Pixelshot

by: Scott L. Lunt
Daily Universe correspondent
(published in: The Daily Universe, Feb 4, 2007, Provo, UT, USA)

It was a Sunday morning, in the summer of 1961, when Berliners awoke to a divided city. On the night before, thousands of East German police and soldiers in Berlin, with the approval of the Soviet government, began building a fence. By the morning of August 13th, the fence was up, instantly dividing neighborhoods, friendships, families. Few people even saw it coming.

That Sunday morning fence, of course, eventually turned into the infamous Berlin Wall, which in its most pronounced form (of many) was not just one menacing concrete wall, but two parallel walls with a large strip between them known as the “death zone” for obvious reasons. For almost 30 years East German border guards patrolled the death zone, manned the hundreds of watch towers, and generally gave an ominous presence to an already ominous pair of concrete walls that surrounded West Berlin. For those cold-war years, especially for the people in Berlin, the distinction between the East and the West was painfully obvious.

In 1989 the Wall came down almost by accident, with a healthy contribution from my temporary home country of Hungary. In August of 1989, Hungary decided to open its border to Austria, essentially creating a doorway through which all Easterners (including East Germans) could pass to the West. Thousands of East Germans did just that, turning the trickle of “escapees” into a flood. Meanwhile, in a press conference in Berlin, the East German Minister of Propoganda, Günter Schabowski, misinterpreted a press statement and, in effect, declared that the borders were open between East and West Germany. That night, November 9, 1989, thousands of jubilant East and West Germans visited the other half of the city for the first time.

Since ‘89 most of the wall has been bulldozed, dismantled, or sledgehammered into oblivion, but some of the wall still stands today. And, where the wall is not still standing, there is a row of cobblestones in the ground that follow the original path of the Wall, a gentle (and effective) reminder of the not-so-gentle past.

My wife and I visited Berlin on the way home from our semester in Budapest, Hungary. I wanted to see the Wall in person. I wanted to feel the symbol of the division between the East, where we had been living, and the West, where we were returning. So, we rented an apartment in Berlin and upon arriving we immediately walked to the East Side Gallery, the longest strip of the Wall still standing.

I was not impressed by its largeness, but by its smallness. I had climbed fences larger than that as a young boy. Sure, it’s not something you could simply skip over, but with a small ladder or a tall assistant, you’re on your way. What made the Wall so impenetrable for Berliners wanting to cross was the guards willing to shoot them (or their family members), and the government willing to back up, and even commission, the guards. Why? Because of an arbitrary line drawn on a map years before. When the Wall went up, the only difference between an East and West Berliner was their address.

Since our Berlin visit, I have thought often about the walls that we are actively building today, especially those partitioning off international borders or racial groups. These walls appear sometimes literally (as in Mexico to Arizona) and sometimes figuratively (as in George Bush’s “Axis of Evil” reference in the 2002 State of the Union address). Our country is in a period of wall-building; our president has made that very clear.

But, contrary to the opinion of the Administration and many of our lawmakers, this wall-building period is not completely necessary. Certainly we have to be careful about our borders. We can’t allow uncontrolled immigration, terrorism, drug or weapon trafficking, disease. But all of this talk of walls and labels brings with it the question: What cost are we and the rest of the world paying for these distinctions (whether arbitrary or legitimate)? In the long run, are we helping people to feel more love, more inclusion, more charity, more compassion? Or, are we emphasizing differences and helping people down a path of isolationism, exclusion, and even hatred?

In 1961, the government of East Berlin was addressing a legitimate problem (population drain) when it built the wall. It did what it thought would help their country. Similarly, our Administration implements policies intended to help our country. But we need to ask ourselves: is this really good for America, is it really good for the world?

There are lessons for us to learn from the grafittied-cement blocks of the Wall and the subtle cobblestone running along Berlin’s former borders. What walls are we building that future generations will have to tear down?

As I’ve travelled I’ve learned that people are basically the same as each other, whether you live in America or Germany or Hungary or Iran. We want to be happy and safe. We want education, good fortune, health care, peace, and the like. It is the government that draws the lines, although they are sometimes based on the labels we give each other. Corruption, power, greed, hatred, fear, can take over a government in crisis and cause it to do things that, in retrospect, don’t sound very nice.

Imagine waking up to see a fence running down the road past your house, complete with armed soldiers being paid commission for every escapee they kill. For me, aside from the obvious darkness and gloom, that would mean that I wouldn’t be able to visit some of my best friends; I wouldn’t be able attend classes; I wouldn’t be able to go to church. So it was for those people in Berlin.

I wish that rather than living in a world similar to Berlin when the wall went up, we can celebrate a world like Berlin when the wall came down. We can follow one of the phrases painted on the Berlin Wall (written in English): “No More Wars. No More Walls. A United World.”

See all of the articles in this series:
Freedom Popcorn in Budapest
Riots, rubber bullets and miracles in Budapest
Arbitrary distinctions: A surreal visit to Auschwitz
Lessons from the Berlin Wall