I tried to locate a comment where Apostropher discussed his senior thesis on the matter, but couldn't find it. It's funny, though.
Also, if you want to feel old, you can read what we were discussing here on the twentieth anniversary of the wall coming down.
Hey, and Stanster specifically posted about the wall, on the 10th.
Although he doesn't seem to have been doing it specifically for the 20th anniversary.
And immediately below that is a post by Standpipe. Crazy times indeed.
I'm the same age as heebie and I remember the Wall being torn down, and being aware of it beforehand, but I don't remember seeing it live or on the news that day. The thing that really surprised me when I learned it, which I'm not sure I already knew at the time, was how far Berlin was from the East/West German border.
Unlike the Soviet coup attempt in 1991, which I distinctly remember because I was on vacation visiting cousins and all the adults were talking about it.
I was just a bit too young to hear about it. I suspect I heard about it at the breakfast table, but wouldn't have retained. I was absorbing news a couple of years later, for the first Iraq war.
I had just come back from East Berlin, where I wrote about the agitation immediately leading up to it. You could tell the stasi thugs because they were the only young men in the city with fancy American trainers. AIMHMB, the procedure to get a journalist visa to pass through the wall from the West was considerably less unpleasant, and quicker, that what is now required of a journalist to visit the USA.
The following year I went to see the Dead play there, and interviewed Phil Lesh. They had a caravan of wholly clueless fans. Then ume and I wandered round about 25 years after it had fallen, and that was very much stranger to see the fortifications and the checkpoints only as ghosts, for the most part, and advertisements all over Alexanderplatz
I remember watching the Wall being taken down, but I think that was because my dad was very invested in the situation (makes sense, maybe a lot of Korean-American people of his generation were?) and also because I really loved the Scorpions.
You misspelled "David Hasselhauf".
I remember it well - I still have a bit of Wall somewhere, along with the brick fragment from Lidice. It was exactly the time I started to pay real attention to news and an awful lot seemed to be happening - the Wall I remember, and the massive crowds in Vaclavske namesti, and the street fighting in Bucharest and Timisoara, and then the Gulf War, and then visiting the USSR, and the coup attempt ("the tanks are in Moscow" I remember my mother saying), and then the whole bloody business coming crashing down.
Anyway, thirty years ago, I was a freshman in political science. The wall stuff came up all the time, with lots of debate about how much credit Reagan should get and almost no attention being paid to David Hasselhoff's larger role.
At Doug's recommendation, I read The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall. It was a good read and did mention Hasselhoff.
I was in college and remember being so delighted by the video of people dancing.
Much odder, a bit later, was working at Microsoft in its glory days when it seemed sort of reasonable for someone to give Gates a whole section of the Wall, and the dining hall and courtyard in the newest set of Microsoft buildings was plenty spacious and handsome to display it in a dignified way. Big.
I passed through Berlin in summer 1989 on a road trip that also went through Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. My traveling companion and I arrived in Gdansk early in the morning of June 4 and went to Mass with our Polish friend, after which the entire congregation decamped straight from the church to the polling stations to vote for Solidarity in the first elections since WWII. Our friend bought every newspaper he could see on the way, because he was so excited that he could finally believe what was being published.
That summer I started a relationship with a Slovak guy I met in Prague. When the Wall came down I was back in London, sleeping on a friend's sofa and working in Harrods' bookshop as I tried to get myself re-established so he could join me there. It was crazy to see what was happening in Germany, and to hope that it would spread to neighbouring countries, while knowing that my lover in Prague was under surveillance as an active Christian. He was summoned to the police station to have his passport confiscated the following week; but before he could give it in, the Velvet Revolution happened. I went back to see him that New Year, and oh, the joy and life on the streets. Havel had been elected president the week before. The Czech flag was hanging from what seemed like every window. I've never been anywhere so full of hope.
(My Slovak lover duly came to London on a visitor's visa and worked illegally - I remember walking the length of Streatham High Street with him, asking at every pub and restaurant, until we found a pizza joint that took him on as a bartender - but the relationship collapsed pretty soon. We're still friends, though.)
