Calling for democratic reforms, some of the one million demonstrators in East Berlin on November 4, 1989, hold a sign reading "Who lies once cannot be trusted" at the Palace of the Republic. The building housing the Communist Parliament is decorated with the national emblem, the hammer and pair of compasses. (AP)

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Twenty years ago this fall there was an earthquake brewing in Eastern Europe.

On November 9, 1989, the almost unthinkable happened. The Berlin Wall came down. The front line of the Soviet empire fell. It was astounding.

Americans have come to think it fell because Ronald Reagan said, “Tear down this wall!” My guest today gives Reagan his due, but says that is a simplification tied directly to a myth that drove the Iraq War. The facts of 1989, he says, are far richer.

This hour, On Point: The real story of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Joining us from New York City is Michael Meyer. He was Newsweek bureau chief for Germany, Central Europe, and the Balkans from 1988 to 1992. His new book is “The Year that Changed the World: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall.” He is now director of communications and chief speechwriter for Secretary General of the United Nations Ban Ki-Moon.

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Barack Obama talked warmly of immigrant gifts on the campaign trail. His Homeland Security chief, Janet Napolitano, talked tough yesterday on the Rio Grande. All nations wrestle with immigration and demographic change. Immigration made America.

Christopher Caldwell says it may unmake Europe. A wave of Islamic immigration, European-style, is now challenging Europe’s historic culture, he says. And Europeans don’t know what to do about it.

This hour, On Point: Immigration, Islam, and the changing face of Europe.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us in our studio is Christopher Caldwell, author of “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West.” A senior editor at The Weekly Standard, columnist for The Financial Times, and a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, he has been reporting on the politics and culture of Islam in Europe for more than a decade.

You can read an excerpt from Caldwell’s book at randomhouse.com.

Joining us from Paris is Christopher Dickey, Paris bureau chief and Middle East regional editor for Newsweek. He reports on European politics, economy, society and new technologies, as well as developing stories throughout North Africa, the Near East and the Persian Gulf.

Pauline Bonaparte at Galleria Borghese, by Dhfeinsmith/Flickr

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Pauline Bonaparte, favorite sister of the French emperor, was a terrible role model.

Faithful to her famous brother — but not to her husbands. A legendary beauty who liked bathing in milk — and being carried in a chaise longue. She collected jewels. And fashion. And men.

But La Paolina, as the Italians called her when she married Prince Borghese, was more than a sum of her frivolous parts. Courageous, canny and cunning, she might have had an empire of her own had she been born a century or two later.

This hour, On Point: Pauline Bonaparte, “Venus of Empire.”

You can join the conversation. Did you know that Napoleon Bonaparte had a formidable little sister? What are your questions for biographer Flora Fraser about the Bonaparte clan, the Napoleonic wars, and the art of piecing together a life for the page?

You can join the conversation. What’s your story of friendship through the years? Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Jane Clayson, guest host

Guest:

Joining us from London is Flora Fraser, author of “Pauline Bonaparte: Venus of Empire.” An acclaimed biographer, she is the author of three other books about scandalous women, including “Beloved Emma: the Life of Emma, Lady Hamilton.” She is also the co-founder of the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography, named for her grandmother, who wrote about the Duke of Wellington and Queen Victoria.

Read an excerpt from “Pauline Bonaparte: Venus of Empire.”

More links:

Here are reviews by The New York Times (title: “Twisted Sister”) and The Washington Times.

Ahead of the G20 summit, a lone protester delivers a speech on the financial issues, back dropped by the Bank of England, left, and the Royal Exchange, right, in central London's City financial district, Tuesday March 31, 2009. World leaders are gathering in London for the Group of 20 summit amid an unprecedented security operation to protect the meeting from possible violent protests. (AP)

President Obama stepped off Air Force One onto British soil last night — his first venture across the Atlantic since cheering multitudes greeted him last summer.

What a difference this time. Heading into tomorrow’s G-20 summit, he faces a global challenge greater than any since perhaps World War II. And his European allies aren’t all falling in line with his agenda. Many blame American-style capitalism for the global economic crisis. Yet can anyone but America lead them out? Will they follow?

This hour, On Point: The view from Europe, on the eve of the G-20.

You can join the conversation. What’s at stake at the G-20 meeting? Do you expect anything to come out of it? What do President Obama and the world’s leaders need to accomplish in London?

-Jane Clayson, guest host

Guests:

Joining us from London is Edward Luce, Washington Bureau Chief for The Financial Times. He’s covering the G20 summit in London.

Also from London, we’re joined by Richard Jackman, professor at the London School of Economics.

Joining us from Berlin is Joachim Fritz-Vannahme, director of European Affairs at the Bertelsmann Foundation. He’s former deputy editor-in-chief, and now an online columnist, for the German newsweekly Die Zeit.

And joining us in studio is Dominique Moisi, a founder and senior advisor at the French Institute for International Relations and currently a visiting professor at Harvard University. His new book, out next month, is “The Geopolitics of Emotion: How Cultures of Fear, Humiliation, and Hope are Reshaping the World.”

In this American presidential election year — like none in a long time — the whole world is watching. Really watching. And no zone is watching more closely what Americans decide than Europe.

Forever Europeans were understood as our closest strategic and cultural allies. Then came Bush unilateralism, and the taunt of “cheese-eating surrender monkeys.”

Now, the U.S. has choices to make. And Europe is tuned in hard.

This hour, On Point: Joschka Fischer, Dominique Moisi, and Timothy Garton Ash on Europe watching America’s choices for the White House.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Dimitri Sevastopulo, Pentagon and Intelligence Correspondent for the Financial Times.

Joschka Fischer, Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor of Germany from 1998 to 2005.

Timothy Garton Ash, professor of European studies at Oxford University, senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and author “Free World” (2004).

Dominique Moisi, founder of the French Institute for International Relations, professor at the College of Europe in Natolin, Warsaw and author of the forthcoming book is “The Geopolitics of Emotion: How Cultures of Fear, Humiliation and Hope Are Reshaping the World”.

Almost 1300 years ago, when Europe was still deep in the Dark Ages, a tidal wave of Islamic vitality and military might swept over Spain and pressed toward the heart of the West. Islam was young and vibrant and rich, and the culture it built on the Iberian Peninsula was, for a time, dazzling.

Historian David Levering Lewis is out with a provocative new view: that Europe and the West might have been better off if Islam had swept over all of the continent.

Then and now, those sound like fighting words.

This hour, On Point: when Islam first met the West, and the long echo of that epic clash.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

David Levering Lewis, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, is a professor at New York University and author of “God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215.”

Christopher Dickey, Middle East Regional Editor and Paris Bureau Chief for Newsweek Magazine.