The voices that cracked stone

Maybe it was 1986. Maybe ‘87. It’s been so long now that Birgit Schlicke struggles to remember, but it must have been around then that her family packed into her father’s car, a boxy Lada, and drove some 60 miles north from their East German hamlet to the divided city of East Berlin. They arrived in search of groceries — the oranges and bell peppers unavailable in their town. By then, the teenage Schlicke had become well aware of the scarcity afflicting her homeland.

As a child, she didn’t notice much was amiss. Her family always had enough of the basics — bread and milk and butter. One time, they even found summer watermelons in town — an unheard-of delicacy, unfortunately small and limited to one per family. Plus plentiful alcohol, though her family didn’t drink much. She was surprised to learn later that East Germans were known to drink much more than West Germans. “Maybe to escape,” she speculates now, “from the misery of everyday life.”

Her family lived in a sought-after 10th-floor apartment in a public housing complex. Her father was an engineer in the glass industry, and her mother was a nurse. With those jobs came certain perks, which is how her father was able to acquire their Lada without waiting the standard 15 years. They used it to travel to other Eastern Bloc countries — Poland and Czechoslovakia, for instance, where they visited distant relatives. She knew they couldn’t go anywhere else, but she didn’t think too hard about it. She was a kid, and that was the way of things.

A prolific letter writer, with pen pals from Norway to California to Japan, Schlicke learned about the wider world through words from people and places she wasn’t allowed to see. They told her stories and invited her to visit — then didn’t understand when she explained she couldn’t. They sent her real Levi’s jeans to wear and Tom Cruise posters to pin up in her room. A West German friend even passed along a Whitney Houston album, which became a mainstay on her family’s record player — right alongside nightly viewing of West German television, which her family was able to pick up thanks to a large antenna on their roof. She watched Hollywood films and soap operas — her favorite was “Dynasty” — as well as West German news. She sometimes had to watch the East German news instead because her school tested her knowledge of current events. Teachers asked questions about the German Democratic Republic’s booming economy and irrefutable philosophy — all of which Schlicke learned to recognize as lies. But she needed to get good grades to have any chance of a career, so she watched because she had to. Then she changed the channel.

Her parents had already applied to leave East Germany when they visited the city for their oranges and bell peppers. They made those trips often, and normally Schlicke didn’t think much about the wall separating East from West; it was a fact of existence for her entire life, and therefore forgettable. But on this particular trip, she stood 100 yards or so from the Brandenburg Gate, separated from the wall itself by a chain-link fence, snarling guard dogs and pristine patches of gravel — a feature meant to discourage escape attempts by forcing on-duty guards to explain any footprints to their commanding officers.

Through the fence and across the divide, she saw a platform in West Germany. A handful of silhouettes stood there, staring down at her and her nation from atop the wall. She had no way of knowing whether the wall would come down. She had no idea that very soon, an American president would stand on the other side of that gate and call for the concrete lesion dividing East from West to be removed. She didn’t even notice the state security lingering nearby, watching her. No, on this day, with a plain cross necklace dangling from her neck, she only knew one thing for certain: “One day,” she told her younger sister, “we will be on that platform.”

The American ambassador to Germany devoted nearly five full pages to criticism of Robinson’s draft of Reagan’s speech. The National Security Council executive secretary sent a memo in May trying to stop the president from seeing the draft at all.

The Berlin Wall crumbled 35 years ago next month, marking the beginning of the end for Soviet totalitarianism. Yet suddenly the wall’s relevance feels stronger now than at any point since it vanished. Tensions between the United States and Russia have reached a fever pitch not felt since the last kicks of the Cold War, when the wall became a global symbol in the ideological contest between capitalism and communism, democracy and autocracy. Russian leader Vladimir Putin, a KGB agent during the Cold War, seeks to rebuild the Russian glory of old, forging alliances with American foes in China and North Korea, and reopening divisions between East and West.

