Fascinating story in the NYT about an (east) German soccer player

I loathe sports. And this article is fascinating. The reporter uses the fact that the captain of the German national soccer team is originally from East Germany to weave a larger tale about east and west and how Germany has changed for the better and not-so-better after re-unification. The article is just great, do read it.

It got me thinking about when the Wall fell. It was November of 1989. I was there during the week it fell. I was working on the Hill and we had a trip planned to Europe to attend the arms control talks, and we had a scheduled stop in Berlin and East Germany. We just so happened to arrive literally days after the Wall metaphorically came down. The wall was still there, and the East German guards were on top of it pointing machine guns at us as we Germans and Americans and every other foreigner in that town ran to the wall and chipped away at it as best we could (it was concrete, not very chip-able). It was amazing.

I remember it being 2AM and it was colder than hell out. I was walking the wall with a friend, and there were still tons of people. We were looking for any chink we could find in order to get even a small piece of it. I finally found a two-foot stretch of re-bar (basically, big long metal pole that goes inside of concrete to help be its frame, I guess), sticking halfway out of the wall. I twisted and pulled and pushed that thing for 20 minutes to try to get it to break off, and as I did so, pieces of the wall, only a few inches across, but with paint on them (!), started to come off. Finally, the re-bar, now hot as hell from the torquing back and forth, broke off. I was ecstatic. I had quite possibly one of the most unique souvenirs ever from the Berlin Wall. (Yes, I brought it on the plane, but such was the advantage of traveling with Congress, we had our own plane.)

The thing that really makes me melancholy about the entire thing is the overwhelming sense of history of the moment. The Berlin Wall was no more. Eastern Europe was imploding. Countries were becoming liberated that had been police states since before I was born. It was an amazing time to care about the world. There was such hope and excitement. History actually worked.

And now, look at how incredibly screwed up the world is yet again. A lot of it is our fault, and there are no more communists to blame.