1989 - The fall of the Iron Curtain 9/9
Audio 48:30
An opening in the Berlin Wall near the Brandenburg Gate, November 21, 1989. AFP
By: Cécile Poss
52 mins
1989, Sergio Leone, Georges Simenon and Herbert von Karajan disappear.
Thousands of people take to the streets in Romania to demonstrate against the Ceausescu regime and East Germany announces the opening of its borders: in short, it is the end of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Iron Curtain.
Publicity
The Berlin Wall officially fell on November 9, 1989. More generally, this event symbolizes the end of the Iron Curtain and the Soviet Bloc. But what is happening in Berlin at the end of the year 89 is not an isolated event. During the decade, the countries located beyond the Iron Curtain were shaken by movements questioning Communist politics and ideology: the rise of the Solidarnosc union in Poland, the Chinese protest symbolized by the events of the place Tian'anmen, or even the questioning of the GDR regime by Gorbachev himself. On the western side, the figure and words of John Paul II, Polish pope, also participate in this questioning and Ronald Reagan, present in West Berlin for the celebrations of the 750th anniversary of the city in 1987,reaches out to the USSR by offering in a speech to Gorbachev to open the Brandenburg Gate and bring down the wall.
The end of the 1980s also saw the emergence of a mass phenomenon: the creation of tele-tubes.
It's the comeback of the summer hit, but this time orchestrated by a television channel bludgeoning a song to dance with the support of a radio and a record company.
The Macarena
remains the symbol of these tele-tubes.
The track will have a worldwide success.
On the music side, the decade was also marked by a notable evolution of rock and hard rock, with more classical groups marking time while new protagonists emerge with music drawing on new wave and punk.
It was also in the 1980s that hip-hop, break dance and rap landed, as well as electronic dance music, the emergence of which was encouraged by the arrival of rhythm machines and sequencers.
With:
Pierre Marlet
, journalist responsible for news on La Première (RTBF) -
Vincent von Wroblewsky
, philosopher -
Jérôme Vaillant
, specialist in contemporary German civilization -
Emmanuel Droit
, historian -
Yves Bigot
, CEO of TV5 Monde -
Bernard Dobbeleer
, journalist specializing in 20th and 21st century music -
Andreas Wilkens
, historian.
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