Thoughts on a Wall


Since the inception of the East Side Gallery in 1990, over 100 murals on remnants of the Berlin Wall have served as pillars of hope and optimism. They are not intended to describe the atrocities that happened in and around that wall. They don’t lead to the same kind of depressed soul-searching that is the rightful result of many memorials in Berlin. They celebrate art, diversity, life, connection, and humanity. But, mere kilometers away, we walk by segments of abandoned wall that are still raw, without paintings to hide the ugly underneath, and I surprise myself with a feeling of shame. In Berlin, I can see nothing but parallels with the American discourse of the moment.
I read about two young boys — the eldest born the same year as my dad — who found themselves on top of a tin roof, facing West, away from their home in the East. Unable to get down, they were rescued by firemen from West Berlin. Were they trying to escape the East, or merely distracted by ambitious play? Did they know how far the drop would be on the other side? They stayed in the West for several days before the decision was made to allow their mother across the border to collect the boys. I am reminded of the children who find themselves across a presently invisible wall — one marking US territory. I am reminded of the children, equally naïve, who are unable to be rescued by their parents.
There are photographs of families waving over the wall, some standing on chairs and holding their babies up high so that an important someone on the other side will see them and be reminded of the passage of time, captured perfectly through the rapid development of an infant. I wonder about the border between Mexico and the United States, and the fiction of it. Many areas of the border, I am told, cut through farms. Livestock wander from one country to the next, not knowing of the existence of countries. Not knowing of the potential for walls. I imagine farmers looking at certain plots of land and wondering, does it go though here? Is this where the wall would be? I think about the children who ride their ponies or bikes over that plot of land, because it leads them from one end of their childhood kingdom to another. And, of course, I think of the families who cross that border, for whom the line is not a figment of the imagination, for whom the line is blazoned into their minds as though it is the only line that matters. Does someone wave to them across the wall? Who will hold their children up, high enough to be seen?
When I think about the Berlin wall — its place in history as an ‘edifice of fear,’ its rise, and eventual fall, the intentions of the leaders who created it, and the cheers as it fell after 28 years, 2 months, and 26 days — questions about a different wall come to mind. I see the remaining fragments of the wall in Berlin and I wonder, “How tall would our wall be?”
They say history repeats itself. But would we recognize it? Would we look for the wrong signs, fooled by its learned disguise? Surely the oppressor would not come with the same name, the same language of hatred. Surely, some lessons would be learned, some alterations made. Perhaps these changes would make the repetition all the more difficult to recognize.
We leave Berlin and head to a fishing town in East Germany — a town completely demolished during WWII and rebuilt in a fashion distinctly lacking in architectural beauty, but charming nevertheless in its simplicity and coordinated color palette. Extensive graffiti covers the pastel-colored apartment buildings and meticulously crafted doors. “NO NAZIS,” one reads. “Make Racists afraid again,” reads another. The words are at once comforting and concerning. The artists are on the side of the resistance, but the oppressor still exists. Here, the oppressor has not even developed a new name.