Long before the Berlin Wall was erected, the United States and the Soviet Union fought as allies against Nazism and fascism during World War II. In the war’s aftermath, however, the differences between the two sides became clear, abundant and irreconcilable. Both wanted to be seen as global powers, resulting in a conflict fought via proxies and ideas. The territories claimed by the Soviets during World War II became communist, and the areas claimed by the United States and other Allied forces did not. The dividing line between these “blocs” became known as the Iron Curtain, most prominent in Germany.

During his presidential bid in 1980, Ronald Reagan, a staunch anti-communist, made his goal of eradicating the Soviet Union’s influence in the world a major part of his campaign. As president, he kept at it, declaring in 1982 that communism would find refuge only within “the ash heap of history.” Those remarks and others like them earned him a reputation as a swashbuckling speaker who had a gift for making complicated situations seem simple. He sold a vision of America, and American ideals, best summarized by his famed reelection ad campaign proclaiming, “It’s morning again in America.”

But his slogans paled compared to the six words that would become synonymous with his presidency and American destiny — six words that would nudge the arc of history, penned by a failed novelist-turned-speechwriter from New York. Peter Robinson had attended Dartmouth en route to Oxford, where he studied “PPE” — politics, philosophy and economics — for two years, then decided to stay for a third to write a novel. After he hit a dead end, he sent letters to every American contact he could think of in search of work.

Most of them ignored him, but conservative thought leader William F. Buckley recommended Robinson reach out to his son, Christopher, who was then a speechwriter for Vice President George H.W. Bush. In the summer of 1982, Robinson flew from London to Washington and got lucky: Christopher told Robinson he was leaving his job, and his replacement had just fallen through. “I think I might recommend you as my successor,” Robinson remembers Christopher telling him, per an account from a recent episode of the “Charles C.W. Cooke Podcast.” The vice president’s office didn’t even ask Robinson whether he’d written a speech before. “Which was lucky for me,” Robinson told Cooke, “because I had not.” After a year and a half with the Bush team, he jumped at an opportunity to join Reagan’s office. Though older than the Berlin Wall by four years, Robinson was much younger than the larger Cold War. He was inexperienced, in both speechwriting and in life, and therefore an unlikely ambassador for the goal of toppling the Soviet empire. But that’s what he became, dramatically, in the spring of 1987.

The president would be traveling to Europe for an economic summit in Venice. Since Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was planning a trip to East Berlin two weeks before to celebrate the city’s 750th birthday, the government of West Germany was hoping Reagan would stop by, too. The speechwriting duties fell to Robinson, then just 29. He joined the president’s “advance team” — Secret Service and press officers in charge of staging for his arrival — for a trip to Berlin, where he saw the wall for the first time. He knew the speech would be important, at a time when the Iron Curtain still stood strong. But he also knew it came at a moment of change.

Gorbachev was touting policies of “glasnost” and “perestroika” — efforts at transparency and more progressive policy throughout Soviet Eastern Europe. It was a hopeful time for many, including Birgit Schlicke. She admired Gorbachev, who was not popular among East German political leaders. They were all older, devoted Stalinists, and they censored Russian magazines and books that featured him. They saw his ideas as too radical, too Western. They saw him as a threat. But he was popular with the public. When he visited, East Germans chanted his nickname — “Gorby! Gorby!” — in the streets, Schlicke remembers. Officials in the State Department lectured Robinson about this atmosphere extensively. They told him to avoid hardline criticism of the Soviets. West Berlin, after all, was still surrounded by East Germany. Subtlety was imperative. “Don’t make a big deal about the wall,” the officials added. “They’ve gotten used to it.”

Used to it? During his trip with the advance team, staring out over that wall, he didn’t believe anyone could ever get used to it. It just felt unnatural; on one side, people drove Mercedes-Benzes and wore designer clothes. Neon lights buzzed in the shopping district. “Then you get to that wall, and look over the wall,” Robinson recalled, “and there’s nothing.” Gray and brown buildings. No traffic and few pedestrians. Military guards and barbed wire. “You could feel a certain oppression almost in the literal sense of the word. You could almost feel as though something was pressing down on you,” he remembered. “You felt sort of — less alive.”

