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The fall of the Berlin Wall is the foreign policy event that does not directly involve the United States, which has had the most impact on Americans, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center. The opening of the Iron Curtain has sparked an unprecedented wave of hope across the Atlantic.
With our correspondent in Washington, Anne Corpet
According to one survey, 60% of Americans who were eight years old at the time of the fall of the Wall still remember where they were when they heard the news.
The event was perceived at the time as fundamental by 84% of the population. The words of President Kennedy in 1963 " Ich bin ein Berliner " (I am Berliner), then those of Ronald Reagan in 1987 " Mr Gorbachev, destroy this wall " had made the book sacred.
Faced with the enthusiasm of the American public, the then President, George Bush Sr., nevertheless managed to react with caution: he refrained from any triumphalism, but committed himself fully to the reunification of the Germany.
At the fall of the Wall, America, optimistic, began to dream of a better future, the expansion of individual freedoms, a world reconciled around the market economy. She could not imagine that thirty years later, cleared of the red threat, this enemy who consolidated her unity, she would tear up around a president whose main obsession is precisely to erect a wall.
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