And the Coliseum in Rome and a bunch of other Roman constructions are still standing, so technically Rome, and hence the Roman Empire, has yet to fall.
I thought we decided to use Autumn instead of fall?
My folks took video back then, of a guy standing there with tools for rent, to get your own section of wall. In the background you can hear “tink, tink, tink” When I saw this I thought, “Capitalism will win every time.”
On the same trip they were caught in a traffic jam on the autobahn, of all places. Traffic blocked for as far as you could see, many of them young people. Someone asked my dad “Are you going to the concert?” “What concert?” he replies. “Man, Pink Floyd is doing The Wall!”
No, it ended in 2000. The 21st century started in 2001. We begin counting decades or centuries with the number 1 and end them with a zero. The 20th century was from 1901 to 2000.
I have a piece of The Wall that I keep in a Jar By The Door. Its made of asbestos. (The piece of The Wall that is, not The Jar By The Door).
protoboard, by memory you’re fairly young. Early 20s, or thereabouts? Everyone who remembers the event also remembers that the major turning point, and the end of an era, occurred this time 25 years ago–that’s what’s being commemorated, not some technicality.
This, along with the fall of the Soviet Union, were two events that are hard to forget. But the imagery coming out of Germany in '89 is iconic.
And the Declaration of Independence wasn’t signed then, either.
It’s nice to know these things, but odd for them to bother you so much to make a whole OP about it. There’s pedantry, and there’s Pedantry.
I was in Berlin a month ago. There are bits here and there and then there’s the East Side Gallery which is a kilometres or so of wall left with a lot of famous graffiti on it.
There was also a guy wearing a plastic horse’s head, no clothes except his underpants (and his shorts down by his ankles) playing Britpop tunes on a guitar. He neighed when I gave him money.
I love you.
Always nice to see someone out-pedantic-literal the pedantic literalist, but the 20th century ended with 2000, not in 2000.
RickJay wasn’t the OP.
Semantics.
Who is it for?
I’m aware of that my point is that the wall itself was not actually destroyed until well into 1990 nor were the fortifications removed. I’m just dispelling the myth that was wall itself was taken down in 1989. It was not.
I consider 1783 a better date for the birth of America actually, just like 1990 or '91 is a better date for the fall of communism. People often remember history wrong.
The 20th century ended in that theoretical infinitely small bit of time that was neither 2000 or 2001. There, I win! 
How come the collapse of the USSR in 1991 doesn’t get nearly as much attention as the events of 1989? I was actually born during the fall of communism (January 1990) so I have a keen interest in the period. It seems like the end of a superpower should be more important than a border fortification being relaxed, but I guess there was just something dramatic about people taking chisels to such a despised barrier.
I guess 1989 just makes a better narrative than 1991, being the end of a decade and all.
I was in Berlin in 1995 when pieces of the wall were still in situ. I was sceptical that they were really the wall, and also, had I picked up a piece of the wall, that I wasn’t sure was the wall, I would have had to carry it alongside my clothes, toiletries etc, and I didn’t have the space. I was a student in Berlin in 1995 and everything I owned was with me.
I’ve met quite a lot of people who dispute my claim to having been in Berlin in 1994 because I don’t have bits of the wall in my cupboard. I wonder if they’ve got their dates confused and think I was claiming to have been there before the wall fell, because although there weren’t a ton of English speakers in Berlin in 1995 there were some and it was an Erasmus exchange.
The physical wall came down over time, this is true.
But The Wall came down on that day in 1989. The Wall was the symbol of separation between nations and cultures. It represented all the methods of control used to keep people apart and for all intents and purposes, they went away on that day. People are celebrating that occurrence, not the removal of cement. Once the border guards abandoned their posts the Wall came down. That is the significance of the event. That is what changed on that day.
The walls of cement, brick, and barbed wire, manned by armed guards, were all a symbol of a system that ended that day. No one really cares when the actual bricks were removed - they no longer served their purpose.
Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Berlin Waaaallllll.
The wall was a visible single point of obvious and dramatic change. Momentum was building towards change before that. The flow of events that came after seemed to follow in a logical if not inevitable process. The next month Romania revolted against their communist government without Soviet response accelerating the unraveling. Changes from a Cold War footing quickly followed. The actual end of the Soviet Union was almost anti-climatic.
My first awareness was grabbing the college newspaper on the way out of physical fitness training in the ROTC building. It wasn’t uncommon to see many cadets grab the paper on the way out. That day involved a lot of stopping as people glanced at the front page and started telling people who all just stopped and read it while standing there. Only a couple months later I was offered the chance to get out of my military commitment. The summer of 1990 saw announcements about significant closings of ROTC programs. The Cold War was quite obviously done well before the Soviet Union ended.
It wasn’t just that in November 1989 the checkpoints in the Wall (and other Inner German border fortifications) were legally opened up to allow people to come and go more freely. The Wall was physically breached; there were crowds dancing on top of it, and people whacking it with sledgehammers and chisels, and whole sections being knocked down–as previously mentioned, all of which happened pretty much immediately, within days or even hours of the “fall” of the Wall. After Novemer 1989, the Wall was not “intact”; it had increasingly large sections missing from it. A wall with great big holes in it isn’t really a wall anymore; “large sections of [a] wall” are not a wall, they’re just the ruins of a wall.
Bear in mind that this is the 25th anniversary of the Fall of the Wall. I’m sure there will be lots of discussion of the collapse of the Soviet Union in August-December of 2016.
The Fall of the Wall is also seen as a relatively straightforward happy story–sure, some discussion of “Ostalgia” and the disruptions experienced by former East Germans and other citizens of the old Warsaw Pact satellite states–but basically it’s a good news story with a happy ending, with the old Soviet bloc countries now part of NATO and the European Union and mostly enjoying both political liberation and economic prosperity. Especially under Putin, the Big Round Number Anniversary of the collapse of the USSR will likely be seen in much more ambivalent or even outright negative terms, at least in Russia itself, with a very sharp divide in how the event is viewed in Russia as opposed to how it’s viewed in Estonia (or in eastern Ukraine versus western Ukraine).