Few days ago, during my Sunday morning newspaper review, I was catch by this image, a guy holding an hammer ready to smash it on a wall full of graffiti, written in different languages.
I couldn't recognize him, and there was no need to recognize him, it was a symbol, as well as the hammer and the wall were symbols.
Needless to say it was the Berlin wall, day November 9th 1989.
Memories of youth arise, I remember myself watching the TV and my father commenting the fall of Berlin Wall, I was only 6 at the time but I was feeling that something important was happening, although obviously I couldn't figure out what was exactly about. Few years later, during high school, I ran into the whole story by reading German literature, studying DDR history and watching awesome movies like "The Lives of Others", being captured by the complexity of 900th century for Germany.
Leaving aside the Cold War, the clash between West and Ost, Willy Brandt, Helmut Kohl and all those political giants, I believe that the biggest service in describing and telling the truth of a divided Germany has been done by the small stories gathered in books and movies written after the fall of the Wall; stories of brave people who fought against the regime, and stories of people who simply suffered because of the regime, its secret police, its collaborationists, its restrictions to travel and so on.
History made by many single stories like individuals who build the society against the idea of State that build its history, predetermined, defined by unreachable powers and therefore unchangeable.
However, common people struggle would have not reached its goal if a certain political situation would have not taken place and this was the Perestrojka and the collapse of Soviet Union. In many cases politics does not work in the same direction of the legitimate desire for freedom of individuals. And this is something which needs to be fixed.
In the same way that Berlin people were silently fighting and opposing the DDR regime, others are now striving in order to guarantee themselves a better, dictatorship-free future. Last summer we saw the brutal repression of the green protest in Iran, as well as in 2007 we saw Burma’s monks and citizens proudly walking into Rangoon streets to testimony their support to exiled opposition leader San Suu Kyi.
We have to support them, we cannot remain silent, we cannot keep on being just another Brick in the Wall, we have to smash it.
