History, the Concatenation of Human Experiences

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History, the Concatenation of Human Experiences

In June 1961, I left Berlin, Germany, with my parents, my sister, and my Swedish cousin enroute to Sweden for what was to be two weeks of Scandinavian fun. The Russian soldiers who processed us through the checkpoints were impeccably dressed in jodhpurs and the shiniest black riding boots I had ever seen. It was obvious they had been carefully selected for this job, which entailed a goodly measure of public relations; the Communists displayed only their best. The soldiers were not only good looking and efficient, processing our papers quickly; on that day they were noticeably relaxed, with genuine smiles on their faces. A week earlier than planned, my family returned to Berlin, driving through the same checkpoints. This time the atmosphere was tense. There were no smiles. Passports and other papers were scrutinized slowly, creating long delays, much to our discomfort.

What had caused the change? An event that will be taught in history classes for hundreds of years. An event that even a thousand years from now will be at least a footnote in the history books. The East Germans had erected a wall, dividing one of the world’s most famous cities in two. Barbara Tuchman would argue—correctly, I think—that it is too soon to write the history of the Berlin Crisis. This contemporary generation, born and raised in the tensions of the Cold War, will record the facts and write the narrative, but we are too close to have a good perspective on it (Tuchman 27-28). For the interpretation of those facts, we will have to wait for the generation now being born, a generation which will have few, if any, emotional attachments to the event and therefore be better able to analyze it with some objectivity—or ignorance, as Edward H. Carr would call it (9). This is how history is written. It is a process—a recording of facts and later an interpreting of those facts to relate them to the future generations.

The question, of course, is what history our descendants will write. Human beings are by nature egocentric. In the West we assume future historians will see the crisis as we do. The wall was not constructed for noble reasons; it was a manifestation of the evil empire, was it not?

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