The Porous Nature of Borders and Walls

In 2005, I went to northeast France with my Mom and Dad.  We went to several other European countries too--just a quick zip across the border for lunch.  We went through checkpoints that were closed, but the apparatus was still there:  the guard booth, the gates that stayed permanently open. 

And those were checkpoints between countries that were friends.

On this day in 1989, one of those checkpoints opened, and history took a different course.  I'm talking about the Berlin Wall.  There had been talk about easing the checkpoints, but no clear plan.  On this night in 1989, after people heard that the borders would open and started to assemble, the guards feared that the gathering would turn violent.  Instead of shooting, they opened the gates.  People spent the week-end tearing down the wall, chunk by chunk.

My best friend from high school had joined the Army in 1987, and she was stationed in West Germany.  I wrote to her to ask if she had been on the scene of any of the historic events we were hearing about in the U.S.  Later, when she returned, she gave me this chunk of concrete:

She said it was part of the wall.  It looks like the kind of thing you might pick up at any construction site.  I wrote a short story that begins this way:  "Kate thinks that chunk of rock is a piece of the Berlin Wall. I let her believe it."  The story is titled "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

I've also written a short story with the title "Border Crossings."  And "Borderlands."  Clearly I've been shaped by the idea of borders.

Once borders seemed so permanent, back when I was a child and the world had been carved into East and West (East/West is a great film about those borders, if anyone needs a primer).  It seemed that some had been born on the wrong side of that border, and it would always be so.

In the 1980's, the idea of borders began to shift.  Now they seem so fluid that we can't count on them at all anymore.  Perhaps it's not surprising that we see a political backlash, a yearning and demanding for borders that are less porous.

But on this important anniversary, let us root for reunification.  Or at least for a level of porousness so that loved ones are no longer separated by brute force.