French perspectives on 1989

Over the past few days, here in Ferney Voltaire we've become aware of how the French media is looking towards the events of 1989. It started when Le Monde ran an article entitled "The Entente Cordial against History" drawing on declassified British government documents to show how Francois Mitterrand and Margaret Thatcher shared a joint suspicion of German reunification in 1989. Then the local newspaper shop had copies of two magazine specials to mark the anniversary - Le Monde's own Liberté a l'Est and Télérama's Le mur de Berlin: 20 ans après. The format of the two magazines is similar and they both use Raymand Depardon's famous image (left) - Le Monde on the cover and Telerama as part of a photoessay. The content is different, however - Le Monde reprints many of its eye witness reports, while Telerama has new content, including profiles of Marianne Birthler (the guardian of the Stasi archives) and Vera Lengsfeld (peace activist now CDU member of parliament), and a counter-current review of Das Leben der Anderen. But what is common to both publications, as in athe article from Le Monde that opened this post, is what seems to be a distinctive French take on the events of autumn 1989. In Germany there is a continuing debate as to whether the key date is 9 October (when the massed forces of Leipzig citizens braved a possible "Chinese solution" to demand change) or 9 November, with the opening of the Berlin Wall as the key step towards German unity. There is no such agonizing with the French perspective in these publications - it is 9 November, but unlike in Germany, seen as an event of epochal geopolitical change, a perspective lacking from some German publications that have marked the anniversary. That's not to say that the reawakening of civil society in eastern Europe is ignored by the French publications, rather that 9 November 1989 is seen as the day when everything changed.* A third of Telerama is taken up with the "shock waves" created by the event: the brak up of the Balkans, "Sarajevo in a thousand pieces", and "Un bilan globalement mitigé" ... for the period 1989 to 2001 which it calls the "interwar period" (l'entre deux guerres) ...
*Hubert Vedrine who was then an advisor to Mitterrand and later a French foreign minister in his interview with Telerama asserts that the key date was not 9 November 1989 but the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991 - "Fin du monde bipolar ... entrée dans un monde global". Much to argue about there ...