I’m sorry I wasn’t and I don’t quite know what happened. I don’t say this to be flippant in the least. I knew that big things were happening, but unlike many others’ experiences, it all seemed very gradual to me and finally anti-climactic. It seemed like something that was gradually sliding into place that had been sliding into place for a long time but was also terribly fragile.
I credit that feeling to two things. One was that I was working in a Manhattan law firm, and completely buried in learning international tax. The other was that I had spent the previous several years putting in large amounts of time with Human Rights Watch, both its Americas division and its Helsinki division. I had done many missions in Yugoslavia, watching the Soviet empire fall apart while watching Yugoslavia fall apart very much upclose, at the village level, and watching it lead to war, affected how I saw the Soviet Union. I had a huge anxiety that war would break out in the Warsaw Pact; or that it would be a repeat of 1968 – especially a fear of a repeat of the end of Prague Spring, that fear more than anything – or something that I didn’t know, but bad, would happen.
I was also perhaps lulled into a sense of passivity that was somewhat Bush senior’s approach – looking backwards, it had important advantages by treating it as a matter of course – but for me, at least, it felt a little like events were unfolding, not so much as Frank Fukuyama would later say, but more as people like Adam Michnik and the Eastern Europeans intellectuals I knew said it would, if only the US and Western Europe would stay the course. In Yugoslavia, it was a very different sense; the intellectual elites of Yugoslavia understood very well that the end of the Cold War undercut the existential position of Yugoslavia and so it did. I had a sense of trepidation, not of liberation and freedom. The profound sense of liberation came later for me, when I finally believed that it was permanent and not a temporary blip.
Not very Reaganite, but then I wasn’t a Reaganite or a con or a neocon then. The books that were on my mind were George Konrad’s magnificent, but unbearably sad, The Loser and Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and, above all, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I had a deep fear that if one looked at it all too closely, someone, the Red Army, someone, somewhere would take it all away again. I was an editor with Telos, the critical theory journal that had introduced so much of the zamizdat intellectual production into English from Eastern Europe; I knew lots and lots and lots about the intellectual politics there. It was very hard for me to believe that this was actually real and tangible, and not something so fragile that a little puff could bring the house of cards down.
So I wish I had been more attentive to events, and wish that I could blame it merely on working such long hours in the law firm – but rather, it felt to me like something happening in slow motion across many years. November 11 was weirdly not so special for me, because I had been involved for so many years, since the early 1980s, with HRW and Telos watching events unfold at the level of civil society activists.
A close friend of mine was there when it happened, though, David, a gay man with AIDS. I was astounded when he stopped by to see me in New York with photos of himself chipping away at the Wall. Possibly a little bit cheated – since when was David off partying in Berlin and not me? He had never been “political” in any sense, not gay rights, not really anything, and I told him I was pretty sure he couldn’t find Bratislava on a map – until AIDS caught him and he became deeply involved in ACTUP. Since when did he deserve to go celebrate the end of Communism and the Wall?
But David saw in some deep way, as AIDS closed in on him, that being at the fall of the Wall was as an act of liberation even for people otherwise altogether uninvolved in the politics of the Cold War, or the politics of Europe, or any of that. It was just freedom, and maybe David actually captured its pure spirit – dissociated from politics. If that is possible, and I don’t know that it is; actually, I am pretty certain it is not. But David died just a month later, AIDS caught up with him for good, in the hospice of the San Francisco Zen Center; the Lord bless him and keep him, he was a good man, and so were the monks of the Zen Center who watched over him.
And so, for better and worse, that’s how I remember the fall of the Wall. Photos of David that I no longer have, pre-digital, gaunt and his long hair swinging round, laughing and singing, wearing some kind of weird poncho that he never would have worn in 80s LA (but of course I might), standing on top of a big pile of cement. There isn’t any big moral here about freedom and liberty – there is all of that, for me as for others, but in my case it wasn’t associated with the actual moment. The comprehension of liberation and freedom came later.
AlanDownunder says:
There a clue to be had here. This almost unique “victory over totalitarianism”, among all the failures, did not involve a US invasion.
Of course, whether the US can claim sole, or even significant, credit for the collapse of the iron curtain is another issue. You don’t need to be American to be enamoured of freedom. Indeed, this century, the US has fallen out of love at an alarming rate.
November 9, 2009, 10:18 pmKenneth Anderson says:
I think I’ll shift the update from this into a separate post, so as not to run together the issues in the main discussion from the update; AlanDownUnder raises important questions, probably better considered separately.
November 9, 2009, 10:24 pmKenneth Anderson says:
AlanDownUnder: Somehow I deleted the update. If anyone has the little deleted bit under “Update” that talks about Washington University and then the bit that is quoted in the first comment, please put it in a comment here and I’ll put it back up as a separate post. Apologies; cut and pasted wrong.
November 9, 2009, 10:29 pmDavid Chesler says:
I was reading one or both local newspapers those years and from time to time the CSM but somehow I missed the fall of Communism. I was spending a lot of time courting the woman who became my wife, but things happened very fast, and I don’t remember much. I remember the cracks, like the East Germans travelling through Hungary and Austria. The coup in Moscow two years later was better covered. At some point when pieces of the Berlin Wall were being discounted I bought a few chips of cement.
