"Decisive political moments are rarely expected, and even more rarely planned. Governments change all the time. But every once in a while, empires fall."
German author Jenny Erpenbeck's work is an exercise in preserving the objects that place a person's memory in history, particularly her own childhood in East Germany.
While Berliners have incorporated the city's notorious wall into museums and public art, restoring the site of the Berliner Schloss of the Hohenzollerns and then the Palast der Republic of the East German government has been much more contentious. The Humboldt Forum has been criticized, but its design and reception exemplify the tensions inherent in democracy.
Thirty years ago, East German officials abruptly announced it would open its border, ending 28 years of separation between East and West Berlin. This story ran on the front page of The Washington Post the next morning.
The article, "What Would It Take to Unify Korea? Germany Offers Lessons, examines all that is still left to do to reunify Germany 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The story of the Berlin Wall is one of division and repression, but also of the yearning for freedom — and the events that led up to its toppling are no exception.
As the 30th anniversary of the end of the Cold War approaches, it should be obvious that there’s been a refusal in the United States to reckon with a decades-long set of conflagrations in the Greater Middle East as the inevitable consequence of that first American invasion in 1990.
The lead role in the drama went to Günter Schabowski, a high-ranking East German apparatchik who recently died at the age of 86 – and whose answers at the briefing have become the stuff of legend.
