I'm sure there will be many of these published today. Send me more if you run across any and I'll add them to the list.
Photos by Peter Turnley taken in Romania, Berlin, Czechoslovakia, Soviet Union, and Hungary, most of them in late 1989.
Update: Pictures from a Vanished Country by Magnum's Thomas Hoepker.
Earlier this year I realized we would celebrate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I went back into my archive and discovered that I had boxes full of negatives that I had never seen before, taken in East Germany over the past 50 years. It was a treasure which had to be unearthed.
(thx, bojan)
Update: The Berlin Wall: Rise and Fall, photos from Life magazine.
Mediabistro has collected video of how the news was reported on American television.
Update: The Big Picture weighs in: The Berlin Wall, 20 years gone.
The NY Times asked their readers to submit photos of the Wall: The View From the Wall.
The Times also has some nice split-screen photos of before and after the Wall fell. (thx, mau)
Photos from Poland in the 1980s. (thx, tomek)
From the WSJ: Wall's Rise and Fall. (thx, paul)
Berliners! Artist Martin Butler is trying to find 33,000 people to recreate the Berlin Wall for the 20th anniversary of the Wall's fall.
The idea is to form on the 9th of november 2009 -- the night the Wall fell 20 years ago -- a line of people that will recreate the Berlin Wall with their physical presence, marking the path where the wall once stood. Thousands of people will form a human chain that will make its way on the 9th of november around 8.15pm. This action will last for approximately 15 minutes.
If you want to be a part of the piece, sign up on the web site. (thx, søren)
Update: A U2 concert at the Brandenburg Gate has run into some trouble after -- and I swear I am not making this up -- a huge wall has been constructed to keep non-ticket holders out of the concert. (thx, john)
One of the many things on Ronald Reagan's mind during the height of the Cold War in the 1980s was the nature of Mikhail Gorbachev's religious beliefs. Some recently declassified notes taken during a summit meeting in Moscow in 1988 indicate that Reagan went so far as to attempt to convert Gorbachev to Christianity.
Gorbachev tried to switch the subject. Perhaps the United States and the Soviet Union might open the way for greater cooperation in space, he told the president. But the president wasn't to be diverted. According to the transcript, Reagan told Gorbachev that space was in the direction of heaven, but not as close to heaven as some other things that they had been discussing.
As the meeting ended, Reagan became even more direct and personal. He noted that his own son Ron did not believe in God either. "The President concluded that there was one thing he had long yearned to do for his atheist son. He wanted to serve his son the perfect gourmet dinner, to have him enjoy the meal, and then to ask him if he believed there was a cook."
In Arsenals of Folly, Richard Rhodes details the making of the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union, with a particular focus on the roles of Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. The book is fantastic and a full review is forthcoming, but I wanted to share a couple of passages that would be worthy of cinematic adaptation.
A pivotal event in the book is the 1986 summit meeting between the two leaders in Reykjavik, Iceland. For two full days, Gorbachev and Reagan discussed drastically reducing the number of nuclear weapons in the two countries' arsenals with the eventual goal of eliminating nuclear weapons altogether. Gorbachev proposed meeting in Iceland because it was halfway between the US and the Soviet Union, but the tiny country was unprepared in some ways for the number of people participating in the negotiations.
Back at the American Embassy, Shultz assembled Donald Regan, John Poindexter, Paul Nitze, Richard Perle, Max Kampelman, Kenneth Adelman, and Poindexter's military assistant, Robert Linhard, inside what Adelman calls "the smallest bubble ever built" -- the Plexiglas security chamber, specially coated to repel electromagnetic radiation and mounted on blocks to limit acoustic transmissions, that is a feature of every U.S. Embassy in the world. Since the State Department had seen no need for extensive security arrangements for negotiating U.S. relations with little Iceland, the Reykjavik Embassy bubble was designed to hold only eight people. When Reagan arrived, the air-lock-like door swooshed and everyone stood up, bumping into each other and knocking over chairs in the confusion. Reagan put people at ease with a joke. "We could fill this thing up with water," he said, gesturing, "and use it as a fish tank." Adelman gave up his chair to the president and sat on the floor leaning against the tailored presidential legs, a compass rose of shoes touching his at the center of the circle.
And later, the US team deliberated in an even tinier space:
Gorbachev and Reagan returned. The leaders retreated upstairs with their teams. Reagan's advisors briefed him in the only place where they could meet in private, Rowny recalled, "a little ten by twelve bathroom where about ten of us crowded in. Several stood in the bathtub, Reagan was on the throne. I was agitated, I was worried about the idea of giving up all nuclear weapons."
The metaphorical possibilities of these two scenes are endless. I hope someone working with a good cinematographer makes a movie out of the book.
Richard Rhodes' Arsenals of Folly is the third book in what is now a series of "Making of" books about the atomic age, picking up where The Making of the Atomic Bomb (for which Rhodes won the Pulitzer) and Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (which should have won a Pulitzer and is one of my favorite non-fiction books ever) left off.
In a narrative that reads like a thriller, Rhodes reveals how the Reagan administration's unprecedented arms buildup in the early 1980s led ailing Soviet leader Yuri Andropov to conclude that Reagan must be preparing for a nuclear war. In the fall of 1983, when NATO staged a larger than usual series of field exercises that included, uniquely, a practice run-up to a nuclear attack, the Soviet military came very close to launching a defensive first strike on Europe and North America. With Soviet aircraft loaded with nuclear bombs warming up on East German runways, U.S. intelligence organizations finally realized the danger.
Random House has posted a portion of the first chapter from which I won't quote because Rhodes' storytelling style is nigh impossible to excerpt; he starts the story on page one and doesn't relent until the final paragraphs. Like the above quote says, his nonfiction reads like a novel...reminds me of Tom Clancy's books but meticulously researched and true.
Rhodes' followup to The Making of the Atomic Bomb (for which he won a Pulitzer), while not as tight a narrative as its predecessor, was more interesting to me because I was less familiar with the story. In particular, the Soviet espionage effort during WWII was fascinating.