He knew he needed to write something equal in stature to that very weird, very profound nexus of competing ideas. “You put the president of the United States right there,” he thought. “What do you give him to say?” Robinson didn’t know the answer until later that night, when he attended a dinner party at the invitation of an old acquaintance. The party was host to many West Berliners, and Robinson couldn’t help himself. “I was told that you’ve all gotten used to the wall,” he observed. “Is that true?” Silence.

Finally, one person he didn’t know slowly raised his arm and pointed. “My sister lives a couple of kilometers in that direction,” he said. “I haven’t seen her in 20 years. How do you think we feel about that wall?”

One by one, every single person in that room shared a similar story. “They had stopped talking about (the wall),” he realized, “but they hadn’t gotten used to it.” His host was the final one to chime in: “If this man Gorbachev is serious with his talk — glasnost, perestroika — he can prove it by coming here and getting rid of that wall.” Had Reagan been in that room, Robinson thought, he would have felt those words. He knew right then what the speech needed to say.

Schlicke had hope as a kid, when she dreamed of becoming a pediatrician, but it’d been dashed when her family applied to leave for West Germany. She was about 15 then, and she knew their application came with some risks. The process was completely unpredictable, with some families waiting many years to hear anything at all. One day, they’d get a letter telling them they had a spot on a train leaving in a week, which was all the time they had to sell their possessions and pack. Some families did so preemptively. One in their building lived out of a suitcase while days turned to months turned to five years. Her parents didn’t want to do something so drastic. They also didn’t want to wait that long, so her father devised a plan. Their ticket to freedom would be determination. Annoyance. They would become a thorn in the government’s finger; eventually, the thinking went, the government would be eager to get them out.

The drawbacks to this plan were many, starting with Schlicke’s education. Rather than medicine, she told her teachers she wanted to study foreign trade. “The idea was the moment they let me travel to a Western country,” she says, “I would not come back.” She eventually let that slip to the principal, who told Schlicke she would never qualify to study foreign trade. She hadn’t studied enough Russian, and she wasn’t involved enough with the Free German Youth, the national socialist youth movement. Not to mention she was Christian. East Germany was formally an atheist state, and while Schlicke attended a Catholic kindergarten, where she learned the Lord’s Prayer and other standards, that was as far as religious education was allowed. In elementary school and onward, her Christian teachings were replaced by lessons on Marx, Engels and Lenin, and blatant mockery of her beliefs. But Schlicke used the cross necklace she wore every day to brace herself against the insults.

She wrote to the government at every level, seeking clarification as to why the government was allowed to ignore the 1975 Helsinki Accords; East German leadership, after all, had signed that document guaranteeing a certain degree of freedom of movement and expression. Why, then, was her family’s petition being ignored? She sent letters to local officials. She sent letters to Gorbachev himself. And she and her father showed up at the local government office every Saturday to inquire about their status. Come back later, they were told again and again. Eventually, they joined with other families for a creative protest in the town square. Effectively, any gathering of more than three people in the town square without a permit was grounds for criminal prosecution. But her father came up with the idea for a group called the “City Wanderers” — like-minded people who gathered on Saturdays to walk around the town square enjoying the trees. Their real purpose was to squeeze in conversations about strategies for making progress in their shared quest to leave the country. They kept the discussions brief and in groups of three or less to comply with legal boundaries. At the first meeting, nothing happened. At the second, again, nothing happened. At the third, they were swarmed by state security and whisked away to interrogations.

