It was two sets of walls of very tough slab of concrete – fiber reinforced with lots of rebar and huge round concrete tops – with a plain of finely raked sand in between. The wall on the East side (viewed from within East Berlin) was painted white and I never saw anyone walk near it. The wall facing West Berlin, which was actually within East Berlin territory, was painted all over in graffiti.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article6829716.ece

Twenty Years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the EU is a Reincarnation of the Former Soviet Union
By Hans Vogel

(Excerpt)

“Now that the Czech Republic has announced it will ratify the Lisbon Treaty, the EU will be even closer yet to becoming a unified monster state, with more than half a billion inhabitants. Inhabitants is the correct term, since â��citizensâ�� would indicate a set of political rights. The people living in the EU should rather be called â��subjects,â�� since they have no influence whatsoever on the constitution of the centralized European government, the â��European Commission.â�� The Europeans are allowed to vote for members of the European Parliament, but this body has about as much political power as the ineffectual German parliament meeting at Frankfurt in 1848. Political power in the EU is firmly in the hands of the European Commission, which is set to obtain even more power under the Lisbon Treaty. This infamous treaty does not hold the peoples of Europe in high regard. As a matter of fact, it is only halfway through the treaty (originally presented as a â��Constitutionâ��) that one finds the first references to the people.”

http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/04-11-2009/110289-berlin_wall-0

I’m 30. I was in the fourth and fifth grade when these things happened. I still remember what a big deal the cold war was, how every movie bad guy was Russian, that so many buildings in my home town bore the three inverted triangles indicating a fallout shelter, how, even in the late eighties, I was still taught to hide under my desk in case of a nuclear attack.

My girlfriend, who’s coming up on 26, doesn’t have a clear recollection of these things. To her Soviet-style socialism, the eastern bloc, glasnost, M.A.D. and “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” are all historical relics with no more obvious connection to modern life than the Boer War and the Teapot Dome scandal.

What’s particularly interesting about that moment in history is that it was also at the same time that computers were becoming household objects. Anyone with experiential memories of the Soviet collapse also remembers a time before the internet, before cell phones and often before cable television.

There’s a very clear generational divide between people born before the about 1983 and those born after. If only because that’s right when CD’s first hit the market, we might call them the Analog and the Digital generations. If you have a clear memory of Germans climbing atop the Brandenberg gate, of them chipping away at the wall with hammers and bits of rebar, of whole sheets of graffiti-strewn concrete being tugged down by cranes and, more importantly, if you understood the significance of these events as they took place, you are probably of the Analog generation. If you lack these memories, then you’re probably more Digital.

I have even more clear memories of “Baby Jessica” in 1987. Guess that says something about the reportage priorities at the time.