This November I finally returned to Wittenberg after four years away—which is a long time for me, since I’ve taught a course on Luther’s theology in Wittenberg every November since 2009. The reason I didn’t make it here in the interval is too obvious to state. It felt like a homecoming, and I enjoyed it hugely.
But it wasn’t till I got here—and took one of my free days for a day trip to Berlin—that I realized something else. Between my last visit in 2019, and this visit in 2023, I wrote, edited, and published my first novel, A-Tumblin’ Down. Both East Germany and Berlin are essential to the story. Yet in that entire process, I didn’t so much as set foot here.
I don’t want to say too much in this post, lest any happenstance reader of the blog is not yet acquainted with the novel and doesn’t want too much spoiled. But it isn’t giving anything away to say that the dying days of eastern European communism loom in the far background of the story that is set in upstate New York, and one of the key secondary characters is a German pastor from behind the Iron Curtain.
I was so excited to find these! Halloren Kugeln were the confection of choice in the GDR. My characters try them, but I never had—until now!
One of the reasons for this is that I’m just old enough to remember what it felt like to be alive when the division of Europe was keenly felt and feared. I also remember when it ended—though not quite the strength of reaction I saw in my parents and other adults around me. Since then, I’ve spent a lot of time in Europe on both sides of the old divide. I know what succeeded, what failed; where people are happy at how things turned out, where they are bitter and resentful (and often conveniently forgetful). I’ve read a great deal on these topics, not least of all for my memoir, I Am a Brave Bridge, about my family’s move to Slovakia just four years after the wall fell.
Apologies to Halloren Kugeln, but Ritter Sport is my German chocolate of choice. Quadratrisch. Praktisch. Gut.
But one thing I hadn’t really seen depicted in fiction was how Americans felt about it. We of course are physically far removed from that cleavage through the heart of Europe. But we felt it too; it meant something to us, too. Maybe it could be less complicated and more joyful for us because we didn’t have to live through the hard business of disassembling the old regimes, and we didn’t get personally caught up in the power grabs that almost immediately began to betray the initial promise of freedom. For all that, it was real and remains an inspiration: not all walls will stand forever. As walls of all kinds continue to be erected—the death-dealing kind, not the live-giving kind—the memory of the fall of the Berlin Wall gives hope that even our present intractable situations won’t deal out death forever.
What do I do when I’m in Berlin? Visit the Stasi Museum, of course. Why? What do you do for fun? Actually, it wasn’t as much fun or as educational as it should have been, because the level of surveillance really didn’t seem that strange or distant from here and now. Gosh, would the secret police have loved the internet.
So, all this in mind, I went to Berlin again. I walked from the Hauptbahnhof through the Brandenburg Gate, and only after I was well on my way down Unter den Linden did I remember—oh wait. The wall used to stand right there. You can actually fail to notice the spot anymore.
I continued eastwards, to the Oberbaumbrücke that formed another boundary, and on to the East Side Gallery, where some of the last remaining sections of the wall still stand, in all their grafittied glory, preserved as an everlasting memorial to the lobotomizing of a city. I visited the new Wall Museum, documenting the quadranting of Berlin at the end of World War II, the erection of the wall in 1961, those who died trying to cross it, and its startlingly rapid demise in November 1989, thirty-four years ago.
It was good to go back. It was good to experience it again. It was good to re-remember what captivated me about this moment in time enough to build a novel with it in the background, and play on the theme of walls falling in Jericho and Berlin.
And needless to say, I was thrilled when I saw a newspaper front page from November 10, 1989, which had the exact same allusive instinct I did: “Berlin Wall comes tumblin’ down”!
And one little bout of homage to a non-East-Berlin site, namely the train stop Zoologischer Garten, immortalized by U2 in their song “Zoo Station,” which opens their best album, Achtung Baby. No arguments on this judgment will be tolerated: I learned something at the Stasi Museum.