November 9, 2009, 10:38 pmThe Berlin Wall went up on the day my parents got married. Other events, like the raid on Entebbe the morning of the Bicentennial, or Tianamen, or the 20th anniversary of Sgt. Pepper (it was 20 years ago today) or of course 9/11 seem much sharper in my mind.
Randy says:
Thanks for sharing a very personal account.
Mine wasn’t so interesting. I read about it here in Washington, and watched it on tv.
Later, I was involved in the Central and East European Law Initiative (CEELI), which was a program with the ABA to bring the rule of law to former communist countries. It was a big success, and I’m glad I played a small role in helping to develop that.
November 9, 2009, 10:58 pmChrisTS says:
KA:
Thank you for your story about your friend, David. I suspect it will get lost in the shuffle of comments on the Wall and who was doing what at the time, but I’m sure he would be touched to be part of your remembrance of an historic event.
November 9, 2009, 11:00 pmgeokstr says:
Randy, not that it would be particularly important to you, but if you were involved in something like that, I’ve just gained some new-found respect for you.
November 9, 2009, 11:54 pmRandy says:
Thanks! See, we aren’t ALL pro-communists!
One vivid memory of mine: I hosted a reception in my house for visiting jurists, lawyers, etc, from one of the Baltic states (can’t remember which one). I asked a law professor, what was the biggest problem in transitioning? She thought for a long moment — I thought she would say something like, we need good legal textbooks, or better judges, or something like that. She said, ‘getting the people to understand that there is such a thing as a rule of law.’
Her point was that under the communist legal system, judges ruled according to party bosses, not actual law. People still didn’t trust the legal system, and that was the biggest problem.
November 10, 2009, 12:31 amReader says:
Kenneth: I didn’t see the update part, but the story about Washington University just shutting down a student memorial about the Berlin Wall is here:
http://gatewaypundit.firstthings.com/2009/11/wash-u-shuts-down-freedom-memorial-on-20-year-anniversary-of-end-of-communism-it-was-too-offensive-video/
November 10, 2009, 12:38 amSplunge says:
Ken Anderson, I was living in San Francisco at the time you mention, in the early years of the AIDS plague, and I don’t think a direct comparison to the Black Death is unreasonable, at all. People forget, I think, that in those days there was nothing whatsoever you could do about AIDS, besides pray for miracles, and that it had a soul-devastating 100% fatality rate.
I recall seeing and hearing men like your friend, and those who managed — God knows how — to undertake the bleak ministry of tending them. That’s courage.
November 10, 2009, 12:49 amVisitor Again says:
Kenneth, let me join ChrisTS in saying that was a lovely little tribute to your friend David.
The fall of the wall didn’t hit me the way other monumental events have. I don’t remember where I was when I learned the wall had fallen or even how I learned it had fallen. Perhaps it was because the wall’s fall was part of a larger event that already was underway: the fall of the entire Iron Curtain.
But I do remember as a nine-year-old in England sitting at my paternal grandmother’s kitchen table and reading the headline in the Manchester Evening News one March day in 1953. It said in huge type: “STALIN DEAD.” That may have been the beginning of the end for the Soviet Bloc.
November 10, 2009, 2:42 amAlanDownunder says:
A German friend of mine recently mentioned to me a (German) book he was reading. I attributes the loss of control in East Germany to an event in Leipzig. Church parishioners had been holding silent demonstrations for freedom as a weekly event. They had refused orders to stop. An order went out for police to disperse them, by firing on them if necessary. For the first time in the GDR, police refused orders. This is claimed to be the pebble that started the avalanche within the GDR.
Notable before that was Hungary opening its border to Austria – with a nod from Gorbachev.
November 10, 2009, 3:39 amJames N. Gibson says:
There is much that can be said for this event. There is a lot of history tied up in the Cold War that most people don’t even know of. I’m sure most readers in this blog can’t name the first official revolt in the eastern block, or what percentage of East Germans migrated through Berlin to freedom before the wall was built. To us the wall was a backdrop for Hollywood movies not sometime tangible.
In the same way, when it fell, to me, it was unbelievable. We had just gone through a political battle to place missiles in europe just to confront the USSR. We were supporting central american countries fighting Communist insurgencies and we had invaded Grenada to stop it going into the Soviet Block. Then suddenly, the great Soviet bear folded. Like a steroid bulked up Wrestler it suddenly collapsed under its own weight. And for the first time since I was born, the spectre of Mutually Insured Destruction was over. Oh, we still have the possibility of someone launching a nuke, but it won’t set-off the end of the world (we’re supposedly doing that with our cars).
November 10, 2009, 4:34 amresh says:
I shalln’t pretend that I know you or that I post here with regularity. But allow me to take a moment to reply to the genuine warmth within your post. It is never an easy thing to see a friend passing away, to watch one’s death-it isn’t even easy recapturing the moment in any poetic, sentimental way.
You might take some refuge in knowing that in the great arc and mystery of who we are that you took the time to recall someone special, someone who touched a part of you, just as you now, with some invisible reach, touch him.
The Wall, we might remember, is first and foremost about the destiny of men, about their plight and pursuits and flirtations with the human condition. Your friend my not have known the politics of The Wall, but he wasn’t so far removed as you might suspect. That Wall is within all of us to some degree, just as we are part of it in another.
I think your friend would feel better about himself knowing that you recounted his final days in the spirit of a transcendent occasion. Like the collapse of The Wall itself, your friend’s final days invite a greater meaning to our end.
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November 11, 2009, 7:33 am