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Jerzy Buzek, Jose Manuel Barroso
Dominoes are pushed by President of the European Parliament Jerzy Buzek, second from right, and President of the European Commission Jose Manuel Barroso, third from right, at the spot of the former border in Berlin, Germany, Monday, Nov. 9, 2009, during the commemorations of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on Nov.9, 1989. (AP Photo/Eckehard Schulz)
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This is a week fraught with profound historical significance in a month full of history. And no, I don't mean a vote for government health care.
Tomorrow will mark the 91st anniversary of the end of the First World War, that calamity which ended the optimism about the future and the faith in the doctrine of “progress” which so permeated the second half of the 19th century, all the way to 1914. For four long years, people's hope in technology's bright promise of what was to come was machine-gunned, blown up, drowned, stabbed, gassed, crushed, ground-up, starved and obliterated. What happened at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918 was a collective sigh of utter exhaustion. Even though much worse was to come.
Today's date is a different matter. Throughout 1989, the government of East Germany had been struggling with “reforms” which would allow it to remain in control, but would tamp down its citizens' desire for freedom and increased contact with their Western brethren. Changes in policy were chaotic, and satisfied no one. In other member states of Moscow's Eastern European empire, state control was deteriorating faster; Hungarians and Czechs had been pouring out of their countries into the west, and East Germans started to join them.
Suddenly, on November 9, 1989, an East German official announced that permanent relocations could be done through any border checkpoint between East Germany and West Germany. People were shocked. Was this possible? In Berlin, a crowd began to gather at the Wall. Some were let through to the West. Very rapidly, a huge crowd formed. They began to pick at the wall with hammers and chisels. On the East German side the feared Border Guards, lacking orders, stood aside. A few even joined in. Sections of the wall began to tumble. By the dawn of the 10th of November, 1989, the Berlin Wall, built by the Soviet Union to keep its subject people in, was no longer an obstacle. A year later, Germany was once again a united country; two years later the Soviet Union — once aptly described as “the prison-house of nations” — followed East Germany into the dustbin of history.
It is worth considering the fall of the Berlin Wall today. It — together with other barriers of the same type, manned by bloody-handed border guards working to support repressive regimes throughout Moscow's Eastern European empire — formed the “Iron Curtain” which for decades prevented tens of millions of Poles, Czechs, Magyars, Germans and others from breathing free air.
Not that they didn't try. They floated past, flew over, ran across, tunneled under and resorted to a hundred other strategies to get to the West. Some of them, like Peter Fechter, paid the ultimate price: Shot while attempting to scale the Wall in Berlin, he was left by East German border guards to bleed to death. Between 100 and 200 Germans shared his fate over the 28 years of the Wall. And they all had guaranteed jobs, and free government health care. Their deaths tell us something very important about the value of freedom.
My friend Klaus Gelhar, a German diplomat, has a fragment of the wall on display in his home. As he once put it, “to remind of what never should have been, and what should never be again.”
I worked with Klaus in Armenia, one of the constituent parts of the former USSR. Regarded by many as one of the “favored republics,” Armenia is blessed with an intelligent, well-educated and inventive — if disputatious — population, a pleasant climate, fertile soil and a picturesque landscape. It had also been cursed with 70 years of Communist political, social and economic control. Abandoned, rusting factories of indeterminate purpose were scattered across the landscape. Functioning, rusting and leaking factories dribbling brightly colored fluids and spewing God-knows-what into the air were plopped into residential neighborhoods and crowded watersheds. Giant, drab apartment blocks occupied square kilometers of suburbs, their gray, slab-sided walls stained with rust from reinforcing rods that had weathered out. Many Armenians one passed on the street had a weary, hollowed-out look. In every sense of the term, it was a wreck — the wreck of the “Workers' Paradise.” This is what people had fled. This is what should never be again.
The fierce determination of those who crossed the wall, and of those who brought it down, should not be forgotten. It is compelling testimony to what people who lack it value above all else — above possessions, above friendship and above life: freedom. Their stories should speak caution, and a warning to those who unconsciously consign, or willingly surrender, their freedoms to a government.
