September 16, 2003: Contemporary History

Today we went on a day-trip to Leipzig. We began the day with a walking tour of the city. We went to the church where Johann Sebastian Bach is buried (What is up with people being buried underneath the church floor? I find that very weird. . . ) and we saw multi-storied, glass-covered exhibition halls that made the merchants of Leipzig famous. We went to the church where the peaceful revolution began in 1989 -- every week more and more people showed up for the word-of-mouth prayer meetings that ended with the congregation marching to the town square while carrying candles. By the end some 100,000 were showing up. We were shown numerous buildings that had been rebuilt since they were bombed during World War II, and numerous buildings that had been rebuilt since they had either been torn down or left to decay during the socialist era.

The tour guide had a bit of a chip on her shoulder about the last issue actually. She carried with her a large book of photographs showing the broken windows and sagging frames of some 25 buildings. She would show us the picture and then point to the restored building now. She would roll her eyes about the state of disrepair the buildings had fallen into, and then look at us sternly and say something like: "So you can see, ending the socialist government was really important for this city." Historically, I have a bad reaction to any kind of bandwagon -- even ones that make logical sense. I don't presume to understand what anyone else has experienced, but she had a certain johnny-one-note sense about her, that probably had the opposite impact on me than she might have hoped -- I tuned out her political message.

That is until we went to the museum of contemporary history.

I get it now. I'm indoctrinated. I accept the bandwagon with all my heart and soul. Democracy is good. Communism is bad bad bad. Side by side in the museum, they show the ballots from the first elections held in West Germany and the first ones held in the GDR. The ballot from the west had, you know, choices on it. With little boxes you could check off next to your, well, choice. The one from the east was a sheet of paper with three names for three positions on it. I'm not quite sure what you were supposed to do with the ballot besides be a conveyor who carried it from the person who handed it to you to the ballot box. Every year, newspapers in East Germany reported that 99.9% of the people voted for the winning candidates.

But the thing that really got me was the video tapes. The Berlin wall -- known in the GDR as the Imperialist Wall in order to give the impression that they were keeping the capitalists out, not the East Germans in) essentially went up over night. There is tape of a woman jumping out the window of her home that sat right on the border as soldiers are bricking up her windows. The soldiers are holding her hands trying to keep her in; people on the ground are pulling at her feet pulling her into the west. There is tape of men dashing across the barbed wire before the brick went up, as shots ring out. There is tape of men swimming across the river in Berlin from the East to the West, lying exhausted on the West bank, amazed that they have made it, surrounded by American tourists, as an East German police boat screams up, waving guns, but too late to do anything.

My friends who grew up here do not describe unbelievable violations of civil rights at all, and frankly they all have some ambivalence about the change from a communist government -- so, again, I have no way of knowing what anyone here experienced. But for the people in the videos, something clearly pushed them. I can't even imagine experiencing the kind of desperation that gets you to leave everything you've known and jump out your window on the spur of the moment, or sprint across a river in the face of gunfire. Each of us in my group, reacted differently, bringing our own experiences to bear on what we saw. Being Jewish, I, of course, see barbed wire and think of concentration camps. A Nicaraguan professor who was with us, teared up remembering her mother sneaking her and her younger sister out of the country. One German thought of his grandmother's optimism after World War II, and how excited she was for the new Germany she truly thought was just around the corner -- and her bitter disappointment when it never appeared. Another German told me of something much more innocent: the joy at 14 of suddenly being able to go back and read all the kids books she hadn't had access to as a child.

So, I'm going out on a limb here and taking a political position. Barbed wire, cages, censorship -- these are the forces of evil in this world. I am understanding for the first time the extremes of something like the American Civil Liberties Union, fighting for freedom of speech no matter what the hell that speech is. I will happily take the extreme of allowing even the hateful to speak out, if what that means is that no one ever tries to curb the middel ground either. Yes, I'm going out on a limb. Democracy is good. Civil rights are good. Walls -- walls are very bad.