Berlin Wall Cracked
Eighteen years ago this evening the Berlin Wall was cut open by the East German authorities.
I remember the first reports — grainy night film of a few grey Ostvolk stepping gingerly West through the crack near Potzdammerplatz, with gay surprise still lighting their faces.
I took the first flight I could find, landed in Zurich and caught a train, and started snapping photos of Berlin.
A man was sitting next to me on a stoop, as I fiddled with f-stops and sized up the building across the way. But then as I raised my camera he quickly stood and turned — to intentionally step into the shot.
He seemed poor, perhaps homeless. His clothes were dirty and his spirit seemed depressed.
I’ve often wondered why he wanted to have his picture taken. Perhaps he felt life was changing again, slipping away in an unknown direction … And thinking of his parents, wished to preserve something …
Or to furnish, great or small, a part toward the soul.
The ruin behind him is preserved by the German republic to remind people of the cost of war and bad leaders, and thus of the responsibilities of citizenship.
Was it part of my stoopmate’s concept to be framed by this memorial?
The ruin floats, by the way, through the background of a scene in Wim Wenders’ beautiful Wings of Desire, which was made in the 80s and thus serves today as a marvellous souvenir of Cold War Berlin. Which no longer exists. At least in brick.
The world we live in now, born that evening through the crack in the Wall, is just now reaching the age of reason. Eighteen years. Old enough to die for Old Glory if not get drunk.
Most of us are old enough to recall that the new world arrived unexpectedly, and brought unlooked-for hope. Few had thought to see the clouds of the Cold War lift. Living with the threat of Mutual Assured Destruction was the way of life.
Yet when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, it was quickly scuttlebutt among strangelove types that one must fear a nexus of international relations in which any power dominates without counterbalance.
Hopes, however, were that all would be okay — that the United States would again prove exceptional, and not misbehave on the world stage.
George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, despite problems of detail, supported those hopes as American presidents.
I was no fan of Bush pere. I loathed him. And continue to look forward to the day his complicity, or innocence, in the murder of Olaf Palme, once the honorable prime minister of Sweden, is aired in the American press and courts.
Nevertheless, it’s clear in retrospect that Bush pere acted with wise restraint to the stumbling and collapse of the Soviet Union, when plenty of Cowboy savants were for kicking’m when they’re down and kicking ass.
In January 2001 baby Bush and Cheney hired many of those same Beltway Cowboys to run American foreign policy. Cheney had been one with them since the mid 90s. Baby Bush seemed to have no ideas of his own.
The rogue American state that people vaguely worried about in 1991 is now a wild child, nearly seven years old, shitting the bed and stomping about the globe. And Cheney seems yet intent upon attacking Iran.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt installed a plaque in the White House upon which were words from a letter of John Adams, the second president, to his wife:
“I pray Heaven to bestow the best of blessings on this House, and all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof.”
Heaven failed Adams in that.
Or was it those who fixed and telemarketed the 2000 and 2004 elections?
The Congress, in any case, might have removed Cheney and Bush, in that order, after Hurricane Katrina. Sufficient grounds and public opinion were at hand.
But the cost of TV advertising has allowed the relatively few families (domestic and foreign) who own most of the country to buy the Congress too. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, is a child of such a family and made it first business as the new Speaker of the House early this year to squash the impeachment initiative.
Meanwhile that erstwhile citizen, the American consumer, more ignorant and barbarous year by year, imbibing Fox News and reality television, seems incapable of exercising his paper sovereignty.
Berlin election poster, 1992
It may be that the current financial crisis — which began with defaulting American mortgages but quickly froze bond markets worldwide and continues to worsen week by week — may lamp the best way out.
That is: All the other major powers in their gut, even our old allies in Europe, are against Bush-Cheney. And we have given to some the power to crush us economically.
Sure, they’d be shooting themselves in the feet to some extent; everyone holds dollars and strives to sell stuff to the American consumer. But conventional means for controlling international behavior seem to have been exhausted.
