Introduction
Trip Start
Nov 07, 2009
1
14
Trip End
Nov 10, 2009
Berlin,
Berlin,
Germany
Friday, November 6, 2009
That wants it down.
— Robert Frost, "Mending Wall"
The people shouted with a great shout and the wall fell down flat.
— Joshua 6:20
As far as I know effective immediately [ab sofort], without delay.
— Günter Schabowski, spokesman for the East German Politburo when announcing loosening of travel restrictions
1989 was a busy year for me. I graduated college, moved to Westboro, MA, started my first job, got laid off, started my second job, moved to Salem, NH, all while returning most weekends to college to visit my girlfriend (now wife). 1989 was also a busy year in Eastern Europe. Communist regimes that had been in power for 40 years fell like dominos in a rapidly accelerating fashion.I basically didn't notice. I noticed the footage from Berlin as people flooded across the previously impenetrable Berlin Wall, but then I went back to my own busy life.
1991 was another busy year. I changed jobs again, got married and moved to Lexington, MA. In the Soviet Union there was a brief attempted hard line coup that precipitated the dissolution of that country and the collapse of the communist party. This time I paid attention as best I could, for at exactly the same time as the coup was breaking out, Hurricane Bob was bearing down on Boston. For the three hours it took to get home from the office, I listened to National Public Radio's coverage of the developments in the USSR. Unfortunately, local station kept having to cut away, somewhat apologetically, to cover the hurricane.
As the decade progressed, I became more and more interested in the fall of communism, reading and watching whatever I could find.
In August this year, I was re-reading one of my favorite books, Timothy Garton Ash's The Magic Lantern, which gives a firsthand account of the peaceful revolutions in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia in 1989. It dawned on me that a bunch of 20th anniversaries were about to happen. A quick internet search found a huge celebration planned for November 9th in Berlin, probably the most dramatic date in a very dramatic year. I can't entirely explain why, but I wanted to be there and started planning a whirlwind, three day trip in November.
This travel blog tries to capture what I did and saw on that trip and gives some of my reactions to those experiences.
