Had it not been for Nicolae Ceausescu, Herta Mueller, who has just won the Nobel for literature 20 years after the fall of communism in Europe, would perhaps never have become a writer. Her theme — a life behind the Iron Curtain, hounded by the state security apparatus, worrying every morning whether one would be alive that evening, fear of the gulag — approximates life in communist East Europe. It was in 1989 that an unprecedented, unpredicted wind of change swept through the former East Bloc, tearing down the authoritarian edifice in state after state. It was the same year that China forcefully put down the Tiananmen Square protests, but that self-assertion of the regime would find no reflection in Europe, except for a brief spectre of firing in East Germany, ensuring that communism died in East Europe without bloodshed,

except for Ceausescu in Romania.

Mikhail Gorbachev helped. But what 1989 did to global geopolitics and history was not determined by an individual. A brief calendar — June 4: Solidarity won Polish elections; September 10: East Germans crossed Hungary’s borders into Austria in droves; November 9: the Berlin Wall fell; November 24: Velvet Revolution succeeded in Czechoslovakia; December 25: Ceausescu executed. The “Autumn of Nations” lasted only a few months; in its aftermath, two Germanys reunited, the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended.

It began with Solidarity’s roundtable talks in Poland, became irreversible with Hungary lifting the Iron Curtain and the citywide Leipzig protests exactly 20 years ago this Friday. But the fall of the Berlin Wall remains its most enduring symbol. Such societies that came in from the cold are far from perfecting their politics, but work such as Mueller’s is an enduring testament to the courage of the millions who faced down totalitarian regimes in the biggest revolutions since 1917.