GW Discourse

Reagan tears into some cake

The 20-year commemoration is the most dangerous period in the formation of  Berlin Wall history, said Cold War scholar Vladislav Zubok to about a dozen GW students and professors. There is a chance, he warned, that the fall of the Wall may be too easily glossed, exaggerated or misunderstood. “Tabloidized.”

Less than three hours later, a hundred students gathered in Kogan plaza to watch a man in a Ronald Reagan mask cut into a frosted rice crispy treat shaped like Checkpoint Charlie.

But is GW guilty of Bild-ing the Wall? I don’t think so. The week had its sophisticated side. We heard from former Leipzig protesters, Central European ambassadors, and Markus Meckel, the former foreign minister of the GDR.

In a way, it makes sense that a nuanced week would finish in the same way as the complex series of events they studied ended: with Pink Floyd, simplifications, and Reagan’s voice booming “Mr. Gorbachev.” Unfortunately, the commemorations with the best attendance will always feature fireworks or cake, not lectures.

The problem with history is that it must be either packaged for mass consumption or forgotten to obscurity. And the more you study a topic, the more awful its packaging begins to seem. If you actually lived the event in question, so much the worse for you. So it was for many of the speakers heard this week.

Meckel became visibly upset as he talked about the official German commemorations. He claimed we are forgetting the courage of October, and the will of East Germans themselves.  It should have been Poland’s roundtable, not Berlin’s Wall that became the augur of ’89.

Prof. Peter Rollberg pointed to the roll of the church as a refuge for those who would doubt the regime. Zubok still seemed surprised to be talking about the Berlin Wall at all. From Moscow, he claimed what was happening in Eastern Europe was on the periphery. Gorbachev was focused on the South Caucuses, where he feared a second Russian civil war was brewing.

Are we destined to get it wrong? How can we hope to summarize such a symbolic moment as a historical event? “In 1989 a 12-foot concrete partition fell that didn’t really keep anybody in or out of anything, because they could travel via Hungary or Czeckloslovakia. Nevertheless, people made a big fuss in the West.” The Berlin Wall will present unique challenges to the writers of introductory textbooks. You can’t understand it from a paragraph and you can’t capture it on a timeline. The fall of the wall didn’t end history. It may have added a dimension.