It Was 20 Years Ago Today. . .

Well, yesterday, actually. Sorry. Chalk it up to Daylight Savings Time. Or is it Standard Time. Can never keep those straight.

Anyway, so, yes: Twenty years ago yesterday, November 9, 1989, the Cold War ended as the Berlin Wall came down--peacefully, no less. The Solipsist has a couple of followers with German roots, and he himself actually visited Germany not too long after the historic events, so we thought we'd share a reminiscence.

(Digression: It was noted in Sunday's paper that November 9 would, in Europe, traditionally be noted as 9/11--those wacky Europeans putting the date first. Something. . . not "ironic," but eerie about that. EOD.)

We traveled to Berlin in the summer 1992. It was the week of the Republican convention, so we were happy to be out of town. Berlin was, of course, no longer physically divided by the Wall, but the Wall itself had not been completely taken down. Somewhere, we have a photo of ourselves standing in one of the gaps, straddling the boundary, posed like Da Vinci's Vitruvian man, half in the East and half in the West. We imagine we are one of about 19 million people to take such a photograph, but the implications still get to us.

Think about it: for nearly 30 years, this was the de facto dividing line between capitalism and communism, between freedom and oppression, between democracy and totalitarianism. Before traveling to Germany, we had an image of some Great Wall of Europe--a literal Iron Curtain to reify the metaphorical one. But it was no such thing.

The Berlin Wall "towered" about 12 feet. It was comprised not of ancient stones but of large sheets of bland concrete. The very fact that we could straddle the boundary gives you some idea of the Wall's thickness. (Yes, we know there were actually two walls with a sort of no-man's-land, valley of death between them. But the physical infrastructure was still less than imposing.)

It reminded us of nothing so much as one of those standard sitcom set-ups: Two roommates bicker to the point where they become so frustrated with each other that they declare a permanent separation: Tape is liberally applied, demarcating the space belonging to each roommate. Hilarity ensues when one roommate realizes that he no longer has access to the front door, while the other realizes he has relinquished bathroom privileges. Cue the laugh track.

Astonishing to think that the Soviet authorities could slap down a few comparatively flimsy miles of concrete and declare that everything to the east of it belonged to them. Even more astonishing to think that, for 30 years, it worked.