Where were you when the Wall fell?
With the fall of the Berlin Wall twenty years ago today, there’s going to be a lot of navel-gazing about What It All Means. It occurs to me, however, that the Fall of the Wall is one of those rare Good News Events in which people remember where they were and what they were doing ...
With the fall of the Berlin Wall twenty years ago today, there's going to be a lot of navel-gazing about What It All Means.
With the fall of the Berlin Wall twenty years ago today, there’s going to be a lot of navel-gazing about What It All Means.
It occurs to me, however, that the Fall of the Wall is one of those rare Good News Events in which people remember where they were and what they were doing when it happened. For a multitude of cognitive reasons, I think most of these transcendent events — the Kennedy assassination, the Challenger explosion, the 9/11 attacks — are calamitous events. Beyond the fall of the Wall, I can only think of the Moon landing as a similar good new focal point.
So, my question to readers — what were you doing when you heard the Berlin Wall had been breached? What was your reaction?
I’ll go first — I was a senior in college, and found out when I was in the coffee shop. My first thought was a profound desire to get on a plane and go to Berlin — I had been there six months earlier, and here was no inkling of what was going to happen.
My second thought was unadulterated joy — because the Cold War had been so omnipresent for my entire life, and it looked like it was headed for the dustbin.
What about you?
Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner
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