Berlin's freedom, 20 years later

Human beings are funny creatures. As we were reminded last week, a round wood bat striking a round leather ball brings joy to millions. As we have been reminded this week, a concrete wall, and the fall thereof, can produce varying emotions in equal or greater numbers of people.

Twenty years ago yesterday, the Berlin Wall fell. They commemorated it in Berlin, and our president was not there. I wish he had been, but he wasn't. C'est la vie.

Anyway, this anniversary shouldn't be about who showed up to the remembrance ceremony. It should be about the people who were there all those years ago. I went back and looked at the old footage that was broadcast on the BBC, ABC News and the like. I watched East Berliners, young and old, cross into West Berlin, a capitalist enclave surrounded by hostile, totalitarian East Germany. Some stayed in West Berlin, some went back to their old homes, but the question of who stayed was beside the point. The point was, they were free to move as they wished, even if all they wished to see was a few city blocks on the other side of the Brandenburg Gate.

Very late Sunday night, I came home from work, flipped on the TV, and there was the late Leonard Bernstein, conducting a performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in Berlin on Christmas Day 1989, leading an orchestra and chorus comprising American, Russian, French, British and, of course, East and West German musicians. This was the performance where Bernstein famously changed one word of Friedrich Schiller's "Ode to Joy." Out went the German word "Freude" (joy). In went "Freiheit" (freedom). The message was not particularly subtle, but the famously demonstrative Bernstein knew that this was not about subtlety. This was about a city and its people coming together, and being made whole in a very real sense.

No nation and city has had a more complex, tumultuous relationship with its history than Germany and Berlin. As the 20th anniversary approached, there was mild lamenting in various retrospectives about the end of the East German system, which encouraged women to work and provided free daycare, among other things. So, the age-old question has been raised again: Which is more desirable, social rights or political rights?

To answer, let's take one more look at that old footage. I don't see West Berliners breaking down the Wall for state-owned enterprises or an all-encompassing social welfare program. What I do see is East Berliners taking advantage, after decades of going without, of the most precious gift people can give one another: the freedom to move, to speak, to choose, to vote, to live as they please.

From these fundamental rights, all others spring. To accept the minor benefits of social rights — such as those that existed in East Germany and the rest of the Eastern Bloc — is to settle for a false liberty, where the individual is only given the illusion of sovereignty, while the government holds the real power. Those East Berliners from 20 years ago knew that, and the rest of the Eastern bloc swiftly took the hint. Two years later, the USSR was officially consigned to dust.

An die Freiheit, indeed.

Samuel Chamberlain is opinion editor.