The German film-maker Thomas Heise sets out to challenge the official script of events. He recalls that when the demonstrators, overshadowed by Tiananmen Square, shouted “we are one people”, they were speaking not to West Germans — as was later claimed — but to police surrounding the demonstration. “This is the reality they want to suppress”, he says, “this moment in time when ordinary people put themselves on the line to speak about themselves. We’re not meant to remember that. We celebrate the Wall falling but not the fact that a sovereign people took it upon itself to fill a power gap. Nor how, following that, it was more about annexation than reunification. Law and order was re-established by destroying utopia. The Federal Republic could not allow a sovereign people to exist in a part of Germany because it would not have itself survived. The Wall was opened to prevent revolution.”
The myth of German reunification
The myth of German reunification