Oh What A Time... - #97 Walls (Part 2)

Episode Date: March 11, 2025

This is Part 2! For Part 1, check the feed!This week we’re not building walls or tearing them down, in fact, we’re simply talking about them. But what a collection of walls we have: the Great Wall of China, Hadrian’s Wall and the Berlin Wall.And elsewhere, isn’t schooling far more complicated these days?! No one being educated in a Victorian Workhouse ever had to worry about an outfit for world book day - so did that make it easier? (Possibly not). But if you have anything unusual about the area you grew up in then please email: [e-mail] you fancy a bunch of OWAT content you’ve never heard before, why not treat yourself and become an Oh What A Time: FULL TIMER?Up for grabs is:- two bonus episodes every month!- ad-free listening- episodes a week ahead of everyone else- And much moreSubscriptions are available via AnotherSlice and Wondery +. For all the links head to: ohwhatatime.comYou can also follow us on: X (formerly Twitter) at @ohwhatatimepodAnd Instagram at @ohwhatatimepodAaannnd if you like it, why not drop us a review in your podcast app of choice?Thank you to Dan Evans for the artwork (idrawforfood.co.uk).Chris, Elis and Tom xSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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This is part two of Walls. Let's get on with the show. Right, it's funny talking about walls because I've kind of personified them in my mind. I think you have good walls and bad walls. The Great Wall of China I thought was a good wall, but Crane you've corrected me. I think, no, it's probably a bad wall. Or at least it's kind of... It has an indifferent... Dark past, I think we could probably say.

Neither good nor bad. Berlin Wall, I think we can all agree, is a baddie wall. We'll talk about later. Yes, yeah, I know what you mean. Yeah, yeah. Hadrian's Wall, I'm going to say, I think it's a good wall, right? Walls are never great in history, but you've got to put yourself in 117 AD, where you've got raiding parties from the north, uncouth Scottish folk coming down, when they're, when Scots are really nasty. They get nastier, we've all seen Braveheart, but this lot, 117 AD, they're really not. These raiding parties, you don't want them coming in your kingdom. Yeah. Yeah? I think we can all agree that.

They're mad, they're cold, and they haven't got trousers on. I'm not sure the kilts have even been invented yet. I think it's just the axe. They're mad, they're cold, they're naked. Yeah, so you've got raids from the Picts and other northern tribes. So I can see why Hadrian in 117 AD, a newly installed Roman emperor, thought we need some walls. So Hadrian had got considerable military experience from his predecessor, Trajanjan and he actually decided, he did something really interesting. He basically decided that the Roman Empire had grown large enough.

I quite like this about Hadrian. A lot of these emperors like Alexander the Great, they're always about conquest. Hadrian's like, no, let's just stop here. We've got a lot of territory. Let's just try and prove what we've got. We don't need the hassle of Scotland. It's Big Sam. We're two nil up. Let's just try and prove what we've got. We don't need the hassle of Scotland. It's Big Sam. We're 2-0 up. Let's just sit back. Yeah. And also nowadays, one of the big mental health things people talk about is trying

to be content with your lot. Yeah. And he was content without Scotland. It's a really healthy place to be. Not to always cry. Scotland is a hassle. They're mad up there and the weather's terrible. You'll have a much happier life if you just accept your lot and you're content and appreciate the things you have. Yeah, all these mad, the axe-swinging Scottish tribes and the picks. Do you know what? Don't take them on. You don't have to. So he decided, right, I'm just going to hang on to what I've got.

So you've got to remember the Roman Empire in 117 AD, it stretches from the north of England south to the boundaries of the Sahara Desert, east to what is now Iraq and Jordan, and then into most parts of Germany, Switzerland, and even the northern Caucasus and the eastern shores of the Black Sea. Too big. It's unmanageable. Unmanage Too big. It's unmanageable. Unmanageably big. It's unmanageable.

No wonder they didn't fancy Fife. They were miles away. On a cold Tuesday night in winter. No thank you. Why, to be honest, it's an argument. Aberdeen, are you mad? There's a strong argument they didn't really need any of Britain. No, I totally agree.