It may be, then, that these are the futures that our neglect of the responsibilities of citizenship have left us:
Either socioeconomic pain on the scale of the 1930s.
Or a world war in which this time the nazis are us.
Talking with people in East Berlin pubs was the most interesting thing.
“Here we prosecute nazis,” said one fellow, 35, a computer person. “In the west they are free.”
The great thing about the west, he said, its great gift, was computer science. That aside, social democracy seemed best.
Another day in the same pub, not far from Checkpoint Charlie, I met a stolid Russian, 55, an ominous fellow, half worldly, half not, who along with writer Alexander Zinoviev inspired the narrator of my second novel.
Our talk was so interesting that midway through I made the mistake of trying to record it with my little cassette player. Merely as an aide de memoire.
But his ears were rather sensitive to such things.
To set him at ease I gave him the tape, the flip side of which was a rambling set of vocal memos and big ideas I’d recorded months before while driving across the USA. Also an amount of romance post mortem.
Perhaps my human, all too human friend later came upon these confessions, found himself amused, and drew satisfaction from having turned tables on the American spy. Perhaps passed the tape to the appropriate authorities. Or did he toss it in the Spree minutes after our good-bye?
Droves of Ostvolk wandered the aisles of the satisfied West Berlin stores. Feasting their eyes on nicely done household things that were sickeningly expensive given the currency translation.
The West German government soon began giving every Eastern visitor fifty deutsche marks with which to get Consuming. Woolworth’s, rather than the fancy department stores, was where this rubber hit the road. Torn apart as if going out of busines.
The grocery stores: Women getting upset to see the wealth of food.
Not that they’d been entirely blinded until then — they received a lot of western television. And at bottom were neither much surprised nor impressed.
The computer fellow in the East Berlin pub had a gilded shopping bag. Sheepishly, but on his own initiative, he showed me the things he’d bought on his first Western sortie. Setting them on the table one by one. Wrinkling his nose and shaking his head.
That embarassment, and ticklish irritation — to be (and to be seen) back home burdened with extravagant consumer goods — was rather common.
Everybody was taking wacks at the wall — which was awfully tough — with sledge hammers and picks.
A tiny yet voluptuous turkish girl — 8 or 10 — was selling chips of the wall laid out on a blanket. Negotiating a sale with a very tall, polite, somewhat dorky US Air Force officer, bending over her like a willow, laboring to count out his coins. What a tough little cookie she was. Stuffed her tiny purse down her pants after every transaction.
There was a steady presence around the clock along the Wall in Kreuzberg, the hip part of West Berlin. Something of a party, but never out of hand. Hippie chicks …
I remember walking along the Wall — covered with cartoonish graffitti on the western side — behind two girls, perhaps twenty, listening to them talk with high excitement in a language I didn’t recognize.
Suddenly one sighed, loudly with much love: “Tracy Chapman!”
At the Brandenburg Gate the soldier-police, east and west, were still on duty, and of course the eighty yards or so between the parallel walls that together constitute Die Mauer — the storied No Man’s Land — was still there.
Despite the world-shaking events of the past week, it was still against the law to step on that once fatal ground, other than when crossing between the now several hacked portals on the official muddy, plywood-paved ways.
But young people were sitting all along the walls, east and west, near the Gate. And when the cops weren’t looking would leap off and run across.
Cops notice the transgression. Slowly shake their handsomely hatted heads. This conduct is intolerable. Then stride at a dignified pace, in pairs, over to the spot where the offenders had climbed the far side and disappeared. Deliver a brief lecture on the law. The consequences for society should order fail. Then respond to the same offense forty yards down. Pure anarchy.
Writing this little bit I’ve realized my life changed rather fatally that week. I was still in grad school. But Academia was now out. Began the second novel a few months later. Then the first print New Combat a year after that. (Not the best name, in retrospect.)
Much seems to have turned on an entirely unexpected event, and an all but thoughtless reaction.
Perhaps not all that uncommon. The way of life in interesting times.
