Marking History

This is a picture of the bricked line that currently traces the footprint of the Berlin Wall. The wall once ran the around the city of West Berlin, having been built by the Soviet Union, beginning in 1961, to keep East Germans from travelling to the West and not returning. There are still parts of the wall standing as monuments and memorials, and there are hundreds of stores in Berlin today where bits of the wall can be bought.

If you are less than 25 years old, you likely don’t even remember the Berlin Wall. Check into it. Here’s wikipedia’s page.

I like that Berlin had chosen to mark the place of the Wall in such a permanent way. Those us of who grew up during the Cold War expected the division would always be there. I remember watching the news of the Wall coming down in 1989 and thinking, “I can’t believe this is happening.” Yet my daughter, who is a college freshman, was only 8 months old when the dismantling began.

Berlin, and likely all Germany, is determined that the Wall not fade into distant memory. The unbelievable notion that a man-made structure could spring up over night and threaten to divide families and friends forever ought to send chills up our spines. It still does mine. Reading the stories of couples being separated, siblings divided, etc., by a wall built to keep people from leaving a nation ought to catch us off guard.

I have similar, though far less severe marks in my own history. Things I’ve been through, decisions I have made, decisions that have been made for me that have hurt me and others lie in my past. Many of them I would like to leave behind me. Some of them I’ve begun to bury.

Yet, like the footprint of the Berlin Wall, perhaps I ought to leave markers so I can always remember those times and places and situations from which I need to learn.