Berlin’s Anniversary

My National Post column on the fall of the Berlin Wall can be read here.

The German-born historian Fritz Stern tells this story in his memoirs. He is invited in 1981 to a lavishly funded conference on the past and future of German science. “It was soon apparent that the conclave was meant to ponder why Germans were no longer at the top of the scientific heap.”

Fritz was amazed by his fellow conferees’ bafflement.

“Couldn’t the Germans see the one quite obvious cause of their nation’s decline? … Perhaps the subject was too embarrassing to mention, the point too obvious to make?”

Perhaps the point is obvious, and yet it still needs to be said. Nov. 9 is not only the anniversary of the opening of the Berlin Wall. It is also the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the organized attack upon German Jews in 1938, and of Hitler’s Beer Hall putsch in 1923.

Some kind dispensation of fate has arranged for this grim anniversary now to be tinctured with the joy of 1989. Yet there is a reason that the new reunified German state has chosen to set its national day not on Nov. 9, but on Oct. 3: the anniversary of the formal merger of the two Germanies in 1990.

Nov. 9 is the more momentous date, but like so many German dates, it is perhaps too momentous to be remembered in full.

On this particular Nov. 9, the Germans will want to remember only what is joyous. Even the day’s anthem is Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. Let’s join with them. They have built a good society and a solid democracy. They have earned the right to a little forgetting.