In this special episode marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Sir David Frost travels to Berlin to talk to two men who were central to the events of November 9, 1989 - George H W Bush, the then US president, and Mikhail Gorbachev, the then Soviet leader.
This episode of Frost over the World aired from Friday, November 6, 2009.
Sir David Frost asks George H W Bush, the US president when the Berlin Wall fell, whether that was the moment when he realised the Cold War was over and whether the world is safer today than it was then.Bush also talks about his relationship with Mikhail Gorbachev, the then Soviet leader.
Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985 with an agenda of reform. By mid-1989, Hungary and Poland had embraced multi-party elections and by November 9, 1989, Europe was irreversibly changed. Sir David asks Gorbachev how he learnt that the wall had started to fall and how he felt about it at the time.
It was the soundtrack to a revolution. In the weeks leading up to the fall of the wall, a song called Looking for Freedom dominated the German pop charts.David Hasselhoff, the man who sang that song, joins the show.
People everywhere can remember the pictures of the Berlin Wall being bulldozed but the first opening of the Iron Curtain actually took place a few months earlier in Hungary. In May 1989, Miklos Nemeth, the then Hungarian prime minister, gave the order to start dismantling the fence that divided his country from Western Europe. He joins the show to discuss those historic events.Plus, Anne McElvoy, the former Berlin correspondent for the Times, discusses whether the people of Eastern Europe are better off today than they were before the wall's fall.