Marion's Miscellaneous Musings

One of the neat things about traveling is history. My city is really only about 70 years old, so there isn't much, and you can cover it pretty much in a day. And then get on with more important things, like shall we go to Starbucks or someplace else that has a larger selection of flavors. I enjoy going places with actual old buildings and history and fleshing out what I know.

So I went to Berlin and I went to the Berlin Wall and I put together more history. I had this mental picture of the wall going through the middle of the city, which it did, but it also encircled West Berlin. (D'oh moment. I'm used to those.) It was a double wall, with a no-man's land inbetween. The Brandenburg Gate, which is the soul of Berlin, was in the no-man's land -- this is a slap from the Soviet Union to any German, allied or not.

When the wall came down in November 1989, I watched live coverage while feeding my infant daughter in the dark hours of the morning. I was thrilled beyond thrilled, because I knew a German (our first exchange student) and now his country could be whole again. He spent some time in Lubeck, one of the border cities, handing out Deutsch Marks to East Germans when they crossed into West Germany.

In the underground station near the Brandenburg Gate, there is a continuously playing movie about 10 minutes long that shows some of the celebrating when the wall came down. My favorite cut shows people cutting up pieces of the wall while sitting on top of it.

Now I know a couple of people who were actually on top of the wall when it came down.

And I know someone whose first project out of college was working on a re-design of the Reichstag...something that didn't make sense really, because the capital of Germany at the time was Bonn. He figured out that something was going to happen. This was after Reagan's statement, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

Now people paint the wall that is left. This is actually not much of a change, but now there is a sense victory and of humor...there was no Japanese sector! Now you can walk under the Brandenburg Gate. Now you can get your picture taken with soldiers in period uniforms at Checkpoint Charlie. Now you don't see the wall, you see markers where it used to be. Now there is a Starbucks right near the Brandenburg Gate in former East Berlin. We won.