Twenty years ago (when I was still in my childhood), a wall was torn down.

'Twas no ordinary wall.

The Berlin Wall was a symbol of a much larger set of defenses, barricades, officially-closed borders, and armies meant to keep people in the Communist-controlled portions of Eastern Europe.

I only vaguely remember the history leading up to that event. There were rumblings of trouble in various parts of the Warsaw Pact; border crossings suddenly opened and then closed again, protests not quashed by State Police, etc.

A series of events led to a dramatic opening of the Wall, and large numbers of East Berliners meeting West Berliners on top of the once-impregnable Wall.

In my vague recollection, there was never any good explanation for why the Wall was brought down, and why the Warsaw Pact dissolved into a group of new, non-Communist states.

It seemed the kind of deus ex machina event one would expect in a poorly-written movies. Some unknown, unseen, hard-to-explicate set of forces outside the Main Story resulted in the end of the Evil Empire.

It is reminiscent of another tale of a wall falling down, the kind of tale that I learned as a child.

The two tales are similar in at least one way: the ordinary observer to either event would not have expected the Wall to fall as rapidly as it did.

(Perhaps, in the case of the Berlin Wall, it became apparent that the Main Story being told to the public wasn't the Main Story of what was happening...)

Many things have changed in the world since that time.

Hopefully, the story will still be told many generations hence: people will remember that the Communist world, which promised freedom and wealth, had delivered fear of the Secret Police and crushing poverty. Also, it had to build a wall to keep its own "liberated" people from leaving.

Posted by: karrde at 08:17 | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 318 words, total size 2 kb.