had been flooded by hundreds of East Germans hoping that if they made it onto embassy grounds, they would somehow be able to get to West Germany. And then on Sept. 11, driving east through Austria on our way back to Budapest from a vacation, we were stunned by the sight of hundreds of Trabis, East Germany’s “people’s car,” going in the opposite direction. Hungary had, indeed, opened its borders that day. I clearly remember being overjoyed for the East Germans who were suddenly able to leave the Eastern bloc—and envious because we were on our way back to that drab world. As much as I enjoyed our posting in Budapest, with marvelous colleagues and a fan- tastic ambassador, I could never share our American embassy friends’ enthusiasm for, as they saw it, the “quirkiness” of a communist country. The things they chuckled about were all too familiar and Checkpoint Charlie, one of the best-known border crossings during the Cold War, became a symbol of territorial and political division— between East and West, communism and capitalism, confinement and freedom. Berlin, 2015. JAMESTALALAY