Unit 14 Discussion – Tear Down This Wall!
In 1987, U.S. President Ronald Reagan arguably delivered his most memorable speech at the Brandenburg Gate in West Germany, which symbolized the sociopolitical division between East and West Germany. The Brandenburg Gate was located near the Berlin Wall, the structure that physically separated Germany’s capital city, which also represented the disunion between the democratic West and the communist East. During his speech, Reagan challenged Mikhail Gorbachev, the General Secretary of the Communist Party and leader of the Soviet Union, to tear down the Berlin Wall. People on both sides of the wall – those living freely in democratic West Germany and those living under the yoke of an oppressive communist regime in East Germany – could hear, and cheered on the U.S. President.
Watch the following video:
QUESTIONS:
1. Watch the excerpt from President Reagan’s famous speech below. What did Reagan mean by, “As long as the [Brandenburg] gate is closed, as long as this scar of a wall is permitted to stand, it is not the German question alone that remains open, but the question of freedom for all mankind”?
2. Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, people in Central and Eastern Europe used civil disobedience to demand an end to communism during a series of rebellions called the Revolutions of 1989. Why do you think citizens living in communist nations, from the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Germany to Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and many other nations, including China, wanted to overthrow communist rule?
3. What role did the U.S. play in the fall of communist regimes during the Revolutions of 1989?
4. What do the Revolutions of 1989 convey about the philosophy and viability of communist governments versus veritable democratic republics, such as the United States?
