Cold War Reflections

I am finishing up what is probably one of the best books I've read this year: The Cold War by John Lewis Gaddis. If you are even remotely interested in history, especially the Cold War period, you have GOT to buy - yes, it's worth owning - this book. It's so well-written and it's just fascinating.

Obviously, as I near the end of the book, Lewis is discussing the events of the revolution of 1989 - all of the events and coincidences and blunders that led to the overthrow of socialism in Europe and the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is extremely moving to read about all of this - what an extraordinary time in history! And I was alive for it - albeit only four years old.

My generation was born at a truly incredible turning point in the history of the world. We are the generation of the fall of the Wall - the generation that came into the world just as everything our parents and grandparents had fought for was coming to fruition.

We were born into an age when the world - for all its flaws - entered an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity. As we toddled around and entered school as first-graders, the Soviet Union - the "evil empire" of the Reagan era - finally collapsed into itself as the world heaved a sigh of relief. As we grew up, the memorials, statues, administrative centers, and power structures of the communist parties were abandoned, fell into disrepair, and were even torn down.

One such administrative center is the Palast der Republik (Palace of the Republic) in the former East Berlin. Once the center of the Socialist Unity Party that controlled East Germany for 40 years, this building had decayed into a dilapitaed, graphittied, and sad shadow of its former self, standing wealkly in the midst of now-restored East Berlin. It seemed to project a sense of loss, as if the building itself knew that its time had long since come and gone, and that it was despised even as it stood there, rotting away. I'll never forget standing there and looking at it from across the street, taking pictures of its rust-colored windows.

While I was in Germany in 2002, plans were finalized to tear it down and rebuild the former City Palace of Berlin that had originally stood in its place. Reaction was mixed - many were glad to hear the building would go, some were sad to see what had evolved into a historical reminder and monument being destroyed. I was somewhere between the two. Last year, at the end of my year abroad in Tübingen, the Palast was finally torn down once and for all.

The symbolic nature of that act is curious to me - here we are, the world, moving into an era of globalization that is more pronounced and widespread than ever before, where exchange of ideas and information occur instantly and at almost no cost, and the final vestiges of the Cold War world are slowly being erased and free markets and democratic ideals take root in more and more places. It's the end - and the beginning - of an era, and we're here to watch it all unfold. That is so unbelievably cool.