It divided one of Europe’s great capitals for nearly 30 years. An ugly scar of a wall designed to keep people in with a shoot to kill order in place to discourage those being repressed from ever escaping. They are declaring this week that the Berlin Wall has now been gone longer than it stood. I’m still having trouble reconciling myself to that fact. More
It took a Constitutional conservative President of the United States of America and a real Pope to bring it crashing down
Looking back, in light of the muslim invasion, the Soviets should have just opened the borders of their satellite states around 1970, and let hordes of refugees, not just the best, brightest and most freedom-loving escapees, pour into the West. The seventies euro-left would have embraced them with open arms and looked to them for guidance, and the entire continent would have been communist by the time Reagan was elected.
I was in East Berlin in February of 1990, and one thing that struck me, as we were eating leathery rindfleisch and cabbage in the revolving restaurant atop the TV Tower, was how dark it was in East Berlin. You could look out the window as the restaurant slowly rotated and follow the path of the wall by where the lights met with darkness. It was like that all over East Germany. Democracy may die in darkness, but Communism lives in it.
I was in Berlin in 2000. All the new construction that transformed the center of the city was amazing. When the Germans move their capital back to Berlin all the German states had to build new offices and many of them went up right were the wall had run. Then there were the major corporations that built new HQs there as well.
There were still plenty of bullet and shell marks on the buildings in and around the museum quarter. When I returned a few years later a lot of that damage had been repaired.
I took a foot tour of the Nazi and Berlin Wall sites. Amazing how many Nazi administration buildings were still standing, like the HQ of the Luftwaffe which one would assume would have been a prime target for area bombing during the war. It seemed hardly touched.
It was one of the most interesting cities I’d ever visited because history had been stamped all over that city, whether it wanted it or not.
I was never in Berlin, but I do live in Kaliphornia.
Someday, it may be necessary for me to dig a tunnel back to the United States.
I should probably get started on that.
Isn’t it ironic how the vermin of one country builds a wall to keep the people in while another country of people want to build a wall to keep the vermin out??