The Fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 signified the beginning of the process of re-unifying East and West Germany. The country had been divided into four occupation zones directly after the end of World War II in 1945. Berlin was split into two, marking the political and economic divide: on one side, West Germany adopted capitalism and on the other, East Germany adopted socialism. The Berlin Wall stood for nearly thirty years before it fell. On its destruction, family members who'd not seen each other for a generation were reunited.
But what cultural walls were also dismantled in the UK in that last gasp of the 1980s, inspired by the wall's demolition? And what ripple effect did this event in Germany have on British culture over the immediate years that followed?
A Guardian article, published thirty years after the fall of the Berlin wall in 2019, tells the story of a musician and record producer from Manchester called Mark Reader who was able to directly impact the techno and trance scene of Berlin in the wake of the wall falling, spreading the distinctive Mancunian sound of the early 1990s to reunified Germany. In the year following the wall's collapse, he produced indie artists including Die Vision on his record label MFS. While over here in the UK, the British alternative rock band Jesus Jones captured the cultural mood in their single 'Right Here Right Now', released in September 1990, which went on to be an international hit selling over one million copies. The song was inspired by the revolutions of 1989, including in Germany. In the music video for the single, the band sing on a stage with clips from the fall of the Berlin Wall and news footage from the collapse of the Soviet Union projected on to the stage's backdrop. Mike Edwards, the lead singer of Jesus Jones, sings: 'Right here, right now, watching the world wake up from history.'
'Waking up from history' was the prevalent – and some critics might say naïve - feeling in the early 1990s. The American political scientist Francis Fukuyama famously wrote the essay 'The End of History' which was published in the summer of 1989, just a few months before the Berlin Wall fell. He wrote that the triumph of the Western idea is 'evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systemic alternatives to Western liberalism.' He attracted critics and won plaudits in the aftermath of the essay and the following book, The End of History and the Last Man, which came out a couple of years later in 1992, but he was not able to predict the erosion of some liberal democracies which would follow decades later.
For many, the Berlin Wall had come to directly signify the Iron Curtain. Its fall was seen as representing the success of capitalism and as a watershed moment within frictionless trade. In the UK in November 1989, the conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was in what would become her final year in office. A neo-liberal capitalist, being able to herald free enterprise directly spoke to her political project, but of course, she had many detractors, especially within the underground and grassroots arts and cultural scene in the UK of that era.
It is perhaps no surprise that the wall itself should instantly became a commodity. Soon after its collapse, souvenir hunters chipped away parts of the wall to re-sell or keep. Here in the UK, you can view sections of the Berlin Wall today in museums, from Cornwall, England to Edinburgh, Scotland. While in 1990, in order to capture the landmark historical moment, the Imperial War Museum presciently commissioned the Scottish artist Jock McFayden to record life in Berlin directly in the aftermath of the Berlin Wall coming down, over a period of a ten-day visit. During his trip, the artist gathered inspiration, materials and photographs in order to respond to them visually. From October 1991 to January 1992, his exhibition 'Fragments from Berlin' displayed his artistic response to how the city was shifting and changing after this seismic socio-political event. The Imperial War Museum now possess four of the artworks from that exhibition. Perhaps viewing these works of art is one of the best ways of understanding the unique atmosphere which the momentous event created? Because after all, it's so often the artists, filmmakers, musicians and writers who are best able to capture the ineffable zeitgeist of the time…
Julia Forster is a first year Creative Writing PhD candidate at Aberystwyth University. She is the author of a novel, What a Way to Go (2016) and a non-fiction work, Muses (2007). Her poetry collection Invisible Sisterhood will be published by Parthian in spring 2027.