A gift that we have tried, for the past three decades, to understand and live up to as it unfolded around us.Ī pre-unification CIA map shows the division between East and West Germany. In that sense at least, I may be representative of my generation of West Germans, for whom the miracle of Novemwhat Timothy Garton Ash has called “that night of wonders, changed everything forever: in Berlin, Germany, Europe, the world” - was mostly an unearned gift. The lessons in store were not small, nor were the topics: war, peace, and memory, prosperity and inequality, democracy and transformation, freedom and identity. Instead, this is a frankly subjective and fragmentary look at what I began to learn in that year, and in the three decades thereafter: first as a journalist, and later as a think tanker. I was very much its object: thrilled, but very confused. Others were agents or observers of history in those heady weeks and months. I leave that to the politicians who were there and made decisions, or the historians who have studied the files and interviewed participants. So I can make no claim to shed new light on the events of 30 years ago, on their causes, on their interpretation, or on their lasting effects. My real education began (as I was to appreciate later and very gradually) in 1989. As the daughter of a West German diplomat, I was worldly in some ways and laughably callow in others. I, in stark contrast, had contrived to string out my adolescence through two university degrees and now a third. War, despair, defeat, and shame had schooled the generations of my grandparents and parents before they ever had a chance to set foot in a place of higher learning. Officially, I was writing a doctoral thesis, but my hope was to stay, reinvent myself in the great American tradition, and escape the baggage of my German heritage for good. In the closing months of the Cold War, I was a graduate student in the United States. As World War II drew to a close, my father was 17, a very relieved and grateful American prisoner-of-war. (Reuters)Īt the end of World War I, one of my grandfathers was a 22-year-old private in the German Imperial Army, while the other was a 19-year-old petty officer on a submarine. East and West Germans celebrate on the Berlin Wall at the Brandenburg Gate after the opening of the border on November 9, 1989. Then, to my surprise, I burst into tears. Many people were chanting “Wir sind das Volk,” we are the people.ĭirect democracy in action, live - and in Germany. TV.” Shocked, I did as I was told, and stared in disbelief at the inconceivable, the impossible: fuzzy shots, in grainy black and white, of tens of thousands of people waving sledgehammers and champagne bottles, dancing and singing - on top of the Berlin Wall, for 28 years one of the most deadly borders on the planet. She said, without preface: “Turn on the TV, the wall is gone.” Annoyed that I’d lost my train of thought, I retorted grumpily that she’d have to be more creative if she wanted to play one of her right-wing political jokes on me. We were used to ribbing each other about our politics, hers crisply conservative, mine vaguely liberal. The house phone rang, and continued to ring insistently. Bean double-layered thermal long underwear, essential for survival in a New England winter. Hunched over library books on Puritan town meetings, I clasped a mug of steaming tea, swaddled in scarf and sweater, and beneath it all, very probably wearing my L.L.
On the clear, chilly afternoon of November 9, 1989, I was sitting at my desk in the drafty wooden double-decker house whose upper-level apartment I shared with three other graduate students, mulling over an early chapter of my doctoral thesis on direct democracy in America. To be exact, I was 3,776 miles away in Somerville, Massachusetts. When the revolution happened, I was not there for it.
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