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The Man Who Disobeyed His Boss And Opened The Berlin Wall

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Jaeger stands in front of a remnant of the Berlin Wall. Behind him is a photo from Nov. 9, 1989, when he was the border guard who opened up the Bornholmer Street crossing, allowing East Germans to go to the west, the event that marked the fall of the wall. Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson/NPR

Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson/NPR

To many Germans, Harald Jaeger is the man who opened the Berlin Wall.

It's a legacy that still makes the former East German border officer uncomfortable 25 years after he defied his superiors' orders and let thousands of East Berliners pour across his checkpoint into the West.

"I didn't open the Wall. The people who stood here, they did it," says the 71-year-old with a booming voice who was an East German lieutenant colonel in charge of passport control at Bornholmer Street. "Their will was so great there was no other alternative but to open the border."

Those people had come to his crossing at Bornholmer Street after hearing Politburo member Guenther Schabowski say – mistakenly as it turns out – at an evening news conference on Nov. 9, 1989, that East Germans would be allowed to cross into West Germany, effective immediately.

Schabowski was a member of the ruling Socialist Unity Party in East Germany who helped force East German leader Erich Honecker from power a month earlier because of mounting public pressure across the Soviet Bloc for reforms.

Jaeger recalls almost choking on his dinner when he heard Schabowski on his workplace cafeteria's TV set. He rushed to the office to get some clarification on what his border guards were supposed to do.

For East Berliners yearning to go to a part of their city that had been off limits for 28 years, Schabowski's meaning couldn't have been clearer. He was a member of the ruling party and what he said was law.

But for Jaeger, everything he learned as a communist who served his homeland in the army, border patrol and much-hated Ministry for State Security had been turned on its head.

The Berlin Wall was a "rampart against fascism," he recalls. "When it went up on the 13th of August, 1961, I cheered."

A Feeling Of Uncertainty

Twenty eight years later on Nov. 9, hours before the Berlin Wall came down, Jaeger felt confused.

He says between 10 and 20 people showed up at Bornholmer Street right after Schabowski's news conference. They kept their distance from the crossing, nervously waiting for a sign from the East German guards that it was all right to cross.

They didn't give any.

The crowd soon swelled to 10,000, with many of them shouting: "Open the gate!"

"I called Col. Ziegenhorn who was my boss at the time and he said: 'You are calling me because of this nonsense?'" Jaeger says, adding Ziegenhorn told him to send the people away. Jaeger says further calls to other government officials didn't help, either.

The Night The Berlin Wall Came Down

YouTube

(This video contains strong language in German.)

He insists East German border guards never had orders to shoot East Berliners illegally crossing into the West on that night or any other. But the official, Center for Contemporary History in Potsdam says 136 people were killed at the Berlin Wall during its existence, including people trying to escape, border guards and bystanders.

Jaeger claims lethal fire was permitted only if guards felt their lives were threatened.

During the quarter century he's worked at the Bornholmer Street crossing, his guards only fired one warning shot, Jaeger says. But on Nov. 9, he worried that if the crowd grew unruly, people would end up hurt, even if it wasn't from guns.

Cracking The Gate Open

To ease the tension, he was ordered to let some of the rowdier people through, but to stamp their passports in a way that rendered them invalid if they tried to return home.

Their departure only fired the crowd up more and pressure mounted on Jaeger from above and below to avert a riot. Despite orders from his higher ups not to let more people through, at 11:30 p.m.: "I ordered my guards to set aside all the controls, raise the barrier and allow all East Berliners to travel through," he says.

Documents, Not Institutions: On 'Benched' And Not Sweating The Future

Eliza Coupe is one of the most precise comedic actresses you will ever see. Every muscle is at work on comedy, all the time. She has the kind of face that tempts you to say she has a great face, but that makes it seem like luck, and it's not luck. It's work.

