History, the Concatenation of Human Experiences :: European Europe History

History, the Concatenation of gentle ExperiencesIn June 1961, I left Berlin, Germany, with my pargonnts, my sister, and my Swedish cousin enroute to Sweden for what was to be dickens weeks of Scandinavian fun. The Russian soldiers who processed us through the checkpoints were impeccably robed in jodhpurs and the shiniest black riding boots I had ever seen. It was obvious they had been carefully selected for this job, which entailed a goodly measure of public relations the Communists displayed only their best. The soldiers were non only good looking and efficient, processing our papers quickly on that day they were noticeably relaxed, with genuine smiles on their faces. A week precedent than planned, my family returned to Berlin, driving through the same checkpoints. This time the atmosphere was tense. There were no smiles. Passports and other papers were scrutinized slowly, creating long delays, much to our discomfort. What had caused the change? An event that forget be taught in history classes for hundreds of years. An event that even a metre years from now give be at least a footnote in the history books. The East Germans had erected a wall, dividing one of the pieces most famous cities in two. Barbara Tuchman would arguecorrectly, I trustthat it is too soon to write the history of the Berlin Crisis. This contemporary generation, born and embossed in the tensions of the Cold War, will record the facts and write the narrative, but we are too close to have a good perspective on it (Tuchman 27-28). For the interpretation of those facts, we will have to wait for the generation now cosmos born, a generation which will have few, if any, emotional attachments to the event and wherefore be better able to analyze it with some objectivityor ignorance, as Edward H. Carr would call it (9). This is how history is written. It is a processa put down of facts and later an interpreting of those facts to relate them to the future generations. The question, of course, is what history our descendants will write. Human beings are by nature egocentric. In the West we learn future historians will see the crisis as we do. The wall was not constructed for dreadful reasons it was a manifestation of the evil empire, was it not?