The Revolutions of 1989

It’s hard to think of non-cliché things to say on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. But I was interested to learn while in the former East Germany, that in the GDR economic system being a waiter was considered a very desirable job. It was apparently disorienting for some ambitious young East Germans who’d achieved the dream of waiterdom to discover that this is a low-status position in a market economy. The guy I heard about this from at greatest length made the transition okay, however, and now works in PR for Volkswagen.

Late-GDR life is the subject of two excellent films, Good Bye, Lenin! and The Lives of Others, that everyone should see. I’m not really clear how representative daily life in the GDR was of everyday existence in other Eastern Bloc countries, but since as far as I know there aren’t excellent movies about daily life in Communist Poland or Communist Bulgaria this is probably how we’ll remember things.

Charles Kenny has written a very interesting paper on the Soviet bloc’s economic performance.

Something remarkable to keep in mind about the Revolutions of 1989 is how peaceful they were—triumphs of people power and courageous non-violent resistance on the part of populations, aided by a late-Communist leadership that in the end mostly chose to do the right thing and give up rather than go down in a wave of bloodshed. With the exception of Romania and Yugoslovia, regimes that ruled by force and violence were not, themselves, brought down by force and violence. A lot of somewhat odd happenstance was involved in the happy ending of the Cold War in Germany, but as the pattern was largely repeated elsewhere I think perhaps it shouldn’t be chalked up to fluky contingencies.