Like if you've got Italy, you've got the hot climate. I totally agree. Just stick around there. Just enjoy that. Even now in 2025, I find the weather unmanageable. It's difficult. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Why bother with Colchester? You have better territory. The way you started is much better territory. It's warm, it produces crop, you've got crops, amazing beaches, you've got everything you need.

Imagine that, you're some Roman centurion and you've left fabulous Italy and you're walking towards S6 and you're like, oh, seems to be getting worse. It's constantly toga weather. Puglia to Portsmouth. It's never not togaweather. And then you come to Britain.

You're like, what is this? Yeah, they got as far as Carmarthen. Did they? I love Carmarthen, yeah. So are there Roman... There's a Roman amphitheatre in Carmarthen. I mean, you can't really see... There's not an enormous amount of evidence left of it.

And now it tends to be teenagers smoking cigarettes and drinking cans there. I mean you can't really see, there's not an enormous amount of evidence left of it and now it tends to be teenagers smoking cigarettes and drinking cans there. But yeah, yeah, Carmarthen is a Roman town. Is that where you did your first open mic stand-up gaze? In the first tread the boards in the Roman amphitheatre of Carmarthen town. Yeah. Yeah, Carmarthen is Wales' oldest town I think for that reason. But yeah, the Romans got as far as Cmarthen.

That was always their dream, wasn't it? Caesar used to talk bang on about that. His dream was to one day reach Cmarthen. Yeah, they didn't go to Llanelli, they thought they're too uncivilised. We can't do anything with them. Okay, Hadrian decided enough's enough for this Roman Empire. So what he wanted to do is mark the northern boundary of the Roman Empire, which is the Hadrian's Wall. It's the northern frontier of the Roman Empire in Britain. It separated the Roman controlled Britain from the uncunked tribes in Scotland.

But of course it was also there to control and defend against the raids from the Picts and the other northern tribes. But he also wanted to kind of control trade and movement. So it's a long war, but there's also gates, mile castles and forts at regular intervals, which allowed the Romans to control who entered and exited Roman Britain. And this helped with taxation, trade and security. I never thought about the taxation aspect of the war and controlling trade,

but that was a major function of it. I assumed it was just a defensive thing. Yeah, me too. 73 miles long, yeah, and it has forts, mild castles, watchtowers along its length, and it took six years to build. Nothing across the trade. That's quick, isn't it? Yeah, that's quick. Yeah, absolutely. Faster than Wembley. But of course, the Roman Empire is massive. So this wasn't the only frontier war. You have the Limes Arabicus from the Red Sea through to Syria, passing east of Palmyra,

Limes Tripolianus from Libya and Tunisia, Limes Germanicus, Netherlands and southern Germany, Danubian Limes, Hungary, Moldova and Romania, Fossitum Africae, Egypt and the Antonine Wall in southern Scotland. And yet the whole idea is you provide protective cover for trade routes and imperial road network control immigration but protect against invaders. But really interestingly, because there are so many like forts and installations like watchtowers, you've got an army managing all this and you've got communities springing up around the wall. How interesting. And effectively the one

side of it is seen as kind of the Roman saw the inside of it as civilized and outside of it as uncivilized. So it's a demarcation between the civilized and the uncivilized world, but also the wall is its own community in itself. Also, so communities are springing up by the wall? Yeah, I'm getting onto that in a sec, hang on. I'm immediately thinking from a cost saving exercise, if I'm looking to build a house, I'm thinking that's one wall sorted already. So that is where I'd set up my family home. I now know I'd only need to do three more walls and a roof and I'm sorted.

