Furthermore: Where the Headlines Take You

When the Wall Came Down

What were you doing 20 years ago?  I was in high school and I can clearly remember coming home from basketball practice and seeing people on the T.V. standing on top of this well-graffitied wall, arm-in-arm, celebrating like I'd never seen before.  I was not a young woman who paid much attention to politics.  I was all about sports and music and my friends.  But I remember the profound impact these images made on me.  Before that moment, I theoretically understood that people all over the world were living under very different circumstances than my own.  But in seeing those images, I finally, really got it.  Monday marked the twenty-year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and The New York Times did an Op-Ed piece asking poets to write works inspired by the events of November 9, 1989.  Reading these poems brought up a lot of those same feelings for me and was a good reminder that the world is full of many people, living in different situations, all trying to find peace and happiness.

Though I already had leanings, this event hit me at just the right moment to turn me into a true history buff.  If like me you prefer to start at the beginning in order to get a better understanding of an event, then I recommend The Berlin Wall: A World Divided by Frederick Taylor.  Taylor will take you through the division of Germany after World War II , the flight of refugees to the West, the construction and eventual bringing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989.  He discusses the origins of the Cold War and the stark contrast in living conditions between East and West Germany.  It is a thick book, but a good one and reads at fairly fast pace.  Plus it has pictures, and who doesn't like pictures!  

For me, history really is about the people, and Anna Funder's Stasiland looks back at real people's experiences being under the organized surveillance of East Germany's secret police, the Stasi, with its army of citizen informers.  She looks at both those who had the courage to resist during the Communist regime as well as those within the Stasi.  There are heartbreaking stories of mothers unable to see their sick children on the other side of the Wall, teenagers arrested for distributing protest flyers, and (for me at least) very unlikeable members of the Stasi regime.  Funder does a really wonderful job with this book and I highly recommend it.  

You never know when you wake up in the morning what the day will bring, and there are many events that have been so dramatic as to change the course of history.  A compilation of these kinds of events can be found in Where Were You When?: 180 Unforgettable Moments in Living History by Ian Harrison.  Mainly through images and with quotes from folks who remember back to the moment, Harrison takes us on a journey starting with the outbreak of World War II through to the 2008 cyclone in Myanmar and earthquake in China.  The stories range from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix breaking all publishing records, to Armstrong and Aldrin first walking on the moon.    

And then because this post is just a bit too serious, I need to diverge a bit.  Perhaps if you listened to NPR's All Things Considered on Monday you will have heard an interview with David Hasselhoff.  Hasselhoff was huge in Germany around the time of the Wall coming down and he believes he may have had a part in its falling.  You see Hasselhoff was on his "Freedom Tour" through Germany in 1989 and his song "Looking for Freedom" topped the charts.  According to his autobiography Don't Hassel the Hoff, he had the idea of "destroying the Wall as a dramatic part of the show." So he "recreated the Wall out of painted Styrofoam blocks and...drove a Trans Am named 'Freedom' straight through it. And the crowd went wild."  Stories like this makes this book (with many color photos) a fun read.

If you were alive back in 1989, please share your memories of this momentous event.  And if you have a favorite book, movie or piece of music that reminds you of that time, please share those as well.