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+Nov 9, 1989: The Day That Brought Down Communism
+Dr Schmidtke
+Kai Stevenson
+
+	Following the second world war, Germany was divided into two--West Germany, a capitalist democracy aligned with the Western Bloc, and Easy Germany, a satellite state of the Soviet Union. 
+This divide was emblematic of the broader conditions in Europe at the time. The communist East, dominated by Russia, was in many ways diametrically opposed to the capitalist West. A so-called "iron curtain" had fallen across the continent, and Germany lay in the centre.
+These structural conditions created an environment in which the ability for individual citizens of East and West Germany to make changes was restricted.
+	The German Democratic Republic was, perhaps unsurprisingly, not in fact democratic. Elections were widely understood to be rigged, and the media was unfree. 
+Furthermore, economic conditions were poor. The communist system did not incentivize innovation, so the East Germans often idealized the surplus of consumer goods available in the West, the Trabant exmeplified this, as there was no incentive for newer, more desirable cars to be produced. As a result of these economic and political equations, there was increasingly widespread unrest. But despite this unrest, change did not seem to come; even as Gorbachev advised Erich Honecker to consider reform, he was unwilling to give in to the
+demands of his people. The framework of class struggle and anti-intellectualism tied the hands of everyone involved. 
+	When demonstrations eventually became too great to ignore, a chain of events culminating in the fall of the Berlin Wall began. But even here, where one might be tempted to point to bravery from protestors, great structural forces were at work. The church, for instance, played a large role in organizing protests.
+The protests were an inevitable reaction to structural conditions created by the communist system, rather than something started by a "great man." This analysis is supported by the eventual fall of the USSR--even if individual agency was necessary to bring down the system, the system itself applied presure in that direction.
+
+[324 words]