Today is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall. I wish I could tell you exactly what I was doing on November 9 1989, when I was told about the fall of the wall, and what I felt when I saw people celebrating on TV that night, but I can’t. I don’t have any memories of that day. I was six years old at the time and I guess I was simply too young to understand what was going on.
The Boyfriend and I talked about it last night and he, being a few years older than me, remembers things more clearly, although mostly what he remembers is his father being completely elated and watching television all night on that day. I guess this is very typical of my generation, the generation that were young children in the 80s: The Berliner Mauer fall was the first major historical event of our lives, but in a strange, remote vague way. Even for those of us who were old enough to understand what was going on on November 9 1989, the divided Germany had not been part of our scheme of things. We had spent our young 80s lives learning how to walk and talk and button those overalls we all wore back then regardless of our sex, and we hadn’t been longing for the collapse of the wall the way our parents had.
But the repercussions were great enough that the event didn’t go completely over my head, and the fall of the Berliner Mauer comes back to me in little fragments when I try to look back. Mostly I remember sitting in the backseat of my parents’ car, as my parents drove me and my brother to a neighbouring city on December 1989, where we would celebrate New Year’s Eve with some friends of my mother. “This may have been the most important year of your lives,” my father solemnly told me and my brother and then went on to explain to us about the wall and what it meant that it was now no longer there.
I also remember going to Germany in the summer of ‘90 with my family, and it is of course no coincidence that my parents chose to take us to our southern neighbouring country that particular year. My parents showed my brother and me both Eastern and Western Germany and the stark contrasts between them made a deep impression. We also saw parts of the old wall, and I was chilled to the bone when I saw the barbed wire and my mother told me what it was for. “Lede mur”, my brother and I started calling the wall after seeing it – “Mean wall” in Danish.
And then I have one memory of the fall of the Mauer that I hadn’t thought of for years and years until just this morning, namely the memory of a particular episode of the cartoon Alvin and The Chipmunks. My brother and I watched that cartoon religiously at one time, despite the fact that our television didn’t receive the channel that broadcast it very well. We only had two working channels back then, the Danish Public Service channel and one commercial one, but my brother and I had managed to find this third channel and it fascinated us to no end. The signal was so bad that everything we tried to watch on the channel had a double outline, making it look as if all the people on the screen were constantly haunted by an eerie ghostly doppeltgänger, but my brother and I could care less because the television broadcast a wide range of American cartoons, the likes of which we had never seen in the sober, daily 30-minute children’s programme on the public service channel that my parents let us watch. My parents disappoved of our watching these mainstream cartoons, thinking that they were in bad taste, but I guess they must have felt it would be useless to try to keep us away from it. And so ignoring the ghostly double outlines and my parents’ eyes on us, my brother and I watched Dinoriders on this channel, we watched Dungeons and Dragons, we watched Captain America. And then we watched Alvin and The Chipmunks, and I’ve forgotten every episode of that cartoon series except for one Berlin Wall episode.
When I googled ”Chipmunks Berlin Wall episode” today I found that the episode actually aired a year prior to the fall of the Mauer, but in Denmark there must have been a delay, because I know I never saw the episode until after the wall had fallen, and I could hardly believe my eyes. I don’t remember much from the story, other than the fact that it was the story of two children, a sister and a brother who had been seperated by the wall. The sister told the Chipmunks her story and how much she missed her brother, and the Chipmunks ended up doing a concert next to the Berlin Wall, singing about their hope that the wall would fall down. Amidst their singing, the wall started to crack and crumble, it fell, and the brother and sister were reunited.
My brother and I were gaping. Even at that age we felt that there was something dangerously inappropriate about a mere cartoon depicting an event that my parents had told me might be the most important event of my lifetime. But I was also deeply moved by the story. I cried when the brother and sister embraced, I thought the song was beautiful, and I think that seeing the event depicted on Alvin and the Chipmunks was one of the first things that made me realize just how big a deal the Mauer was. It was one thing that my parents were preoccupied with the wall – they were preoccupied with so many things that didn’t concern me; politics, economics, work. But the fact that the American cartoons, this childish realm that belonged so exclusively to my brother and myself, the fact that they related to the event made me begin to realize that that big, crumbling wall wasn’t just something that grown-ups in grey suits talked about dryly on the news, it was something that was going to define me and my generation and the way we would live our lives.
I don’t think I’ve ever realized how powerful that moment was to me until just this morning when I managed to find the Chipmunks clip on youtube and I damn near teared up listening to the song. In German class in school we were told about the wall endlessly and wrote essay upon essay about it, but nothing ever had as much of an impact on me as that silly cartoon episode did on that day. Is the image of Alvin and the Chipmunks breaking the wall with their singing sappy and in poor taste? Certainly! But the episode served its purpose for me back then.
