When the Wall Came Tumbling Down

Rating

Director

Hans-Hermann Hertle, Gunther Scholz

Screenplay

Documentary

Length

1h 29m

Starring

Gert Heidenreich, Martin Seifert, Thomas Vogt, Liane Dammenheyn

MPAA Rating

Unrated

Review

PREFACE:
In the early 2000s, I was writing reviews for an outfit called Apollo Guide Reviews. That website has since been closed down.

Attempting to reconstruct those reviews has been an exercise in frustration. Having sent them to Apollo Guide via email on a server I no longer have access to (and which probably doesn’t have records going back that far), my only option was to dig through The Wayback Machine to see if I could find them there. Unfortunately, while I found a number of reviews, a handful of them have disappeared into the ether. At this point, almost two decades later, it is rather unlikely that I will find them again.

Luckily, I was able to locate my original review of this particular film. Please note that I was not doing my own editing at the time, Apollo Guide was. As such, there may be more than your standard number of grammatical and spelling errors in this review. In an attempt to preserve what my style had been like back then, I am not re-editing these reviews, which are presented as-is.

REVIEW:
Only a few events in each chapter of human history are remembered through the ages. The 20th century has seen several such events, including the bombing of Pearl Harbor, which forced the United States into the Second World War, U.S. President Harry Truman deciding to drop nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bringing about the end of that war, and the collapse of New York City’s World Trade Centre. When the Wall Came Tumbling Down is a documentary about another of these seminal events – the collapse of the Berlin Wall, a key event during the end of the Cold War.

The subtitle of this intriguing documentary is “50 Hours That Changed the World.” It speaks of the hours between November 9 and November 11, 1989 when a symbol of communism was rather suddenly and decisively destroyed.

German directors Hans-Hermann Hertle and Gunther Scholz have taken an event that many people might think they already know well, and turned it into an experience of discovery. The documentary begins on the evening of November 9. The East German leadership had been discussing new travel laws to prevent East German citizens from fleeing into neighbouring countries and trying to escape to West Germany.

That evening, they decide to open their boarders to West Germany for permanent relocation, but not for vacation travel. They plan to implement this new policy the next morning, but someone accidentally leaks it to the news media, causing mass hysteria and a sudden convergence on the wall.

The event lasted for two more days before things really could be considered over. This documentary humanizes and explains the real events behind the destruction of the wall. It doesn’t venture into the aftermath of this tumultuous time, but most people know what happened shortly thereafter – German reunification and the fall of the Soviet Union.

The film starts off rocky with inappropriate music and a long montage showing peaceful German existence. When it really gets going, even the German language with English subtitles doesn’t get in the way of English language viewers learning a great deal. The best part of this film is that we’re not forced to watch other people, who are “experts” on what happened talk about the event. Instead, we actually get to hear the leaders speak on these matters.

We hear directly from General Secretary Krenz on what happened. We hear Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s reaction and explanation of his thoughts. German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, U.S. President George Bush and U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher also appear in the program.

When the Wall Came Tumbling Down gives audiences a chance to see and hear things that they may never have known before. It does what a good documentary should do: it informs.

Review Written

September 23, 2001