For purely personal reasons, Sheri Berman's “Democracy and Dictatorship” is one of the few books that grabbed me with its opening paragraph:
“In November 1989 the place to be was Berlin. History was being made. Dictatorships were collapsing and, as George H.W. Bush put it, ‘America [had] won the Cold War.' The bloody twentieth century with its horrible violence and titanic ideological battles was coming to a close. Liberal democracy was triumphant, and the West was about to lead the way towards progress and prosperity. Many felt in 1989 as Wordsworth did about the French Revolution exactly two hundred years before: ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive./But to be young was just heaven.'”
In November 1989, I was a middle-aged 45, but I did happen to be in East Berlin. No one who was at ground zero as the Wall and the Iron Curtain came crashing down will ever forget those heady days. My only regret is that I didn't buy a fragment of the Wall itself. At the time, I thought that souvenir-buying would cheapen the historic moment. Now I wish I'd yielded to the temptation.
