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rfmcdonald,I quite like this Spiegel Online article.
Any number of my friends have commented on how they experienced it, on how the saw the Wall and how they saw the Wall fall and how they felt about that. I was only nine at the time, but I was impressed by the euphoria. I don't have to remind you that I own some chunks of concrete accredited as chunks from the Berlin Wall.
I think that the biggest sensation that beset the world in those halcyon days. I'm a big fan of 1980s music, as people who've seen my music video posts on Facebook can say, and one thing that has always stuck out for me is the sheer number of nuclear catastrophe-themed songs: "Dancing with Tears in My Eyes", "99 Luftballons", "Forever Young". That wasn't the only way the fear of Cold War-themed nuclear gigadeath was in popular culture. Take Threads and its perhaps optimistic depiction of life in a post-apocalyptic United Kingdom; take Hackett's fictional Third World War histories; take the obnoxious heavy metal song in Star Trek IV that claimed the only thing left for us to decide was "how many megatons"; take the desperate protests of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and its European peers during the early 1980s' missile deployments; WarGames that saw Matthew Broderick race to try to prevent the reliable artifical intelligence the generals put in place of unrealiable men from starting a nuclear war. And then, take the TTAPS study of 1983, the only that confirmed that just as Mars cooled during its planet-wide dust storms, so would Earth because terribly, unliveably, chill.
Comes Gorbachev, and there's hope that the future won't be as bleak. Comes November 1989, and things just can't be as horrible as they were. It's worth noting that the first thing Berliners did after bringing the Wall down was have a huge days-long party.
We're safe now. There's problems in the region, sure, eastern Europe hasn't fared nearly as well as one might like and entire generations have been left adrift. There's still nothing like that existential fear, little that I can remember and nothing that younger generations can remember. The world has its rivalries and it has its problems, but it's a normal world safe from the fear that one year everyone could die. Ours, after all, is a world that's relaxed, so relaxed that we can take a geography that marked the sternest border of the sternest ideological conflict ever and make it a game of dominos while others smile at the idea, at least a little bit.
This November, two kilometers worth of gigantic dominos will be erected between Berlin's Brandenburg Gate and Potsdamer Platz along a portion of the strip that once separated East and West Berlin. In celebration of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the dominos will be set tumbling and the barrier will collapse in roughly half an hour's time.
"We want to knock over the Wall once again," Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit said at an opening ceremony for the project last week.
The 43-kilometer Berlin Wall -- the most famous symbol of the Cold War and of divided Germany -- fell on Nov. 9, 1989, after having stood for nearly three decades. The domino project, which is headed by the Berlin group Kulturprojekte, hopes to inspire reflection on that day by toppling 1,000 eight-foot tall Styrofoam slabs.
Each of the dominos will be individually decorated, most by young Berlin residents. Part of the project's aim is "to encourage young people to reflect on what the fall of the Wall meant," Wowereit said.
Roughly 20 of the dominos will also be sent abroad to be decorated in other parts of the world where aggressive divisions and separating walls have left an impact. "It's important that we not only bring Germany to the world but that we also bring the world to Germany," Michael Jeismann of the Berlin office of Germany's federal cultural foundation Goethe Institut, which developed the foreign component of the domino project, told SPIEGEL ONLINE.
Any number of my friends have commented on how they experienced it, on how the saw the Wall and how they saw the Wall fall and how they felt about that. I was only nine at the time, but I was impressed by the euphoria. I don't have to remind you that I own some chunks of concrete accredited as chunks from the Berlin Wall.
I think that the biggest sensation that beset the world in those halcyon days. I'm a big fan of 1980s music, as people who've seen my music video posts on Facebook can say, and one thing that has always stuck out for me is the sheer number of nuclear catastrophe-themed songs: "Dancing with Tears in My Eyes", "99 Luftballons", "Forever Young". That wasn't the only way the fear of Cold War-themed nuclear gigadeath was in popular culture. Take Threads and its perhaps optimistic depiction of life in a post-apocalyptic United Kingdom; take Hackett's fictional Third World War histories; take the obnoxious heavy metal song in Star Trek IV that claimed the only thing left for us to decide was "how many megatons"; take the desperate protests of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and its European peers during the early 1980s' missile deployments; WarGames that saw Matthew Broderick race to try to prevent the reliable artifical intelligence the generals put in place of unrealiable men from starting a nuclear war. And then, take the TTAPS study of 1983, the only that confirmed that just as Mars cooled during its planet-wide dust storms, so would Earth because terribly, unliveably, chill.
Comes Gorbachev, and there's hope that the future won't be as bleak. Comes November 1989, and things just can't be as horrible as they were. It's worth noting that the first thing Berliners did after bringing the Wall down was have a huge days-long party.
We're safe now. There's problems in the region, sure, eastern Europe hasn't fared nearly as well as one might like and entire generations have been left adrift. There's still nothing like that existential fear, little that I can remember and nothing that younger generations can remember. The world has its rivalries and it has its problems, but it's a normal world safe from the fear that one year everyone could die. Ours, after all, is a world that's relaxed, so relaxed that we can take a geography that marked the sternest border of the sternest ideological conflict ever and make it a game of dominos while others smile at the idea, at least a little bit.
