Good Morning Gentle Readers,
In the 28 years the Berlin Wall stood, about five thousand East German citizens escaped its bleak facade. Several hundred did not make it, including Peter Fechter who was killed on August 17, 1962. He was shot by border guards while scrambling over the wall and fell back into no man's land. He screamed and bled for an hour before dying. Peter was eighteen and his sole crime was an attempt to escape from tyranny.
Then, twenty years ago today the gates opened and the wall came down. What was once an executable offense has become as routine as morning coffee.
After the wall tumbled a friend returned to his childhood home where he'd lived with strangers as a German refugee in East Berlin. His father had been a German soldier and besides the fighting and death there was a three year search after the war to locate his family. Hans told me that the neighborhood looked exactly the same in 1990 as it had in 1946. Bomb cratered, pockmarked roads and crumbling, war torn buildings, still half standing. Never bulldozed. Never rebuilt. Such is the promise of socialism.
History of the Berlin Wall here.
As Ever,
TWC
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