Twenty-five years ago this Sunday the East German government made a surprising announcement. It would do what its citizens and the Western world had been demanding for years. It would tear down the Berlin Wall.

For 38 years the wall had stood as a literal and figurative barrier between the communist-controlled East and democratic West, a real-life Iron Curtain blocking passage into and out of that forsaken land. Its destruction really did bring freedom and, in time, greater prosperity to a people that had become virtually accustomed to living without it. And the eventual collapse of an empire, rendering an ideology to the ash heap of history. Three cheers for democracy.

A final word for those interested, and a question often raised by my students (many of whom were born post-1989… ouch). Just as the entire wall was not built in a day it was not torn down in a day either. What happened on November 9, 1989, was the announcement that East German citizens could now pass through the wall to West Germany and West Berlin. The citizens took it upon themselves at that point to literally bring down the wall, though the process was not actually completed by the state-run bulldozers until 1992. The final sorry example of crappy government service at work.