Ten years ago in Berlin

The first man who breached the Berlin Wall was, in retrospect, the New Man whom even Marx would not have recognised. This day ten years a...

The first man who breached the Berlin Wall was, in retrospect, the New Man whom even Marx would not have recognised. This day ten years ago, the day the Wall fell to the passions of freedom, the first act of this century’s greatest demolition was performed. After all, what was the Wall if not the visible, concrete translation of the Iron Curtain? It was more than the soaring monument of the Cold War. It was the thickest line between ideology and the idea of freedom, socialist superstition and capitalist realism, between man and man. In 1989, Europe’s annus mirabilis, the breached Wall, Ossis-Wessis bhai bhai, was a dramatic rejoinder to the pretense of communism. For, on the eastern side of the wall lay the artificial democratic republic where democracy was a synonym for the Leader’s choice.

On the other side lay Europe’s most powerful nation with an incurable guilt complex, the federal republic. Between them stood the Wall, separating the caged from the free, the Wall as a bar- bed-wire guarantee againstcultural and capitalist pollution. That day on November 9, when Ossis defied the concrete, they were reaching out to the new world, they were falling, so willfully and innocently, to the raw temptations of freedom. The bogeyman of socialist classrooms, the D-mark-wielding demon of the West, looked so different that day. The liberated saw beyond the granite debris the first images of the brotherhood of redemption.

People, not the abstract masses of the communist narrative, made it possible. They executed the will of history, and two men, the last communist of the Soviet empire and the last larger-than-life chancellor of Germany, turned the demise of the Wall into a new chapter of reconciliation. Helmut Kohl, the chancellor who never missed the fine prints of history, was ready to sacrifice for the sake of re-unification. Mikhail Gorbachev, the Mikhailangelo’ who sculpted the empire to a humane form, didn’t send tanks to preserve the satellite. True, the post-Wall scenario witnessed the making of a thirdworld within the first world, and the contrast was starker in re-unified Germany. But Kohl was willing to ban-kroll the historical correction. And his triumph was truly historic.

Still, for a while, it seemed deceptive as the remains of the Wall took refuge in souvenir stalls. One legitimate question was: Has the wall migrated to the mind? As the neo-Nazi theme song merged with the wail of the Turkish victim, as the politics of hate aggravated the social divisions of re-unification, it was a legitimate liberal question. But there is no easy transition, and the tamed German eagle was not destined to be the guardian of domestic calm. Today, despite the initial dissonance, despite Gunter Grass (the socialist’ critic of re-unification), Germany is a nation without nostalgia. In the post-Wall Europe, this post-Kohl nation of middle-path socialism is a testament of togetherness: what has started in Berlin should end up a pan-European story of living without frontiers. The Wall-less city of Berlin is today thecapital of a nation which continues to celebrate the idea of unification. Europe today is happy to live without a wall to write the message of salvation.