Published in the Nov. 26 – Dec. 9, 2014 issue of Morgan Hill Life
By Marty Cheek
Marty Cheek
My mother was a Berliner. As a young girl, she witnessed how during the 1930s the rise of Hitler’s fascism brought the fall of individual liberties. Thirty years later, she saw how the rise of the Berlin Wall divided the people of her city.
The 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall this month brought up some memories of the German city I visited at the age of 10 when it was divided between two opposing economic systems.
I remember much from the trip to Germany in 1977 where my mom showed me her home city. We explored much of West Berlin where we stayed at my grandmother’s apartment. But one morning we went on a daytrip excursion to East Berlin, traveling by a commuter train, crossing the wall’s border and passing through a canyon of dreary, abandoned apartment buildings to reach the Berlin Friedrichstrasse Railroad Station at the core of the Soviet sector.
It took us an hour to trudge our way through the bureaucratic maze of a border checkpoint located in a grey-spirited station chamber. Armed uniformed guards stood stiff and watched everyone closely as mom and I slowly shuffled our way down the long queue to the drab, unhappy looking workers at the processing counter.
As we started strolling through East Berlin, I saw the vivid difference between capitalism and communism. In West Berlin, I’d witnessed a joyous energy of citizens moving about their lives in liberal freedom. West Berlin’s soul pulsated with a noisy, hearty, cheerful exuberance. In East Berlin, I saw a city soul trapped in a state-run prison. Eyes looked tinged with a deep sadness, a hopelessness, a despair. The people on this side of the wall marched along the sidewalks in silence only accented by the clip-clopping of their shoes treading the cement. When they were in public, they would be foolish to speak out loud. Some eavesdropping informant might overhear. Most vividly, I remember a stench of sulfur permeating the air. The smell came from the low quality of coal burned in East Berlin.
During our visit to East Berlin, my mom took me to several of the cultural centers on the city’s Museum Island. I particularly enjoyed the ancient Near East artifacts at the Pergamom Museum, including the reconstruction of King Nebuchadnezzar II’s ornate Ishtar Gate that was once a checkpoint along the wall that rung the inner city of Babylon. Even 2,500 years ago, cities divided their populace with walls.
The trip was highlighted with a dinner visit to an East Berlin couple who were relatives of a German friend of hers in America. As it got late, they guided mom and me back to the Friedrichstrasse Station. The front entrance building was called Tränenpalast, “The Palace of Tears,” the border where East Berlins could not cross. Here, friends and families said their goodbyes, knowing their lives would once again be divided by an ugly wall.
As the Berlin Wall rose in 1961, it became a metaphor for the Cold War clash that put the world in jeopardy of nuclear annihilation The wall also served to symbolize the hunger for liberty. Many Berlins died trying to cross the wall to reach freedom.
Today, the wall provides us with a lesson of hope. President Ronald Reagan and President Mikhail Gorbachev let go of their ideologies and worked together to bring about democratic freedom with the fall of the wall. Both went up against the ideologies of their political parties to accomplish their miracle. On Nov. 9, 1989, the miracle happened. Twenty-five years later, the world celebrates that point in history as the beginning of the end of the Cold War.
The United States is now constructing a wall that is dividing the people of our nation. Our wall is not one built of concrete and rebar. Our wall is being built of uncompromising ideology and political dogma. We’re seeing this wall’s construction in the halls and chambers of our nation’s capitol city. It’s an ugly wall built by politicians and pundits using the bricks and mortar of hateful and vitriolic words.
With the anniversary marking the Berlin Wall’s demise, let us remember the miracle of how cooperation between two one-time enemies caused a wall to fall.
