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National Post – Conrad Black: Centuries in the making

In the only place where heavily armed Soviet and American soldiers had faced each other in the Cold War, at the world-famous Berlin checkpoints, there was now an immense flow of traffic, and thousands of people tearing down the wall, as U.S. leaders from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan long had demanded.

Now its relics could join the other nearby alluvia of previous German states, like the rings of a tree: Frederick the Great’s Brandenburg Gate, Bismarck’s Reichstag, the pretentious Hohenzollern Lutheran cathedral, with implausibly heroic tombs of deceased infant princes, a few stark, Teutonic, Albert Speer exemplars of Hitler’s pre-nascent Germania (the Fuhrer Bunker remains, sealed, the subject of intense controversy), Stalin’s grotesquely large Socialist Realist Soviet embassy, which he had ordered to be larger than the Reichstag, the glass monstrosity of the East German parliament.

All these heirlooms of Germany’s unsuccessful search for responsible government are jumbled together in half a square mile, and would soon be joined by the magnificent monuments of a reunited Germany: the brilliantly restored (by British architect Norman Foster) Reichstag, the immense but benign, white chancellery, and soon, the restored Schloss of the Wilhelmine emperors. …

Twenty years ago, communism itself was crumbling along with these deep-seated German political neuroses. Part of the Hungarian border was opened; Romania’s Ceausescu was publicly booed, fled his palace in a helicopter, and was hunted down by his former collaborators, with he and his wife finally being executed by one of history’s largest firing squads, so eager and numerous were the volunteers for it.

In Prague, students conducted large sit-ins and occupations of the universities and public places, and read out some of the most lapidary works of Jefferson and Lincoln. Poland was already under martial law and committed to elections that were sure to send the communists packing (these being the elections Stalin had promised at Yalta 44 years before). Soon, Poland would join NATO and the European Economic Community, finally fulfilling the decision of Britain, France, and Canada to go to war to defend Poland when it was attacked by Hitler and Stalin in 1939.

The eastern border of the Western World would not be a German border. Germany would be encased in the West. The Cold War, and in a sense the Second World War, would end in a mighty and bloodless triumph of democracy, and, more or less market economics.

Skipping bits…

All this was easily foreseeable, even inevitable, 20 years ago. What was not so clear was that the Soviet Union would itself disintegrate, and that the emergent era of one overwhelmingly powerful country in the world would be such a fragile vacuum.

The spirit of reconciliation and relief that rippled out from the Brandenburg Gate uplifted the world. I assumed that the United States, at the supreme coruscation of its history, would have a long, successful, and benign eminence in the world. In these 20 years, it has come close to fumbling, but has not forfeited, its status, unique in the world since the Roman Empire. It will presumably recover its balance, if not its dominance, and it was there when civilization needed America, and when only America could lead. Twenty years ago, almost the whole world was grateful to America.

The world turns, but it should not forget.

I feel like I’ve missed most of the interesting bits of history (and what could be interesting is looking like it’ll only by tedious, frustrating and forfeited, but never mind that, I just need to eat something baked and buttery), but at least I remember the Soviet Union, and two Germanies, and watching the TV as the Berlin Wall came down. My grandparents went on one of their semi-regular trips to Europe soon after that and brought back little chunks of the Berlin Wall for all of us. I think ours are still in the silver bowl on the bookshelf in the living room.

But then there’s being a child of the 70s:

Colby Cosh: My Cold War

I was born in 1971. … Eighteen when the Berlin Wall came down, 30 when 9/11 happened. Our twenties, broadly speaking, corresponded to a brief Golden Age — the End of History, as some dared to call it.

Weird.