Even Walls Come Down

I was a German teenager living abroad when the Wall came down on November 9, 1989. It took a concert on November 12 for me to understand the emotional stakes.

The Fall of the Berlin Wall occurred on November 9, 1989. When I think back, the enduring image that comes to my mind is not of elated East Germans pouring through the border past guards who up until then had been under orders to shoot anyone trying to leave. Nor is it the iconic scene of young people from both sides of the city partying atop the graffiti-covered Wall. The memory that floats up is of my father, his heart in his throat, watching the live broadcast of a concert the Berlin Philharmonic played on the morning of November 12 for an audience of East Germans, many of whom were openly weeping.

As a news-savvy German teenager growing up in Brussels, I thought I had a solid grasp of the event’s political implications. In fact, I had been in Luxembourg on November 9 taking part in a Model European Parliament session where delegates from my school represented the Socialist faction. The next morning, we convened an emergency plenary session to discuss the geopolitical ramifications, which made me feel terribly grown up.

But it was only back in my living room in Brussels, seeing the emotions of that concert audience reflected on the face of my normally reserved father, that the wounds of the Cold War really came home to me. There would be many more musical celebrations in Berlin that year, including a jubilant performance of Beethoven’s Ninth conducted by Leonard Bernstein that featured musicians from East and West Germany, America, Britain, France and the Soviet Union. In the final chorus they substituted the word “freedom”for “joy.” I look back at that “Ode to Freedom” now — I even have a commemorative CD that came with a tiny piece of the Berlin Wall — and can’t help seeing it as a premature victory celebration. “Mission Accomplished!”

But the footage of the Berlin Philharmonic and Daniel Barenboim playing Beethoven for an all-East German audience has become only more affecting with time. Watching it after a week that brought an isolationist U.S. leader to power and the German government coalition to its knees, it is a poignant reminder of how far the world was fallen from that heady optimism. On the classical subscription channel Medici TV you can currently watch a gripping documentary about it, while the concert in its entirety is available on the Berlin Philharmonic’s Digital Concert Hall. (There’s also a free German version of the documentary without subtitles on YouTube.)

Barenboim was in town for recordings of “Così fan tutte” with the Berlin Philharmonic when the East German authorities announced that the borders were open. The next day, the orchestra council approached him about putting on an impromptu concert to commemorate the occasion. They settled on two works by Beethoven, the Piano Concerto No. 1 and the Symphony No.7. On East German media, the message went out about a free concert for anyone with proof of GDR citizenship. By dawn on Sunday, the muddy parking lot outside the Philharmonie — which sat in a no-man’s land right by the Wall — had filled up with Trabant cars.

At curtain, the hall was overflowing, with some people sitting on the steps. And by the time Barenboim gave the downbeat seated at the piano, you could see people in tears. In the beginning, the cameramen were too discreet to zoom in on faces, but because the terraced ranks surround the stage, some portion of the audience is almost always visible. And even in the grainy distance, you can see chests heaving with sighs and people removing their glasses to wipe their eyes. Later in the broadcast, there are close-ups of couples clutching each other’s hands, of a woman sobbing as she stands and claps, of a young woman listening with her head tilted and a dreamy smile on her face.

Emotions were just as high in the orchestra. One cellist had worked at the Comic Opera in East Berlin when the wall went up in 1961 and had only barely managed to retrieve his cello and tailcoat from the theater. A sizable contingent of players from Saxonia had family ties to the East. The concertmaster, Daniel Strabawa, was Polish. The Wall didn’t just cut through the city, it cut people off from their families and their hometowns. As one Swiss violinist remembers in a separate documentary posted on YouTube, “I always had the feeling there was another people living next door to us, and they were locked up.” Now, they were playing for these people.

‘It was the most emotional concert of my life,” Fergus McWilliam, a Scottish member of the brass section, says in the same video. “As a horn player you work with air, and I knew I could not make eye contact with anyone in the room because I knew that if I did, I would lose control. The emotions were so intense. You heard sighs, people almost choking on emotion. Sniffles. Crying. I had to protect myself from that to even be able to play.

Many kinds of music offer catharsis. But I think that a classical music concert is particularly apt at dislodging pent-up emotions because it imposes this stillness on the listener. I remember a string quartet concert I attended the day after my oldest child’s high school graduation, and how feelings welled up inside me that I had been too busy to name or even notice amid the hectic festivities. When I look at the East German audience take in the concert, I see them processing the momentousness of the situation.

In the break after the concerto, when the stage was being set up for the symphony, a television reporter asked a silver-haired audience member about his impressions.

“These are the happiest days of my life,” he said. “You know, in a civilized country, the longest prison term you can serve is 25 years. And we had 28 years and three months—” here he reached into his pocket for a handkerchief before adding, “and then this concert. I have never heard Beethoven like this.”

Over the previous two days, I had mostly felt excitement and sympathetic joy at the sight of all those suppressed people getting their first taste of freedom. But watching my father take in the broadcast, occasionally commenting on the scenes in the auditorium in a voice thick with emotion, I understood for the first time how much grief the division of Germany had caused that would need to be healed. It was only that concert that helped me feel the Wall as a collective scar.

I had not only grown of age with the Iron Curtain as an incontrovertible fact but had been raised to embrace the European Community (as it was called before the Maestricht Treaty made it a European Union) as my primary identity. It’s not that I didn’t know the German Democratic Republic. We had driven over its aseptic transit routes on visits to relatives in West Berlin. We had toured its historic sites in Dresden, Leipzig and Weimar – along with the Buchenwald crematoria that had pulverized my grandfather’s remains – on a summer vacation in 1985. As recently as in May of 1989, I had crossed over into the East during a class trip to Berlin, in search of cheap sheet music.

But until that concert, I had not felt any visceral kinship with East Germans. Yet here they were, drawn by a love for the same music I loved, the same Beethoven whose Ode to Joy had recently been adopted as the anthem of the European Community. The best concerts arise from a special symbiosis between players and listeners. In this one, the chemistry between the people on stage and those in the ranks was off the charts. The resulting Beethoven was electric.

Many works by Beethoven would have fit the celebratory mood of the moment. But the Seventh Symphony draws an especially long arc from darkness to triumph. The famous second movement, which manages to sound both funerary and light-footed — “a dance with grief,” one cellist calls it in the documentary — seems to offer a panoramic view of the march of history toward justice. I can only imagine how the East Germans in the audience that day heard it. They had just brought down an authoritarian regime with persistent, peaceful demonstrations that had built over the course of weeks from grassroots vigils in churches to mass protests drawing half a million citizens. On that Sunday morning 35 years ago, that music belonged to them. But it’s always there for any of us in need of inspiration or just as an excuse to sit still and feel all the feels.