Response to The Ghost of Berlin

In high school I learned a lot about Germany through studying the two major World Wars in my history classes. Of course these courses exhausted the topic of the Holocaust and Hitler. However, we only spent a limited amount of time on the Berlin Wall. I remember reading about the Berlin Airlift and it’s successful legacy on defeating the Soviet’s malicious plans of taking over the entire city of Berlin. Indeed the Berlin Wall was discussed when the Cold War manifested itself in our textbooks. I have always found that the “Iron Curtain” dubbed by Churchill Winston was a creative way to describe the wall. These two words are short and simple, yet their implications are in fact truly profound.

Even with this prior knowledge of the turmoil that powerfully hit Germany like a violent tornado and incurring permanent damage, I was still taken aback by the first few sentences in the introduction to the Ghost of Berlin by Brian Ladd. “Berlin is a haunted city” ultimately explains the title of this book. I thought that was a really interesting way to present the history of Berlin. However, the part that really caught my eye was Ladd’s depiction of tourists and Berliners hacking at the wall. He said, “The cold night air during that winter of 1989-90 was filled with the sound of pik-pik-pik.” This was a powerful description of the importance of the wall as a symbol. It is obvious that people all around the world wanted to have a piece of this wall to forever celebrate its significance. The wall represented a time of trepidation and dread. Many people spent their lives in fear of the spread of communism and the threat of a nuclear war. I can understand and empathize with the need to own a piece of the wall, but this desire is truly detrimental to the preservation of this historical symbol. Ladd stated, “The Wall, symbol of the epic confrontation between capitalism and communism, became a capitalist commodity”. This idea presented in this sentence is sad to me. How could such an important part of history be capitalized on? I was a bit stunned that people would enable the exploitation of the wall.

Perhaps I am overly zealous about preservation of historical buildings, but I believe that it is very important to keep history alive both physically and mentally as much as possible. I am excited to be witnessing the wall first hand and learning about its history right where it was form.