I am an former Est Germany. I am older than 35. I can assure you, the Reagan speech did noting.

There where only one or two important speeches, may be 3 if you count Kennedy in.

One of the most important was, when Willy Brand had its visit in East Germany. The only important visit by a western politician in East Germany. The other one, which was not really a speech, but very important, was the one by Genscher for the release of the people into West Germany after occupying the West German embassy in Praha, CZ.

It was clearly more directed at the USSR and specifically Gorbachev. Khrushchev and Ulbricht had unwisely created the concrete, so to speak, symbol of the evil empire, a very visible wall dividing a historic, major city. Where families trying to cross it were shot at, often successfully.

It had to have been terribly embarrassing to Gorbachev to be called out like that, and it strongly cut against many of his and the USSR's themes, e.g. if it's so great, why do you need that wall keeping people inside of your socialist worker's paradise?

Getting back to the 1989 fall, something stayed the hands of the USSR, unlike Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. I believe it's impossible to make an honest case that Reagan had nothing to do with that.

Respectfully, I think you are mistaken to say that Regan's speech did nothing. The reuse of Regan saying "tear down this wall" in various pieces of remix culture is evidence of the iconic nature of the speech.

By no means am I arguing that these words literally tore down a wall. But if anyone can argue that a speech can ever be important, this one was, at least for American culture.

So my point here is that this author is punching at a straw man. I don't know anyone who believes this speech itself contributed to the felling of the wall. It was an event in a much larger storyline that was bigger than the wall itself: the cold war.

Kennedy's "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech in '63 is much more present in German culture then Reagan's in '87. If anything, we associate Gorbatchev's Perestroika process as the beginning of the end of the socialist system.