Berlin: just another prick on the wall

Goldfish are commonly said to have a three-second memory, which has given rise to many a joke about the delight a goldfish must experience every three seconds or so as it drifts in circles around its bowl and sees the same bubble-burping castle as if for the first time. Well, "Ich bin ein Goldfisch," as they say here in Berlin. Despite having crossed and re-crossed a dozen lines of longitude and latitude over the last few months, my ability to locate myself in a cartographical sense has not improved beyond that of our minimally-neuroned cousins (Respect, of course, to the salmon and its impossible ability to navigate hundreds of miles of open ocean.) By contrast, Cara will strike out into an entirely new city, and within minutes, she’ll put away the guide book and say “I think we’ll take a short cut here.” I’ve even seen her give directions to locals who have wandered into an unfamiliar part of town. She leads me along like a stunned Chihuahua, and I simply take in what I can. While Cara is building a mental atlas rivaling Google Maps, my geographical knowledge of the world remains, shall we say, impressionistic at best.

Which is a fair description, I’ve come to realize, of my knowledge of the world in general. Like every Canadian, I revel in Rick Mercer’s “Talking to Americans.” You might remember the one where he gets a Harvard professor to congratulate us for outlawing the practice of abandoning our seniors on ice floes; but like any honest Canadian, I’m also privately relieved that the rest of the world hasn’t thought it fair game to subject Canadians to the same exercise. My understanding of the Berlin Wall is, I hope, not typical of my fellow citizens. I have a collage of vague knowledge of the Wall and the whole East/West Berlin thing; I knew that there was a whopping great wall; I remember Reagan asking Gorbachev to please take it down; I remember East German shot putters. But in the interest of journalistic integrity, I have to admit that I never thought to ask myself why East Berlin was communist and West Berlin wasn’t. I never asked myself why American and Russian tanks were facing each other down in Germany. The Potsdam Conference, the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift? That’s all way outside my scope as a goldfish. I always thought the Wall just ran in a straight line right through Berlin. I didn’t know that it entirely surrounded West Berlin. I also never realized that the East Germans built the wall, not around their own country, but to enclose someone else’s. Is it my goldfish mind that finds this, frankly, quite cheeky? Is it because I lack gravitas, not to mention historical vision, that I think this might be one of the funniest things one country has ever done to another? I can imagine the discussion:

Ulbricht: …well, why don’t we just build a wall around them?
Khrushchev: But Walter, can we really do that?
Ulbricht: Come, Nikita! Live a little! Build a wall, I dare you…

And so, West Berlin went to bed one night and woke up to find that the crazy neighbour had built a fence around them. I’m ashamed to say that that makes me giggle. Berliners themselves, whose families were torn apart, and whose teenagers bled out in the death zones, wouldn’t find it so amusing.

Still, the wall is gone now, though not entirely. Myriad chunks of it are for sale, for a couple of Euros apiece, in tourist shops all over Berlin. I suspect that if all those chunks were glued back together, there’d be one or two extra walls left over.