The lyf so short

When the Wall began to fall, I was six years of age, and I never realised what was going on until things were already over.

I remember that I knew what the GDR was while it still existed, because I remember expressing the (as I then thought, ingenious) opinion that the "D" was obviously for "dictatorial" rather than "democratic" (I was a weird child); but I do no longer know just how I learned about the existence or nature of the GDR. Looking back, I assume that it popped up in discussions and in the news a lot, and thus I may have picked up on a thing or two; but it was all very abstract. My parents did not believe in teaching their kids things about politics at that tender age, so all I knew was either overheard, conjectured, or told to me by friends. It must have been a big muddle.

I remember that I thought that Berlin was right at the border, because I could not imagine that a whole city should, like an island, be lodged in the middle of a different country - and parted in two. In my logic, Berlin must be at the border, half-way across.

I remember that my elementary school teacher told us, a few months into my first school term ever, how her daughter had been to Berlin, and how people had crossed the border "to the East" unchecked. I think she also mentioned cold weather and sleet, but the memory is fuzzy. It did not seem important to me at the time. Piecing things together, I must assume that this was in early mid-November.
I remember that the daughter was called Astrid.

I remember that we had an activity week in school, in early October, when I was in second grade, almost a year later. During that week, there were no classes; instead everybody got to choose a project in which to participate for that week. I was in an "art" project group, because the topic had sounded interesting, but on the whole it was disappointing; instead of drawing and painting normally, which I liked to do, we had to experiment with different infused plants (an experiment the teacher leading the project had never tried before, hurrah) and paint with finger paints and other things I didn't enjoy at the time. I remember that clearly enough.
I do not remember how exactly it happened, but I remember that the teachers were all entirely useless one day - close to hysterics, and randomly saying things like "The Wall is gone, it really is gone".
I did not know what wall they were talking of. The only vaguely remarkable wall in my village was the wall at the back end of the school grounds, which we were not allowed to climb and accordingly climbed all the time.
I do remember that my mother ceremonially and with great satisfaction took our family atlas and crossed out the border between the Federal Republic and the Democratic Republic. This was something we had to do frequently in our school atlases, later on, because our schools rarely could afford new books, so our books were usually 5 - 10 years old, and often obsolete.

I remember being asked, when I went to school in Canada, what I remembered about the Unification; and I had to give the unsatisfying account I gave above, with the apology that, having only been six to seven at the time and, on the whole, a very unpolitical child, things had mostly passed me by. Being born and raised in Western Germany, things hadn't change for me anyway. Only years later did I actually get to "the East": for a family reunion in Eisenach, and for a short fall vacation to Leipzig (where my grandfather on my mother's side had originally come from, but when he returned from war captivity he had wisely made for relatives in Swabia) and Weimar.
There were two other exchange students from Germany at the time - Max from Baden-Baden and Inken from Hamburg - and both remembered as little as I, so I felt a little less badly about it.
The girl who had asked us had asked because she was going to do a presentation on the Berlin Wall, and she had made a little cardboard model of the Wall, and asked us to decorate the "Western" side with authentic German graffiti, which, during lunch break, we did.

I remember, a few years ago, a visit from Jörg's American cousin Kurt and his boyfriend Richie. I do not remember how we came to talk about the fall of the Wall, but it turned out that (unlike Jörg or I) Richie had been in Berlin in late 1990, and of course he'd gone to take a look at the Wall. Enterprising young Germans had put up stalls, selling either (relatively expensive) chunks of Wall or renting out (relatively expensive) chisels and hammers to people who wanted to have their own go. Richie of course rented chisel and hammer and enthusiastically chopped away at the wall..... and about an hour later brought the chisel and hammer back. And bought a chunk of Wall.

Almost everything I know about the fall of the Wall is pieced together in hindsight, or acquired via collective memory. Which is not surprising, I suppose - I was, after all, only six years old - but it's still a pity.

My mother's middle brother is professor of pharmacy at the University of Jena, which is in the East. We rarely see him and his family, except once or twice a year. His wife likes to point out that the way from East to West is no shorter than the way from West to East, because it's almost always them who have to drive here, rarely us who drive there. Somehow my family still seems to feel that it's more natural for Easterners to want to come West than the other way round.

These days the Unification is mostly seen - at best - as a mixed blessing. It is still expensive, see, and idealism always dwindles when it takes its toll on peoples' purses. Unification Day - in celebration of October 3rd, 1990, when the process begun on November 9th, 1989, came to full bloom - is officially our national holiday; but it is not generally celebrated much (except by politicians or, this year, because of the anniversary). Germany are no longer comfortable with anything that even vaguely looks like patriotism, unless it pertains to football.
Sometimes physical walls are easier to tear down, after all, than the walls in the heads of people.

But the Unification still was a proper real-world miracle, in my own lifetime, and twenty years ago was when it began for good, when the first two letters of the big, fundamental "impossible" suddenly started to flicker.
And I wish I remembered more about it. I wish I could say that I danced in the streets, burned off fireworks, lit a candle, cheered and clapped, anything. I wish that I could at least remember heated and hopeful discussions around the kitchen table, or requests to pray for a peaceful solution, or anything of the sort. But I don't. Instead, 20 years ago, the most important thing for me was (likely) a) the impending St Martin's wassailing and bonfire, and b) my brother's birthday.

And now, 20 years later, I still cannot quite grasp it. But even though I feel that I am not properly a part of it, I can't help being just the tiniest bit proud. Generally, by association, just because it was Good and it happened in my lifetime and it changed, in its way, the country and the world.

And that's that.