Coverage of the commemorative activities of the fall of the Berlin Wall, now twenty years ago, has been surprisingly insightful. Surprising, because the meta-narrative of the thing has surely been solidified well enough to fit decently into any Western (liberal, democratic) tale of societal progress, etc. While it is of course disingenuous to assert the inevitability of the Eastern bloc’s collapse, the appeal of the Drumbeat of Freedom is sometimes too compelling to resist, and goodness knows what all mythologies We, the Victors of the Cold War — and They, the Losers — have been confronted with to explain just the tail end of the 1980s.
Somewhere slightly below Reagan running a credit line the Soviets couldn’t match, or Gorbachev damning his regime with the irreconcilability of glasnost, perestroika, and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, fits the story of the people’s discontent and the rise of Walesa’s unions. His sentiments on the occasion (which of course also contribute to a certain Great Man history with a protagonist in his own image…and of course in that of his Holy Father) seem an indictment of the stories we like to tell of our History:
The politicians always told us that the Cold War stand-off could only change by way of nuclear war. None of them believed that such systemic change was possible. They now express gratitude to the people for having made the changes possible, but at the same time they present themselves as the fathers of German reunification. In truth, they were only accidental fathers of the fall of the Wall — forced into action by the masses.
It was, then, quite appropriate that the German Chancellor should observe of and to those in attendance at the old Bornholmer Strasse border crossing that each would have “eine lange Geschichte . . . über seinen Beitrag zur Freiheit.” If there is something bigger in this story, I have difficulty seeing it, the thing to be reduced to a single historical thread, unwound and untangled to show its “true” meaning, separate and unique among all others. There’s freedom, of course, from paranoid systemic control, but can we ever speak of it in absolute terms? Are we not left with “this is better than that”, yet in a very real sense? I’ll have to think on that one.
In the meantime, anyway, here’s a Berlin tune from a band I’m really digging these days:
