The Foreign Service Journal, November 2019

68 NOVEMBER 2019 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL A Well-Baby Checkup to Remember Michael Dodman West Berlin, Federal Republic of Germany w hile I never served or lived in Berlin, the wall is etched on my professional and personal life. Fortuitously assigned to Warsaw for my first tour in 1988, I spent most of the next 25 years working to support Central Europe’s transition to democracy and a market economy. Today, like most everyone, I tend to date the beginning of the end to Nov. 9, 1989, even though I lived through Poland’s first democratic election many months earlier. But my connection to the wall is more personal than profes- sional. On Nov. 9, 1989, I was in Berlin for the happy occasion of our first-born son’s first well-baby checkup. For more than a year my wife, Joan, and I had been regular visitors toWest Berlin. What started as our lifeline for shopping became evenmore impor- tant as the destination for prenatal care, and then the place of our son’s birth in September 1989. What I remember of that fateful day was, first and foremost, that Brian passed that first examwith flying colors (I’d like to think there is a direct line between that exam and his serving with distinction as a U.S. Marine many years later). Ensconced as always at the temporary duty (TDY) quarters the then-consulate maintained in the far southwest of the city, I do not recall being much affected by the news that the travel restric- tions had been lifted. But I remember vividly an early morning visit to downtown Potsdamer Platz, where we had gone regu- larly over the previous year to see the wall and the disruptions it caused to the once-vibrant center of Berlin. It was either Nov. 10 or 11. It was incredibly foggy that morning, which made even more surreal the sight of gaps newly created in the wall, through which shabby East German Trabant autos were emerging. Somewhere far away fromwhere I’mwriting this, there is a box of old photos with one of an East German guard sticking his head through an opening in the wall—I like to imagine he was debating whether he should make a run for it, in case this magic moment ended, and the wall was resealed. Over the following year we returned regularly to West Berlin. The hassles remained—renewing short-term East German transit visas, the dance when crossing to East Berlin of not letting the border guards stamp the diplomatic passport—but the changes came ever more rapidly. Now on our visits to Potsdamer Platz we brought a hammer and took home a piece of the wall; there was some sense of urgency about taking pictures of it rapidly disap- pearing. In 1999 we returned to Warsaw for a second tour. We loved seeing the changes Poland had experienced in less than a decade; there was no longer the need to travel monthly to Berlin for shop- ping or medical care. For a vacation in 2001 we piled Brian and his sisters in the car and took the old route to Berlin for the first time. The two-lane road had been nearly destroyed by the freight traffic on the Berlin-Warsaw-Moscow route. Potsdamer Platz was Sections of the wall flank an original guard shack, battered but not removed, on what was the east side of the wall. Berlin, 2015. JAMESTALALAY