Coupe was on the last couple of seasons of Scrubs and then got more attention from a lot of comedy types playing Jane on Happy Endings. After that show's cancellation, its cast has scattered to some pretty good gigs (Casey Wilson has her own show, Marry Me; Damon Wayans Jr. is back on New Girl, the pilot of which he filmed before Happy Endings was unexpectedly renewed; Adam Pally is having great fun on The Mindy Project). Coupe's sharp, warm but hyper work seemed like it might be hard to place outside the show's cartoony universe, but now she's landed in a new comedy on USA. Better yet, it was co-created (with Damon Jones) by the very funny Michaela Watkins, last seen killing it on Transparent and on the late and very, very lamented Trophy Wife.

Between Coupe, Watkins, additional executive producer Jon Embom (Party Down) and Coupe's co-star Jay Harrington — who was in the great, weird, short-lived Better Off Ted — Benched feels a little like a bunch of highly talented comedy people got tired of reading loving eulogies about the shows they used to be on, said "OKAY, ANYWAY," and made themselves something new.

Benched is the story of Nina, an attorney who takes a breakup phone call from her doofy boyfriend right before she finds out she's not making partner. A meltdown follows in which she breaks various items precious to her terrible boss ("That was a gift from Elton John!" he exclaims after she smashes one vase). It's your basic Person Is Brought Low And Must Begin Again premise; that part is familiar in concept but fresh in its sparky, energetic execution, in which Nina manages to be very funny and very put-upon but not pathetic. "You know you're never going to work in corporate law again!" her terrible boss barks at her. "Is that right?" she answers defiantly. "Well, watch me, 'cause the next job I get is going to be ten times better than this ass carnival." [I wasn't sure if I could say "ass carnival," because what even is that? But if it bothers you, think of it as some sort of donkey exhibition.]

Nina's next job, however, is at the public defender's office where everyone, it turns out, is a little weird. The first co-worker she encounters is a pantsuited, helmet-haired blonde named Cheryl, delightfully played by genuinely and wonderfully odd duck Maria Bamford, who's instantly in trouble for having lost track of a prisoner who was her client. She complains about how this was not her fault: "Apparently when you leave a client to go pee, you have to tell a guard, or they won't guard, which you'd think they would do automatically since they are guards."

Harrington plays another attorney in the office who quickly becomes Nina's verbal sparring partner and very appealing love interest, and what makes the show's handling of their relationship so great is that it's not coy. These characters are adults; they are a little long in the tooth for the kind of flirtation where he comes on to her and she gives the "Well, I never!" and then they fight and so forth. Here, by the end of the first episode, the flirtation is already text, not subtext, and that's a lot more interesting than bicker-bicker-bicker for half a season.

Two side notes: First, the pilot episode had made me a little uncomfortable in its portrayal of Nina's introduction to the public defender's office. It involves the heavy employment of hip-hop, which I could have lived without as it seemed to be hitting some pretty stereotypical beats. But in the second episode, she winds up explicitly talking about the fact that the primary crime of many of her clients is being poor, since a poor Mexican kid who smokes pot gets deported, while a rich white kid who smokes pot is considered to be a perfectly ordinary college student. It's better treatment of that topic than I feared from that opening.

Second, you should be aware that Benched is under the relaxed profanity rules of cable, under the system where you can say the S word, but not the F word. I like to abbreviate this as "S, no F," or SNOF. Many basic cable channels follow SNOF rules or modified SNOF, unlike broadcast television, which follows NOSNOF rules, or pay cable, which follows ATFWYCSO rules. (All The F Words You Can Spit Out.) Our own Neda Ulaby, by the way, reported on this last year. So if you prefer your comedy with no profanity, this may not be up your alley, although I would argue that missing the chance to watch Eliza Coupe wrap her mouth around swears is missing a great thing in life.

All of this is a lead-up to saying: I like the show so much, but I admit, I feel like I've been here before. With Trophy Wife, with Happy Endings, with Enlisted, with Better Off Ted, with Ben And Kate, with ... well, heck, with Sports Night in the late '90s. Affection for a new show — any new show that doesn't seem pre-destined to be a blockbuster — comes with a heavy dose of anxiety: Oh, I'm going to get to like this, and then they're going to cancel it, right? I've already been through it this season with NBC's A To Z, which I had just begun to believe was going to turn into a solid show when word went out that the network had pulled the plug. (Producer Rashida Jones has been quick to point out that they are not technically canceled, but the odds seem very long.) (This is my favorite tweet from Jones on the topic.)