And if the Romans are doing it, it's definitely been done properly. Exactly, yeah. It's a quality wall. So you've got one good wall in your house. Win. We know a lot about life on the Roman frontier, North and South, because of writing fragments that have survived in the form of wooden tablets. And there's one really famous example, which is a birthday party invitation issued by Claudia

Severa. This is absolutely astonishing. Historians believe this to be the first example of words written by a woman in Latin in the world. It's a wooden tablet, it's in the British Museum and it's written by a woman called Claudia Severa, who's the wife of the commander of an unidentified fort along Hadrian's Wall, to Sopulcia Lepidina, who's the wife of a commander at Vindolanda. So there's basically the two wives of these two commanders

at different forts are writing to each other, and Claudia, the woman who's written this note, is writing to invite the other lady to a birthday party. And this wooden tablet was discovered in the 1970s and we can actually read it. And it says, this is the actual thing, this is 2000 years old essentially, these writings. Claudia Severa- It's Prosecco o'clock is the first. Claudia Severa to her Lepidina greetings. On 11th September, sister, for the day of celebration of my birthday, I give you a warm invitation to make sure that you come to us to make the day more enjoyable for me by your

arrival if you are present. Give my greetings to your Ser Aelius. My Aelius and my little son send him their greetings. And then this first bit is written by the scribe, but the second bit is thought to be written by Claudia herself who says, I shall expect you sister farewell sister my dear Esau as I hope to prosper and hail and then back to the scribe to Sepulchiana Lipadena wife of Ceruleus. So that wooden tablet existed. Isn't that amazing?

I love that. Like a little time capsule from 2000 years ago, inviting to a birthday party. It's just so, that's magic. The thing is, right, when that stone wooden tablet was written, the person writing it never thought that it would be in any way significant or that we'd be pouring over it. A fascinating point.

A fascinating point, exactly. 2,000 years later. It was a completely normal piece of correspondence. And that, genuinely, is why I find it hard to chuck anything out. Because if I find anything I've written that's, say, 20 years old, I'm like, Oh my God, that's from 2003! And then I feel obliged to keep it. But if you start thinking like that, then you keep everything, and your house just becomes an archive of your life, which I personally wouldn't mind. You would

make writing autobiographies far easier if everyone did that. I think Izzy would leave me if my house became an archive of my life. But I just find that amazing. I love the mundanity of it. This is the history that I absolutely love, just a random person, relatively inconsequential to history, just doing a bit of admin. It's just fascinating. So is that scratched into the wood? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll send you a picture of it. Now, it's a wooden tablet. Do you think the fact someone's taking the time to scratch into the wooden tablet is

putting a certain pressure on you going? Because I think someone's taking so much time to do that. I can't feel it. It's not a text. That's exactly what I mean. You haven't been added to a WhatsApp group late. Yeah, wait. You've already missed the first 15 messages. There's clearly banter about something

that's been discussed before, and I've not been part of that. You've missed out on that. And you are thinking to yourself. Gifts that make no sense. You are thinking to yourself, hmm, I'm not sure I was in the top 10 of people who were going to be invited to this party. I think they've had a few dropouts. Exactly.

I've sent you a picture of it. It's not scratched in. It's actually this pen. You can see it's like there's ink on this wooden tablet. It's fascinating. It's also strange to think that's how wooden tablets with how messages were getting sent around. I guess it's harder wearing than paper. Wow. Yeah, or not even sure whether you'd have paper then. Nice handwriting, lovely. Yeah, it's amazing, isn't it?

We can tell a lot about the people who were living in these fortifications along the walls because they've left over loads of writing evidence. At South Shields, for instance, there's a tombstone dedicated to Regina, wife of Baratz, a man who had come to the north east of England from Syria. And we know that hundreds of Syrian archers served on the wall, with some completing their 25 year military service while stationed in England. Think about that, in like 117 AD, around that time you had hundreds of Syrians coming to England

to serve military service for the Roman Empire. Yeah, that's incredible. Yeah, and also we know that there were civilians from the Middle East in Britain in this period too, and also traders and their families. South Shields in particular was home to a garrison of between 300 and 640 Iraqi boatmen who were likely from Basra, whose presence in the local area was such that the immediate vicinity of the fort where they were came to be known for a short time as Arabia. And again, we know this from the writing. Incredible. People around that time.

