20 Years Later

Jump to Comments

November 9, 1989: I’m seven. I’m in my room — I don’t recall what exactly I was doing, but chances are good it involved the Babysitters’ Club books or stuffed animals — when Tony Russo drags me out telling me I need to watch something on television. “This is important,” he says to me, plunking me down in front of footage of the Berlin Wall falling.

What's Left of the Wall Today (well, in March 2009, anyway...)

I understand, however vaguely, that somewhere far away, the world is changing. The people dancing on the wall look fascinating: teenagers in jeans who look crazily ecstatic as the pick up hammers and shout and bust into the cement and wire. Whatever had been going on before this moment, I know, must have been bad.

November 9, 2009: At 27, I’m recently back from life in a post-Communist country. Before leaving, Hungary and all of its cohort, were that gray and dreary place the wall-busting kids seemed to be so happy to leave. As I sat on the last leg of my flight last August, I remember a sudden, gripping fear: what the hell was I doing?

But Hungary turned out to be much different than those of us 80s-children Americans, raised on pictures of breadlines and sad women in babushkas, could ever expect. It was thriving and lively, and those events of 1989 — to a newcomer ex-pat — seemed so far away.

Of course, that’s both true and untrue. The legacy of 40+ years of the Cold War were not smashed in a single hammer blow, or even in the 20 years since one wall in one city in one country fell.

Checkpoint Charlie -- once where secrets and spies passed between East and West; now, a stop where tourists can pose for pictures and buy fake GDR visas

As an American in a post-Communist country, I got plenty of cheaper prices and Commie kitsch: you could enjoy Trabi-spotting in my Budapest neighborhood (or sit in one at my favorite bar) or buy candles in the shape of Lenin’s head at Statue Park. When in Berlin last March, tour guides dressed as East German soldiers sold visas with faux GDR stamps and people posed under the Checkpoint Charlie sign all day. Sometimes, it all felt a little slimy: are we laughing at what happened? But then, another part of me wondered if the “laugh” wasn’t a good thing: doesn’t the fact that people have turned the oppressor into kitsch become an act of defiance and freedom from the old order?

My good friend Karolinka in Bulgaria (who arrived in her post-Communist land the same time I did, but still remains) might put it best in her post today. She writes: “sometimes I think I am living here because I can. And this in and of itself is a remarkable thing.” Indeed, the fact that I, random American girl, happily bounced off to Hungary, rented an apartment, spoke in English to my friends, and wore my Obama “Hope” t-shirt (to general applause) on a Budapest metro still remains pretty darn amazing. In my own lifetime, visiting the country was difficult to the point of impossibility, and it wouldn’t be anyone’s first vacation destination. But not only did I visit, the city and country have become as much a part of my heart as my own hometown — and I had so many people excited to see the city that my studio was a veritable hostel. This, in the “gray and dreary” east?

20 years later, it is remarkable indeed.

4 Comments

Filed under travel