Everyone involved was told the City Wanderers needed to disband, or they would be arrested and imprisoned. State security, the “Stasi,” kept a much closer eye on Schlicke and her family after that. She could feel it, even if she couldn’t always see it. She was in 11th grade at the time, so her teachers learned about her family’s exit permit. One summoned Schlicke to her office and asked whether this rumor was true. Yes, Schlicke told her, it was. “Well,” the teacher proposed, “why don’t you stay behind all by yourself?” Schlicke was stunned. “You could separate from your family,” the teacher continued. “You can get an apartment. You can study whatever you want.” It was an unthinkable suggestion. A few months later, the principal summoned the then-17-year-old to make a similar offer. But this time, when she refused, there were consequences. “You can pack up your stuff and leave now,” the principal told her. Because she planned to exit the country, it no longer made sense for the government to spend money educating her. She was denied the opportunity to earn a high school diploma, which meant she wouldn’t be able to study at the university level. She tried to apply for apprenticeships to learn some job skills but was always rejected — due to the intervention, she suspects, of the Stasi. And while some of her friends from school tried to visit her and help her learn what she’d missed, school officials eventually intimidated most of them into silence. They couldn’t be friends with her anymore, they told her; it was just too dangerous.

To make some money — and, more so, to relieve her boredom — she started working at the post office. She also got ahold of a typewriter and learned to use it. She practiced by typing up copies of her father’s handwritten letters, and they’d send both copies to government officials. In 1987, around the time Reagan visited West Berlin, they happened to watch a program on West German television that made a notable announcement. The leader of East Germany, the program said, was planning an official state visit to West Germany. A West German human rights organization was collecting petitions from East Germans looking to leave their country, and planned to present them to the East German leader during his visit. Schlicke’s father jotted down the address, and they reasoned it couldn’t hurt to write their own leader — something they’d done many times before, to no avail. Maybe this time, they thought, he would pay attention.

Schlicke was Christian. East Germany was formally an atheist state. In school, the lessons focused on Marx, Engels and Lenin, and blatant mockery of her beliefs.

Reagan’s speech, as Robinson wrote it, was intended precisely for someone like Birgit Schlicke. But it almost never reached her, or anyone. Many in the U.S. government, from the State Department to the national security apparatus to the German embassy, still wanted to squash it.

But because Reagan was preparing for a big trip to Europe, with many speeches scheduled, the normal review processes were delayed. Instead of disseminating drafts and having them sanitized by the rest of the White House, Reagan read an early version of Robinson’s speech. During a Monday meeting with speechwriters following his review, Reagan said he liked the draft, but guarded as usual, he didn’t say much else. Robinson pushed for more. “Mr. President,” he said, “I learned on the advance trip that your speech will be heard not only in West Berlin but throughout East Germany on the other side of the wall. And if the weather conditions are just right, I was told they could pick up the speech as far east as Moscow. Is there anything you’d like to say to the people living on the communist side of the wall?” Reagan, in view of multiple witnesses, highlighted the passage about removing the wall.

The rest of the U.S. diplomatic apparatus wasn’t so sure. They knew many Germans viewed Gorbachev’s reforms as hopeful, and thought this blunt call for taking down the partition was shortsighted. Robinson wrote, when recounting the experience in a 2007 issue of Prologue, the magazine of the National Archives, that these offices submitted no fewer than seven drafts, all of which nixed the call to “tear down this wall.” A Deseret Magazine review of documents provided by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library revealed that they often did so with extreme prejudice.

John C. Kornblum, American ambassador to Germany, devoted nearly five full pages to criticism of Robinson’s speech and promotion of his office’s alternative version. His first criticism was “tone,” noting that the speech came at a hopeful time for Germans. “In the current mood,” he wrote, “many Berliners will see the current White House draft as being confrontational and detrimental to the progress they so deeply desire.” Grant Green, special assistant to the president for national security affairs and executive secretary of the National Security Council, sent a memo on May 27 trying to stop the president from seeing the speech at all. “In reviewing the revised draft,” he wrote, “it is clear that serious differences still remain. … We do not concur with the speech being forwarded to the President in its current form.” The National Security Council was concerned, like the ambassador, that the tone didn’t match the moment and risked feeling out of touch. Their revised draft, which included substantial handwritten revisions across the board, didn’t even offer a reason for cutting “tear down this wall” — it was just marked off with a black X.

