Dr. King’s Forgotten Speech at the Berlin Wall and What it Means to be Free in Today’s World
November 24, 2014 By
URL of Original Posting Site: http://www.tpnn.com/2014/11/24/dr-kings-forgotten-speech-at-the-berlin-wall-and-what-it-means-to-be-free-in-todays-world/?utm_source=Newsletter+11%2F26%2F14+3am&utm_campaign=Newsletter+11%2F26%2F14+3am&utm_medium=email
Recently, the world remembered fondly the anniversary of the demise of the Berlin Wall- the concrete scar that tore a city apart and served as a physical and metaphorical barrier between the West and the East during a time where the world’s survival appeared far from certain.
On November 9th, 1989, I became a Republican. I had conservative leanings prior, but I had the privilege of viewing with my own eyes the struggle and the triumph a people who used hammers and chisels to tear down a wall that had so cruelly divided them. Conservatism, I discovered, was the vehicle for freedom. At that moment, I saw clearly that conservatism and the absence of big government was the surest way to individual freedom- freedom to succeed, freedom to fail, the freedom to make of my life what I could.
I arrived in Berlin that day from Bern, Switzerland, to visit a cousin who was in Berlin and what I saw forever changed me. As I peered onward, I saw the Cold War not as some abstract political feud, but I saw the very-real effects on people. People swung sledgehammers against the wall feverishly as one would do to free a trapped child in a well. On the other side of the wall were thousands of trapped people; they were trapped by a collectivist regime that did not value human dignity.
Years before my arrival in Berlin, Dr. Martin Luther King traveled to the divided city and, somehow, was privileged to not only address the West Berliners, but the East as well- a rarity for any American.
On Sept. 13, 1964, Dr. King addressed a crowd in West Berlin at Waldbühne stadium and offered a message of hope, of reconciliation with their fellow man. Somehow, the American reverend crossed into Soviet-occupied East Berlin via Checkpoint Charlie and offered a very similar speech to a crowd at East Berlin’s Marienkirche.
When we think of speeches in Berlin, we think of only a few. We think of Hitler, we think of Kennedy and most think of Reagan’s famous verbal showdown with the Soviets where he demanded that they “tear down this wall.”
However, Dr. King’s speech has been downplayed over the course of history. His vision for a unifed people- not merely a unified Berlin- is precisely the message for which the reverend was known and the kind of message so desperately needed today.
Paul Kengor recently reported in The Washington Post on the often-forgotten speeches offered in Berlin and noted:
King began his speech by striking a bond with his German audience, noting that his parents had named him after the legendary German reformer. “I am happy to bring you greetings from your Christian brothers and sisters of West Berlin,” he started. “. . . Certainly I bring you greetings from your Christian brothers and sisters of the United States. In a real sense we are all one in Christ Jesus, for in Christ there is no East, no West, no North, no South.”That introduction set the tone. The reverend had come to this church to give, first and foremost, a Christian message. It was, after all, a sermon. But there would be a political undercurrent to much of what he said.King made two allusions to the wall, built just three years earlier. “For here on either side of the wall are God’s children, and no man-made barrier can obliterate that fact,” he said at one point. And then later: “Wherever reconciliation is taking place, wherever men are ‘breaking down the dividing walls of hostility’ which separate them from their brothers, there Christ continues to perform his ministry.” Here was affirmation of the inherent, God-given dignity of all human beings, regardless of whether communism denied that dignity, denied that God and denied free passage from East to West.While King made an effort to distinguish “the struggle” in the United States from “your situation” in Berlin, he shifted back and forth between them in a way that made the parallels obvious. In one passage that must have had particular resonance among East Berliners, who were at a severe economic disadvantage compared with those on the other side of the wall, King acknowledged the fears among African Americans about not being able to hold their own in an integrated society. “Many have not had the opportunity to get an education, which will prepare them for the ‘promised land,’ ” he said. “Many are hungry and physically undernourished as a result of the journey. Many bear on their souls the scars of bitterness and hatred, seared there by the crowded slum conditions, police brutality and . . . exploitation.”King urged the need to overcome those fears. He talked about the potential power of grass-roots movements to instigate reform, introducing East Germans to names like Rosa Parks and places like Montgomery, Ala. He described how the American civil rights movement married the philosophy of Gandhi with the “Negro’s Christian tradition,” and he promoted “non-violence and love” as the basis for reform movements. This tactic of non-violence was probably the only approach that East Germans had available at the time.
I was recently reminded of this speech by a friend and colleague. At a time when racial divisions are so ruthlessly widened by race-hustlers for personal gain, profit and egotism, it is an affirmation of the will of a people to be free to remember the triumphant movement led by King and others who stressed a Biblical message that centered on human dignity and a desire of people to be free.
Whether we are talking about slaves, Jim Crow-era blacks or Berliners feverishly tearing down a wall, the will of human beings to be free is awe-inspiring. 25 years after I witnessed the spectacle of people tearing apart a wall with their hands to help topple the evil Soviet empire, I am dismayed to see so many people in all kinds of communities so readily clamoring for the shackles of big government dependency.
Humans are meant to be free; Dr. King knew this; Reagan knew this. Let us not remain silent when others before us so bravely stood up for what was right.
What Did You Say? 
You must be logged in to post a comment.