The Fall of The Wall: Reflections on Berlin and the Iron Curtain

I remember where I was when the Berlin Wall came down much the way the generation ahead of me can recount where they were when JFK was shot. I was a sophomore in college and was standing in the hallway of my dorm when the girl who lived across the hall exploded from her room with the news she'd just seen on TV. It was truly one of the happiest days of my life and I sat glued to the TV absorbing every ounce of it - naïve to the economic and social struggles that would ensue - but high on what it meant.

Roll back the clock four years: I was 15 years old and living in West Germany. In the Spring, my parents and I traveled to Berlin, crossing through Checkpoint Charlie into the East. Borrowing someone else's words, it was as though the sun quit shining at The Wall. West Berlin was like the rest of West Germany: bright, lush, healthy, shiny, conspicuously wealthy and modern. But East Berlin? To me it was like moving from color to black-and-white. It was drab, dirty, poor and broken.

A picture I snapped at the checkpoint while passing through in March 1986

Riding the train across East Germany to Berlin, we saw bomb-damaged buildings not yet repaired in the 40 years since the war. We saw a lot of abandoned trains and old cars sitting out in fields to rust. The whole place looked frozen in time, as though nothing much, or at least nothing much good, had happened since the end of the Nazi regime. People on the street didn't smile or make eye contact. The shops were mostly empty. I tried to buy a trumpet in one shop but was told they couldn't sell it to me unless I came back on Monday. (It didn't make sense, but I knew enough to leave it alone.) The restaurant where we stopped for lunch didn't have a printed menu; the selection varied from day to day depending on what was available in the kitchen. [Check out Anthony Edwards' action/comedy Gotcha for a peek at Berlin in the mid-1980's.]

The week before we visited East Berlin, an American was shot and killed for taking a photo of a government building. Mom was nervous. I was 15, not at all nervous, and busy snapping pictures.

Even as a kid, it was clear that East Berlin epitomized the failure of Communism. Forget economic and social theory. Forget psychology and religion and politics. Forget Adams and Kant and Marx. Any idiot could see it. If you have to build a wall around it for it to 'work', it's no good. I left there grateful for everything about my way of life. A few months later, we traveled to Yugoslavia, where the sun did shine and the people smiled and Communism seemed all-round much nicer, at least in Porto Roz.

Fast forward to 1993: I was living in Vienna, a city that had once been quartiled like Berlin, but for whatever reasons had regained its unity and freedom shortly after the war. [Check out the superb Orson Wells' spy film The Third Man for a view of the divided Vienna post-WW2.]

My friends and I regularly traveled from Vienna into the fledgling democracies of Eastern Europe, because they were close and, more importantly, cheap. I visited Czech Republic and Slovakia the month they split into separate countries and watched them change radically between each subsequent visit. I traveled to Budapest, Hungary just before (and several times during) the invasion of Pizza Hut, New York Bagel and Dunkin Donuts. I visited Kiev as it struggled - mightily - to survive the shift from a Socialist to a Capitalist economy. I made a second trip to Porto Roz, now in the newly independent Slovenia, and found it relatively unfazed. On the whole, it seemed Eastern Europe liked Capitalism just fine.

But then there were the tidbits that didn't fit my mental model, like when I learned my friend Gugi got MTV at his house in [Communist] Yugoslavia about a year before we got it at our house in America. Gugi was watching The Clash sing "Rock the Casbah" on MTV in Ljubljana while my buddies and I all waited for the weekend to catch music videos on TBS' Night Traxx. (Let's just ignore what a colossal waste of time it was to sit and watch people sing!)

And then there was my friend Sascha from Kiev. His father was some sort of government official who - like most Ukrainian government officials - retained his post after the fall of Communism just as he had before. Hey, flavor of the day. Whatever works, you know? Anyway, Sascha had played on the USSR's junior national hockey team as a teenager. He told me about the immense pride he felt skating onto the ice as the Soviet Union's national anthem played and the spotlight shined on the team and their flag. Pride? Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was. I mean, all those people I'd learned about in the Checkpoint Charlie museum had risked - and sometimes lost - their lives trying to escape Communism. And what about the famous defections of Nureyev and Baryshnikov? Yet here was Sascha waxing poetic about the good ol' days before Capitalism ruined it all. For real.

Aren't you excited about the possibilities though? I'd asked him incredulously.

Eh, he replied with a shrug.

He's a banker now. Enough said. But the point stands: Many people lived quite happily under Communism. During its hey dey, Soviet school children learned to fear us just as we had learned to fear them. As my friends and I watched all the spy vs. spy and Nuclear Armaggedon movies popularized in the early 1980's, Sascha and his schoolmates were having nuclear bomb drills and fearing the 'radical West'.

You guys were afraid of us?!? Of America?!? Seriously?

You could drop The Bomb, he said, still wary of Reagan.

It all suddenly struck me as funny! We were like two people on opposite sides of a mirror. All the same things were there - but seen in opposite. In Sascha's defense, the years following the fall of the Iron Curtain were very difficult and far more frightening (for many people) than the limitations of life under Communism. But twenty years down the road? All I see is good...

Gorbachev and Reagan showed the world what is possible. They ended a decades-old [cold] war, brought down The Wall and The Iron Curtain, ended a nuclear arms race, and enabled a series of Velvet Revolutions across two continents... all without firing a shot.

And that's the clencher, folks.