Bleh

I think I slept well last night. I didn’t go to bed quite as late as I often do and I don’t remember taking an inordinate length of time to doze off. I didn’t fall asleep immediately, to be sure, but it was still only a matter of minutes. I don’t recall waking up, other than my usual look at the clock at about 4.55 and I didn’t have to dash out to the smallest room at any point. As I say, I think I slept well.

So why the fek are my eyelids like lead this morning and my eyes feel as though someone has been spooning grit into them with gay abandon? Why does my chest feel like I have just sprinted a hundred yards?

Today is clearly a biorhythm bopping along the bottom of the tank day.

Bleh

I think I slept well last night. I didn’t go to bed quite as late as I often do and I don’t remember taking an inordinate length of time to doze off. I didn’t fall asleep immediately, to be sure, but it was still only a matter of minutes. I don’t recall waking up, other than my usual look at the clock at about 4.55 and I didn’t have to dash out to the smallest room at any point. As I say, I think I slept well.

So why the fek are my eyelids like lead this morning and my eyes feel as though someone has been spooning grit into them with gay abandon? Why does my chest feel like I have just sprinted a hundred yards?

Today is clearly a biorhythm bopping along the bottom of the tank day.

It was twenty years ago today

The fall of the Berlin Wall twenty years ago on 9-10 November 1989 is one of those rare occasions that nicely brings to an end (at least symbolically) the procession of events from an earlier action, or series of actions. It is rare enough for there to be a handy place to draw a line under an epoch and it is rarer too, for the cycle to end on its own anniversary.

The night of 9-10 November is not only the anniversary marking the fall of the Berlin Wall and ushering in the end of the so-called German Democratic Republic and arguably heralding the fall of the Soviet Empire, but it closes a chapter that started in 1938, with Kristallnacht, when the Nazis got openly serious in their was against Judaism, sending the first signals to the world that what they meant was rather more than just the usual anti-Semitic rhetoric often employed by bankrupt ideologies throughout history. To their credit, I understand that modern Germans commemorate and reflect upon that event as much as politicians may celebrate events fifty-one years more recent.

Less than a year after the first event, Europe was embarking on the bloodiest war in history, and less than a year after the second, the State behind it all was finally reunited.

I can’t quite remember what I was doing when the wall came down. That’s because unlike the moon landing, or the death of any number of politicians or celebrities, it happened over a period of days and weeks. I recall it started (or at least started being newsworthy) when the Hungarian border guards dismantled the barbed wire fences etc between Hungary and Austria and suddenly there were floods of East German “holiday makers” streaming through Czechoslovakia, into Hungary, through Austria and into the Federal Republic in their smelly and dilapidated old Trabants. I remember wondering how long it would be before it all went wrong and the boot came down.

Looking back on it now, the series of events that started with Polish dock workers striking in Gdansk in 1980 and culminating (arguably) with the failed August Coup in 1991, when Soviet tanks briefly shelled Boris Yeltsin’s “White House”, before withdrawing in confusion looks almost to be an inevitable historical process¹. I recall watching the events unfold on TV in my little Clapham garret. I had been moved in about a month. It was still some years before the advent of the Polish Brigade² and I was unused to having a very excitable elderly Polish landlady in the same house. Remembering the crack downs in Poland, dimly remembering the Prague Spring of 1968 (though not being even remotely aware of its significance at the time) and remembering the stories our Hungarian next door neighbour had told us when I was a kid, of fleeing Hungary in 1956, just ahead of the Soviet tanks, I recall being as much nervous as anything else when the crowds topped the Berlin Wall and the pickaxes came out.

I also recall feeling vaguely sad in a perverse sort of way that the certainties of the Cold War were receding. You knew who the bad guys were when you grew up during the Cold War unlike now, when the baddy is a stereotype rather than a state. I was also perversely sad that I had missed my opportunity to go to Berlin when it was the last divided relic of the allied occupation and showcase of the west.

But given what’s happened in the world since 1989: the ethnic cleansings in the Balkans during the 1990s, the wars in the Gulf and the War on Terror post 9/11, where the face of evil has become a face with a beard and a Keffiyeh, I wonder whether we should not think more about Kristallnacht and what it augured than the fall of the Berlin Wall.


¹In itself an ironically Marxist view of historical determinism.

²You will need to trail back about 5 years on this very journal to find references to them.

It was twenty years ago today

The fall of the Berlin Wall twenty years ago on 9-10 November 1989 is one of those rare occasions that nicely brings to an end (at least symbolically) the procession of events from an earlier action, or series of actions. It is rare enough for there to be a handy place to draw a line under an epoch and it is rarer too, for the cycle to end on its own anniversary.

The night of 9-10 November is not only the anniversary marking the fall of the Berlin Wall and ushering in the end of the so-called German Democratic Republic and arguably heralding the fall of the Soviet Empire, but it closes a chapter that started in 1938, with Kristallnacht, when the Nazis got openly serious in their was against Judaism, sending the first signals to the world that what they meant was rather more than just the usual anti-Semitic rhetoric often employed by bankrupt ideologies throughout history. To their credit, I understand that modern Germans commemorate and reflect upon that event as much as politicians may celebrate events fifty-one years more recent.

Less than a year after the first event, Europe was embarking on the bloodiest war in history, and less than a year after the second, the State behind it all was finally reunited.

I can’t quite remember what I was doing when the wall came down. That’s because unlike the moon landing, or the death of any number of politicians or celebrities, it happened over a period of days and weeks. I recall it started (or at least started being newsworthy) when the Hungarian border guards dismantled the barbed wire fences etc between Hungary and Austria and suddenly there were floods of East German “holiday makers” streaming through Czechoslovakia, into Hungary, through Austria and into the Federal Republic in their smelly and dilapidated old Trabants. I remember wondering how long it would be before it all went wrong and the boot came down.

Looking back on it now, the series of events that started with Polish dock workers striking in Gdansk in 1980 and culminating (arguably) with the failed August Coup in 1991, when Soviet tanks briefly shelled Boris Yeltsin’s “White House”, before withdrawing in confusion looks almost to be an inevitable historical process¹. I recall watching the events unfold on TV in my little Clapham garret. I had been moved in about a month. It was still some years before the advent of the Polish Brigade² and I was unused to having a very excitable elderly Polish landlady in the same house. Remembering the crack downs in Poland, dimly remembering the Prague Spring of 1968 (though not being even remotely aware of its significance at the time) and remembering the stories our Hungarian next door neighbour had told us when I was a kid, of fleeing Hungary in 1956, just ahead of the Soviet tanks, I recall being as much nervous as anything else when the crowds topped the Berlin Wall and the pickaxes came out.

I also recall feeling vaguely sad in a perverse sort of way that the certainties of the Cold War were receding. You knew who the bad guys were when you grew up during the Cold War unlike now, when the baddy is a stereotype rather than a state. I was also perversely sad that I had missed my opportunity to go to Berlin when it was the last divided relic of the allied occupation and showcase of the west.

But given what’s happened in the world since 1989: the ethnic cleansings in the Balkans during the 1990s, the wars in the Gulf and the War on Terror post 9/11, where the face of evil has become a face with a beard and a Keffiyeh, I wonder whether we should not think more about Kristallnacht and what it augured than the fall of the Berlin Wall.


¹In itself an ironically Marxist view of historical determinism.

²You will need to trail back about 5 years on this very journal to find references to them.