As I was writing about “November 11th, 1918” (post-242), another anniversary was being commemorated. The 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
I think historians of the future ought to use the two (11-11-1918 to circa 11-11-1989) as bookends, to fence off a coherent era of history. It is convenient, or poetic, or something special anyway, that the period is exactly seventy-one years to the day. Those seventy-one years were an era of wild political-ideological struggle, unseen, really, before or since.
- November 11th, 1918 : WWI ends as the armistice goes into effect at 11 AM. That war really brought down the old aristocratic order in Europe. As a result, politics was “opened up” very widely, perhaps more widely than it has ever been, before or since. Formerly-fringe “radicals” proliferated everywhere.
- 1918 through the 1960s: A lot of stuff happens, in a lot of directions. As the smoke clears, Soviet-model Communism is arguably the biggest winner of the decades of political struggle after 1918. Certainly the biggest if looked at in relative terms; from zero communist states on the map in 1917 to something like half the world in the 1960s.
- November 9th and 10th, 1989: The Berlin Wall Falls. The East German Communist government allows free border crossing and anti-communist radicals quickly take to smashing up the wall. The same was happening everywhere across the Soviet bloc in these months, but the symbolism too profound to not focus on Berlin. Breached late in the day on the 9th, free movement persisted on the 10th. As the sun rose on November 11th, still no crackdown. It must’ve been clear to everyone by, say, lunchtime (11 AM?) on the 11th that “Soviet-model Communism” was finished as an ideology and force in the world. The East German Communist state had gone out with a whimper. (The ex-Soviet bloc faced dreary years ahead. Ukraine: In 2013 [before the coup and ongoing civil war] Ukraine’s economy was, incredibly, still only two-thirds its 1989 size. See post-194).
November 11th, 1918 to November 11th, 1989: The Era of Ideological Struggle.
I don’t remember any of it.