Berlin Years

November 9, 1989.

As I’ve said, I normally try to keep this blog focused on things that are at least tangentially related to metalsmithing, but for the second time in the past few months, not today.

November 9, 1989. The day the wall came down.
I just felt the impulse to go back and correct the preceding sentence to say “the Berlin wall”, but if you’d lived through the years leading up to it, there was no question about which wall was “the wall”. There was only one. That thin grey ribbon slashing through a dark grey town.
They say Berlin’s pretty in the spring, but every time I’ve been there, it’s been dark and raining. Seemed appropriate somehow. A grey concrete city, and a sodden grey blanket of sky.

Mostly what I remember from 20 years ago is sitting in the living room of a college friend. He was a grad student working on his PhD, and had gone back to school after a stint in the Air Force. He’d been a watch stander in a nuclear missile silo.
I remember sitting there in Jamie’s living room, watching that damned wall come down, live on CNN. Neither one of us thought we’d ever live to see it come down, nevermind peacefully. If you’d told me, even a week earlier that the wall would be down by Thanksgiving, I would have considered you a madman. The wall, and the cold war it represented, were immutable facts of life. They would continue until the end of the world, one way or the other.
Jamie and I both knew far too much about nuclear weapons and their effects, for our various reasons, to have harbored any hope that civilization would survive anything more than a limited war, and the prospects for ‘limited’ never seem too good once the rubicon of the launch codes has been crossed.

We sat there, watching, drinking what turned out to be far too much wine, and we reveled, stunned, in the knowledge that for the first time in our lives, the birds weren’t going to fly tonight. The sun would not rise in the north, and the missiles would stay sleeping in their tubes. There was a sense that a vast weight had just been lifted from our shoulders, a weight we hadn’t noticed until it was gone. It’s a sense of relief that is difficult to express to those who didn’t live through it. Those who lived through those years know instinctively what I mean, and those who didn’t probably never will understand. If you ever wonder at the some of the exuberant nuttiness of the early 1990’s, chalk it up to relief. We suddenly realized that we were actually going to live to see the next few years. In the mid ’80’s, I wouldn’t have bet on it. In fact, I didn’t bet on it. I was living in the middle of one of the biggest bulls-eyes on the east coast, and I knew, even as a pre-teen, that there was no way I was going to get far enough away to survive. So my plan, in the event that the balloon went up, was to head downtown to DCSC, which was the biggest defense supply warehouse on the east coast, and incidentally, next to the Lockheed plant where the B-1 Bomber was built. Obviously a high value, first strike target. At the age of about 10, I knew I couldn’t possibly survive that war, my only realistic option was to try to die quickly. Hell of a way to grow up, planning how best to die.

That was the weight that came off our shoulders that afternoon. That’s what I remember: the sense of weightless hope, for the first time in what suddenly seemed like a long, grey stretch of Berlin years.