It's the 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall

[corrielle]

Some people remember the JFK assassination, some people remember when Martin Luther King was assassinated and when the Apollo mission landed on the moon. I was a little late to this world for all of those things.  For me, the Berlin Wall coming down is the first big world event I remember clearly and whose significance I really understood (other than a presidential election... I remember learning about the election process with Bush v. Dukakis in '88).


I grew up watching the news with my dad.  We didn't have cable, but my Dad watched three different broadcast "nightly news" shows almost every weeknight, and when I got old enough to care, so did I.  We watched NBC news on the channel that came in from Bakersfield at 5:30, part of the MacNeil Lehrer New Hour on PBS starting at six, and ABC news at 6:30 on the channel that came in from Fresno.  I learned two things from all of that news watching (ok, maybe three).  First, I learned that knowing what was going on in the world was important.  Second, I learned that there are lots of different ways to tells a story, and that presentation matters.  And third, I learned that Tom Brokaw is just plain awesome. (I've had a brain-crush since I was eight.)

So, on November 9, 1989, (which was a Thursday, so this site tells me) I saw video of the wall coming down.  There was little else on the news that night, and I knew that this was big.  I remember understanding that there were two halves of Germany, and that one of them was a communist country, and one of them was a democracy, like America, and I knew that it was hard to travel from one half of Berlin to the other.  My understanding of Communism was probably something along the lines of, "The government owns everything, and everyone is poor," and I felt bad for the people who had to stay on the East German side.

Some of this I had probably learned from school.  But the reason I remembered it had nothing to do with the classroom and everything to do with a cartoon.  That's right... I learned about one of the defining symbols of the Cold War era from Alvin and the Chipmunks.  There's an episode where the Chipmunks visit Berlin to have a concert, and (this is all from memory, so I may be telling it wrong) they end up meeting a kid on the East German side of the wall who is separated from a family member who lives on the other side.  They end up playing their concert at the wall, and the noise makes it fall down, and their friend gets to see her (his? I think it was a her...) family again.  At the end, Alvin wakes up as they fly over the wall, and he realizes it was a dream because it's still standing.  Wikipedia says that the episode aired back in December of 1988, and I must have watched it when it ran on TV because we sure didn't have it on video. Anyway, I remember asking my mom about it, and when she told me this separations like that were real, I was really sad for the people who couldn't see their families.

(By the way, I found that episode online here.)

That was the context in which I watched the news that night.  I knew that something big was happening, that something about the way the world worked was changing, and I remember thinking that it was neat that all of these people on either side of the wall who had never met each other before were helping each other to climb up and over, and that they were hugging and laughing and friends with pretty much everyone because they were standing on top of the wall and no one cared.  It's always stuck in my head as an example of spontaneous human goodness to one another.

I got to go to Berlin while I was in Europe, and we went to a section of the wall that is still up and preserved and to the museum where Checkpoint Charlie used to be. (One of the places where traffic was allowed to cross between the two halves of the city.)  It was... probably one of the more profound experiences I had that year.  I went to a lot of places where I could really feel the sweep of history.  I went to the Parthenon, the Colosseum, Stonehenge, and at least a dozen beautiful cathedrals.  Don't get me wrong... I love going to old sites where the weight and the age of the place is settled and ancient, but when I was in Berlin, I was walking through history that I remembered.  We spent the morning going through the museum and seeing all of the ingenious ways people tried to get across, watching newscasts from the night the wall fell, and learning about the effects that the wall had on the the two halves of Germany, the city, and individual people. And then, when we were done, we snapped a picture at Checkpoint Charlie and passed by as if it was the most normal thing in the world.  Walking right by the old checkpoint into what had been the East German side and sitting down for lunch was... very odd. I knew that not very long ago (it had been about twelve years when I visited) what I had just done would have been impossible, and it made me extraordinarily conscious of how very delicate a thing personal liberty is.  

I talked with my students about this today.  To tie it in to their own experience, I had them write about a historical event they remembered clearly.  Some of them wrote about Obama's election, but most of them wrote about 9/11, which was to be expected.  That really is the big event that has most visibly shaped the reality they live in.  Most of them weren't alive when the wall fell, and only a couple of them could tell me why it was important. I explained a little about it, and I now know what it must feel like for someone to try to explain the JFK assassination or the Vietnam years or the Apollo landing to someone who wasn't there.  I could try to give context and explain why it mattered, but even if these kids (most of them are kids, anyway...) wanted to know, it hadn't been a reality for them.  It was already history when they were born.