PrintNovember 14, 2009
McDonald's and the Berlin Wall
The Berlin Wall fell twenty years ago, and among those credited with paving the way for that spellbinding event are Ronald Reagan and, to a lesser extent, Soviet reformer Mikhail Gorbachev. Yet recent media accounts largely overlook the role that another major player had in helping to bring down the Wall and rebuild a ravaged economy.It was McDonald's: the all-American restaurant chain with its iconic golden arches -- McDonald's, the global food retailer that leftist elites love to hate. Twenty years ago this week -- days after the Berlin Wall fell on Monday, Nov. 9, 1989 -- a McDonald's in the sleepy West German town of Hof served as a beacon of American-style freedom to thousands of celebrating East Germans -- a fact touched upon in a recent Wall Street Journal article: "As Wall Crumbled, Berliners Rebuilt Their Lives."To those new customers, the golden arches were what the paper called a "siren of capitalism's long-forbidden fruits." They'd seen television ads...(Read Full Article)
