Does this young student know the history of The Wall? Maybe, maybe not. Photo by David Lansing.
I went looking for a chunk of the Berlin Wall today and had a hell of a time finding it (more on that later) but it got me to thinking.
In a very short period of time—perhaps no more than ten years at most—Berlin as the metaphysical symbol of the Cold War will be all but forgotten outside of history books.
High school-aged students from London and Prague and Kansas City will hop off stuffy motor coaches and be herded towards a rather non-descript gray monolith of pitted cement and, being informed by a buttoned-up, sweaty-browed teacher that this is, in fact, a piece of the Berlin Wall, they will think—or perhaps even say out loud—“So what’s the big deal?”
It will carry no emotional weight for them. It will seem much ado about nothing. The some 1,200 people who died trying to get up and over that wall (the last, Chris Gueffroy, was shot trying to flee East Berlin the night of February 5, 1989) will be no more meaningful than the names on that forgotten plaque in their little hometowns honoring the dead from WWI.
Anyway, yesterday I hopped in a taxi and asked my driver to take me to the Berlin Wall. Minutes later we were at Checkpoint Charlie where there is, indeed, a chunk of what’s left, but what I was interested in seeing was the graffiti-filled section of the Wall. My driver had no idea where that was. It’s in Kreuzberg, I told him. What street? He asked. I told him I wasn’t sure but surely someone would be able to point us in the right direction.
After driving aimlessly around Kreuzberg for a bit, I told the driver to pull over. I got out, paid the driver, and then asked the first person I saw, a young woman who looked to be 16 or 17, how to get to the Berlin Wall. She shrugged and kept walking. I decided to do the same. A block later, there it was. Being passed by dozens of strollers who never gave it a second look. Some twenty years after The Fall, and The Wall is all but forgotten. At least by those born after 1990.
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My two years in Germany, 63-65, were spent in support of the West’s mobile missiles tucked away in sundry places along the Iron Curtain. Never got to Berlin, but remember it all, and later even the fall of the wall. My brother-in-law has a chunk, which appears to be reinforced with a fiber, perhaps asbestos. He related how strong the concrete was, and the single-minded destruction of the crowd as it hammered away.
I never thought that I would see it come down. Glad to have lived to see it fall.
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