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Today, there’s plenty being written elsewhere about the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I’ll leave all that for better-informed and better writers to get busy with, and just stick to some of my own memories.

Potsdamerplatz, Berlin

In April 1989, when my family booked tickets to fly to England and Europe the following November, we had no idea that we would arrive in time to celebrate the fall of communism. My English grandfather had just had a stroke, and the long NZ summer holidays of December/January offered the last chance that the family could travel to visit him while I was still a child airfare.

My sister and I, who had never been overseas before, spent an excited few months preparing for the trip: reading up about the sights of London, learning little phrases in German and poring over Mum’s Collins University Atlas, tracing train routes that would take us through unknown countries called France, Holland and Switzerland.

After Christmas in England, we crossed the Channel in the dead of winter and by way of Oostend and Amsterdam, found ourselves in Germany to visit Mum’s old friends in the Ruhr valley. The Wall had been down less than two months at that point, but the ripples of the fall seemed evident everywhere we went: the trains were stuffed full of East Germans, perhaps visiting family or simply enjoying spending Christmas in the West for the first time.

GDR-era Mural, Federal Finance Building

The Silvesternacht we spent in Germany was one I’ll never forget… we kids were allowed to let off fireworks across the cul-de-sac, drink sekt and participate in the inexplicably German tradition of Bleigießen. At midnight we gathered around the television, watching crowds of East and West Germans celebrating together at the Brandenburg Gate.

A piece of history arrived, quite literally, a couple of days later: a package arrived at the door, containing lumps of asbestos-laden concrete. The brother of Mum’s German friend was in Berlin, and had hacked off enough pieces of the wall so that we New Zealanders would have something to take home with us.

The Reichstag Dome

That trip to Europe happened at an impressionable age, and probably sparked my ongoing interest and love of that continent. We played in the snow on the Jungfrau; I chased my sister around borderstones on the frontier of France and Switzerland; and when on a cold January morning 1990 we stared up into the mist on the Champs de Mars to try and spy the top of the Eiffel Tower that was missing in the gloom, I had little idea that twenty years later I would be able to speak French and live in Paris.

In their wisdom, our parents made me and my sister write a diary during our trip. So I can still read what I thought at the time (I was mostly interested in playing with Lego and running around borderstones). And I still have that piece of the Berlin Wall, although it’s currently sitting in storage in Birmingham.

So, just like Nicolas Sarkozy, I was not in Berlin on the 9th of November, 1989. But as a young kid, I did manage to be in Europe right at the end of the 1980s. Ride on Time by Black Box was top of the pops, and it felt like the wheel of history was turning.

Coke ad in East Berlin

(All photos in this post were taken during my March 2008 trip to Berlin)

Lebanese-born author Amin Maalouf is the first commentator I’ve heard who frames the current financial crisis as a logical conclusion of the end of the Cold War.  His ideas are laid out in his most recent book (March 2009) Le dérèglement du monde : quand nos civilisations s’épuisent (“The world’s moral dissolution: when our civilisations exhaust themselves”).

Maalouf was interviewed for last Saturday’s Rue des Entrepreneurs on France Inter. Although his argument may be a little reductive, his thoughts were interesting enough that I transcribed them. An English translation is below, and a copy of my transcription is available if you want to check the accuracy.

Image: gavinandrewstewart (Creative Commons)

AMIN MAALOUF: “I think that the current economic crisis is a symptom of a moral dissoluteness, a dissoluteness which goes back a long time in history. It’s tricky to find the cause of an event, but it’s possible to date this [crisis] generally from the fall of the Berlin Wall.

[The fall of the Wall] was the end of a certain kind of world. At the end of an era like that you need to take stock and decide what you want to build on the rubble of the world that’s just collapsed. In reality, we didn’t do this.

I’m not nostalgic for the world prior to the fall of the wall. I consider that the Soviet system had manifestly failed in economic terms, that dirigisme had showed its limits. This can be seen in how China and India have started to develop themselves by getting rid of dirigisme.

Image: aur2899 (Creative Commons)

But at the same time, we came to the wrong conclusion. We thought that we could take the market to its logical conclusion – a market without limitations, without scruples. We unthreaded all the concerns, the idea of “social capitalism” – everything that had been accomplished within capitalism to humanise the system. We thought we had to roll all that back…

…at an intellectual level, it’s true that the fall of the Berlin Wall represented the end of a certain ideology, and I have no nostalgia for the ideology or for a world split between marxists and anti-marxists. Simply, we drew the conclusion that the era of ideologies was over. Everyone fell back on their loyalties, particularly religious loyalties. We find ourselves today in a world that’s difficult to live in, where our loyalties are expressed with violence.“

INTERVIEWER: “So [the fall of the wall was] a mistaken victory, you say?”

AM:“A mistaken victory in terms of economics, a mistaken victory in terms of ideology, as well as a mistaken victory for international relations. It was the end of a confrontation between two blocs, the triumph of a superpower who became the sole superpower. And at the same time the behavious of this superpower has not been above reproach! It’s difficult for people to behave properly when there’s nobody opposite them watching.“

Image: KCIvey (Creative Commons)