That's so cool. Slightly further down the wall, you had a fortification managed largely from a cohort from Algeria and Morocco. Great. The frontier established by Hadrian was traversed by all sorts of Romans as they moved around the ancient world, bringing with them languages, faiths, foods, including figs and couscous that the first times those foods would have been eaten in Britain, would have been brought over by people walking on the world.

I imagine the international five aside tournaments they were doing then as well. Oh, yeah. Morocco versus Syria. Also, very different playing styles. Exactly. Like the European Cup in the 70s. Yeah. Because football hadn't become an enormous global marketplace by that point. So you still used to have very, very low. You'd have had the English

boys would have been playing a very attritional sort of long ball, very physical game. The Italians would have been, who'd have been Catanaccio that had been playing defensive football. Horror as a Brazilian village is set up. Oh, how we are. Imagine the English sing tick attack for the first time, having their minds absolutely blown. Yeah, I love it. That's great.

The word reducer being added into the international football context for the first time. A goal being, the shape of a goal being chalked onto the wall, that's what it's for as well, isn't it? Yeah. Anyway, it's perfect. It's all set up to go. Yeah. Oh, take me back, let me play.

Yeah, so it wasn't just a fortification, it was also a real point of cultural exchange amongst a diverse range of peoples. Amazing. That is amazing. I love that. That's so exciting. Yeah. The idea of these different communities and cultural differences just mean that's awesome.

That's so exciting. And I'll go back to what I said at the start. I think it's a good war. Broadly a good war. And it's still there now. It's a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Go have a look. That birthday invitation, it's for, as I said, I was in this lead mine and cabin complex in

Derbyshire last week and they had, it was graffiti where it was marked the initials of the miners and the bosses and who owned the mines or all privately owned and it was the initials of all the miners they they know exactly who they were what their full names were and then it was marked 1705 and that would have been a completely um just a very normal sort of work based administrative piece of graffiti that is now 320 years old. And I find that step absolutely fascinating. I think I like, I think mundane history is my favourite kind of history. No, I think you're right. I absolutely get that because it's just like the day to day lives. And I think it's easier to see an equivalence of the human experience between them and us.

Yes, that's a good point. Far more than let's say some huge military writer. Yeah, or the great men of history theory where it's just emperors and kings and military leaders. Yeah, exactly. It's a fact that people are just doing the same things we are, trying to get enough people around to their birthday so it's dignified. They're trying to work out whether they should pull it. Shall we, shall I book a table at ZZ first or shall I see if any people can come? Exactly, yeah.

And if no one can come, do I go to ZZ on my own? I'll send out a few tablets, I'm going to make it sound breezy. No worries if you can't make it. Okay right we are now moving on to a wall that the three of us remember I would imagine. I think the I'm discussing the Berlin Wall. the fall of the Berlin Wall is one of my most formative historical and political memories. So the fall of the Berlin Wall, I had turned, I was nine, I think, six days before.

So I've got a totally vivid memory of the fall of the Berlin Wall, because it was something that just got mentioned all the time. And even if you weren't aware of what it was, and I thought it was much older than it was actually, I thought it'd been there for much longer, it was just part of everyday life in the late 1980s,

even if you didn't live in Berlin like the three of us. So in August, 1961, these German authorities unveiled what they call the Anti-Faschist Schutzwall, the Anti-Fascist Protection Wall. Now, I've got to say, every time I see German written down, I think I could learn German in about an hour. I reckon I could have,

I think I could have worked out what Anti-Faschist Schutzahl meant without seeing the translation. I don't know. I'm currently having French lessons and trying to learn French. Are you? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've been doing this since August. And I don't know why I'm bothering learning such a difficult language when I could pick up German in about 40 minutes from what I can see. But anyway. How are you doing that? Are you meeting someone or are you doing Duolingo or whatever it's called?

