"A worker started repair work on a long stretch of a Berlin Wall remnant Wednesday at the East Side Gallery. The same 118 artists from 21 countries who were commissioned to paint the wall in 1990 will repaint their pictures after the concrete is repaired." (Herbert Knosowski/Associated Press) (Image credit here)
Because half of my ethnic heritage is German, in December of 1988 I leaped at the opportunity to give a lecture in East Berlin, and stayed with friends who lived there. One day I asked my host family if I could visit the Wall, so under cover of darkness they drove me and my wife to a deserted portion and I ran over to the wall and scrabbled at it with my fingertips (having forgoten to bring a tool), finally managing to dislodge a portion of the cement, and brought my trophy back to the car. Then Jurgen informed me that had I tried that a few weeks earlier I would certainly have been shot.
I still treasure that fragment of the Wall; the following year I watched with great interest the live coverage on television of the wall coming down, and it is with no small sense of irony that I read today about the efforts underway to repair the fragments of the Wall that still exist.
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