Fall of the Wall: 20 years later

BERLIN – Nearly 20 years ago, in November 1989, the deconstruction of the infamous Berlin Wall began.

Berlin today is quite different than it was then, and one look at the Wall will show you. Remnants of the Berlin Wall only exist in a few select spots throughout the city.

The most popular surviving section of the Wall stands in Potsdamer Platz between the enormous Sony Center to the west and a gigantic Samsung advertisement spread across a building to the east.

Some visitors simply come to take a picture with phony German troops in front of the Wall and drop a few Euros into their jar. Other visitors have gray hair and tell a grandson about how the Wall separated the family for 28 years.

But all the visitors show that the legacy of the Wall is much larger than the few cement parts that still remain in the city.

To Berliners, the Wall seems to be something that forcibly tore their people in two. To Americans, it seems more to symbolize the failure of Communism.

In regard to Communism, Berliners choose to think about the fall of the Wall in a different way. Statues of proletariat workers still stand across from a red city hall. The famous German-Communist author Bertolt Brecht has a statue next to a theater where his plays are still performed.

And an entire little park surrounds larger-than-life statues of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the German writers of “The Communist Manifesto.” In addition to the statues, many streets are named after German Communists like Käthe Niederkircher, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg.

After the reunification of Germany in 1990, the people of Berlin eventually chose not to erase the marks of Communism. It seems that Berlin, in some small way, recognizes that it was the U.S.S.R. that fell and not necessarily the ideals of Communism.

Perhaps the way Berlin deals with Communism is something of interest to contemporary America, which has recently seen an influx of Internet posters saying “Obamunism” and showing Lady Liberty holding the Communist sickle and hammer.

Being in Berlin for 10 days has really made me want to reconsider the way that I view Communism. Perhaps the political ideology introduced by Marx and Engels is more than just an idea that failed. Something about Communism gave people hope all across the world, from Cuba to Russia to China.

Still, the fall of the Berlin Wall almost 20 years ago marked the beginning of the end of a brutal regime.

But the fall of the Berlin Wall did not mark the end of Communism – Brecht’s plays are still performed throughout the German-speaking world, Rage Against the Machine is playing Communist music again and Che Guevara’s picture continues to be popular on T-shirts.

Maybe the most interesting thing I saw in Berlin was some fresh graffiti outside of the cheap hostel I was staying at. It said “Die Krise heißt Kapitalismus” – “The (economic) crisis is called Capitalism.”