On Zoom. So I do two apps to keep myself ticking over. And I try to have a weekly lesson when, if I can be, it doesn't always happen. And she did go on holiday for six weeks. And how's it going? Are you getting good? Can you speak French? But yeah, so... And how's it going? Are you getting good? Can you speak French? Do you know what? I can speak as long as the person I'm speaking to says exactly what I want them to say in

the way that I've learnt it. And they know where the bibliotheque is. As long as they respond in exactly the way I've predicted. And if they go off-beast, I'm in big trouble. So I'm imagining you going around Paris and handing out scripts to people. So you're going up to, you're going to the patisserie and you're handing them the script and saying, let's run this through. So if I'm asking to hire a bike, he had better say, yes, you can hire a bike today. Otherwise I'm like, oh, come on mate.

And then add, what is your favourite colour? Help me out, mate. We are non-civil play. That's great, Oel. Good on you. That's great. It's a very interesting process. It's a very interesting process. Absolutely. So the anti-fascist protection wall was formally designed not to keep in the East German population, but to prevent fascist and capitalist West Germans

from entering the communist state and conspiring with criminal elements to bring down the revolution from the inside. Now in practice, of course, it worked precisely the opposite way around. It was keeping in these Germans, although a small number of people did make the journey from West to East,

and they came to be known as West Zone refugees. Now, before its construction, about three and a half million people had crossed from east to west. Afterwards, that immigration basically came to an end with only 5,000 people making the journey over the wall. So the walls collapsed, came in November, 89. It was built in August, 61. So only 5,000 people made it in November 89. It was built in August 61.

So only 5,000 people made it in that time. But around 100,000 tried. So it wasn't now, the wall wasn't fully demolished until 1994. And the flight was known colloquially in East Germany as a Republic Flucht or flight from the Republic. Again, I really think I'm wasting my time with French. I could have worked that out. I it feels very, very doable.

It's just English with a load more consonants piled in unnecessarily. Yeah, yeah. As long as you're willing to do an accent from a lower lower that makes you feel uncomfortable. German feels very, very, very achievable. Or flight from the Republic and officially as in Gechlischer, Greschen-Bürtret or an unlawful border crossing. Now at first, because I read Beyond the Wall, the Katja Hoyer book about East Germany very recently.

And I didn't know this until I read that book over Christmas, but at first the wall was not a wall at all, but it was a sort of barrier made up of concrete blocks, bad wire, blocked windows, and other interruptions of the sort of built fabric of that part of Berlin. Oh, that's interesting. So connecting roads were torn up, for instance. And it was certainly in the early days, and I mean early days, it was easier to breach. So it wasn't a complete wall in the genuine sense of all that? No, no, no. They didn't finish it until a couple of years later, I think. So only later was the wall installed with additional security measures such as guard posts and minefields put in place to prevent illegal crossing. So there was an additional

barrier about 100 yards behind the wall. This followed in 1962 and this was a joint East German and Soviet initiative. So there was a gap between the two and that became known as the death strip. So if you got caught in the death strip you were in big trouble and Katja Hoyer writes about this in Beyond the Wall Wall, some awfully sad stories. So the Berlin Wall soon became a symbol of the separation between Eastern Europe and Western Europe. So before that, Churchill had spoken of an Iron Curtain,

and now it was the wall which served as that metaphor. And it just crops up in things like John Le Carre novels, spy thrillers, there's lots of films about the Berlin Wall and yet for foreigners it was possible, even relatively easy, to move across the wall via one of nine formal checkpoints. Most of us will have heard of Checkpoint Charlie, that was the most famous one because it was exclusively used for foreign tourists. Yeah, I've visited that. Have you? Wow. What's it like?

Will Barron There's a museum there, if I am remembering the right one. I'm sure that's what, yeah. It's great. It's absolutely fascinating. It's amazing. Will Barron Yeah, I've been to Chet Point, Charlie. It's still there, isn't it? Because they've got the picture of the Soviet soldier on one side and the US soldier on the other. Will Barron Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Charlie Wollman Now, crossing in other ways, including going over the top, was incredibly dangerous. So you had border guards, and they'd been issued with instructions permitting them to shoot anyone

attempting to do so, and they would, and they did kill people. So with this in mind, if you were an intrepid, would-be emigrant, you tended to seek alternatives, which included tunneling underneath. This is crazy. I'd forgotten about this. Crossing in hot air balloons or light aircraft. Yeah.

