Walls of Concrete Come Down in Germany; Walls of Ignorance Remain

Far from being planned,  November 9 might have been a colossal misunderstanding—and, quite literally, a media event. 
- Robert Darnton, Berlin Journal, 1989-1990

I wish I could believe that the human impulses which give rise to the nightmares of totalitarianism were ones which Providence had allocated only to other peoples and to which the American people had been graciously left immune. 
-George Kennan, Memoirs

A liberal friend of mine called this weekend to complain that right wingers were attempting to cover up their guilt for lying the U.S. into the hot war of Iraq by crediting Ronald Reagan with bringing down the Berlin Wall, and thus “winning” the Cold War.

Headlines quote East German-born Chancellor Angela Merkel as crediting Mikhail Gorbachev with doing the job. Others credit Polish leader Lech Walesa.
Naaaaahhhh.

The guy who did it was George Kennan, author of America’s bipartisan containment policy from 1944-1947.
 
Kennan had a lot of help from Republicans as well as Democrats, believe it or not. Also, despite some scary deviations [JFK (Cuba) and Reagan (Star Wars)], every President, from Democrat Truman to Republican George H. W. Bush adhered to the common sense notion that a full scale “hot” war with the Soviet Union was unacceptable to basic interests of the American people. Actually, erection of the wall in 1961 to stem the flight of young working people, showed that Kennan’s containment policy was working, long before internal contradictions of Soviet Empire brought it down.
Cold War stalemate between the U.S. and the Soviets allowed softer subversive forces, like the Lutheran Church in East Germany and the Catholic Church in Poland to work their way through prayer and music. These had as much effect, I think, as the more publicized, ghastly wars with China in Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan.

Music to Germans is a mighty wall busting language. I discovered this in seven trips to West and East Germany from 1960-1989, one of them for a year, from August, 1962-August, 1963 [Munich] as a student and Professor of German History.
 
My only weapons the first three times were a guitar, Bob Dylan and the Kingston Trio, quite effective in a West Germany which was still coming out of its Nazi dogma hangover, not unlike current tea baggers and birthers spouting totalitarian fantasies similar to those cooked up by Dr. Goebbels.

By day I visited the Modern History Institute, where archivists were compiling TV documentaries to let Germans know, for the first time in their own language, what their country had done between 1933-1945. As of 2002, Japan had yet to do this.

By night I was getting my beer free for singing American folk songs at a place named after German-American Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer,” that wonderful, filthy, book Americans were not supposed to read in the 1930’s, that seems tame nowadays.

In February, 1963, I drove through East Germany from Munich to West Berlin, and then walked through “Checkpoint Charlie,” in order to photograph the Brandenburg Gate from close up in a then-desolate East Berlin. As a civilian American from Chicago, speaking German, I was a curiosity rather than a threat to the young East German border guards.
My own feelings were different.  As I crossed in my car at Hof, Bavaria, I was among pine trees similar to where I grew up in the summers in northern Wisconsin.  The landscape was the same in both West and East Germany, but as I instinctively slowed down to gape at an armed border guard, who lowered his rifle until I resumed speed, I felt an inner message that though the trees were the same, nothing else was.

I took the Helmstedt crossing on my way back to West Germany and picked up a young student hitchhiker in West Berlin.  He was from Magdeburg in East Germany, and when we neared the outskirts of his city on the Elbe River, he asked me if it was OK to get out and take a picture.
 
I said “sure,” being young and dumb, and just too used to a free way of living to imagine that he might be engaged in some sort of spy work. I’ll never really know, but one thing is for sure. East Germany was a sieve long before the walls came down.

My other four trips were with German-American choruses from Chicago, where we sang in small towns all over West Germany. In September, 1989, we were forced to change hotels in the Rhineland city of Rastatt at the last minute. The Mayor collected us at City Hall to apologize and explain. Amidst our gifts of chocolate and champaign, we were told that East Germans in great numbers on “vacation visas” had entered West Germany through the Hungarian/Austrian border, had no intention of going back, and were being resettled in as many hotels as West Germany could find.

I remarked to my singing buddies, some of whom had left East Germany before the Wall went up, that “it’s all over but the shouting.” They agreed, but we had more important things to do,...like singing Schubert and Negro Spirituals. That sure beats dogma,...every time.

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