It wasn’t just a wall. It was also barbed wire, machine guns, attack dogs and fleeing human beings shot down and slowly dying in sight of rescue.
When Christiane Alsop of Beverly recently brought a youth group from America to visit her native Germany, she took them to Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin, once the heavily guarded gateway between East and West. She tried to give a sense of the Berlin Wall, the barrier that stood here for two generations.
"I found it so difficult to explain to them what it means to live in a divided country," she says. "Then I realized how far away it was for them."
"Was it before or after World War I?" a girl asked.
Today is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Fittingly, at the end, it was dismantled by ordinary people, taking advantage of a regime that had lost faith.
"Communism sort of went bankrupt," Alsop remembers.
More important, the fall of the wall marked an unofficial end to what President John F. Kennedy had called a "long twilight struggle." From 1946 to 1989, the Cold War saw the world tottering at the brink of annihilation.
The wall went up in 1961 when tensions between the Soviet Union and the West were at a peak. Barriers already existed between East and West Germany, but thousands of young, educated Germans were fleeing communist Berlin for the unguarded western sector. The wall virtually ended the exodus.
Just as the wall went up abruptly, so it came down on Nov. 9, 1989. "Only a week before," recalls Margo Steiner of Marblehead, "the last person was shot trying to escape." Steiner, an American, lived in Heidelberg at the time.
By then, the Soviets had begun to lose hold of client states like Poland and Czechoslovakia.
"There was a movement afoot," Steiner says. "It was irreversible."
"I remember the joy," adds Alsop, then living in Hamburg, a part of West Germany. East Germans coming through breaches in the wall were welcomed with oranges and bananas, foods inaccessible on the other side.
Just returned from a business trip to Japan, Steiner remembers, "People were going nuts. ... There were celebrations everywhere. People were drinking Champagne in the streets."
She went to Berlin and chiseled away a piece of the wall as a keepsake. Near the Brandenburg Gate, Steiner saw "a huge black casket labeled 'East Germany is dead.'"
"I still remember all these crazy Ossies (Easties) running around, waving their bananas like madmen," Steiner says.
"There was a hole in the wall," recalls Chris Mauriello, a professor of modern German history at Salem State. As a young student, he arrived in Berlin a few months after its fall to see people coming and going from that hole. But an officious East German guard singled out the American and sent him away.
As a result, Mauriello says, "I was one of the last people to go through Checkpoint Charlie. ... People forget how ugly the wall was. There's often a sense of nostalgia about it." He pauses. "It was a scar that ran through the middle of Berlin."
Culture clash
Slowly, the euphoria died out in the face of a difficult reunification. Modern infrastructure was absent in the East. Communism had been an environmental disaster, Alsop says, poisoning waterways. "It will take forever to clean them up." Huge financial sacrifices had to be made and no one had prepared the West Germans for that. Resentment grew.
Life got tough in unexpected ways for East Germans, too.
"Not everyone was really equipped for living in the West," Steiner says. "Suddenly the state was not providing everything."
"Actually," Mauriello agrees, "some East Germans, the old timers, they told me, 'We had it easier before. ... We didn't have a lot, but everyone had a little.'"
Life in a police state exacted a real toll. A psychologist, Alsop counseled a woman whose mother had fled to the West during the communist era. In short order, she was tossed from her college and only with difficulty found a job as a lifeguard.
There, officials conspired to have her unjustly accused of stealing and she was sent to jail. Now, she told Alsop, she was surrounded by the people who worked for the secret police, the very individuals who conspired to destroy her. Unpunished, "they carry on."
The Cold War had a lasting impact on America, too, says Endicott College professor of international studies Michael Kilburn, leading to the formation of "the national security state." But the young people he teaches know little of the era. "It's history to them. It's like you have to explain the joke before they get it."
"My students are wholly unaware of the Cold War," Mauriello adds. They look back blankly when he talks of America's fallout shelters, of the nuclear weapons pointed our way.
In recent years, critics have argued that the fall of the wall and the end of the Cold War were preordained, that communism came crashing down of its own weight.
"It wasn't inevitable," Mauriello insists. "Nothing in history is inevitable. It only happens by human agency."
So, others credit individuals, some famous, some obscure, from Pope John Paul to the leaders of Western governments and peoples, to the ordinary soldiers who stood guard at Checkpoint Charlie and all along the bloodied barrier that skewered Europe for more than 40 years.
Man Killed in Courthouse Shootout
Video of Ga. Man Who Killed Girl Released
Air Force Airlines: Leaders Get Polished Service
Ga Girl Fights Off Kidnapper at Walmart
Nevada Highway Patrol, City Settle Beating Case
White House Attacks Romney on Birth Control
Homs Bombardment Continues, Global Outcry Grows
Mo. Teen Gets Life Sentence for Killing Girl, 9
Lower-hassle Screening to Be Tested at Airports
Raw Video: Dog Rescued From Icy Colo. Water
Helmet Camera Captures Calif. Fire Rescue
Worker Tells 911: Powell 'exploded the House'
Triple Win: Santorum Takes Minn., Mo., Colo.
Injured Marine Inspired by Homecoming
No Rape Charges Against Son of NYPD Commissioner
Egypt's Ruling Generals Play Risky Game With US
Former Komen Exec Defends Funding Cut
Skip the Coffee Cup and Inhale Your Caffeine Fix
Calif. Gay Marriage Ban Ruled Unconstitutional
Jury Selection for Ex-UVa Athlete Enters 2nd Day
