Scary Monsters

When I was a pre-school kid, my dad was stationed in Germany and my parents took me to see the Berlin Wall. My memories of that trip are vivid: I have never seen anything so chilling and sinister.

Note that these are historical photos gleaned from the Web.

They were not taken by my family during out trip to Berlin, but they do epitomize what we saw there.

The wall itself, monstrous and ugly, cinder blocks hastily slapped together, shards of broken glass embedded on the top of the wall and coils of barbed wire strung above that, clearly intended to lacerate human tissue. Where families once lived, windows bricked up on the East zone side of the street so that apartment buildings themselves became part of the wall.

East German Volkspolizei (VoPos), armed with machine guns, survey us through binoculars as we approach the wall. Scattered at intervals along the wall, wreaths and small memorials to those killed trying to get across.

I remember looking upon these memorials in awe, and feeling a kind of childish metaphysical dread wash over me. Someone was killed here, I was thinking. Here, where I am standing.

At Bernauer Strasse, my father throws a pack of American cigarettes over the wall to East German workmen repairing the church roof (below). A well-intentioned if now seemingly ironic gift. They wave their thanks.

And also present, of course, were the defenders of the "free world" whose role, I later came to understand, was somewhat more complicated than my parents had led me to believe.

Partly as a result of that experience, I could never be a communist in the old "one party state + command economy" mode. On the other hand, the fact that Soviet-style communism was a monumental world-historical cock-up does not seem to me to imply that all things not-communism are therefore just fine and dandy, couldn't be better, exempt from criticism. The hard-edged capitalism we practice in America, and push on to the rest of the world, is no workers' paradise either. And while communism was blatantly undemocratic in many senses, our society creates all kinds of barriers to real democratic self-governance. We can do better.