November 9th, 1989

Germany Remembers Fall of Berlin Wall - Article

Video about the Berlin Wall

I was thirteen years old. My dad was stationed in Berlin before, from 1978 to 1985. So when we went back to Berlin in the summer of 1989, it was like coming home. Up until this point in my life, and even now, I have spent the largest percentage of my life growing up in Berlin. Living there felt right; every time my dad was stationed stateside, I would freak out. This was borne from the countless hours of TV that had been taped by our extended family and sent to us, so we would have something to watch. Unlike the US in 1989, Berlin had ONE TV station, AFN, the Armed Forces Network. It was one part patriotic propaganda and one part escapism. The tapes my aunts and uncles would send were completely with everything American, including commercials. And I ate it all up. Like a sponge I soaked up every ounce of info I could on America. At this time, the only part of America I knew about from experience, was Sierra Vista, Arizona (very flat and dry), and Fort Polk/Leesville, Louisiana (meh, kids with a seriously askew sense of self-entitlement). I had no idea about the rest of this great country. I would ask my mom, when we had to travel to the US, if we had to stop at the border of California and get Nevada money, thinking that the states were just like all of the European countries, and would need the appropriate currency.

Safety was also an issue for me. There was a great sense of safety in Berlin, and all of this TV I had been watching from the US made it seem like every corner in America had someone waiting to take your wallet or shoot you. It was extremely nerve-wracking to deal with. When we moved back state-side, my junior year of High School, I remember having a panic attack about what I was about to experience. In a way, I had lived my whole life in a gated community, my eyes shielded, by my parents and the military community, from things I didn’t need to know about, or couldn’t comprehend at my impressionable age.

Shortly after the Wall came down, my dad got stationed back state-side, and we moved permanently back to the US. I can honestly say that I am still coping with living in the US, still feeling as though this is the foreign country to me.