A wall came down, and hope was raised
When I was 14, our family traveled to the central area of (then) West Germany for my Uncle Edgar’s wedding. Perhaps someday I’ll write about the charm of a rural German wedding, but this post is about another site we visited.
Our parents took my brother and I to see the East-West German border.
I was in high school and had studied the historical facts that led to the division of Germany. My parents chose to make history come alive by taking us children to see it firsthand.
I remember just a wide track of light brown dirt with rolling fences of barbed wire along it. There was no grass. There were no trees. This was the “no-man’s land” where East German citizens would be shot dead if they attempted to cross it. In the absence of any foliage, escapees could be clearly spotted by soldiers in the wooden guard towers that rose up out of the ground every 300-350 yards all along the border.
My brother, known then as Bobby, was about 9 years old at the time. Like any boy that age, he was very interested in the fact that there were soldiers hanging out in those towers, probably watching us as we walked along the West German side. And, like most little boys probably would, he tried to engage the soldiers. Bobby, much to our mother’s horror, got down on one knee and pretended to shoot a make-believe gun.
Of course, he thought it was all good fun. Our parents, on the other hand, were filled with fear. I remember Mom, especially, pulling at his arm to get him to stop. I think she was genuinely afraid that the guards were going to shoot back at us - and they would not be pretending!
My parents were born and raised in Germany. During World War II, they were about 8-10 years old. Old enough to have very vivid memories of the horrors suffered by local farmers at the hands of Nazi soldiers. Old enough to know that it was the war that led to my Opa’s leg being amputated. Old enough to know that my Uncle Walter was taken as a prisoner or war in Russia.
Old enough to be terrified of East German soldiers.
Fast forward about 27 years. I remember my parents being absolutely fixated on the television as Tom Brokaw reported the tearing down of the Berlin Wall. Mom and Dad were consumed by the excitement of the wall coming down. For them, it was much more than just a stone wall dividing and surrounding a far away city. It was a symbol of the division of their beloved “Europa-land.” To them, it represented the Iron Curtain, dividing Western Europe from the Eastern Bloc. To them, the wall coming down was a hopeful sign, that would ultimately lead to a reunited Deutschland.
The wall came down twenty years ago. What has happened since then is an amazing chapter in European and World History. Think of the history we are living today.
Where will you take your children someday to take history out of the textbooks and make it come alive? What lessons will you teach them?
Tags: Community, Culture, Family, Politics, Possibilities
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