History In The Making

Oh, I know I said in my last blog entry that I would answer those questions that are hanging over our heads…but did you check the date? I can’t let this date go by without spending time on this date…the beauty and importance of that important-as-July-4th-date of November 9.

Those who witnessed this night 20 years ago of the events that unfolded in Berlin will never forget what happened—the night the wall came down. On the evening of November 9, 1989, I was watching TV. The Berlin Wall was coming down, and I was flabbergasted.

I was a graduate student at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island and I lived on the third floor of a house on Lloyd Avenue. There was a great deal I did not like about graduate school at Brown, but I really liked a course I was taking on the history of Eastern Europe with a man awaiting confirmation to become the next U.S. Ambassador to Poland. The course filled in so many blanks about my knowledge of Europe, since every course I had ever had was a western Europe focus. I was watching the news with delight but also with a deeper knowledge since this course from Tom Simons.

From my mid-20-year-old perspective, that Wall had always been there, and I had no reason to doubt that it would remain there forever. I had been to the wall in the summer of 1988 with my great friend Tony. In the summer of 1988 that wall seemed as permanent as what I hoped for my friendship with Tony. (Fortunately, my friendship with Tony is more permanent than that wall—it has lasted and stood the test of time.) During my only visit to the divided Berlin, in 1988, I had experienced the city in all its terrifying absurdity. I vividly recall the “ghost stations” of the subway: some Western subway lines passed through Eastern territory, resulting in a surreal glimpse of that life. So the news of the wall coming down was like somebody telling me that the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates had reversed course overnight, and everything we thought we knew and accepted about the cold war had vanished, or crumbled, like the wall.

I looked in wonder at the pictures of people dancing on the wall in front of the Brandenburg Gate. I stared agape as Peter Jennings provided commentary about the millions out in the streets of Berlin, complete strangers falling into one another’s arms, smiling and weeping at the same time. The images could not have been more emotional, and since this history course was in the front of my brain it did not impact me as just an abstract event. This was history in the making. I felt almost as joyous as the woman from East Berlin in her pajamas and robe who didn’t even take time to change. She felt so compelled to go immediately out into the night and taste the freedom of crossing into West Berlin.

History in the making is all too often tragic. We see that all too often with shootings, the most recent the tragic shooting on the grounds of Fort Hood in Texas. History in the making usually leaves many with a gnawing sense of fear since those plate-shifting moments involve such change that can almost paralyze us. Only rarely is history in the making capable of irony. November 9, 1989, was one of those rare moments when irony reigned, because East Germany’s bureaucratic socialism died as it had lived—with a bureaucratic snafu. As we learned later in the night, as the revelers surmounted that famous wall and danced, the speaker of the politburo had simply misunderstood that body’s decision and by releasing incorrect information about the lifting of travel restrictions, triggered the fall of the Wall! That scene must have been just like a scene from the TV show M*A*S*H—Groucho Marx couldn’t have scripted a more ludicrous moment! It was Germany’s happiest hour. Germany, with a history so full of iron-fisted terror, war and wanton violence, had finally experienced a revolution without a single bullet being fired.

We can better view the sweep of that night now. Never has liberation come to so many people all at once — to Eastern Europe’s millions, released from decades of bondage; to the world, freed from the shadow of nuclear Armageddon; and to the democratic West, victorious after a century of ideological struggle. Never has so great a revolution been accomplished so swiftly and so peacefully, by ordinary men and women rather than utopians with guns.

I heard a commentator on CNN say earlier today that even twenty years later, we still haven’t come to terms with “the scope of our deliverance.” He cited Francis Fukuyama who famously described the post-Communist era as “the end of history.” By this, he didn’t mean the end of events — wars and famines, financial panics and terrorist bombings. He meant the disappearance of any enduring, existential threat to liberal democracy and free-market capitalism.

Twenty years later many revolutionary consequences of that night lie behind us. The Soviet Union and its empire and international order quietly disappeared. Germany was reunited. The peripheral Soviet satellites won independence. Numerous civil wars around the war ended. Apartheid in South Africa ended. A disintegrating Yugoslavia degenerated into war and ethnic cleansing. The great European Union enlargement came about in 2004. And in the wake of the euphoria of 1989, Palestinians and Israelis came closer to peace than at any time since.

As the victorious heir to the collapsed cold war order, the United States stood alone, undisputed, at the peak of its global power. Twenty years later, have we squandered that special status? We have to look beyond the irony and the euphoria to deal with the remnants of that night twenty years ago.

I remember the following day in class with Professor Simons—seriously one of the most momentous days in my education—how would we fold in the events of the night before? Would we simply dance and frolic like the Berliners on television? Would we continue analyzing Joseph Rothshild’s book like the day before? Professor Simons was a career diplomat having spent years in the eastern bloc. How would he react? Well, he strode up to the lectern in the room, held aloft his notes for class, and ripped them up. He said, “everything we knew, everything we thought we knew, changed last night. I’m not quite sure what kind of world we are going to be in.” But he had the biggest smile on his face.

In our own way we at KA are in the stew pot of history in the making. The vision of the school is to create a kind of school that has never existed in this region. The making of history, the birthing of something new, is often excruciating. We have had disciplinary incidences recently that seem to suggest that our history in the making is too hard, which would be tragic.

But then last night I remembered the night I met Eric, our headmaster, at a fancy restaurant in New York, just after New Years’ in 2007. We were talking about the birthing of the school, and one of his comments has stayed with me. He mentioned that he knew the school would be on its way, and its course steady, when he heard students making music at the school.

Last evening, following an update on a four-hour disciplinary committee hearing from the night before, I attended a student chamber music concert. It was a modest concert. In the last week a wonderfully talented American chamber music quartet had been in residence at KA and the few who attended their concerts had been enraptured. Our students wanted to show off their own skills. Few of our students had ever played an instrument before coming to KA. I sat with a devoted audience and enjoyed their efforts. It took me back to Eric’s 2007 comments about his hopes for this plate-shifting school. Some days we seem to be in crisis—focusing on that 20% or so of bottom feeders who can drag down our spirits.

But I remembered Eric’s words that when he would finally hear students making music he would know that our course was steady.

I watched Faisal’s steady bow on his violin, George’s steady bow on his cello, Anna Rose’s confidence with her flute and Leen’s steady accompaniment on piano, and I felt wonderfully calmer about our own history in the making.