A tale of two walls

A tale of two walls

EDITOR:

Something there is that doesn’t like a wall. Those immortal words from a Robert Frost poem came to full life 20 years ago with the fall of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9, 1989. By then, almost no one still liked that wall, but its sudden fall took just about everyone by great surprise. Everyone, that is, but a small group of devout Christians in the East German city of Leipzig, where this miraculous revolution of our times germinated.

Under the prophetic leadership of the pastor of Leipzig’s St. Nicholas Church, a humble man with the remarkable name of Christian Fuehrer, a small group of Christians formed a prayer circle called “Swords into Plowshares” a decade before the wall fell. Every Monday beginning at 5 p.m. sharp, members of Swords into Plowshares gathered in the church sanctuary for prayer and discussion. Attendance in the early years remained low, and participation in these prayers was, like everything else in the former German Democratic Republic, monitored by the Stasi (the secret police). Yet since the prayers and discussions were strictly for and about peace, hardly a subversive theme in the GDR, nothing was officially done to stop them, until it was too late.

By fall 1989, it was too late.

Hundreds of people, many in a church for the first time, packed the sanctuary of St. Nicholas every Monday evening during September and October of that historic year. The critical mass was reached on Oct. 25, when the church was packed to capacity and thousands more stood outside holding candles in the night. Also packed, albeit with heavily armed troops and police, was the adjoining Opera Plaza.

A bloody suppression of nonviolent protest, like what happened in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square or on Kent State’s campus, seemed unavoidable. Thousands of participants, singing “We Shall Overcome” in English, took to the streets of Leipzig in an unauthorized demonstration following the prayer service. The order to shoot them was given. It was not followed. No one knows exactly why.

Perhaps it was the courageous intervention of Kurt Masur, the highly respected conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, who passionately pleaded with troops not to open fire. Perhaps it was an intervention of a different and higher sort, one that no army can overcome.

Leipzig, after all, is the city of Bach, who gave life to some of the most divine music every composed. The in-breaking of divine forces through the social ministry of Martin Luther led to the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation not far from Leipzig. That same power was planted, like a mustard seed, in the heart of this heroic city within the confines of that Monday peace prayer circle. It burst out in a nonviolent revolution of candles on that fateful October evening, and within the following weeks it accomplished that which the mightiest armies in human history could not: the Fall of the Wall, the end of the Cold War, and the re-unification of Europe.

That was 20 years ago. Since then, another notorious wall has been erected. This one, funded in part by U.S. tax dollars, cuts through the heart of the Holy Land. Euphemistically called a “security fence” by its builders, Israel’s wall extends along the entire western perimeter of the West Bank of Occupied Palestine, and, in places, is twice as high as the Berlin Wall was. Like the Berlin Wall, Israel’s wall cruelly divides a people and renders their repressed lives increasingly more burdensome.

As was the case for the Berlin Wall, there is no justification beyond self-serving propaganda, for the existence of this new wall of hostility in our times and with our funds. Perhaps its promoters should re-read recent history as well as Frost’s poem, which reminds wall builders to carefully examine to whom a wall “was likely to give offense”.

WERNER LANGE

Assistant Professor of Sociology

Edinboro University of Pennsylvania

X The author was an exchange professor at the University of Leipzig in 1983 and conducted extensive interviews with Leipzig residents during 1990s.