NATIONAL POST - RURAL FORCES - REMEMBRANCE
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- Gilbert_Schramm
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Anation FREE
of its CAGE
Twenty years ago this week, the people of one of the least happy countries on the planet were forced to build a new existence from the powder of a shattered barrier and the foam of a half-formed dream.
They were farmers and factory hands, scholars and schoolteachers, the drones of the Deutsche Demokratische Republic. Few of them had had anything to do with the construction — or the rupture — of the Berlin Wall that, since 1961, had mummified them against the liberty and licentiousness of the West. If they were old enough, by 1989 they had endured (or endorsed) Hitler and had lost their brothers and fathers in the war. If they were young enough, walled in since childhood, they could see no further than the grey cement certainties of Stalinism.
“You already knew when you were five years old how life would be when you were 50,” a daughter of East Germany told me this week. “You would have kids, two or three of them, and no career to speak of, unless you wanted to be involved with the regime. Your life would just go by, and you knew already that when you were a child.”
Imagine, then, these automatic lives suddenly fractured in mid-sentence, and millions compelled to emigrate to a strange new country without leaving their homes. See page 25 http://digital.nationalpost.com/epaper/viewer.aspx
of its CAGE
Twenty years ago this week, the people of one of the least happy countries on the planet were forced to build a new existence from the powder of a shattered barrier and the foam of a half-formed dream.
They were farmers and factory hands, scholars and schoolteachers, the drones of the Deutsche Demokratische Republic. Few of them had had anything to do with the construction — or the rupture — of the Berlin Wall that, since 1961, had mummified them against the liberty and licentiousness of the West. If they were old enough, by 1989 they had endured (or endorsed) Hitler and had lost their brothers and fathers in the war. If they were young enough, walled in since childhood, they could see no further than the grey cement certainties of Stalinism.
“You already knew when you were five years old how life would be when you were 50,” a daughter of East Germany told me this week. “You would have kids, two or three of them, and no career to speak of, unless you wanted to be involved with the regime. Your life would just go by, and you knew already that when you were a child.”
Imagine, then, these automatic lives suddenly fractured in mid-sentence, and millions compelled to emigrate to a strange new country without leaving their homes. See page 25 http://digital.nationalpost.com/epaper/viewer.aspx
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