Or heading through the cities. A filious fog. It feels like a very slow way to creep. It's obvious you're up there. Do you know what it feels? It feels slow and exposed. Yeah, it really does. Also, from what I understand with hot air balloons, you're very, very dependent on

the wind. Yeah, absolutely. Imagine being blown back into East Germany. Hi! There is an example of that happening. A family in East Germany, they made their own hot air balloon. They built all the fabric and they attached it to like a boxing ring, I think it was. And then the first attempt, this is one for another episode, but it's a fascinating story

and it definitely happened. And the first attempt, they almost blew the wrong way and they were saw, they were almost captured and they went again and successfully did it. I'll dig that story out. I've read about it for a future episode. It's incredible. Wow. Now the precise number of those who died attempting

to cross the wall ranges from the official, in inverted commas, figure of 98, through to historians' estimates of around 200. And most of those who died were killed in the 1960s, because then there was a tail-off in the number of casualties by the mid-70s, when new agreements allowed for easier forms of migration. So young single men predominated, almost 80% of those killed were young single men.

Women, single or married, were under 10%. So by the late 1980s, the existence of the war came under even greater scrutiny with the launch of Glasnost and Perestroika in the USSR. That was aimed at greater liberalization in the Soviet economy and social sphere. There was a lot of pressure on East Germany, particularly from the West, to act in a similar manner. Ronald Reagan, president of the US, famously put it in June 1987,

I actually remember this, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It just became this symbol of everything that was wrong with East Germany and communism. And as I said, I read Beyond the Wall and it's a very, very human description of what life in East Germany was like. And Josh Widdicombe, who recommended the book to me, he said, it's really made me change my opinion on East Germany, actually. And it's worth it because it puts certain things into focus that you

never would have thought of because we obviously we were just told that it was terrible and all this kind of stuff. Actually I happen to know a few East Germans who grew up in East Germany and that's not entirely the case but the wall was a symbol. Now it took another two years and five months for the wall to finally come down. The East German leadership believed it would stand for a hundred years as a symbol of their regime. But then in the summer of 89, the borders between Austria and its communist neighbors, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, were suddenly opened amid a wider wave of protests.

So since East Germans could hardly close their borders to, you know, communist countries, the Schutzwall that had separated East and West no longer had any strength, because a would-be immigrant could flee East Germany, the German Democratic Republic, the GDR, through a series of open borders. So in the autumn of 89, the Berlin Wall came under ever closer scrutiny. And then one day in November, the East German leadership made a mistake. Now, this happens so often in history where it's basically a little cock-up that then gets magnified, right? So they've agreed behind the scenes to loosen travel restrictions. But 6pm on the 9th November 1989, a spokesperson was due to give a press conference live on

television and radio. Now the new rules were passed to him by means of a note. So they've agreed behind the scenes to loosen travel restrictions. And this presser is happening live. So the new rules were passed to him by means of a note, which he had no time to digest, so he went them out. When asked when the new rules allowing free movement would come into force, he said, immediately without delay.

Now that wasn't quite right. Really? Now the news spread quickly. So at 7pm the journalists at the presser basically ran out of the room. They were like, oh my god, it's happening. Now at 7.04pm West German news reported that East Germans would be able to travel freely and immediately. And this was massive because families had been split up by this war. Yeah, of course. So this was huge. People had friends or they had family members on either side.

So it was a very, very, it was an enormous part of life, splitting up families and friendships. So by 8pm it was the headline on every German television station, East and West. So one news anchor moved by the Ecclesiastical Declaration declared, the gates and the walls stand up and wide. At which point a load of people turn up at the wall. Now already a crowd has amassed at the wall on the eastern side. So large that the guards at the checkpoints were overwhelmed. So they couldn't re-impose restrictions even if they'd wish to do so. So shortly after 11pm the guards relented, the wall finally came down and then you had a quarter of a century division. That was over in five hours.

