The Wall Came Tumbling Down

[tartysuz]

When the Berlin Wall came down 20 years ago, I was glued to the television set. It wasn't my TV. It belonged to E, a former co-worker from whom I was renting a room. She was born in what in 1989 was known as East Germany.

She was a young girl when her family crossed the line as the fences were being put in and spent most of her childhood in a camp for displaced persons. E was in Germany, the country where she was born, but she was stateless, a refugee in her own land. She almost died there, of pleurisy, an anachronistic disease, even for the time.

Before I met E, my only connection to East Germany was through news and pop culture. I grew up on stories about young people trying to get over the wall, getting shot in the back for it. I loved The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, which we read as part of high school English, and I idolized Nina Hagen, who not only escaped East Germany, but became a punk rock star singing in her native language. I admit there was a romance about it, but then again, it was easy to romanticize. The wall always seemed to belong to the realm of theatre, not politics. The wall did nothing to settle any affairs, it was not installed for strategic reasons. It was all symbolic. E and so many others suffered so much, and for what?

E had told me about the real effects that the symbolic wall had had on her and her family. She recounted some of those stories as we watched the news together that night, but mostly, we watched in silence, with tears, and in disbelief. We knew for weeks that the division between East Germany and West Germany was in trouble. Thousands of East Germans were demonstrating against their governments leading up to 9 November 1989. Hundreds took trains across the border, leaving in droves, many for ideological reasons, most for economic and aspirational reasons. There was a great fear that the East German government would crack down on its citizens, and a faint hope that it would loosen up the restrictions just a bit, even as a sop.

But for people to actually break the wall? Unfathomable. Its dismantlement was as if by collective agreement: "We're tired of this shit." It was like a dream that people just decided to wake up from (a sentiment captured in the film Goodbye Lenin!, in which a patriotic East German woman has a heart attack falls into a coma and wakes up after the fall of the Berlin Wall; her well-meaning son tries to recreate her mother's beloved country, lest the shock of its disappearance crush her weak heart). There were no epic battles, no shoot-outs, no big cannons -- just a bunch of young people armed with garden implements and household tools. To be reductive: kids took the wall apart by hand.

My friend's young daughter watched as well. She was about 10, a bit older than her mother would have been when she was stuck between the borders of a semiotic war. She'd heard her mother's stories, but she missed out on my experience, the weird combination of fear and romanticism that the wall inspired. That's not to say the same combination wouldn't be applied to other events -- humans are like that -- but at least she'll be hearing her mother's experiences in a largely unmediated fashion. They'll share that bit of reality, even if it seems so surreal now.