
Twenty years ago today, an event occurred that would have a lasting impact on me both personally and professionally: The Berlin Wall came down. No, I am not Eastern European, nor was I a reporter covering this; I was just another 9-year-old sitting on the floor in my parent’s living room one evening while they watched the evening news. Looking back, I have to wonder what my parents were thinking at that earth-shattering moment. My parents were both military brats who grew up during the Cold War. My maternal Grandfather was actually stationed in Germany at the time the Wall went up, and as Mom recounts it, was gone for several days without coming home during that particular crisis. For my Parents, this must have been an unbelievable experience, the Berlin Wall; symbol of the Cold War in all its overwhelming tyranny was coming down without a shot being fired.

As a 9-year-old, I admit my full understanding of the significance of the events I was witnessing was rather limited. Having grown up in the wide-open suburbs of Southern California, the thought of a gigantic wall totally bisecting a major city seemed a bit ludicrous to me. Being an inquisitive child, I began to bombard my mother with all manner of questions. “Why had there been a wall in the first place?” “Why were the Soviets in Germany?” And many other similar questions. My Mother, longsuffering soul that she was, laid out for her son the basic outline of the sad and sordid history of the 20th Century across Europe, explaining about the Second World War, Nazism and the eventual Cold War that arose from the Allied occupation.

Such explanations might have been enough for some “normal” children, but being an admitted “freak” I wanted to know more. I read numerous books on the subject, passing a summer in High School reading William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich just for the heck of it. Everything I read took me back further and further from the erection of the wall in August 1961. I read about the war, and then about the Third Reich, and then about the Weimar Republic. Finally I got to the First World War and had to admit that I was hooked. There is something about the narratives of trench warfare on the Western Front, in all their starkly macabre horror, that grasp a hold on one’s imagination and refuse to let it go.

Hence, upon my graduation from High School, I chose to become a history major, and upon my graduation from college, chose to go on, and study history in Graduate School. My chosen field is Modern Germany and while the time period which I seek to study (I haven’t written my Dissertation yet, so much of this is still in the future tense) is considerably earlier than the rising of the Wall, (I want to focus on the Weimar Republic) I nonetheless freely admit that my interest in the study of history, was inspired by witnessing history in the making as a child.

Further Reading: German Chancellor Angela Merkel thanks former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev for his key reforms that made the fall of the wall possible. (AP)
Yesterday, at approximately 12:30 local time, a gunman opened fire at a graduation ceremony at Fort Hood Army Base in Texas. In the end 12 people were killed, and another 31 reported wounded. The attacker, a Major Nidal Malik Hassan, was a psychologist on the base specializing in Combat trauma. He had recently received his deployment orders and was reported to have been vehemently opposed to his posting to Iraq.











