With all the insanity in the world, it’s too easy to lose track of the good things.  There’s no news like good news because good news is no news at all.  Human nature tends to focus on the bad.  William F. Buckley, Jr.’s new book The Fall of the Berlin Wall is therefore all the more welcome.  How quickly we can forget what a wonderful event that was, and how much better off the whole world is because of it. 

Buckley is a treasure, but when I read his works it’s often with sense of regret.  For all these years he’s often displayed two bad habits: his sentences have too many clauses, and he uses too many Greek and Latin garbage words.  (They’re garbage words because their English equivalents are usually sharper, and because they’re often foolishly obscure and therefore distract from the central points being made.)  This book marks a total break from those tendencies.  Stripped down to clear and simple prose, Buckley shows what an extraordinary writer he can be.  He has a certain liveliness, a sense of humor, a sense of the absurd.  He’s willing to express contempt for those who deserve it, but he doesn’t allow things to bog down by belaboring a point or telling the reader to feel a certain way when any sensible reader will already feel that way.

This elegant essay traces the history of the Berlin Wall from the beginning of the Cold War which led to the Wall’s inception on August 13, 1961, until the night of November 9, 1989, when thousands of people danced on it.  Buckley points out the awful state of Berlin in May, 1945, by which point 50,000 Berliners had been killed, a quarter of the housing destroyed, and tens of thousands of Soviet troops had occupied the city after the final battle in the European Theater.  Buckley sketches brief and damning portraits of the East German Communists, who were a bunch of shabby nonentities.  In the immediate aftermath of the war, the surviving Germans were mainly interested in finding their next meal, and in the chaos those who wished to move West could do so.  By 1953 many Eastern Germans were fed up with Communist rule, and that year saw a wave of strikes that the Communists crushed by killing hundreds.  The emigration from East to West continued, and in the decade after the war four million left the east. [p. 23]  In 1959 7500 Germans were fleeing Westward each month, and in 1960 this increased to 12,600 [p. 17]  In June of 1961, 20,000 fled [p.39]. 

By that point the leaders of the Warsaw Pact were alarmed on two main counts: the flow of people to the West was an embarrassment, and many of the best and brightest were among those leaving, and this had major implications for the East German economy.  By late 1961 the Communists were meeting and trying to figure out what to do, and their answer was the Wall, known in Commie-speak as the “Anti-Fascist Protective Rampart.”  Buckley points out that if the West had physically intervened in order to halt the construction, the East would have backed down.  But we had know way of knowing that. [p. 53].  As it was, a few American tanks tried to make a show of force but it amounted to nothing [p. 83].  The West had to content itself with a proclamation of moral victory, which is what you say when you’ve just been handed your head. 

For the next two years it was almost impossible for Westerners to visit the East, but in those days a major new activity became all the rage: tunneling.  Here Buckley does an excellent job telling a number of harrowing stories of people who engaged in that dangerous occupation.  In addition to the tunneling industry, there arose a major new form of trade.  From the early Sixties till 1989, West Germany purchased the freedom of 25,000 East German prisoners, at a cost of two billion dollars.  [p. 106] One wonders if this charming source of easy profits encouraged the East to imprison people who otherwise would have remained free.  Was it the only Eastern industry that actually showed good financial results? 

During the Wall’s tenure in defense of tyranny, a major evolution took place in Eastern Europe.  As Buckley states, people like the Czech leader Alexander Dubcek (of 1968’s Prague Spring) and Soviet dissidents like Alexander Solzenhitsyn and Andrei Sakharov weren’t shot.  Had Stalin and others of his generation still been in power, such dissidents would have been murdered.  In 1956 the Soviets had the ruthlessness to crush Hungary, and they sent in the tanks to subdue the quasi-pacifist Czechs (are they Europe’s most peaceful people?) in 1968.  But in 1977 a Czech dissident group -- Charter 77, which included Vaclav Havel -- arose and was suppressed.  Havel was imprisoned briefly and then harassed, but he wasn’t shot.  [pp. 128-9]  When dictatorships stop murdering people, the end is usually nigh.

