The Foreign Service Journal, November 2019

72 NOVEMBER 2019 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL boosted us. Once on our perch, there wasn’t much to do but talk to others and celebrate with champagne toasts. Getting down from the wall in that condition was challenging, to say the least. Little East German cars—Trabis—filled the streets of West Ber- lin. Sales of champagne and alcohol exploded. Families separated for decades were able to cross the border and reunite. Rock bands from all over the world flooded into Berlin to play sold-out con- certs. Every venue was packed. It was a time of great jubilation. As a teenager, I had been focused before on things such as try- ing to emulate the latest Western fashions, like acid-washed jeans and Chuck Taylor shoes. As kids living in West Berlin, 300 miles inside East Germany, my friends and I often felt very discon- nected from the outside world. The sudden attention that began on the evening of Nov. 9 blew our minds. After the Berlin Wall fell and Germany was reunited in Octo- ber 1990, Berlin acquired big-city problems, immigration issues and crime. My four years there, from 1986 to 1990, were a very lucky time. Laura D. Williams, a Foreign Service kid, lived in Berlin from 1986 to 1990. She joined the Diplomatic Security Service as a special agent in 2000 and is currently assigned to the Foreign Affairs Security Training Center in Dunn Loring, Virginia. The Professor Gets It Wrong Barclay Ward Sewanee, Tennessee I n November 1989 I was pursuing my second career, teach- ing at The University of the South (Sewanee), and was asked to speak on the fall of the Berlin Wall to a gathering of students and their parents on family weekend. I think that most of what I had to say about the fall of the wall and its significance for Europe was reasonably accurate, except for my final point: The Soviet Union will never, under any circumstances, accept the reunification of East and West Germany. Fortunately for me, by January 1990 I was happily working a different temporary job at the U.S. Arms Control and Disar- mament Agency, safely removed frommy students and their parents—who had been so badly misinformed on family weekend in November. Barclay Ward was a member of the U.S. Foreign Service from 1961 to 1975. He was a consultant on nuclear nonproliferation at ACDA and the State Department until 2015. Mr. Ward lives in Brookline, Vermont. From Bulgarian Student to U.S. FSO Assia Ivantcheva Sofia, Bulgaria o n Nov. 10, a day after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I was on a bus in my hometown of Sofia. Someone whispered: “Zhivkov is no longer in power.” Another passenger quickly hushed him up. What if it were not true and someone was listening? Zhivkov had been in power for 35 years, the longest- standing dictator in Eastern Europe. It was difficult to imagine him gone. But it was true. Soon mass protests began; students camped outside the parliament and “occupied” the university, insisting on free elections. I was one of those students, riding the wave of public euphoria. All of a sudden everything seemed possible. While the first election did not bring the swift changes that we hoped for, the course toward a free Europe was set. 1989 was a miraculous year for me. Only four months before the fall of the wall, I was on an exchange-student visit to Mos- cow State University, where I made friends with some German students from East Berlin. We were all fascinated by perestroika and the freedom the Russians enjoyed back then, the multitude of newspapers and public debates. Ironically, my new Ger- man friends and I both thought how lucky the Russians were; none of us thought we would soon see anything like this in our countries. But only months later we were writing letters to each other, describing the miraculous events in Berlin and Sofia, and comparing notes on student movements. Joining the surge of Eastern Europeans who went to study in the United States, I traveled to New Hampshire, determined to return to the Balkans with a degree. Instead, upon graduat- ing from college I ended up on a fellowship at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C. At that time brutal nationalism and atrocities were spreading across the former Yugoslavia. I advocated passionately for the United States and Europe to intervene as I looked for my “calling” in life. My calling, as it turned out—once I was a U.S. citizen and earned a Ph.D. in international relations—was to join USAID’s Foreign Service. What better job than providing international assistance to countries experiencing democratic transitions and trying to knock down their own inner “walls”? I did not quite choose my career; rather, it chose me. My first assignment was to Ukraine, then under President Leonid Kuchma. Few could have predicted the 2004 Orange Revolu- tion—the regime fell without a drop of blood owing to the cour-