My Brush with Reagan

I'm really too young to remember Reagan in much detail. But I have one near brush with him that meant a lot.

I was an exchange student in West Germany in 1986. I lived on my host family's dairy farm. But my host parents were determined that I was going to see more than just the farmlands of Gemmingen. So they arranged lots of day trips and set up visits with friends, family and all sorts of distant connections. The brother-in-law of a neighbor was a local politician in Berlin, so off we went to see the great city.

There were six of us - four German teens, myself and another American who was staying on a neighboring farm. We all packed into a car and drove the long way through East Germany to West Berlin. I didn't realize it at the time, but President Reagan was scheduled to visit Berlin that week. The first I knew was when all the Germans in the car started laughing and carrying on at something on the radio.
I asked what was so funny and was informed that my president had gone to the Berlin Wall and told Mr. Gorbachev to tear it down. They couldn't stop laughing at how idiotic a suggestion they thought this was.

During the visit I was able to visit the wall myself at Checkpoint Charlie and also where it snaked around to within a few blocks of the house where we were staying. It did look formidable and impregnable. And after all, it had been there in one form or another since before I was born. The Soviet Union looked strong and unlikely to want to tear it down anytime soon, unless it was in order to absorb all of West Berlin too.

I've had several opportunities to go back to Berlin, including the three years that I lived there. Only ten years after Reagan's speech, I visited with my husband. Wanting to show him where the wall had been, we went to the site of Checkpoint Charlie. Not only was there no wall, but there was another full block where I remembered the No Man's Land, double wall sections and watchtowers to have been. It was only by going back to Museum Haus am Checkpoint Charlie and then pacing east that I was able to give him an idea of about where the wall had been. A few years later, the Berlin city council voted to place markers along the streets of Berlin to indicated where the wall had once divided the city.

I loved to tell that story to Berliners and others when we lived there. Not as an I told you so about how great one American president or one political viewpoint was. But rather to remind them that dreams of change that can see impossible, desires to topple systems that seem of infinite endurance and to replace them with something better aren't just a folly worthy of mocking. They really can come to pass.