Tuesday, November 5, 2019

Tuesday, 11/5


I kinda wish I was in Germany this week.

To be a little more specific, I kinda wish I was in two of my favorite places in Germany this week, Leipzig and Berlin. Why, you ask? Well, I answer, because Saturday is the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which means that protests that started earlier that year in this Leipzig church courtyard--



Eventually led to this--



If you were following along with the blogs I wrote while in Leipzig earlier this year you may recall the fascination I seem to have developed with both of the fall of the Wall and how the protests that led to it started in another city 150 miles away. Not only is it an amazing piece of recent history, but it's also a story of authoritarian tyrants and their desperate attempts to cling to power through lies, deceit, & force, and how the sheer human need to be free brought them down.

It's a story that's as vital and important today as it was back then.

Berlin, especially, is going whole hog on the celebration, with history walks & lectures, and an amazing light show throughout the city where they light up the sides of building with projections of scenes of those fateful few days. I would love to just wander around and soak it all in. Leipzig actually had their big annual “Light Fest” a few weeks ago, where city residents gather in the plaza where 400,000 of them protested a few days before the Wall fell for a candlelight commemoration of those heady days--


(That's obviously not my picture, by the way, but I sure wish I could've been there to take it).

I think this is just a coincidence, too, but the soccer teams of those two cities—RB Leipzig and Hertha Berlin—meet at Berlin's Olympic Stadium Saturday afternoon. I don't know if that's something the Bundesliga actually considered or it they just got lucky on, but it would be another great reason to be over there this week.

If you're interested in any of this history, there are a couple of phone apps I might recommend. “Leipzig 89” tells all about what happened in the city in the six months before the Wall came down (including the arrest of street musicians who defied a ban on actually playing music in the streets, believe it or not), while one called “Berlin Wall” talks about the building and history of the structure, how it came down, and the story of those who died trying to escape the fascist regime ruling over them.

They're both available from Apple and Google; like I said, I highly recommend them, especially this week...a week that would be great for anyone either of those really cool places.

Okay...that's enough German history for today. Tomorrow, a tale from local history!


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