The collapse of the Berlin Wall 30 years ago offers two important lessons.
The first is that freedom and its many, varied benefits should never be taken for granted.
The second is that a free people have no moral right to treat one another with hatred or contempt in the political arena. Theirs is an obligation to solve differences democratically and to do all in their power to preserve the gift of liberty.
Those lessons may seem quaint or naively idealistic to generations that have known little other than freedom and, generally speaking, the lack of want. But 30 years ago in Berlin, little else seemed real.
Today’s generation of Americans, heirs to a great gift, must do all they can to keep this country worthy of such dreams.
East Germans who began to stream across borders on Nov. 9 vividly recall the smells, the gleaming buildings and the marvelous products they found for sale on the West side.
In a Time magazine story this week, some of these people recalled how, as citizens of East Germany, they had loved the smell of hand-me-down clothes sent from the West because of the detergent used. Others spoke of reverence for feeling western deutsche marks, which they described as feeling more substantial than East German currency. Whether this was literally true or not, what the money symbolized gave it heft.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel was a young adult living in East Germany. She told the German publication Der Spiegel that she knows where she would be today if the wall had not fallen. Because she is over 60, she would have been a pensioner, no longer subject to East Germany’s travel restrictions because, at that age, the government no longer felt she was economically useful enough to force to stay.
“I would already have picked up my passport and traveled to America,” she said. “I wanted my first foreign trip to be America, because of its size, its diversity, the culture. To see the Rocky Mountains, drive around in a car, and listen to Bruce Springsteen — that was my dream.”
It’s a dream many, particularly in Utah, experience regularly, perhaps without realizing its significance.
Today, Germany faces a tough set of political challenges related to immigration and the economy. Its reunification efforts with East Germany have had mixed success. Some villages in the east have emptied out as people fled west. Some former East Germans feel a longing for ways that were obliterated in a wave of western culture. Many adults have no memory of what it was like before the wall fell.
But few would return to the days when their movements were controlled by force and their opportunities were few. They have the opportunity today to work through those problems democratically.
In the United States today, politics has, in many quarters, devolved into name-calling and demonization. The loyal opposition is considered an enemy, compromise is unthinkable and the free expression of ideas is intolerable except for a limited range of viewpoints.
If the fall of the wall in 1989 and the reaction of a newly freed people taught anything, it is that such attitudes are insults to the gifts of freedom and liberty. They trample on the bravery of those who sacrificed all to preserve those gifts.
Parts of the world today still exist as East Germany did before the wall fell. The United States remains a beacon of hope to many who, like Merkel once did, dream of its wonders.
Today’s generation of Americans, heirs to a great gift, must do all they can to keep this country worthy of such dreams.