When we think about the fall of the Berlin Wall, which took place 30 years ago next week, the piece of oratory we associate it with is Ronald Reagan’s speech at the Brandenburg Gate: “Tear down this wall!” Quite right, too: it was one of the Gipper’s finest moments, against strong competition. Here was a speech in which — with the wall right there beside him as a visible symbol of division — Reagan was able to play a variation on his predecessor’s “Ich bin ein Berliner”: “Standing before the Brandenburg Gate, every man is a German, separated from his fellow men. Every man is a Berliner, forced to look upon a scar.”
The speech’s killer line was given special torque by its use of apostrophe — its direct personal address to the then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Reagan had opened his remarks with an address to his immediate audience — the then German chancellor, the city’s mayor and the West German crowd in earshot. He’d acknowledged, too, that the speech was being overheard (“Our gathering today is being broadcast throughout western Europe and North America. I understand that it is being seen and heard as well in the east”) and he directly addressed those in the Eastern Bloc and in East Berlin especially. “I address my remarks to you just as surely as to those standing here before me.” He said — in German — “There is only one Berlin.”
Shades, here, of David Bowie’s 1987 Reichstag concerts — where he, too, was conscious of East German overhearers as he sang “Heroes”: “We kind of heard that a few of the East Berliners might actually get the chance to hear the thing, but we didn’t realise in what numbers they would. And there were thousands on the other side that had come close to the wall. So it was like a double concert where the wall was the division. And we would hear them cheering and singing along from the other side. God, even now I get choked up. It was breaking my heart. I’d never done anything like that in my life, and I guess I never will again.”