At some point during July we found ourselves in Berlin, Germany, where one wall was coming down and another was going up. The one coming down was being marketed in pieces on the street for something that must have seemed outrageous at the time relative to our twenty-five dollar-per-day travel budget.
That's my friend, Drew, on the left. He's kind of tall.
We stumbled onto a different wall going up that day. This turned out to be part of the stage set up for a Pink Floyd concert, you know, as in Pink Floyd's The Wall? Did anyone NOT own that album?
The Wall at the Pink Floyd concert in Berlin, 1990
I didn't think to take a picture at the time because I didn't realize what it was, so I lifted this from A Fleeting Glimpse
I'm no walking scruple, but as we walked the streets of Berlin, something struck me as wrong that they were selling pieces of the wall. I think I figured it was such a fundamentally huge event, you know, freedom from oppression and whatnot, that I sort of felt I was witnessing history and was awed by it.
Wait, I'm not that principled. More likely, it was because it didn't feel meaningful to buy what could have been some random hunk of cement from someone who should not have been benefiting from it. Also, because I'm skeptical as all get out, how did I know that these pieces of cement actually came from the wall? I mean, you could pretty much hack at any sidewalk that year, toss the crumbs on a blanket in a Platz and sell your concrete snake oil: Steppen zee right up, meine Freunde!
So we walked until we found the real wall: The Berlin Wall. You know, Checkpoint Charlie and all that.
The Berlin Wall in 1990
As I saw a few people chiseling away, I wished I could participate in what they were doing. Just then, a boy of about seven or eight came up to me with a hammer and chisel held out toward me.
"Ein Mark", he said.
One lousy Mark. What was that, 20 cents to me? And it pretty much guaranteed that I would be getting an actual piece of the Berlin Wall, since I was standing right in front of it and all.
Perhaps the kid was just another huckster, but I decided he was a child who needed to provide for his newly freed East German family who would starve otherwise. He was a boy, and he wasn't so greedy, asking for a fraction of a dollar, so I preferred to get a piece of the wall this way. It was akin to a neighborhood kid and a huge wall that once divided his country and his people now served as his personal lemonade stand. Also? It seemed a heck of a lot more poignant if I helped bring down the Berlin Wall myself. I wouldn't just be witnessing history, I'd be a part of it.
I think that's the little boy in the lower right. Doesn't he look tiny and oppressed?
The Berlin Wall? Yeah, I tapped that.
Drew takes a crack at it.
* * *
Click here each visit to keep NGIP in the Top 25
