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heidiI was an 18 year old sophomore at Penn, sitting and watching NBC in my dorm room in High Rise South when the Wall came down. My dad called me that night and asked if I wanted to meet him in New York to fly to Berlin - neither of us had ever been, and we'd been able to only three months before when we were about to take a cruise from Hamburg to various Scandinavian ports, Gdansk and Leningrad. We hadn't done the drive that day, though, because my mom was concerned that we something would delay us and we wouldn't get back to Hamburg in time to make embarkation.
Maybe we'll go next year, she said. So we boarded the boat and in Leningrad I bought a pin that said (in Russian) "What have you done for the Perestroika?" I still have it somewhere, in some random box of college memorabilia.
But that November night, years before one could just hop onto the internet and see if any flights had seats, we had to call our travel agent, or try to get through to Pan Am, and all circuits were busy when we tried to call the airline. And then we realized that my passport was set to expire in nine weeks, and that could be a problem for getting last minute visa, even in this incredibly tumultuous time.
So we didn't go, and I watched history being made on my 13 inch tv screen.
Is there any random relevance, in this retroactive moment, to the fact that "We Didn't Start the Fire" had come out only a few weeks before?
I finally made it to Berlin for three days in July of 1992. We walked from the KaDeWe to Checkpoint Charlie - how many miles is that? Then we wandered around on the East German side for a while, visited a synagogue that was under renovation to repair the damage that had been neglected since the Holocaust, and walked by where there were still huge chunks of the Berlin Wall. Tourists could chip pieces off the slabs, and I still have the pebbles that I knocked off the Berlin Wall - I keep them in the plastic pouch in the Filofax I carried around that summer, in a drawer in my room.
And nine months later, Jesus Jones released Right Here, Right Now, and it encapsulated the enormity of the way it felt to watch everything that happened in those years.
Special thanks and hugs today to all my friends from Germany, who're sharing their memories and stories.
Maybe we'll go next year, she said. So we boarded the boat and in Leningrad I bought a pin that said (in Russian) "What have you done for the Perestroika?" I still have it somewhere, in some random box of college memorabilia.
But that November night, years before one could just hop onto the internet and see if any flights had seats, we had to call our travel agent, or try to get through to Pan Am, and all circuits were busy when we tried to call the airline. And then we realized that my passport was set to expire in nine weeks, and that could be a problem for getting last minute visa, even in this incredibly tumultuous time.
So we didn't go, and I watched history being made on my 13 inch tv screen.
Is there any random relevance, in this retroactive moment, to the fact that "We Didn't Start the Fire" had come out only a few weeks before?
I finally made it to Berlin for three days in July of 1992. We walked from the KaDeWe to Checkpoint Charlie - how many miles is that? Then we wandered around on the East German side for a while, visited a synagogue that was under renovation to repair the damage that had been neglected since the Holocaust, and walked by where there were still huge chunks of the Berlin Wall. Tourists could chip pieces off the slabs, and I still have the pebbles that I knocked off the Berlin Wall - I keep them in the plastic pouch in the Filofax I carried around that summer, in a drawer in my room.
And nine months later, Jesus Jones released Right Here, Right Now, and it encapsulated the enormity of the way it felt to watch everything that happened in those years.
Special thanks and hugs today to all my friends from Germany, who're sharing their memories and stories.
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(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-09 05:43 pm (UTC)Man.
History.
That is some crazy shit.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-09 05:50 pm (UTC)Also, I was in Berlin in July 1992. I don't remember what days, but I went to stay with a German friend for the last part of that month, and while I was there we traveled to, among other places, Berlin.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-09 07:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-09 05:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-09 06:50 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-09 07:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-09 07:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-09 05:53 pm (UTC)My mother-in-law was working in Berlin with the Red Cross when the thing went up - she was convinced World War III was coming any second. Now it's amazing to think that in under a decade, it'll have been down longer than it was up.
Also
Date: 2009-11-09 05:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-09 06:12 pm (UTC)One of my friends in high school that year was an exchange student from Germany. D found the whole thing completely surreal, being here when her home was changing so completely back there.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-09 07:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-09 07:38 pm (UTC)I wish I had memories of the Cold War and its conclusion. I want to be able to relate and understand, but somehow I know I never will. Listening to "We Didn't Start the Fire" puts into stark relief just how much I'll never really understand about that time in history. No matter how much you read about it, or hear friends' and relatives' remembrances of it, it's still something you had to be there to "get".
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-10 12:11 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-10 03:36 pm (UTC)