Even three years later the joy lasted. It seemed like every woman in Prague was just a little in love with Havel, and random Czechs would buy you beer when they heard you speaking English because [insert explanation here in a drunken mixture of Czech, German, schoolboy Russian and English in which the only intelligible words were "Stalin" and "NATO"].
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very Heaven.
Berlin [inhales on cigarette, stares into distance].... yes, I remember Berlin....
In the third year of Law School. Everyone was on the job market, A few folks who were interested in international law practice and had some German or Slavic languages were totally stoked that there was going to be a huge opportunity. They were right for the short run, but they would have been better off studying Chinese, and much better off studying HTML.
The Con Law professor spent part of a class talking about how Germany was going to need a new constitution and he mght land a sweet consulting gig (it did, but he didn't), and the many reasons he would advise them to avoid the U.S. constitutional model at all costs.
My sister was in Berlin around the time of the wall coming down, and she hacked off a bunch of pieces of the wall to bring home to her little brother (me) who thought it was the coolest thing in the world. Probably altogether I had 30 pounds of it, chunks of concrete with graffiti and laden, I'm sure, with asbestos.
One day a couple years later my mom got tired of it taking up space in my closet and dumped it in the woods out back. I never did find it, and as far as I know its still out there where the woods used to be, just waiting to be discovered by whatever rich fucks bought the McMansion that now stands atop the remains of my childhood home.
Some kids moms throw out their baseball cards. My mom threw out the Berlin Wall.
24 needs to be the first page of a memoir.
I was 17, an exchange student living in Bremen.
My host family had a ritual of watching the news together after dinner on nights that Dr. Host Father was not at the hospital, and I vividly recall their reactions to the "official" notification of travel freedom. In fact, the emotional reaction of everyone surrounding me is my most visceral memory now - it was striking to this teenage Ami with only a tangential attachment and knowledge of what had just unwound.
My host brother and I took a train to Berlin on the weekend a few weeks later, and skipped two days of school hanging out. Things were starting to be a bit more normal, but especially around Brandenburg Gate it was still happy mayhem. Another thing that stuck in my mind was the street hustlers - lots of Three Card Monte on cardboard boxes and pickpockets.
A few months later, there was an exchange-organized visit to East Berlin - we USAians still needed visas and were not allowed out of the (forget the word...) visitor zone. Ate dinner at a lovely little place with some other exchange students whom I thought were incredibly embarrassing - they were obsessed with consumer product differences.
Another thing I remember was the Trabis. The influx of these identical, antique-looking, exhaust-belching cars was a bit comical.
My mom desperately wanted a piece of the wall, I also brought back a few pounds of it. Don't think I personally have any of that now.
I was in Berlin later, late winter of 1992. They were selling pieces of the "wall" that look pretty obviously fake to me (they all had very fresh paint on one side). They were also selling "Soviet" memorabilia. I bought a watch that didn't work after two days.
What I remember most about Berlin is Zoo Station (why was there a song about this?) and the Pergamon Museum and how the German police pulled the only black guy out of our train car aside for questioning.
I bought a watch that didn't work after two days.
At least you thought it through thoroughly.
I Was a Teenage Cold-war Liberal*, had read my Orwell ('We may be heading ... for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity') and Solzhenitsyn, and found persuasive the then-common view that once a state goes bolshevik, it can never go back. The East-West divide seemed metaphysical and eternal, not material and historical. So 1989 was for me both exhilarating and extremely surprising - it brought home how easy it is for a significant background assumption of your world-view to be just wrong.
*Emphasis on the 'liberal' - had no positive feelings whatever towards anything to the left of social democracy, but was never keen on military confrontation.
29: It was contributing according to its abilities.
Visited a friend in Berlin in the winter of 1991-92. His apartment was in the former Eastern sector and had a bloody great white-tiled ziggurat of an oven for heating, which you had to feed with coal brought up from the cellar in a bucket. The whole city smelled of brown coal. Felt like I was in a John LeCarre novel. Was in Wenceslas Square in Prague on New Year's Day. Fun times.
I don't know if I've ever seen a coal fire.
The flames were invisible, because encased in white tile.
