The global celebrations marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall aren't entirely about commemorating the rebirth of freedom or reliving those thrilling moments when a perverse and repressive system collapsed. Listen closely to the exalted commentary recounting the events of those historic days and you're also likely to hear the subtle intonations of regret and nostalgia.
I'm not speaking of ostalgie -- nostalgia for the Old East (ost in German) -- that is still felt by a large number of residents of the former East Germany and other Eastern bloc nations. Sad as it may be, it shouldn't be the least bit surprising that, after the initial euphoria, many in East Germany and the other Iron Curtain countries had a hard time transitioning from the boring predictability of totalitarian communism to the terrifying insecurity of democratic capitalism. There are plenty of people who feel just like the 60-year-old gravedigger I met in Bucharest a few weeks ago who wanted to be sure I knew "freedom" wasn't all that it was cracked up to be.
What I'm talking about, however, is nostalgia on the part of us Westerners who once deplored the evil absurdity of what the East German propagandists called the "anti-fascist protection barrier." Because, for all our collective disgust at the erection of a wall that caged people within their own country, that wall also provided the West -- particularly Americans -- with the sense of moral clarity and superiority that we now long for.
The awful truth is that in many ways the Berlin Wall, where at least 136 people were killed over 28 years, was almost as important in forming our sense of identity during the Cold War as it was to the people who were hemmed in by it.
A menacing symbol of global division, the wall required us to vehemently declare which side we were on, ideologically speaking. It could induce even the hardiest campus leftist -- someone who was reflexively appalled by President Reagan labeling the Soviet Union "the evil empire" -- to start belting out "The Star-Spangled Banner." To peer east into no-man's land from an observation post in West Berlin was to look our proverbial evil twin in the face in order to reassure ourselves that we were on the right side.
