Das Versprechen

Professor Lorenz:
Outrage is quantitative. It gets used up.

[When the Berlin Wall comes down]

Woman:
When the cage opens after thirty years, you can't fly anymore.

Konrad:
Can a woman love a man she has only seen three times in twenty years?

Professor Lorenz:
Outrage is quantitative. It gets used up.

Sophie:
[speaking to Konrad at the 1936 Olympic Stadium] Sooner or later you must accept what happened in your life, as your life.

Narrator:
[first lines - over images of the raising of the Berlin Wall] In August, 1961, the world was already divided. But no one ever dreamt of this long border reaching it's full height. Moscow had the copyright for the concept and execution. West German firms delivered the barbed wire.

German speaker:
An unjust regime committed a new injustice.

Harry S. Truman:
We want you to know that the pledge we have given to the freedom of West Berlin has been...

Narrator:
The West protested. Threatened. Lamented. The wall grew. All arteries between the two halves of the city were severed. And to the people on both sides, the few hundred meters between East and West became the longest strip of land in the world. So began one of the strangest experiments in history. A people once mad enough to want to rule the world, slowly became two peoples. And soon the Wall kept up the illusion that all that divided the German people was a wall.

Sophie:
You wall in a whole country, then you pop over here for a cup of coffee.