U.S. embassy in Berlin unveils Reagan statue
‘ Tear down this wall!’
Germany unveiled a big, bronze statue of former U. S. president Ronald Reagan on Friday.
The bronze creation, 2.1 metres in height, stands on the balcony at the U. S. embassy in Berlin overlooking the exact spot where, on June 12, 1987, Reagan stood in West Berlin and urged his Soviet counterpart Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall!”
Reagan urged Gorbachev to help him destroy the so- called “Iron Curtain” that divided Western Europe from the Eastern Bloc.
Saturday marks the 30th anniversary of the Nov. 9, 1989, fall of the Berlin Wall — a construct that had been in place since 1961.
The gradual dismantling of the wall, erected by the East German government, marked the slow end of Communism in the former East Germany, which had been a Soviet satellite for decades. The wall’s demise had been sparked by 1989 revolutions in other countries in the Eastern Bloc. The official reunification of East and West Germany would follow a year later.
Reagan died in 2004, and was made an honorary citizen of the city of Berlin in 1992. To Germans, that seemed to be enough, but the Americans had long pushed for more, making applications to the city for something more concrete. The U. S. Embassy found a workaround German reticence by installing the statue on the balcony — technically on U.S. soil.
Mike Pompeo, U. S. secretary of state, attended Friday’s unveiling and spoke of his time as a U. S. soldier patrolling the wall.
“My tour, my time on station here, happened towards the end of the Cold War but my fellow soldiers and I know that we had no idea that it was in fact close to the end,” he said. “We did midnight emergency drills and exercises within sight of a militarized border.”
In the speech in which he criticized Russia and China, he cautioned that freedom was never guaranteed in the world.
“Today authoritarianism is just a stone’s throw away, it’s rising and if we’re honest, it never really went away completely,” he said.
One woman told German media outlet DW that she wasn’t opposed to the statue because America had protected the people of East Germany. One 30- something man, though, wasn’t impressed.
“I wouldn’t be too happy to connect the fall of the Berlin Wall to Ronald Reagan because he was quite a conservative president. He made the Cold War much more intense than it was before.”