Mr. Wickert, on 9 November 1989 you were the ARD correspondent in Paris. How did you hear about the fall of the Wall?
A friend called me at about seven thirty that evening. He had heard the news on Deutschlandfunk. I was just about to go out, because I had an eight o’clock appointment with the head of Willy Brandt’s chancellery, Horst Ehmke, for a meal with some French journalists. I immediately told Ehmke and his spontaneous reaction was that Willy Brandt’s détente policy had prevailed after all.
At the time, were you not tempted, as an ardent journalist, to return to Germany immediately and report on the events?
Yes. Just two weeks later I was in Berlin, where my daughter was studying. I went straight to the GDR with her, to Bralitz in Brandenburg, where by father was born in 1915.
How did the French react to the news from Berlin?
The French people saw the opening of the Wall as a victory for liberté, for freedom, and many young people, and also politicians like Simone Veil, immediately set off for Berlin. By contrast, the French political elite was horrified. They were afraid that the new “Greater Germany” would dominate Central Europe and leave NATO and the European Union.
The first time you came back to Germany after the fall of the Wall – how did you experience the country?
I was delighted to be able to go and work for the Tagesthemen television news programme in 1991, because the most exciting place for German journalists at the time was right there, in our own reunited country. It was a historic moment that communicated a sense of a whole new beginning.
You were a foreign correspondent for 15 years, anchorman for the best known German television news programme, you have interviewed countless politicians and reported daily on world events. Did you ever expect to witness the fall of the Wall?
That possibility was more obvious to foreigners than to us Germans. The French, for example, could remember that Alsace and Lorraine once belonged to Germany. Their attitude was “always think about it, but never talk about it”. And they believed we saw things the same way. In Germany, however, the division of the country was regarded as punishment for Auschwitz. The end of that division only seemed possible by means of another war between east and west.
In your books you repeatedly deal with German identity and man’s historical consciousness. What role does the peaceful dismantling of the Berlin Wall play in the Germans’ self-image?
Today we see that German identity has changed considerably. In 1990 I edited a book called Angst vor Deutschland (Fear of Germany). If you were to read it today, you would be astonished. So that is how people thought about Germany then! But it does show how far we have come. Then in 1997 I devoted a whole book to German identity, Deutschland auf Bewährung (Germany on Probation). But an essential leap forward for that identity came one year later with the election of Gerhard Schröder as Federal Chancellor. He was the first chancellor not to be influenced by personal experience of the Second World War. His election campaign was conducted under the motto: “Mehr Deutschland wagen” (literally, Risk More Germany). His decision to engage in the Kosovo conflict but not to follow the United States into the Iraq War advanced and consolidated the development of German identity.
You have gathered articles by foreign correspondents and conducted interviews with colleagues for an exhibition called “Wir waren so frei … Momentaufnahmen 1989/1990” (We took the liberty … impressions of 1989/90), which will be shown from 1 May to 9 November 2009 at the Museum für Film und Fernsehen Berlin. What does the fall of the Wall on 9 November 1989 mean to you 20 years down the road?
Personally speaking, I experienced the opening of the Wall at the Brandenburg Gate around midnight on 20 December 1989, and I still have a piece of the Wall today, a white piece, that is to say, a piece from the eastern side, where the plaster was not covered in graffiti. France’s President François Mitterrand was visiting the GDR at the time, and as ARD correspondent in Berlin I was one of the accompanying journalists. That is why I still feel as if the fall of the Wall 20 years ago is also part of my biography.
Ulrich Wickert
The journalist and author, 67, is a citizen of the world. He was born in Japan, went to school in Heidelberg and Paris, and studied law in Bonn and the United States. For 15 years, as ARD correspondent in Washington, New York and Paris, he brought the latest news into the living-rooms of German television viewers. From 1991 to 2006 he shaped the most important German news programme, “Tagesthemen”, as its anchorman. Ulrich Wickert divides his time between Hamburg and the South of France.
