The Day The Wall Fell - (2009) [BBC Radio (MP3 160kbps)] - dearleuk torrent download



The Day The Wall Fell 03-11-2009





Jeremy Vine marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall by looking at its history, from construction in 1961, to the day it was finally breached on 9 November 1989.





Jeremy visits the city to examine what remains of the Wall and speaks to those who lived on both sides - East and West. He visits some of the key locations in the Wall's history including Checkpoint Charlie; the Brandenburg Gate; Bernauer Strasse, which was cut in two in 1961; and Mauerstrasse, where the largest remaining section of the Wall exists today. Jeremy explores why the Wall went up in the first place, why it came down and asks whether the psychological scars of a divided Germany still remain.





The programme contains firsthand testimony from Germans who escaped from the East and those who helped them. It also considers what it was like to live in a state controlled by the secret police or Stasi and hears from a political reformer who was held in the notorious Hohenschönhausen prison. He considers to what extent the phenomenon of "ostalgie" or nostalgia for life in the former East Germany still exists, particularly as some former Stasi and government officials have prospered since the Wall came down 20 years ago.





There are interviews with escapee Joachim Neuman, who spent two years working on tunnels under the Wall to bring his girlfriend to the West; and escapee Irmgard Muller, who escaped from East Berlin under a false passport to be with her husband. We also hear from West Berliner Horst Seeliger, who was in East Berlin on November 9 1989, and one of the first people to cross back through the border into the West; and Vera Lengsfeld, an East German reformist politician who was imprisoned by the Stasi.





Additional contributors include historian Frederick Taylor; Sunday Times journalist Peter Millar and veteran BBC reporter Brian Hanrahan, who both covered the fall of the wall; and Ben Bradshaw, Secretary Of State for Culture, Media & Sport, who was a young BBC reporter in Berlin in 1989.








Review from The Guardian





Jeremy Vine's enthusiasm for a good story was in evidence last night as he presented The Day the Wall Fell (Radio 2). Vine was in Berlin, and literally hopping with excitement. "If I just hop like that, left and then right," he observed, "my right foot is in what was East Berlin and my left foot is in the West." Endearingly, you could actually hear the sound of his hopping.





This was a slickly produced account, which engagingly evoked the reality of a divided city and the euphoria when the wall came down. Vine slapped the remnants of the wall, prodded and tapped museum exhibits ("here in a glass case"), as if to convey the physical reminders of a division which, as he suggested, will seem unbelievable to future generations.





But he heard too from those nostalgic for the old times in the east ("Sometimes I miss the spirit you used to have here – it was more sharing") and a woman still reeling from the fact that 49 people, including her husband, informed on her to the Stasi. For all the hopping glee early on, Vine ended with a more measured picture. "You think the wall comes down and it's happy ever after," he said. "But the shadow of the wall is still there."





-- Elisabeth Mahoney





Review from The Radio Times





The Berlin Wall was erected in 1961 to stop skilled East German workers relocating to West Berlin in search of a "better life". It took another 28 years for the wall to come down in what was a landmark moment of the 20th century. One of the most interesting points of discussion in this documentary is whether the acquisition of wealth and the opportunity to shop until you drop that came when East was reunited with West did make for a better life - or just a more selfish, self-obsessed one. Jeremy Vine extracts fascinating testimony from some of those who managed to cross the divide in those interim years, the most harrowing of which comes from a woman who was betrayed to the secret police by her own husband.





-- Jane Anderson








Type                : mpeg 1 layer III


Bitrate             : 160


Mode                : joint stereo


Frequency           : 44100 Hz


Length              : 00:57:07


Encoder             : Lame 3.97


Source              : iPlayer





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