Robinson’s frustration built as the speech approached. “I leave it to you to decide what to do about (one staffer’s) sixth re-write,” he wrote to his boss at one point. “For myself, I reject it completely.” Though inexperienced, Robinson did have strong opinions about writing. He understood that language had power, and that sanitizing that power was cowardly. One draft suggested by the American diplomat in Berlin, for example, swapped his signature line for, “One day, this ugly wall will disappear.” At first, it looks very similar to what he said — but it isn’t. It removes responsibility. “The wall would disappear only when the Soviets knocked it down or let somebody else knock it down for them,” Robinson wrote in 2007. “What State (Department) and the NSC were saying, in effect, was that the President could go ahead and issue a call for the destruction of the wall — but only if he employed language so vague and euphemistic that everybody could see right away he didn’t mean it.”

Robinson found that idea unthinkable — and figured Reagan would feel the same way. He knew the president understood the power of precise language, and assumed he wouldn’t respect the euphemisms running rampant in the suggested rewrites. “Their speeches were drab,” he recalled. “They were bureaucratic. They lacked conviction.” And that wasn’t his style, nor Reagan’s. Luckily, because multiple people had heard Reagan himself praise the part of the speech that called for the wall’s destruction, Robinson and his team had leverage.

The secretary of state met with Reagan in person during his European trip to try, once more, to reframe the speech. But Robinson, who did not come along for the trip, did not know what the president’s response had been when he tuned in to watch from across the Atlantic.

Perched directly in front of the towering Brandenburg Gate, with its 12 Doric columns crowned by four magnificent bronze horses, Reagan stood at a lectern in a dark pinstripe suit and looked out at tens of thousands of waving German and American flags. Before he began speaking, they offered a rousing ovation that would only get louder as the speech progressed.

Robinson recognized the windup. “As long as this scar of a wall is permitted to stand, it is not the German question alone that remains open,” Reagan said just a few minutes in, “but the question of freedom for all mankind.” The crowd erupted with the loudest burst of cheers so far. Robinson suspected then, but didn’t know for certain, that his speech had remained intact. That line was meant as a warmup for the main attraction. Still, maybe the diplomats and advisers didn’t recognize that and cut it anyway. He wouldn’t have put it past them. He waited and wallowed in anxiety.

Eleven minutes in, the big moment arrived. Reagan was careful to frame the remark in the context of new hope for the Soviet Union. He wondered aloud whether Gorbachev’s reforms were genuine — or a smokescreen. To find out, he said, “There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable.

“General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace — if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe — if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate.” The crowd erupted, less clapping than full-blown screaming. Reagan had to pause for a full 25 seconds before he could continue. Finally, he said those six words. “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

Again, the crowd erupted. The speech continued for another 14 minutes, talking about arms control and international cooperation, but it never reached the same heights of enthusiasm. The signature moment was clear.

Watching from thousands of miles away, Robinson was elated. The message had been sent across the world — and he’d beaten the apparatus that tried to silence it. Watching from her family’s living room on West German television, 17-year-old Schlicke recalled her trip to their side of the Brandenburg gate with her sister. She remembered looking up and saying that one day, they’d be the ones looking down from the other side. “And it was so close,” she says, “and yet, not attainable at the time.” Reagan’s words made it seem even closer. “It was very powerful. I had goosebumps and tears in my eyes,” she says. Even the direct challenge to Gorbachev felt entirely appropriate. The end of the wall was what she and many others wanted. If Gorbachev was really a hopeful figure, she thought, he should be challenged to deliver on that hope. “When he said open this gate, tear down this wall — that’s what everybody felt,” she says. “It told me that we were not forgotten by the free world.”

