--- title: The Words (and Deeds) that Brought Down the Berlin Wall | TIME description: TIME Deputy Managing Editor Romesh Ratnesar describes the events that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, told in his new book 'Tear Down This Wall' canonical: https://time.com/video/EodIIVXT/ og:title: The Words (and Deeds) that Brought Down the Berlin Wall og:description: TIME Deputy Managing Editor Romesh Ratnesar describes the events that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, told in his new book 'Tear Down This Wall' og:url: https://time.com/video/EodIIVXT/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/EodIIVXT/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: The Words (and Deeds) that Brought Down the Berlin Wall twitter:description: TIME Deputy Managing Editor Romesh Ratnesar describes the events that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, told in his new book 'Tear Down This Wall' twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/EodIIVXT/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # The Words (and Deeds) that Brought Down the Berlin Wall > Sponsored content. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: The Words (and Deeds) that Brought Down the Berlin Wall [Watch (HLS stream): The Words (and Deeds) that Brought Down the Berlin Wall](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/EodIIVXT.m3u8) (4:50)  _Published 2009-11-04. TIME Deputy Managing Editor Romesh Ratnesar describes the events that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, told in his new book 'Tear Down This Wall'_ --- Jul 27, 2023 1:15 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [Berlin Wall Balloon Release](/video/bmcvcnZ3/) ### Berlin Wall Balloon Release [TIME Remembers: The Day The Berlin Wall Fell](/video/jV5CSSDl/) ### TIME Remembers: The Day The Berlin Wall Fell [A GPS Tour of the Berlin Wall](/video/46NxmAa2/) ### A GPS Tour of the Berlin Wall --- ## Transcript >> General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet union and Eastern Europe. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. >> When Reagan went to Berlin in 1987 and said, tear down this wall-- >> Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. >> Reagan recognized that things were changing. My name is Romesh Ratnesar, I'm the deputy managing editor of TIME and I've just written a book called, Tear Down This Wall: A city, a president and the speech that ended the cold war. This was the wall that was erected within the city that divided families, that divided neighbors. You know, one side of the block would be on the East, Eastern side and the other side on the West. And you couldn't cross it. I mean, people I talked to talked about, you know, not seeing relatives for 28- 30 years because, simply because they happened to be on the wrong side of the wall. And what Reagan often said was that in most cases, people build walls to keep people out. And in this case, the East Germans, a communist, with the support of Moscow built a wall to keep people in and essentially it became-- came to symbolized it was almost like a prison and I think for that reason, it really highlighted the contrast between the Western capitalist democratic- system and the socialist Soviet- run system in the East. The facts that the East Germans were so affective have basically suppressing their own people masked the fact that there was tremendous discontent that was building and by the time Reagan arrives, you're starting to see some of the signs of this and just before he arrive, in fact, there have been a clash between East German youths and the police near the Brandenburg Gate. There was a concert going on just on the Western side of the Berlin Wall near the rise stag, in which David Bowie and Eurhythmics and Phil Collins are the people were performing and a lot of East Germans had heard about this and kept coming from all over the country to just try to listen and just kind of get-- hear a little bit of this concert and basically the authorities pushed them back from the wall. There were riots and, you know, number of people were injured and imprisoned as result to this but this really was the first sustained protest and revolts against the communist government in like 30 years. Early 1989, the communist gripped throughout Eastern Europe started to crumble and in Hungary, you had a group of reformers who really patted themselves after Gorbachev, who finally managed to take power. And they decided to open the borders with East Germany. -[ Foreign Language ]. >> And essentially this sort of, what started as a trickle just became a flood and people were just pouring out of East Germany and in some cases just not coming back and so the authorities decided they had to do something about this. They had to get control the situation so they decided to institute this policy in which people would be able to immigrate to other countries for a month at a time. But they wanted this to be very, you know, controlled. You know, people would have to get their passport stamped. It would all be very orderly. And on the night of November 9th 1989, the governor official who went to announce this policy was asked to question about and clearly not really reviewed all the details and he somewhat inadvertently said this policy takes effect immediately. And once he said that, people just started having straight to the Berlin Wall to try to go across into West Berlin and basically it was just too-- it was overwhelming and they were hundreds of thousands of people who were there that night and the guard just said, we can't stop them and they let them through and that's basically how the wall came down. ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"The Words (and Deeds) that Brought Down the Berlin Wall","description":"TIME Deputy Managing Editor Romesh Ratnesar describes the events that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, told in his new book 'Tear Down This Wall'","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/EodIIVXT/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2009-11-04T23:52:45.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/EodIIVXT.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/video/EodIIVXT/","duration":"PT4M50S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/video/EodIIVXT/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}} ```