I was a second year law student, home early, when I saw the first of it on the TV. The wife was working in German politics at the time, so I called her and told her to run go turn on the office TV RIGHT NOW.
We were in Germany for Christmas/New Year that year, a long way from Berlin, but everyone was pretty excited.
I remember watching on the TV in boarding school the people streaming out of the East before the wall came down.
And I remember that people were selling what they claimed to be pieces of the wall. And I remember, a few years earlier, a girl talking about her trip to Germany and crossing into East Germany.
24 needs to be the first page of a memoir.
And this needs to be the first sentence:
Some kids moms throw out their baseball cards. My mom threw out the Berlin Wall.
And this needs to be the first copy-edit: +'
I remember it as the beginning of the lifting of a feeling of dread that was completed when the USSR was shut down. I had had that all my life up until then, and didn't even realize it was there until it started to dissolve.
I was always nervous in Omaha because everybody said Omaha* gets nuked first. Now I'm nervous in Omaha because of the traffic.
* The target was Strategic Air Command in nearby Bellevue, but close counts in horseshoes and nuclear weapons.
The end of the cold war also freed up Ina Garten to move from nuclear policy to cooking.
43: While of course I know better than to trust Moby, this seemed such a random factoid that I thought it just might be true. It's not. Ina Garten left her government job and took over the Barefoot Contessa in 1978, a time when the Cold War showed no signs of ending.
I was 7yo when the Berlin Wall fell. I have vague memories of seeing it on TV, and of seeing people holding physical pieces of the wall. But it's possible I'm conflating that with the memory of Comiskey Park being demolished in 1990-91. That was a bitter moment on Chicago's south side, and to this day the White Sox still bear the shame by being forced to play in a stadium named Guaranteed Rate Field.
44: Cover story. Jeffrey didn't exist except on paper until 1991
The jolly-looking, older straight guy on her show.
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I finished my bible-reading project today. It took me just about exactly six months. Next up, the apocrypha.
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Stop before you get to Dan Brown novels.
I had twelve years of Catholic school plus a couple more decades of time than you and I never read the whole Bible. I tried once and got stuck somewhere in Leviticus or something.
Like the camping trip in the last Harry Potter.
50: Hebrew Bible and New Testament (which is considerably shorter, of course.)?
I am very confused about what is happening today. Protests in so many countries around the world, like 1968 or 1989. But is there hopeful change?
42- Since 1989 I've learned about so many more things that applies to. Bocce, curling, the electoral college...
After months of his lawyers arguing he's immune from all prosecution, Trump is giving a speech in Madison Square Park today. I hope he's not planning to test the "shoot someone in the middle of 5th Avenue" claim.
Favorite books? I'm currently of the opinion that Jonah is the standout best, and it's not particularly close.
65: For a moment I forget the context of this and I thought,"What???? Liberal Fascism?????"
66: "Forgot" not "forget". Oy! My proofreader sucks!
65: When I was in high school I really liked Ecclesiastes, but I remember looking at it a few years ago and thinking, "Yeah...so?" I guess as a teen, it was exciting to find a jaded almost nihilistic attitude being expressed in the Bible.
Apocryphal book of Tobit is a good story, Judith also. Gospel of James has fun childhood miracles and anecdotes.
I like the angry prophets myself. Ezekiel is interesting and really varied.
64 is astonishing. A we dream from a certain kind of apocalyptic science fiction, perhaps.
I think Ecclesiastes is in the top few. It's doing a weird thing that as you say is maybe best when you're a teenager, but it does a pretty good job at it, and holds up a lot better than most things from the Bible.
If you're going to read the Old Testament in English, use the recent Robert Alter translation.
For me it's Ezekiel (who really saw some shit in his spare time) and of course Job.
Hebrew Bible and New Testament (which is considerably shorter, of course.)?
Yeah, both.
Favorite books?
Ecclesiastes is definitely up there, along with Jonah and some of the other minor prophets. Also Jeremiah (especially the narrative parts toward the end), Ezekiel, the Deuteronomistic History, Esther, and Ruth. The Pentateuch is highly uneven as a narrative, but there are some great set pieces especially in Genesis. Job is interesting theologically and philosophically, but it's quite long and I found it a bit repetitive.