This happens a lot. And the more outlets proliferate, the more things people get to try, and the more things people get to try, the more likely they are to try something that's just right for you, and the more likely it is that that thing may get lost in the shuffle. (I have no specific reason to believe this will happen with Benched, it's just a generalized anxiety I feel myself having with everything.) There was a time in the days of three or four channels when shows either came and went and were forgotten — they "failed" — or they became institutions, running for years. That was the goal: become stable, become eternal, become routine. (This could happen, by the way, with both good shows and bad ones.)

But now, that cycle is much more hectic, and success — both a successful show-making experience and a happy show-watching experience — really need to be redefined. I don't think of Happy Endings as a failure, for instance. I think of it as a show I got to watch for a limited amount of time, during which it made me laugh and exposed me to new funny people. I think of Trophy Wife the same way, even though its run was shorter. The persistent on-demand availability of shows no longer in production (you can still buy Trophy Wife very easily from Amazon or iTunes, for instance) means that just like a movie can still be a great one to recommend to people even though it's a closed book, there's no reason not to say, "Hey, are you looking for an offbeat, sweet, warm, kinda weird comedy? Here's one I loved." Same with Enlisted, same with whatever.

Obviously, it's sad when projects don't get to continue. Any of these shows, I'd rather there were five seasons than one. (I don't know if I'd rather there were ten seasons than five, though.) Any of them, I'd like to be the wealthy dowager who could create a Warm Weird Comedy Endowment that could support them for as long as the people making them had stories to tell.

But from time to time, I hear people say — and I hear myself guiltily feel — that there's no point in getting attached to something until you're confident it won't be canceled, and I think that feeling needs to be turned back. Don't not watch a great show because it might not be around for a long time. Among other things, that creates a vicious cycle in which the kind of things that fight to find audiences are guaranteed to never find them. A longshot becomes a no-shot, precisely because people were sad that it was a longshot, and that's not quite ... logical. Part of me believes firmly that if everyone who would have really enjoyed these shows had been willing to try them, they would have lasted longer, and that stings.

If you like A to Z, talk about it a lot. If you like Benched, talk about it a lot. Worst-case scenario, these things don't last, they don't make it into "institution" status, so what? Fun fact: there will wind up being more episodes of A to Z, even if it's over, than there were of the British The Office. Maybe this crowd of people makes six seasons of Benched; that's great. Maybe they make one season of this and five seasons of whatever the next idea is, or one season each of the next five ideas.

Parks And Recreation has felt bubble-ish, teetering, imperiled, whatever you want to say, for the entire time it's been on television. It never crossed over into "broadcast television institution!" in the sense of huge ratings and the absolute right to stay on for as long as it wanted. It stayed itself, funny and specific and warm and philosophical and silly, and now it's ending. It's managed to hang on for seven seasons (though three of those were or will be shortened to varying degrees), but if it had only hung on for three, I'd still consider it a success. I'd still take it as a document: "Here's a thing people made that they loved."

Here's my advice, for whatever it's worth, for viewers: Don't sweat ratings too much. If you watch the things you really value and you talk about them and support them and don't try to guess in advance what's got legs and what doesn't, you'll do more good for the general state of television than you will if you try to master the science, which is laughably unscientific a lot of the time anyway. Most viewers don't know the business side of television very well — many critics don't either — and ratings are a business thing. Your part is to be an enthusiast. Be sad when things end and happy when things are good, as Benched is right now.

optimism

cancellation grief

benched

michaela watkins

jay harrington

eliza coupe

Republican Sweep Highlights Climate Change Politics In Alaska

On election night in a hotel ballroom in Anchorage, Alaska, Sen. Lisa Murkowski picked up a chair and waved it over her head.

"I am the chair-maaaaaaaaaaan!" she shouted.

