Today is the twentieth anniversary of the tearing down of the Berlin Wall. There are celebrations in Germany and a plethora of articles in newspapers and on the web about the significance of that spectacular visual monument to the end of the Cold War. I wish I'd known it was coming up so I could have arranged a trip to Germany to see all the festivities.
The Wall coming down (and the Wall itself) has always been a strange phenomenon for me. It happened before I was old enough to remember it and signaled the end of an era I never experienced. At Rice, one of the "cool things" on the campus was a piece of the Berlin Wall. I mostly remember how little significance it held for me.
In my perspective, Germany has always been one country and the Soviet Union something that I never feared. I remember being very little and playing some sort of submarine game at our local pool in which all the participants had to pick an army to be. When asked, I answered that I was the U.S.S.R because U.S.A. had already been taken and I assumed that because they sounded similar they must be almost the same thing. A kid yelled "Ah, he's the Russians," surprising the hell out of me. U.S.S.R. meant Russians?
I was a party last Friday and found myself talking to some Germans from Berlin. It never occurred to me to ask them what they thought about the anniversary, but I now I really wish I had. If it feels weird for me to reflect on the end of an era I never experienced as an American, what must it be like for them? I imagine if I had asked, they would have avoided the subject. It must be hard to see all the evidence of East and West for your whole life without ever experiencing what it was really like.
While the anniversary of the end of the Cold War is important for the significance it holds in the minds of those who lived through it, for me it is a chance to reflect on the post-Wall world that I have lived in for almost my entire life. It is my hope to spend some small portion of my year in Europe traveling through the former Communist Eastern states. I am positive that should I go to Poland or the Czech Republic or Hungary, there will be McDonald's there to greet me. The people there will probably gripe about how the Recession has affected them, just as they are doing in Copenhagen or Durham.
The Wall coming down was a triumph of people over oppression and a moment of immense hope. But what have we made of that moment? A couple of articles I read today lamented the missed opportunities. A great op-ed by Slavoj Zizek in the New York Times talks about how former Communist leaders in Eastern Europe quickly learned how to play the capitalist game so as to maintain their power and riches. This piece by Matt Taibbi outlines, with a sensationalist bent, how investment banks gamed the American political and economic process to make billions in bubble after bubble. It's almost as if after Capitalism won, it had to flaunt its victory by assuming its most evil form.
And, despite the triumph of '89, there are still walls. Not even just figurative ones. As my good friend Clint pointed out on his facebook profile, Palestinian youths celebrated the anniversary by tearing down a section of the wall that separates them from the rest of Israel. Until they got tear-gassed and rubber bulleted into submission.
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