Photo credit: FORTEPAN/Tamás Urbán

I was there for the new year celebration that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall. A fall that began 30 years ago this past Sunday. My auditory memory will hold the sound of the collective take down forever. A quiet, gentle hammering and chiseling murmur that grew louder, more determined, distinct, all encompassing and celebratory as I got closer to it. It was a several mile walk towards the amplified sound of the cooperative take down. The fresh scar between two sides that were once one was edged by color: the big and small fragments of it’s scattered graffiti for sale. We packed up crumbs of wall pieces, tiny drawings in bags as souvenirs for family.

I was a young student living in Europe. I slept on the floor next to the overused urine smelling bathroom of a night train packed with the camaraderie eager to arrive to this momentous happening. And ironically at the strike of midnight, I was also in a train —between East and West Berlin. While transitioning into 1989, I experienced two starkly different Berlin’s. West Berlin was similar to what I knew back then about places: signage, maps, color. But that didn’t stand out until I swerved in and out of the other side with train stop landings in a place that I remember as monotone, dusty and dark. If felt like another place in another time.

On that celebratory day I was also scared. Germans are much taller than small Latina me. They were overjoyed, many inebriated and climbing up on fragments of the wall and onto the horses of the Brandenburg Gate. In the sea of excitement, bottles of wine were swinging and chiming by a momentous, slow, drunk and happy moving mass of very tall people hovering above me.

The fall took a while. The wall came down fast and yet also slow. The erasure of space and place that a wall, even after it is physically gone, is permanent. Is it? It felt like it then. And while I’ve been back to Berlin since then. I want to go back to experience this again first hand.

I’ve had dreams of walls many times. Bad walls and good ones too. Ironically it was my plan to share on a different wall a few days ago consciously unaware but very aware of the exact 30 year mark of this experience of my life. I will share about that wall some other time. For now I’m consumed in a memory.

Martha

p.s. With the command here to add links, I’ve noticed I’ve blogged about walls before. Here’s a link to that: We Don’t Want Walls, We Want Games! Also revisiting this experience reminds me of how emotional I get when I feel the energy of people working together to accomplish something. The image of people working on the graffiti of this wall together and the auditory presence in me of the collective chiseling to take it down is in the spirit of Musical Table, the project that I’ve been leading for 25 years. There’s two next week. Join us to participate, if you can.