Undivided: Encounters with America

Transcript: Bravery of the People Involved in the Revolution
July 1, 2009
J.D. Bindenagel, Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in East Berlin from 1988-1990

[21:18]
There is something I am very attached to in the GDR and that is the bravery of the people - and there are not many. Anybody who says a revolution is run by more than a handful of people is crazy. And that handful of people - not the famous ones, the Bärbel Bohley or the Schorlemmers, but those other people who were among the crowd, who went out and... Well, I could say Christian Führer at the Nikolaikirche; a very smart man, very bitter at this point, but okay. DeMaiziere. I mean, individuals who gave their careers. I mean nobody was really killed, but who have their careers and lives to make this happen. That's what I really do miss and I think that they are the people that made it happen. And like all revolutions, things happen afterwards and they are kind of shunted aside and nobody knows...[22:18]

[22:20]
Ruth Misselwitz, I knew from her husband who was a pastor in Washington for a year on an exchange in 1988. Ruth came to a reception that I had for Don Kirsch, who was the Economics Minister in the Embassy in Bonn. And during that reception - this was the end of November - she told me that they were planning an action, a nation-wide action, a human chain, kind of like what was done for Mutlangen in West Berlin when I was there for the deployment of the Pershing missiles. ("Now that's fascinating, how does that work?" [22:57])