The Republican takeover Tuesday night puts Murkowski in charge of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. That's great news for Alaska, which is always eager for the feds to allow more oil drilling up here. But what does her chairmanship mean for the other side of that coin — global warming?

At that same election-night party, Murkowski said she takes climate change seriously.

"I come from a state where we see a warming. We're seeing it with increased water temperatures; we're seeing it with ice that is thinner; we're seeing it with migratory patterns that are changing," she said. "So I look at this and I say this is something that we must address."

But does she mean we should address the cause of global warming? Hard to say, since she's apparently not so sure what the cause is — or that mankind is to blame. She mentioned a volcano she had heard about in Iceland.

"The emissions that are being put in the air by that volcano are a thousand years' worth of emissions that would come from all of the vehicles, all of the manufacturing in Europe," she said.

Remembering The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill

25 Years After Spill, Alaska Town Struggles Back From 'Dead Zone'

"What can I say?" wonders Princeton professor Michael Oppenheimer, a leading expert on climate change. "It's simply untrue. I don't know where she gets that number from."

Oppenheimer says it's actually the other way around: Annual emissions from Europe are 10 times bigger than the annual emissions of all volcanoes put together. And he says the argument misses a bigger point: Humans are adding carbon dioxide to what was a balanced system.

"So not only is the number wrong, but the context is highly deceptive," he says.

But casting doubt on mankind's role kind of makes sense in Alaska — a place where the warming itself is becoming too hard to ignore.

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Oil, carried here by the Trans-Alaska pipeline, is fundamental to the state's economy. But Alaskans also face the effect of climate change in their daily lives. Al Grillo/AP hide caption

itoggle caption Al Grillo/AP

Oil, carried here by the Trans-Alaska pipeline, is fundamental to the state's economy. But Alaskans also face the effect of climate change in their daily lives.

Al Grillo/AP

In the very same hotel where the Republicans had their victory party, there is a climate change conference going on. It's a conference for land managers who are dealing with global warming right now: They're talking about things like what to do when melting permafrost moves your sewer pipes and water runs the wrong way. This isn't a conference about stopping global warming — it's about living with it.

Scientist Scott Rupp of the University of Alaska Fairbanks admits Alaskans tend to avoid talking about the cause.

"You know, that's a tough thing for a place like Alaska," he says. "I mean, there's no way of getting around the pragmatic fact that we depend on fossil fuels for the majority of our state budget. We also experience the highest energy prices anywhere in the country."

Rupp says talking about the cause politicizes things.

"But if we stick to the impacts part of things, which is part of the equation of living in Alaska — and has been for 10, 20 years now — you can kind of side-step that," he adds.

On the forefront of global warming, Alaska and its politicians have settled into a kind of acceptance. Instead of arguing about causes, they've decided to concentrate on trying to adapt.

Alaska

climate change

'Daily Show', 'Colbert' Strain To Lampoon Democratic Losses

Jon Stewart may be the only media figure who started his election coverage Tuesday with an apology.

"I did vote today ... I was being flip and it kind of took off," said Stewart, who had told CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour in an interview earlier Tuesday that he wasn't voting because he "had just moved, and I don't even know where my thing is." The comment sparked loads of stories about how the comedian wasn't voting in an election he had been talking about for months.

"I want to apologize," Stewart added. "Because I think I wasn't clear enough that I was kidding and it sent a message that I didn't think voting was important or that I didn't think it was a big issue. And I do. And I did vote. And I was being flip and I shouldn't have done that. That was stupid."

Television

Jon Stewart: The Most Trusted Name In Fake News

Monkey See

Stephen Colbert: The End Of One Joke, The Start Of Many More

Yes, it was that kind of night for liberals. Even a left-leaning fake news anchor had to start the night by seeking forgiveness for a screw-up.

Both Stewart's Daily Show and its Comedy Central sibling, Stephen Colbert's Colbert Report, went live Tuesday to talk about the historic wins Republicans piled up in this year's midterm elections.

