Cold war crackups

This week marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Followed shortly afterward by the collapse of Communism in Europe (except for Yugoslavia and Albania, which both took time to rot from the inside, but made up for that by unleashing just about every form of civil warfare, up to and including genocide).

It’s interesting that news stories talk about the generational gap—Germans in their 20s and 30s are pretty blasé about the significance of the event. They have nothing to compare a united and prosperous Germany with.

Their elders—who lived in the German Democratic Republic—on the other hand are grateful for being out from under the Stasi and the Communist economy. They’re really appreciative of the prosperous Germany (whose prosperity is for once not built on armaments and plans for invading their neighbors).

Listening to NPR I flashed back to my mother; she died 11 years before the wall’s collapse. She had lived through the 20s and the aftermath of World War I as a child, and as a young adult she worked at Lockheed during World War II.

Me, I never knew anything but a divided Germany. So I thought it interesting when Mom said (more than once) that if we ever let the two Germanys unite, we’d just be faced with yet another war.

Mom, not what I would call inclined towards paranoia and certainly leaning more towards the logical, nonetheless had a primal, gut-emotional response to that possibility.

It’s been 20 years now, and the united Germany shows no signs of overrunning Poland or invading Belgium. They’re doing perfectly fine through carving out economic rather than geographic lebensraum. But that’s capitalism and de facto fine.

I wonder what Mom would say about that?