This brings us to this book’s limitation.  In the latter part of the Nineteenth century and the first third of the Twentieth, Marxism had the power to move people to murderous fanaticism.  By the late Thirties the Marxist creed was rapidly dying in Europe, although it experienced a barbarous second life in other parts of the world.  Why did it come and go so fast?  Why did beliefs and perceptions change so profoundly?  As far as I’m aware, neither Buckley nor anyone else has offered a convincing explanation.  One might say that different generations usually have different beliefs, but the central elements of the British and American ideologies have scarcely changed or wavered for over two centuries.  Why are we so steadfast while others -- Nazis, Communists, Fascists, Pan-Arabists, etc. -- come and go?  While this short book gives us a fine narrative of events, it does not offer deeper explanations of such crucial questions, nor does it provide a picture of how people lived and worked during the Communists’ time in power in Eastern Europe. 

By March of 1985 the last of Stalin’s political offspring had bitten the dust (at least in Russia), and Mikhail Gorbachev came to power.  It’s probably fair to say that he did not intend to dismantle the Communist empire, but he showed himself to be a decent and practical man.  He therefore wound up with no choice but to say things like, “We are interested in eliminating the division of Europe ... and the gradual advancement toward a common European market.”  On the other side Reagan was saying “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”  [pp. 130-3]  In 1989 the Warsaw Pact disintegrated.  In May, Gorbachev ordered a reduction in Soviet forces in Hungary and East Germany, and Hungary opened its border with Austria.  On June 4 of that year Poland had a largely free election and Solidarity clobbered the Communists, and on August 17 Jaruzelski transferred power to Lech Walesa.  [pp. 141-8]  In October Gorbachev visited East Germany, where he said “Policies that affect the German Democratic Republic are decided not in Moscow but in Berlin.” [p. 157]  In other words, don’t look to us to save you.  On October 18 the old hack Erich Honnecker retired and was succeeded by Egon Krenz, who was young enough to have a future and didn’t want to be hanged from a lamppost.  On the evening of November 9, the boss of Berlin, Gunter Schabowski, held a press conference in which he said that “Permanent emigration is henceforth allowed across all border crossing points between East Germany and West Germany and West Berlin.”  At about eleven that evening Communism died.  [pp. 156-163]

Over the next few months all the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe fell, and only in Rumania was there a lot of violence.  Only in Russia did the Communist Party manage to maintain a twilight existence.  In August of 1991 some Communist clowns tried to stage a coup, but they held power for less than 48 hours.  [pp. 189-190]

In the defeat of Communism, Buckley himself deserves a share of the credit.  Few people in the West worked harder to rally the forces of anti-Communism.  For almost half a century Buckley was an important leader in the fight.  Everybody makes mistakes, and it’s fair to say that from the Sixties till the early Eighties he underestimated the decrepitude of the Soviet system, and he overestimated the appeal and importance of the Marxist ideology.  In reading some of his earlier work, I get the impression that he thought the Marxists were sailing to inevitable victory, and he only hoped to delay the awful day.  At times he was too tolerant of some people, notably Joe McCarthy.  Some of Buckley’s friends went insane or became insufferably eccentric or perverse.  But if you were to tote up his mistakes and compare them with his accomplishments, the balance sheet would be extremely favorable to WFB.      

The recent announcement of his step back from National Review was naturally a disappointment, but he’s pushing eighty and it’s best to take these decisions while you’re still on top of everything.  Let’s hope he keeps writing for a long time.  As I said before, his style in this book is excellent.  Here’s a little excerpt:

The Fall of the Berlin Wall is available on Amazon.com.

Geoffrey Riklin is a writer living in Detroit. A graduate of the University of Michigan, he also attended the London School of Economics, and has lived recently in Chile and Spain.

Send Feedback Regarding this Review

Send this Article to a Friend