November 9 marks the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. For more than 28 years, the forbidding concrete barrier had separated the two halves of post-World War II Germany. Nearly 4m high, 50km long, topped with barbed wire and punctuated with 302 guard towers, it was effectively impassable, designed to keep East Berliners in (and West Berliners out). Families were separated; people attempting to cross became casualties – more than 140 died between 1961 and 1989.

Although its fall on the dramatic night of 9 November was sudden, the lead-up was not: anti-Soviet sentiment had been growing throughout the 1980s and peaked in 1989. Protests, demonstrations and marches became more frequent and louder and louder; soon there was no countering the groundswell of action by people desperate to bring about fundamental change. In June that year, the communist government in Poland fell; the Hungarian government began dismantling the electrified fence along its border with Austria, and in September more than 13,000 East German tourists escaped from Hungary into Austria.

The timing of the collapse was, in fact, an accident. East German leaders had tried to calm mounting protests by easing restrictions at the borders, making travel easier for people living in the east side of the country. They had not intended to open the border up completely; but during the day of November 9, after a Central Committee meeting in East Berlin, Günter Schabowski, a Politburo member and spokesman for East Berlin’s Communist Party, announced a change in his city’s relations with the West. When asked by a journalist when the change would come into effect, the flustered and ill-briefed Schabowski replied that it would come into effect at midnight – and that the citizens of the (east) Germany Democratic Republic would be finally free to cross the border.

That was all that was needed. Cellphones were not so ubiquitous, and social media was not the powerful, omnipresent tool that it is today, yet the news spread with the speed of a wildfire and, within hours, East and West Berliners flocked to the Wall, drinking beer and chanting “Tor auf!” (“Open the gate!”). At midnight, they flooded through the checkpoints, clambering on top of the wall and attacking it with chisels and hammers as the guards stood by, unsure of their new orders and unable to repel the jubilant hordes.

More than two million people from East Berlin visited West Berlin that weekend to participate in a celebration that was, journalist Erik Kirschbaum wrote, “the greatest street party in the history of the world”. East and West Berlin had both enjoyed a vibrant but separate cultural and music life, but now concerts to celebrate the newfound unity were quickly arranged, notably an emotional performance by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, of Beethoven’s 7^th Symphony, conducted by the renowned Daniel Barenboim.

Some performances were impromptu. Hearing the news on the radio at his home in Paris, the world-famous cellist, Russian-born Mstislav Rostropovich, immediately knew what he wanted to do. All scheduled flights were fully booked, so he asked a friend with a private jet to fly him and his cello to Berlin. Two days later, on 11 November, he went to the infamous Checkpoint Charlie at the Brandenburg Gate, to welcome East Berliners with the most powerful gift he possessed – music.

He borrowed a chair, sat quietly in front of a graffiti-filled section of the crumbling wall and played a Bach cello suite.

Video: EuroNews, November 1989

In an interview in 2005, he recalled: “I went to knock on the door of a house, and someone recognized me. Within 10 minutes, there was a little crowd, and a television crew came passing by. I played the most joyous Bach Suites for solo cello in order to celebrate the event. But I could not forget all those who had lost their lives on this wall in trying to cross over it. Hence, I played the Sarabande of Bach’s 2nd Suite in their memory, and I noticed a young man crying.”. For Rostropovich knew about matters of the heart, and about the repressive side of politics – exile, persecution. Born in Azerbaijan of Russian-Jewish and Polish descent, his musical career was encouraged by his teachers at the Moscow Conservatory – pre-eminently Shostakovich and Prokofiev – and in 1951 he was awarded the State Stalin’s Prize for his musical achievements.

His reputation, his livelihood and his life were threatened, however, by his championing of the dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The fallout was extreme: he was banned from international tours and prohibited from earning royalties; his performances in the Soviet Union were banned; his musical activity was severely curtailed and his communications were restricted.

He fled with his family to the West in 1974, and was stripped of his Soviet citizenship in 1978. His career flourished but he never lost his yearning to return to his homeland. He later recalled that on that frosty November day he managed to unite the two parts of his existence that had been forcibly divided: his life in Russia before 1974 and his life in the West afterward. In 1990, he said that going back to the Soviet Union after 16 years in exile was “like being in a coma and then waking up, but the coma has been really wonderful”.

The cello suites are widely recognised as some of German-born Bach’s finest compositions – “music wherein a man has created a dance of God,” wrote the English musicologist Wilfrid Mellers. Fitting, then, that Rostropovich chose to play one of them for the occasion.

The musician and director also said, “Every man must have the right fearlessly to think independently and express his opinion about what he knows, what he has personally thought about and experienced, and not merely to express with slightly different variations the opinion which has been inculcated in him.” ML