Schlicke remembers that feeling well, 37 years later. But in the moment, she couldn’t think about its implication too deeply. She had much more pressing concerns.

Schlicke’s letter to West Germany was a particularly risky proposition, given that East German correspondence to Frankfurt was sure to be opened beforehand by state security. Their letters — hers typed, her father’s handwritten — would never arrive, they thought. They managed to smuggle them to an intermediary, who mailed them in Frankfurt on their behalf. Only much later did they learn that an East German spy in the human rights organization was monitoring the incoming letters. When word reached local authorities, state security finally came for them.

Schlicke’s father was supposed to go to the doctor for an hour. Ten minutes after he left, a neighbor knocked on Schlicke’s door, telling her they’d seen her father forced into a car by men in ties. She did the only thing she could think to do: locked the door and hid. Another 10 minutes passed before the doorbell rang again, this time over and over. Schlicke didn’t answer, but she heard what sounded like men’s voices in the hallway. Her mother eventually opened the door when she got home, with little choice but to let them inside. They ransacked the place and left with her typewriter, all the letters from her pen pals, and many books from her shelf.

Two days later, agents plucked her from her job at the post office. They drove her 45 minutes to a location far outside town, through an iron gate that closed behind her. The hope she’d felt, whether listening to Gorbachev’s talk of reform or Reagan’s call for freedom, turned to fear when she looked up at window after window sealed by iron bars.

She waited six months in an interrogation prison for a trial that lasted only three days. On the fourth day, she and her father were both found guilty of violating laws related to communicating with foreign organizations. Her father was deemed the ringleader, since he wrote the letter by hand, and sentenced to four years and six months. Schlicke was painted as more of an accomplice and sentenced to two years and six months in Hoheneck Fortress — the most notorious women’s prison in East Germany.

Schlicke had learned about it in a West German documentary. In her mind’s eye, she saw it as “an old, dark castle on a hill.” But the prison had a strange beauty to it, with red-brick walls and Flemish-inspired stepped gables. Even a steeple. In a different context it might look like an old college dorm. It housed the country’s most dangerous female inmates. Many had murdered their own children. A few were Nazi war criminals. But in the eyes of the guards, they were all the same, including political prisoners like Schlicke.

A typical day at Hoheneck started with sliding into standard-issue uniforms. Schlicke remembers them as drab and cheap. Most of her time was spent sewing colorful bedsheets and pillows — items Schlicke knew must be for export, because nothing that vibrant was available in East Germany. They had daily quotas, and even though Schlicke didn’t know how to sew, she learned quickly. They ate mostly stews, soups and pastas — rarely anything fresh. Her hope rested in her lawyer’s counsel that she would more than likely not have to serve her full sentence; that West Germany would purchase her freedom, as it had for many in her situation. That hope sustained her, as did her faith. She insisted on attending Catholic Mass every Sunday even though she couldn’t get anywhere near the priest. Once, for Christmas, he was prevented from even gifting her an orange.

After about a year she learned, in late October 1989, that there was a coming amnesty for political prisoners. She would be released on Nov. 17. The Berlin Wall crumbled just before, on Nov. 9.

She didn’t hear anything about it until the following day, when some newspapers began to circulate with the details. Guards then asked all the inmates to gather in a large hall, where they all watched East German TV together. “People were all over West Berlin, they were dancing in the street and partying,” Schlicke remembers.

She briefly returned to the same apartment she’d inhabited before her imprisonment, as did her father days later. Her hopes arrived all at once from there: Not only was she free from prison, but her family soon moved to West Germany, where she was able to attend university and even visit a pen pal in California. She attended an exchange program at Georgetown, in D.C., for a year. She even interned for a Republican congressman. “I always had this idealized picture of the United States,” she says, in part thanks to those resonant words of Ronald Reagan.

She thought, then, that those words had triumphed. She thought they had won. That that would be the end of it.