But the wave of red sweeping over the electoral map seemed to dampen the mood a bit at both shows, where leading Republicans like Sens. Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham had been the target of barbed jokes for quite a while.

"Look, I'm trying to find any way to entertain people who are truly on a ledge tonight," Stewart joked at one point, just before promising to replace the Statue of Liberty's torch and tablet with a Bible and an AK-47 to signal the GOP's success.

The evening seemed to highlight the limits of news-tinged satire on the political scene, as HBO comic Bill Maher's public effort to oust Republican U.S. Rep. John Kline — referred to on his show Real Time as the "flip a district" campaign — also failed.

Kline, whom Maher criticized for being "invisible" while representing a district outside Minneapolis, won his seventh term in office Tuesday despite repeated criticism from the comic, who devoted a website to the effort and even visited the state for a panel discussion on the election.

On Stewart's and Colbert's shows, the reporting of election results almost seemed an afterthought — though the Daily Show had fun with some election projections, picturing McConnell as a cartoon turtle and showing an alligator gobbling up failed Florida gubernatorial candidate Charlie Crist, the Republican turned Democrat.

Instead, Stewart poked fun at the influence of money — alumnus Rob Riggle played a stack of cash giddily celebrating the dollar's role in the most expensive midterm election in history — and interviewed Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus.

"Were you surprised that the Democrats' strategy seemed to be curling in a ball and hoping you didn't kick them in the face too hard?" Stewart asked Priebus, setting the tone for the rest of the interview.

Colbert presented his last live election special before leaving Comedy Central to take over David Letterman's Late Show on CBS next year. Many of his jokes centered on the media coverage, lampooning social media-obsessed TV reports and playing multiple instances of Fox News anchors referring to the channel's election data center as its "brain room."

"Just as you suspected, Fox News keeps all their brains in one room," Colbert joked. "And it's not the one with the cameras."

Although his persona on the show is ostensibly a parody of a conservative political commentator, Colbert seemed less like his character than ever, signaling the kind of attitude viewers might see once he moves to CBS and drops the show's conceit forever.

"It's been a good night for Republicans," Colbert said, not really sympathizing with or enjoying the victory. "Some of them are even awake to celebrate it."

Colbert also welcomed conservative pundit turned Obama supporter Andrew Sullivan, who blamed Democrats' massive electoral losses on being "weak-kneed" about supporting the president and party policies.

"You have a president who has an excellent economic record ... [who] enacted universal health care, which is their goal for 40 years," says Sullivan. "And they ran away from that achievement and refuse to talk about it."

Colbert responded by asking, "What can we do to get more Americans to vote? Should we have those 'I voted' stickers deep-fried?"

There were lots of odd events elsewhere in media coverage Tuesday, including a moment when Fox News pundit Brit Hume kept chanting the word "Redskins" as fellow pundit Juan Williams tried to talk about the controversy surrounding the name of Washington's NFL team.

Former Meet the Press host David Gregory joined fellow NBC alumna Katie Couric on Yahoo's election coverage — which was held in a Washington, D.C., bar.

And CNN anchor Anderson Cooper had a novel comeback when a panel responded sluggishly to his question about marijuana legalization just before 1 a.m. Wednesday: "What, are you all stoned, or something?"

The only time Colbert got close to being serious Tuesday was when he wrapped up the show noting it was his eighth and final live election show for Comedy Central in 14 years.

"I'll just end by saying it has been a pleasure and privilege to be welcomed into your homes these last nine years," he said. "So to you and yours and I say a fond ... what's that? I have another month and a half of shows? Well, this was a little too dramatic."

Not dramatic enough to change the tone for TV's leading news satire shows, which worked hard Tuesday to slap a smiling face on a defeat that most likely disappointed many fans in their audiences.

Maybe Colbert just got out while the getting was good.

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The Man Who Disobeyed His Boss And Opened The Berlin Wall

Documents, Not Institutions: On 'Benched' And Not Sweating The Future

Republican Sweep Highlights Climate Change Politics In Alaska

'Daily Show', 'Colbert' Strain To Lampoon Democratic Losses

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