Students at Westminster College in Fulton ran through a temporary replica of the Berlin Wall at 6:53pm Monday, the time the actual Wall began to actually crumble 20 years ago.
Did the students truly understand the significance of this historic event?
Do any of us?
It was a perfect November evening to hold a celebration of the fall of the Wall; clear, cool and crisp on the Latshaw Plaza in front of the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Aldermandbury on the Fulton campus. I attended not as a reporter, but as a spectator, because my daughter Mackenzie, who has a real appetite for history, wanted to attend. I also attended, because two years ago, I had the chance to see the real Wall or what remains of it in now a united Berlin, Germany.
The journalist exchange program sponsored by the RIAS Berlin Kommission (they spell funny in Germany) allowed me a glimpse of what the fall of the Wall meant to the people of West and East Berlin and the difficulties of reunification; only a glimpse. I never want to overstate my understanding of such an historic event.
During the two week stay in Germany, the American journalists in attendance heard much about the division of Berlin after World War II and the erection of the Wall in the middle of the night in 1961, a desperate, yet effective way of keeping East Berliners from escaping the Soviet-controlled portion of the city to those parts occupied by the US, Britain and France.
Many remember the stunning video footage and photographs of the Wall coming down in 1989. I saw those too, but on my first evening in Berlin two German journalists who took me to dinner near where the Wall once stood described that fateful night. Their description belies the drama of sledge-hammers tearing holes in the Wall and students atop the structure rocking it back and forth until it toppled. That, of course, did happen, but later, after many East Berliners simply walked to West Berlin.
As told to me by this German journalist, there had been talk about loosening the restrictions placed on East Berliners visiting West Berlin. The mayor of East Berlin at the time apparently misspoke during the announcement of relaxed visiting privileges and stated something to the effect that those in East Berlin were free to visit the West without the qualifiers he intended to include. Tentatively, East Berlin residents approach the Wall and the guards stationed there. The guards heard the same speech and assuming the official position had changed, allowed their fellow East Berliners to walk through the gates to the other side. The trickle became a flood, the Wall began to crack, and then it came down.
Sections of the Wall remain in Berlin. A double row of bricks outline where it once stood. I often walked over it without noticing, striding over what at one time seemed so impenetrable. The director of the German Information Center USA reminded those gathered for the Westminster celebration that razor wire and guards accompanied the concrete sections that made up the Wall. Officially, 136 people were killed trying to escape from East to West German during its nearly 30-year existence, though no one will ever know how many actually died in their pursuit of freedom. The East German government, officially known of course as the German Democratic Republic, was quite good at keeping certain things from becoming known.
Winston Churchill told a Westminster audience in 1946 that an Iron Curtain was falling across Eastern Europe. The Berlin Wall actually rose in 1961, a physical manifestation of Churchill’s colorful phrase. It fell in 1989, a triumphal moment marked by uncertainty and tempered by the struggles with reunification.
None of us here can truly grasp what happened there 20 years ago. To get a glimpse by visiting Berlin or through events such as the one at Westminster should help us truly grasp the meaning of freedom and shake us from the complacency of taking it for granted.
-Brent Martin
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