The Fall of the Fall of the Wall

Remembering November 9, 1989

I had just turned 20 and was spending my junior year abroad in Heidelberg, Germany.  West Germany that is.  The wall in Berlin was still standing and the Germanies were divided by hundreds of miles of barbed-wire fence and watchtowers.  Heidelberg, nestled in the Neckar valley not far from Mannheim and just an hour south of Frankfurt, was far off from the German-German frontier.  Nonetheless, the events of the autumn of 1989 lay heavy in the air and the news events coming in from East Germany and across all of Eastern Europe were on every body’s lips.  I lived in a all-male student dormitory (Keller-Thoma Stiftung http://www.keller-thoma.de/) sponsored by the Evangelical Church.  For me this was ironic as I was Catholic, but, I was certainly male and that made me an ideal candidate to move into the rare double-room vacancy.  The commoradary and intellectual stimulation I found in that house in the Neuenheim area of Heidelberg will never be forgotten.  We shared a daily breakfast together reading newspapers and talking politics and history and religion.  And during the fall of 1989 there was a lot to talk about:

*Hungary’s “green boarder” and the forest path to freedom taken by so many GDR citizens that late-summer into Austria and then to West Germany

*GDR citizens gathering at the West German embassy in Prague

*Gentscher

*The 40th anniversary of the BRD and GDR and the mounting tensions in the East symbolized by the weekly “Monday Demonstration Walks” first in Leipzig, then spreading across the country and eventually reaching Berlin

*Gorbachov’s Glasnost and Perastroika

Change was in the air.  Even in our conservative “Studentenwohnheim” changes were all around us.  The leadership of the house had decided to give the students a vote as to whether or not we should allow women to join our ranks in the Bergstraße.  This was probably meant as more of a rhetorical question than anything else.  Everyone was surprised that the lone voice of opposition came from the mouth of the American, me, the youngest and newest resident of the house. Nothing against women, then or now, but the atmosphere in that house was different than anything I had ever experienced before.  I appreciated it and cherished it and attributed it to the freedoms a young man enjoys when the pressures of “performing” for the opposite sex are excluded.  I delivered an impassioned speech at our house meeting but garnered only the vote of my Chinese housemate.  He had a picture of “The Unknown Rebel” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man facing down tanks in Tiananmen Square hanging on his door.  Even my Tunisian friend and a few of the gay residents, all of whom I had counted on for support, abandoned the cause and acquiesced to the popular decision.  In the end, so did I.  Changes were coming and as Gorbachev said:  “Danger awaits those who do not react to life.”  And we were all reacting as fast as we could.

Next Blog:  “Disco and the Fall of the Wall”