As for the NT, obviously it all looks a bit odd from a non-Christian perspective, but I definitely found Luke the most engaging of the Gospels and unsurprisingly also liked Acts. Not a big fan of Paul as either a writer or a thinker. The Epistle of James is kind of fascinating in how different it is from all the rest but especially from Paul's letters. Revelation is some crazy shit, but the advantage of reading it this way is that it's really clear how much it depends and builds on the earlier Jewish prophetic and apocalyptic traditions, starting with Ezekiel and developing further through Zechariah and especially Daniel.
And here I thought you were still trying to finish Mort.
Job is interesting theologically and philosophically, but it's quite long and I found it a bit repetitive.
I remember deciding that I needed to read Job since William Blake's comic book adaptation was a favorite, but I vaguely remember getting bogged down, and skipping over parts of it. I think many books of the Bible could use a good editor. That's not even to bring up the New Testament with it's four versions of the same story.
80: Its not it's! I swear I had it right, and my sucky proofreader messed it up. You're fired, sucky proofreader!
Interesting that you preferred Luke, for whatever reasons Matthew and John have been the most popular from the 2nd century to the present. Mark is only interesting from a scholarly perspective and not as a read, Matthew and Luke were basically right that it was a weird book that they could improve on for readers. Paul's letters are also more interesting as historical documents than as something to read, most religions just don't have analogous documents that let you see the day-to-day workings of the religion the way that the Corinthians correspondence does (if only we still had one of the letters from the Corinthians back to Paul!). I will say for Paul that the fake writings of Paul are substantially worse than the real ones (both in terms of thinking and writing).
There's a fascinating debate as to whether the author of James has read Romans and is explicitly writing something disagreeing with it, or not. I think the former point of view has the better side of the argument.
Job has a funny thing where the person who wrote the prologue and epilogue either missed the entire point of the poem, or disagreed with it.
Sometimes you just gotta reshoot.
Job is the book I know best because I took a class in law school about it, which was unrigorous from both theological and legal standpoints, but still pretty fun.
The way getting a new family with even cuter daughters is a replacement for the deaths of the old family seems a bit patriarchal even for the Bible.
But the new daughters got to inherit. Very unusual. Boils lead to feminism.
Interesting that you preferred Luke, for whatever reasons Matthew and John have been the most popular from the 2nd century to the present.
Matthew's Jesus just comes across as kind of a dick, especially to his disciples. The same is true of Mark's, and it's really interesting that Matthew retained this image while Luke changed it significantly to make Jesus more kindly with more of a social-justice orientation. John's Jesus is also nicer, but otherwise John is so different from the Synoptics that it's hard to compare.
Paul's letters are also more interesting as historical documents than as something to read, most religions just don't have analogous documents that let you see the day-to-day workings of the religion the way that the Corinthians correspondence does (if only we still had one of the letters from the Corinthians back to Paul!).
Especially interesting in this context is Philemon, which has very little explicit theological content and seems to essentially be a random piece of Paul's personal correspondence that happened to be preserved along with the more important stuff.
There's a fascinating debate as to whether the author of James has read Romans and is explicitly writing something disagreeing with it, or not. I think the former point of view has the better side of the argument.
I can definitely see that, and I agree that it reads more clearly as an explicit response to Romans than as an independent argument. Either way it's a fascinating contrast to Paul, with a more "Jewish" feel to it in some ways. (Though actually I think Paul comes across as pretty Jewish as well, as does the whole NT. One striking thing about reading the OT and NT in succession like this is how much continuity there is.)
AIMHMHB...
Evelyn Waugh to Nancy Mitford, occupied Yugoslavia, 1944:
" ...In the hope of keeping [Randolph Churchill] quiet,, Freddie and I bet him £20 that he cannot read the whole Bible in a fortnight. Unhappily it has not had the result we hoped. He has never read any of it before and is hideously excited; keeps reading quotations aloud... or merely slapping his side & chortling 'God, isn't God a shit!'
82. Luther wanted to exclude James from the Protestant canon on the grounds that it contradicted sola fide. I can't remember why he didn't eventually.