Some of the great myths about the Revolution of 1989 in Eastern Europe include the belief that Ronald Reagan's going to the Berlin Wall a few years earlier had a great deal to do with the opening of that same wall a few years later.
http://chnm.gmu.edu/1989/exhibits/reagan-brandenburg/essay
According to popular American school syllabi, this speech of Reagan's at the Brandenburg Gate in June 1987 had a fairly direct influence on what occurred within two to three years in Eastern Germany-and Eastern Europe.
Nonsense! Most of the European press on both sides of the Wall ridiculed Reagan's naivety at the time.
If, in the end, Reagan was correct in indicating that Gorbachev would be the one to open the Iron Curtain between East and West Germany, it was only correct due to the fact that Gorbachev was young enough not to die in office as had his predecessors as head of the Soviet Communist Party in 1982 (Brezhnev) , 1983 (Andropov) , and 1985 (Chernenko).
Another myth from 1989 memories and historical narration is that the combined Carter-Reagan arms build up led directly to the collapse of the Soviet Union. This second myth actually has a bit more teeth to it, but it, too, is not easily measured over time. Like with the U.S. economy today, there is no clear argument to state that the arms build-up, with its huge budget deficit in the USA, needed to lead directly to a change in the system in the Soviet Union.
Yet, both political scientists and historians in Europe and the USA continue to make such connections year-after-year as though these myths are scientific fact.
http://chnm.gmu.edu/1989/exhibits/intro/originsofchange
Basically, these are a few of the great American history myths. The facts in Eastern and Western Europe, especially in the Germanies were quite a bit different. I think, for example, that in the narration of what was happening in East Germany in the 1970s and 1980s in terms of increasing tolerance of opposition, the role of the churches as an umbrella of incubation of democratic reform are ignored in American historical memory.
(In contrast, the history of the big man, like the Pope John Paul II and the institution of the Catholic Church in Poland are almost never ignored. This is because this movement could be described from the American perspective as a Western-driven movement, i.e. not always a clearly locally developed or indigenous movement.)
As another example, I also explained to my one-time professor of political theory at Texas A & M that it would not be difficult to claim that the image of the Tiananmen Square massacre had a more direct effect on what occurred in autumn 1989 in Eastern Europe than what Reagan had said at the Wall in 1987 or how much money the USA had spent or wasted on weapons from 1978 through 1989.
In short, with this first writing on the Revolutions of 1989, I need to emphasize that history reveals and will continue to reveal that the image of the massacre of students in Tiananmen Square in China in June 1989 had a much more profound and direct effect on the peoples and leaders of the Eastern Block and Soviet Union than did anything that Ronald Reagan said at the Wall two years earlier.
How do I know what the River of History was like in Europe in the 1980s?
Well, first of all, I lived it. I mean: "I lived in that River of History."
For all but one year between 1983 and 1990, I lived in either Western Germany or France. Moreover, I made about ten visits to East and West Berlin between 1987 and 1990. The last visit found me climbing over the Wall with thousands of others in front of the Brandenburg Gate.
Between 1987 and 1989, I also traveled to Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union before the Wall came down in Berlin.
Not only did I personally have the pleasure of climbing over the Wall at Brandenburg Gate on December 31, 1989, but in Wuppertal, Germany I had been leading weekly discussions (1987 to 1990) over "current political affairs, social issues and environment" for adults from across West Germany, Poland, Romania, East Germany and other European states, i.e. as the Wall opened up in November of 1989. (Note: These discussions were held at the Elberfelder-Volkshochule or Adult Continuing Education Center.)
