The Foreign Service Journal, November 2019

62 NOVEMBER 2019 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL brought back unpleasant memories from my childhood and teenage years. I was born and raised near Cologne, Germany, the daughter of parents who had fled East Germany when they were in their early 20s, shortly before the wall was built. My father had been an outspoken critic of the East German regime during his high school years. He had been told by the princi- pal of his school one day before his graduation that to prove himself a loyal East German citizen, he would be sent to work in a coal mine for two years before being allowed to study at a university. That night my father said goodbye to his mother and father and left for West Berlin; my mother followed him a year later. His parents stayed behind in East Germany, and he was not able to see them for the next seven years. While I was growing up, we were allowed to visit my grandparents, my aunt and my cousin once a year; but those were not happy experiences. East Germany in the late 1960s and 1970s was gray and polluted and stagnant, full of banners with optimistic slogans hanging on decaying buildings. There was nothing to buy, and my cousin and her friends treated me like a celebrity simply because I was wearing blue jeans, something they could only dream of. Every aspect of the place made me feel uncomfort- able. I never knew whether our East German relatives were so welcoming because they genuinely liked us, or whether they were just happy because we showered them with Western goods every time we visited. I was always relieved when we got in the car and started driving back to West Germany. On the evening of Nov. 9, after hanging up the phone, I remembered those visits. I thought of my cousin, whomarried an Austrian because that enabled her to leave East Germany; my aunt, who could never bring herself to leave her hometown and found her little niche in the system; andmy grandparents, no longer alive, who had lived two-thirds of their lives under dictatorships. But above all, I felt my father’s utter joy about the sudden collapse of the East German regime and the happiness he felt knowing that East Germans would finally be able to live in freedom. Christiane Armstrong was a Foreign Service spouse for 29 years until her husband’s retirement in 2016. The Armstrongs were in Budapest when the wall came down. No Inspections, No Guards, Nothing Kelly Lauritzen Aschaffenburg, Germany w hack! Off came a chunk from the BerlinWall. Whack! Another chunk flew. It was two weeks after the BerlinWall fell, and we were doing our part to reduce it to rubble. During the Cold War, I was the platoon leader in a nuclear- tipped missile artillery battalion in Aschaffenburg, Germany. The beauty of the countryside belied the tension between East and West that was constantly on our minds. Every day at work, we were literally training for a nuclear holocaust. When cracking the “cookies” with nuclear release codes that came down in the middle of the night, we were never certain until the end that it was a training exercise. At the time, official military orders authorized military mem- bers and their families to travel to the Soviet occupation zone. My wife Marion’s parents had come to visit in October 1989. To give them a taste of communist East Berlin, we decided to travel to Berlin on the military train. The journey was harrowing. At the border into the Soviet sector, the train was stopped. Soviet guards in fur hats closely examined our papers. The morn- ing after arriving in Berlin, we experienced an even more tense situation at Checkpoint Charlie: concertina wire, machine gun nests, sandbags and inspections. Strolling through the quiet plazas of East Berlin was quite a contrast to the hustle and bustle of West Berlin. In the shops, you had to ask the clerk to see an item and wait for them to get around to serving you, only to find out that items on the shelf were not actually for sale. Our visit lived up to the billing: it was a fascinating glimpse into the lives of those on the other side. What we could not have imagined at the time was that two weeks later the whole system would collapse. Watching the TV news, we saw chaotic, joyous scenes with masses of people surg- ing into West Berlin. We immediately knew we had to go back to personally witness this historic change with our three children. That’s how we found ourselves back at the Berlin Wall just two weeks after it fell. This time, someone had left a series of sledge hammers along a portion of the wall. We each took a few East Germany in the late 1960s and 1970s was gray and polluted and stagnant, full of banners with optimistic slogans hanging on decaying buildings. –Christiane Armstrong