Reagan’s speech almost never reached Schlicke or anyone. Many in the U.S. government, from the State Department to the National Security apparatus to the German embassy, wanted to squash it.

For much of her life outside East Germany, Schlicke lived like the Berlin Wall and everything it stood for was something of the past. In addition to her travels, she built a career that included stints at American telecom giant WorldCom and an executive assistant role at power tool manufacturer Black & Decker. She still lives in West Germany, in the state of Hessen, near Frankfurt. But nowadays, Schlicke finds that past harder and harder to escape.

Her father, for one, is 80 and still somewhat bitter about how things ended. How so few of their tormentors ever faced justice, and how, because he spent so many of his prime earning years in East Germany, he struggles to make ends meet on his small pension. Schlicke has also chosen to lean into her past; she published a book in 2009 about her time in Hoheneck and visits schools across Germany to serve as a “contemporary witness,” telling stories and sharing pictures about life behind the Iron Curtain. But her struggle to escape East Germany isn’t all about the past; mainly, it’s about the geopolitics of the present. “When the wall came down, to me and to a lot of people, it was the end of the Cold War. And we thought we would all live happily together,” she says. “And what we have now is just — scary. It feels like Cold War 2.0.”

She calls Putin a “horrible dictator;” an “evil narcissist” seeking to turn back to an age with which she’s intimately familiar. And there are also new players. China threatens. And even within Germany and across much of the Western world, right-wing populism rises. Particularly in what used to be East Germany, she says, where many people seem lost and eager for a strong leader to make sense of the changing world for them. To withstand these threats will require unity, and looking at Germany’s allies, she doesn’t like what she sees. Especially from the United States. “It’s important that the Western Allies stand together and support each other. But what’s happening in the U.S. is also kind of scary,” she says. “It’s very confusing, and it’s not where I had hoped we would be today.”

It’s a long way from the vision of Ronald Reagan, who Robinson remembers had a unique serenity to him. While the rest of the White House felt frantic and high-pressure all the time, Reagan himself brought a calming presence to every room. He had a way of putting people at ease with humor and perception. That, believes Robinson, who didn’t respond to requests to be interviewed for this story, is what made Reagan the “great communicator” — he had a superhuman sense of what would resonate in a given moment and what wouldn’t. Yet whatever his superhuman instincts, when Robinson thinks of Reagan now, he remembers something else about him, too. Though he’d joined Reagan’s staff as a true believer and expected the Gipper to be “larger than life,” he instead found “he was just a man,” Robinson told Cooke. A man who, up close, had some gray hairs; who was shorter than his listed 6-foot-1; who looked older in person than on television.

Robinson wasn’t disappointed, but it taught him something about historical figures. Reagan, like every leader before him, was mortal. And over time, that made Robinson appreciate him even more. He wasn’t some demigod; he was better: a man who was willing to speak the truth as he saw it. That willingness is, ultimately, what made “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” so immortal and definitive in hindsight. “It didn’t achieve a place in history,” Robinson told Cooke, “until the wall came down” two years later. Because once that happened, Reagan speaking truth to the situation almost predicted the future. It spoke freedom into existence.

Schlicke often repeats a similar sentiment, one she attributes to German playwright Bertolt Brecht: “When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty.” Most people, she can say from personal experience, don’t feel that way. Or, at least, they don’t act like it. It’s easier to seek stability within injustice, then ignore it. But she’s never been able to do that. The way she sees it, speaking up earned her freedom and brought down the Berlin Wall. Speaking up eventually led her to West Berlin — though not to the platform she saw as a teen, when her family visited in search of oranges and bell peppers. Thankfully, these days she doesn’t need to look down from there, from afar.

Instead, she can stand where Reagan stood all those years ago and feel the pulse of history at her feet.

Then, she can walk through to the other side.

This story appears in the October 2024 issue of Deseret Magazine . Learn more about how to subscribe .