November 9th

clipped from www.newyorker.com Germany observes no official holiday on November 9th, the day when, twenty years ago, crowds of stunned, delirious East Germans breached the Berlin Wall. This is because November 9th is also the date on which Kaiser Wilhelm abdicated, in 1918, two days before Germany’s defeat in the First World War. On November 9, 1923, Hitler attempted to overthrow the Weimar Republic, in the Munich Beer Hall Putsch. In 1938, November 9th was the Night of Broken Glass, when Nazi gangs attacked Jews and their property across Germany and Austria, foreshadowing the genocide to come. The German calendar is appropriately inconvenient: nothing good is conserved without the active remembrance of something bad. The revolutions of 1989 were made possible by a multiplicity of conditions: the courage of East Bloc dissidents and the hundreds of thousands of fellow-citizens who finally joined them; the disastrous economies of the Communist countries; the crucial forbearance of Mikhail Gorbachev.