30 November 9ths Ago: The Wall Gets Torn Down

Saturday, November 9th, was the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.  Those who were not born yet, or were not old enough to be paying attention in 1989, cannot fully appreciate how all-pervasive a part of everyday life the Cold War was, or how sudden and out of the blue were the events that brought it to an end.  

When I was a kid, we were all aware of communism and the Iron Curtain. The old civil defense sirens still wailed us under our desks into the ‘70s. The death of Leonid Brezhnev in 1982, his string of short-lived successors, and the Soviet government’s ridiculous stories about why they disappeared from public view for months, were the subjects of schoolyard conversation.  

When I was in college, I learned German from professors from war-torn Europe who still had relatives trapped in the Soviet sector of a still-divided Germany. One day, I asked one of them if she thought Germany would ever be re-united. No, she said. She did not think the Berlin Wall would ever come down. Just a few weeks later, crowds of ordinary Germans with hand-tools punched holes in the wall and reduced it to a pile of souvenirs.  Less than a year later, the East German communist government having voted itself out of existence, Germany was reunited. The communist monolith had loomed like a dark shadow on the eastern horizon, vast, threatening, seemingly invincible; until, as William F. Buckley put it, one day, God cleared His throat, and it all blew away on a cold wind.  

“I have seen the wicked highly exalted, and lifted up like the cedars of Libanus. And I passed by, and lo, he was not: and I sought him and his place was not found.” (Psalm 36:35-36)