Thursday, 17 October 2024
Gallery Room, State Library
Her Excellency the Honourable Margaret Beazley AC KC

Bujari gamarruwa

Diyn Babana Gamarada Gadigal Ngura

I greet you in the language of the Gadigal, Traditional Owners of this land. I pay my respects to Elders past, present, and emerging, and acknowledge the enduring connection of Elders around NSW to Country, to culture and to community.

• The Honourable Greg Piper MP, Speaker of the NSW Legislative Assembly, Member for Lake Macquarie
• The Honourable Peter Primrose MLC, Assistant President of the Legislative Council
• Dr Marjorie O’Neill MP, Member for Coogee

Thank you, Consul-General, for your invitation to join you, your diplomatic colleagues and members of the NSW German community to mark this national day of German Unity.

There are a select number of world events which are transfixed in people’s memory: most notably, the assassination of John F Kennedy in 1963; the death of Princess Diana in 1997; 9/11 in 2001 – and two years earlier, on 9 November 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall.  Even from these far antipodean shores, the astonishment was palpable. 

As the photojournalism of people dancing on top of the Brandenburg gates streamed across the world, this rather deadpan report appeared in the Guardian newspaper:

“East Germany’s ruling Communist Party last night took the momentous step of allowing all citizens direct passage to the West in a step that renders obsolete the Berlin Wall and puts into question the border between the two Germanies.”

The question of borders was answered 11 months later, with the reunification on 3 October 1990 when the Treaty on the Final Settlement with respect to Germany came into force, having been signed in Moscow three weeks earlier.  

The impact on people on both sides of the Wall was visceral, with dancing, cheering and much hugging. The contrast in that moment from what life had been in East Germany was captured by former Chanceller Angela Merkel in her Harvard University Commencement Address in 2019 when she recalled ‘walking …on the east side of the Wall so close to freedom on the other’.[1] Whilst it is difficult to think that anything could have surpassed the joy of the moment, the long lasting metaphysical impact was summed up by one commentator who described a ‘cheering, waving mass of people chiselling away at totalitarianism’. [2]

There were also the ‘trophy’ moments, as people literally chiselled away at the wall taking a piece of history with them.  A large piece of that history sits on public land just outside the Goethe Institute in Ocean St, Woollahra. 

It is a time in history which has spawned movies, including the classic Good Bye Lenin; books such as Stasiland by Anna Funder, winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize, the United Kingdom’s most prestigious prize for non-fiction; and which, on Christmas Day saw Beethoven’s 9^th Symphony played at the Gendarmenmarkt in Berlin, by an international orchestra conducted by Leonard Bernstein. 

Ode to Joy, the rousing final movement of the 9^th Symphony was sung by the Bavarian Radio Chorus, together with members of the Radio Chorus of what had been the East Berlin Radio Chorus, already emerging as one of the best choirs in the world; and the large Children's Choir of the Dresden Philharmonie.  Momentous as that performance was of itself, the piece de resistance was Bernstein’s transposition of the word Freude (Joy,) to Freiheit (Freedom).[3]  

Whether this change was Bernstein, capturing the mood of the moment, or whether it was emblematic of his deep musical scholarship remains a mystery as  there had long been debate as to whether Friedrich von Schiller, who wrote the text of Ode to Joy in 1785 was playing word games – the use of the word ‘freedom’ in those times of despotic rule could prove a little dangerous – much safer to write of a brotherhood united in ‘joy’. People would have well understood the point. But in either case, it would be undoubted that on Christmas Day 1989, freedom and joy were one and the same.  

That the Wall was breached on 9 November 1989 without any violent retribution by East German guards was almost an accident of history.  In the preceding months, East German tourists had reached West Germany as border restrictions were relaxed in neighbouring communist countries – Hungary, in particular.  East Germany was, in any event, in turmoil with its long-time leader Erich Honecker having resigned the month before.  At a press conference that was being held on 9 November a party official was asked by Italian journalist Riccardo Ehrman about East Germany’s travel ban.  

The hapless official, Gunter Schabowski, caught off guard by the question said, or so it was interpreted that he had said, that there were no travel bans and all transit points from East to West Germany were free ‘effective immediately’.  That statement was taken literally, and the rest, as they say, is history.

However, freedom rarely comes without a cost, and so it was with reunification which necessitated an end to the Four State status imposed on Germany in 1945.  Amongst other things, this required the negotiation of the withdrawal of Soviet troops – which eventually cost the Federal Republic of Germany 12,000 million Deutsche Marks, plus an interest free loan of 3,000 million Deutsche Marks. With that, Russia’s opposition to Germany’s membership of NATO dissipated.  The post-Cold War era had arrived.

To the German Consulate and German community of NSW, congratulations on your Day of German Unity.

[1] SMH 2 November 2019: Thirty Years ago the Berlin Wall came down.  Today, across Europe walls are going up

[2] Ibid

[3] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06-09/ode-to-joy-at-200-classic-100-winner/103921080