ruminating on the wall

I've been thinking about Germany lately, and the 20th anniversary, tomorrow, of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the ensuing demise of the Iron Curtain and the Soviet Union and the Cold War and the world as we knew it, that world of the Evil Empire.

Slate Magazine ran a fascinating piece the other day on the mundanities behind the initial border openings (missed phone calls, misread government memos) on November 9th of 1989.

The New York Times ran a Then & Now piece today, and a small collection of poems, Berlin poems, Wall poems:

"Then the inspiration to build walls facing in!
Reservation, concentration camp, ghetto,
finally whole countries walled in, and saved were we
from traitors who'd dare wish to flee our within."
-C. K. Williams

"When the wall came down I was distracted. By what?
A man I loved and longed for?
A self integrating so slowly most days I hardly knew who I was?"
-Marie Howe

Ten years ago, in the spring of 1999, I was working at the University of Pennsylvania Bookstore and semi-surreptitiously reading as many books as I could. One that's stayed with me all these years, the one I perhaps found most haunting, was Tina Rosenberg's The Haunted Land: facing Europe's ghosts after Communism. She wrote compelling stories of resistance and dissidence in Poland and Czechoslovakia and Germany, and how that resistance played out, became integrated into a post-Communist world, once those Eastern Bloc regimes collapsed. But even more compelling, to me at least, were her stories of how easy, how seemingly necessary, it sometimes was to be complicit in one's own repression. These post-war Eastern European countries, unlike most dictatorial regimes, demanded of its citizens full political participation, whether that meant attending endless political rallies and marches and meetings or spying on relatives and friends and neighbors. As Jane Kramer wrote in The Politics of Memory, "With 300,000 informers, the Stasi was not so much a mirror of East Germany; to a large extent, it was East Germany."*

My family was in Berlin for Christmas a month and a half after the Wall first opened. My father regaled us with stories of JFK's infamous "Ich bein ein Berliner" speech and took us off to see Checkpoint Charlie and the opening of the Brandenburg Gate and took a sledgehammer to the Wall. I have a notebook somewhere, or perhaps not any longer, with pages full of the graffiti I copied down from the western side of the Wall that December. The eastern side was blank, empty, the people of course having been kept away from it by armed guards. We brought back to New York a bag of chunks and chips of the Wall to give to friends and family, though this bag, too, has probably gone astray in the twenty years since.

I don't have any of the Wall anymore, though I remember poring over the pieces we took away, hunting for the perfect one, the one with the brightest bit of colored spray paint (sea green or stormy blue or a deep firey red), the one with the most legible fragment of writing (ghosts of this demarcation point between two worlds).

"They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
For trying to change the system from within
I'm coming now, I'm coming to reward them
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin

I'm guided by a signal in the heavens
I'm guided by this birthmark on my skin
I'm guided by the beauty of our weapons
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin"
-Leonard Cohen, First We Take Manhattan

Other interesting reads:
The day Checkpoint Charlie came back to haunt me
Berlin Wall's fall inspires us still
Berlin Wall as a piece of history: too-good riddance?


*The Stasi was East Germany's version of the Secret Police. After Germany's reunification in 1990 legislation was passed that opened up the Stasi files to the public, so that people could see their own files and possibly learn who had been spying on them. Turned out pretty much everyone was spying on pretty much everyone else -- 300,000 informers, in a country of a mere 16 million people.