The beginning of die Wende

Twenty years ago today the Berlin Wall, the concrete symbol of the Cold War, began to come down. Günter Schabowski, a member of the politburo, announced that permission to leave East Germany would no longer be denied. “Thousands of Berliners clambered across the wall at the Brandenburg Gate,” the New York Times reported, “passing through the historic arch that for so long had been inaccessible to Berliners of either side.” President Reagan’s confident prediction of how the Cold War would end (“We win, they lose”) was gloriously fulfilled.

As far as I am aware, not a single American writer with pretensions to literary importance has touched the fall of the Wall, one of the central events in the history of political freedom. Since 1989, when American novelists have selected Berlin as a setting, theirs has been postwar occupied Berlin (Theodore Weesner, Novemberfest, 1994), the divided Cold War city (Charles McCarry, Christopher’s Ghosts, 2007), or the vibrant reunified city that only wants to forget the Communists, although it remains haunted by the Holocaust (Ward Just, The Weather in Berlin, 2002). Perhaps because I have always admired Crazy in Berlin (1958), his first novel, I expected Thomas Berger—a writer who has never shied away from his German-American background—to take Carlo Reinhart back to the city where, as a U.S. soldier after the war, he had resolved “to know the German actuality.” Like Updike, though, Berger was apparently satisfied with a tetralogy, and with leaving his four-time protagonist in middle age.

But this can’t be right. There must be some American writer I am forgetting, who has had the presumption to imagine what it must have been like in Berlin twenty years ago this week.

German writers have required no presumption to do so. The Goethe-Institut lists thirty-five works by twenty-nine German writers on the fall and die Wende, the reunification of the two Germanies. In the Guardian’s book blog, Suzanne Munshower compiles the top ten books about the Wall, including Peter Schneider’s Mauerspringer (translated as The Wall Jumper in 1983)—“what might be the best Wall fiction ever written,” she says. The best single historical and political volume is William F. Buckley’s Fall of the Berlin Wall (2004).

From twenty years ago today until September 11, 2001, Americans famously took a “holiday from history.” American writers apparently had begun their holiday some time before, and declined to interrupt it even for the collapse of the Wall that had divided the world.