Nineteen Eighty-Nine was instantly recognizable as an eventful “event,” one that merited inclusion in global-dating systems. It was connected to 1945 to periodize the Cold War, to 1917 to mark off the era of Communism, and to 1914 to frame the “short twentieth century,” characterized by the world wars, the Bolshevik Revolution, and their aftermath, in contrast to the long nineteenth century from 1789 to 1914. The usefulness of “1989” as a date to establish periods indicates the continuing pertinence of dating systems and periodization. It confirms the historical nature of two deeply embedded systems that accompanied post–Second World War history: the entire military-industrial complex of the Cold War state in the West, and the Communist block, which was quickly promoted to become the “Second World” and whose otherness testified to its seeming imperishability. The fall of the Berlin Wall on Germany’s “9/11,” a day shared with the November Revolution in 1918, Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, and the pogroms of Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) in 1938, also made it very clear that the end of the Soviet Empire and the division of Europe had come. Indeed, the almost instantaneous recognition of 1989 in the register of periodicity, of the end of an era and the beginning of a new one, contributed decisively to the acceleration and thorough-going nature of the political landslide. In its lengthening shadow, from the initial roundtable agreement on elections in Poland in February 1989 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in November, Communism seemed increasingly anachronistic and obsolescent, even to its own leading statesmen. On the fortieth anniversary celebrations of the German Democratic Republic, Gorbachev himself warned the East German leader Erich Honecker that history punishes those who are left behind, urging him to reconcile himself with the revisionist tempo of the times. The year 1989 fell into line with the master dating system of the modern West — 1789, 1914, 1945 — which was premised on rupture and thus heralded discontinuity.

However, the instant recognition about endings left it unclear what 1989 meant in broader historical terms, why it came about, and what it meant for the future.