Mason. Amazing. Dan. So the seeds are incredible because at this point Berliners on the East and Western sides started chipping away at it, symbolically bringing it down and then tourists did the same, hoping to take away a piece of history because they still sell bits of the Berlin. Mason. I've got a bit in my house. Yeah, amazing. And they came to be known as Mauerspector or Wallpeckers. Yet again, I'm wasting my time with French.

I think I could have walked that out. Some people were dancing on the wall, some people juggled on it, people were playing music on the wall. So then on the 22nd December 1989... When did Hasselhoff rock up? When was that? Hasselhoff did rock up. Now, we love Daryl Leeworthy, our fantastic historian, who does all the research for us. He doesn't mention Hasselhoff. Yeah.

So I'm going to keep talking. If one of you could Google that, because that is one of the things I remember, is Hasselhoff on the wall as a symbol of Western decadence. So people were juggling, they were playing music. So on the 22nd of December, 1989, three days before Christmas, the Brandenburg Gate opened for the first time since August, 1961 and threw it. This was huge. The West German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, he walked through it and then the East German Prime Minister, Hans Modrow, met him on the other side, and they shook hands. As if to say, we are one united Germany at the

heart of Europe. And that's how it proves. Helmut Kohl's protege in politics was Angela Merkel, who had grown up in East Germany, and she rose to the top, you know, not just of German politics, but of European politics as well. So it's just, I just, if you were, obviously I wasn't there, but if you were watching on television, it was completely unforgettable. Do you know what surprises me about that whole thing that I've subsequently learned from reading history books is that I thought the reunification of Germany was a great moment, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War, reunification was a brilliant thing that everyone wanted. But of course, you're still dealing with a post-World War II mindset,

and there was a lot of nervousness, particularly in Britain, about the unification of Germany. You're like, are we going to create another monster that might come for us? Because everyone remembered World War II, and some people just about remembered World War I. Yeah. So you're like, fucking hell, the Germans. Yeah, hang on a minute. A mega powerful Germany. No thanks.

Well, let's all just calm down. Do you want some David Hasselhoff facts? Oh, yes, please. On the night the Berlin Wall fell, the 9th of November, 1989, David Hasselhoff was not there. However, he became closely associated with the event because of a performance later that year. On New Year's Eve, on 1989, Hasselhoff stood astrode the remains of the Berlin Wall and sung his song, Looking for Freedom, wearing a light-up jacket and was lifted on a crane

above the crowd. And it was a huge hit in Germany in 1989, symbolising the desire for freedom and unity. Millions watched his performance upon the wall, but many started jokingly or mistakenly believing that he helped bring down the wall, where in reality it was weeks before. In my mind, it was basically Hasselhoff's idea. He'd contacted all the interested parties and said, come on guys, enough's enough. He built the wall in the first place. He's the one who knocked it down.

He was passing with a pickaxe at the exact moment it all started booting off. He must have, he must, when he's going to bed late at night, look back on his career and think, Fair play. Night Rider, Baywatch, Fall of the Berlin Wall. Well done David. What a life. Well done. What a bloody life. Talk about the right place at the right time.

Yeah. To be on that beach of Panoramnus and years later when they started filming that documentary Baywatch. Just incredible luck. Yeah. A talking car, running around in trunks following the Berlin Wall. Job done. If you want to read more or hear more about the Katja Hoyer book, Beyond the Wall, East

Germany, 1940-1990, which I absolutely loved. It's one of the best history books I've read in the last year or so. I did a subscriber special about that very book, a whole episode dedicated to it. It was brilliant. So become a Nowater Time full-timer and you can hear more. So that is Wolves. Thank you so much for joining us as ever. We really appreciate the support if you enjoy the show Leave us a lovely five-star review spread the word or even become a what a time full-timer. It's loads of benefits

It's and free the subscriber episode that's live shows coming up many wonderful things I don't forget if you want to drop us an email you can hit our inbox at hello at oh what a time calm We'll see you next week when we will be talking about diarists exciting times. See you then. Bye bye. Bye. Follow Oh What A Time on the Wondry app, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts and you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple podcasts. And before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondry.com slash survey.