There has been a boom in coverage in the UK press about the Mauerfall on November 9th 1989 – 30 years ago next Saturday.
Photo: Lear 21 at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 2.5, CC BY-SA 2.0 and CC BY-SA 1.0
Here are some of the most interesting pieces:
The FT discusses Neues Deutschland, a newspaper that almost completely missed the events of the Mauerfall – noting only “Lots of traffic at the border crossing.”
Time Magazine discusses the Begrüßungsgeld or “welcome money”, that the Federal Republic of Germany gave to East Germans as part of a policy dating back to 1970 and Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik. By the time payments were halted on Dec. 29, 1989, it’s estimated that at least 4 billion Deutsche Marks had been paid in seven weeks.
Author and columnist Timothy Garton Ash, who lived in the DDR’s East Berlin has written about the Mauerfall and the democratic ‘spirit of 1989’.
This report in Die Welt outlines how China hoped to save the DDR from dissipating in 1989.