Quote:
Originally Posted by CastleBravo
Krauts? Please.
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Hey, I am German, I can say that without being offended!
It is not different than us calling the British "Tommys" (if we had called them Charly, now that would have become one of history'S biggest jokes...)
Originally, this thread was about the reactions from Britain and France 20 years ago, and I mind you that not only did Mitterand line up with Thatcher who had some much more unpßolite things to say about Germany in 1989 and met Kohl with uptmost hostility, but - not mentioned in the articles since they completley ignored the American view of things - that Washington called in Moscow and asked them if they could intervene in Eastgermany to make things stop there so that control would not be lost over the situation.
Pretty much everybody - including ourselves - got simply overrolled by the speed by which events took place. In autumn 1989, I lft berlin and went to university in Osnabrück. I left a divided city, and five hours later I arrived in 450 km away Münster at my grandparents, as a first stop, which is 50 km SE of Osnbrück. there I was, having just left a sealed and dividec city - and my grandfather was greeting me five hours later with telling me in the door that the wall in Berlin had been opened in some places! Until then, we just had seen mass-escapes of Eastgermans making holiday in Hungary and pressing for being allowed to cross the border there. that it would end with the total collapse of the GDR, was not certain - and
nobody saw it coming that quickly.
Seen that way, that there was panic in London, Paris and Washington, could be understood. as history has shown, it soon faded in just 2 or 3 months.