When they are gone, they may be difficult to recover.
Summit County resident Morgan Liddick pens a Tuesday column. E-mail him at mcliddick@hotmail.com. Also, comment on this column at www.summitdaily.com.
Tomorrow will mark the 91st anniversary of the end of the First World War, that calamity which ended the optimism about the future and the faith in the doctrine of “progress” which so permeated the second half of the 19th century, all the way to 1914. For four long years, people's hope in technology's bright promise of what was to come was machine-gunned, blown up, drowned, stabbed, gassed, crushed, ground-up, starved and obliterated. What happened at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918 was a collective sigh of utter exhaustion. Even though much worse was to come.
Today's date is a different matter. Throughout 1989, the government of East Germany had been struggling with “reforms” which would allow it to remain in control, but would tamp down its citizens' desire for freedom and increased contact with their Western brethren. Changes in policy were chaotic, and satisfied no one. In other member states of Moscow's Eastern European empire, state control was deteriorating faster; Hungarians and Czechs had been pouring out of their countries into the west, and East Germans started to join them.
Suddenly, on November 9, 1989, an East German official announced that permanent relocations could be done through any border checkpoint between East Germany and West Germany. People were shocked. Was this possible? In Berlin, a crowd began to gather at the Wall. Some were let through to the West. Very rapidly, a huge crowd formed. They began to pick at the wall with hammers and chisels. On the East German side the feared Border Guards, lacking orders, stood aside. A few even joined in. Sections of the wall began to tumble. By the dawn of the 10th of November, 1989, the Berlin Wall, built by the Soviet Union to keep its subject people in, was no longer an obstacle. A year later, Germany was once again a united country; two years later the Soviet Union — once aptly described as “the prison-house of nations” — followed East Germany into the dustbin of history.
It is worth considering the fall of the Berlin Wall today. It — together with other barriers of the same type, manned by bloody-handed border guards working to support repressive regimes throughout Moscow's Eastern European empire — formed the “Iron Curtain” which for decades prevented tens of millions of Poles, Czechs, Magyars, Germans and others from breathing free air.
Not that they didn't try. They floated past, flew over, ran across, tunneled under and resorted to a hundred other strategies to get to the West. Some of them, like Peter Fechter, paid the ultimate price: Shot while attempting to scale the Wall in Berlin, he was left by East German border guards to bleed to death. Between 100 and 200 Germans shared his fate over the 28 years of the Wall. And they all had guaranteed jobs, and free government health care. Their deaths tell us something very important about the value of freedom.
My friend Klaus Gelhar, a German diplomat, has a fragment of the wall on display in his home. As he once put it, “to remind of what never should have been, and what should never be again.”
I worked with Klaus in Armenia, one of the constituent parts of the former USSR. Regarded by many as one of the “favored republics,” Armenia is blessed with an intelligent, well-educated and inventive — if disputatious — population, a pleasant climate, fertile soil and a picturesque landscape. It had also been cursed with 70 years of Communist political, social and economic control. Abandoned, rusting factories of indeterminate purpose were scattered across the landscape. Functioning, rusting and leaking factories dribbling brightly colored fluids and spewing God-knows-what into the air were plopped into residential neighborhoods and crowded watersheds. Giant, drab apartment blocks occupied square kilometers of suburbs, their gray, slab-sided walls stained with rust from reinforcing rods that had weathered out. Many Armenians one passed on the street had a weary, hollowed-out look. In every sense of the term, it was a wreck — the wreck of the “Workers' Paradise.” This is what people had fled. This is what should never be again.
The fierce determination of those who crossed the wall, and of those who brought it down, should not be forgotten. It is compelling testimony to what people who lack it value above all else — above possessions, above friendship and above life: freedom. Their stories should speak caution, and a warning to those who unconsciously consign, or willingly surrender, their freedoms to a government.
When they are gone, they may be difficult to recover.
Summit County resident Morgan Liddick pens a Tuesday column. E-mail him at mcliddick@hotmail.com. Also, comment on this column at www.summitdaily.com.
