The presidential election is over, and George W. Bush has been declared the victor by the Electoral College. Leaders from all over the globe have called to offer him their congratulations. However, in the international press, the prevailing view seems to be that he is, to use the title of last week’s edition of The Economist, “The Accidental President.”
I was in Berlin last week doing some training for political candidates interested in American online campaigning techniques, and had to follow the final lap of the election marathon as an expatriate. While CNN, MSNBC and the BBC provided plenty of cable television coverage, and while news Web sites provided minute-by-minute updates, I missed being in the United States to view an event as important and troubling as this latest transfer of presidential power.
As it turned out, I was in a small hotel a mile from Checkpoint Charlie when Al Gore gave his concession speech and George Bush gave his acceptance speech. Because of the time difference across the Atlantic, I set my alarm clock so I could wake up and watch the speeches at 3 and 4 a.m. on a tiny 14-inch screen beneath an idyllic 19th century scene of a Germanic countryside villa.
For those too young to remember, Checkpoint Charlie was the most famous guard-post in the world at the dawn of the nuclear age. As I viewed it, it appeared to be little more than the booth and gate you see at any parking garage, but the sandbags on the front of the guardhouse and the large “You Are Leaving the American Sector” and “You Are Leaving the Soviet Sector” signs are a reminder that this was no ordinary border crossing.
Checkpoint Charlie provided the opening between the East and West sectors of Berlin, at a time when the Cold War between the United States and the former Soviet Union was still a source of front page news. After World War II, France, Great Britain, the Soviets and the Americans had joint control over the vanquished Germans. The Soviet-controlled part became East Germany. Within East Germany, the pre-war capital in Berlin was split into four sectors. The Soviets called theirs East Berlin, and put a wall around it in August of 1961, when too many East Berliners started to leave for jobs in the West. The Soviets had also hoped to surround West Berlin and get it to become part of East Germany, but a heroic airlift of supplies and munitions allowed West Berlin to stay out of Soviet control.
The museum at Checkpoint Charlie provides photos of the famous stand-offs between the Soviet and American tanks that stood guard there four decades ago. It also houses a museum devoted to world peace, which chronicles the efforts of Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and others who stood up to injustice using non-violent means. (See www.dailysoft.de/berlinwall/index.html, www.dailysoft.com/berlinwall/checkpoint-charlie.htm, www.dailysoft.de/berlinwall/time.
htm .)
In talking to any Berliner over the age of 50, the building of die Mauer (the Berlin Wall) in 1961 is a time-stopping moment, just like the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963 is embedded in the minds of Americans of that generation. One cab driver told me that he was 14 when the wall separated his parents’ home from the homes of his grandparents. They died before the wall came down, so he never saw them again.
A woman in her 80s described how she and her sister were separated for 28 years by the wall, and spent a jubilant evening in November 1989 toasting its fall. Soon thereafter, however, the sister from the East started to see the sister from the West as patronizing and arrogant. The sister from the West grew tired of the complaints and requests for assistance from her Eastern sister. Within a month, the relationship had a barrier that was even more insurmountable than the one made of concrete and reinforced steel.
As an Asian American, I was happy to see that Germans of Thai ancestry were able to sell sweet and sour soup and pad thai from a German language menu at the Asian Snack take-out restaurant near the Friedrichstrasse U-Bahn (subway) near Checkpoint Charlie. However, racism still rears its ugly head, as is evident in the decline in applications for German schools by foreign students, and the skinhead crimes carried out against people of color. In a country where unemployment was 12 percent in 1997, and some estimate is twice that now in East Berlin, Germans of Turkish, Iranian, Sudanese and other backgrounds are free to drive cabs, go to school, and sell Christmas items near the world famous Pergamon Museum. The resentment expressed against them by a cross-section of Germans with whom I spoke, however, is an ominous sign of underlying intolerance that pervades the society.
Former Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, now president of Georgia, said in a letter read out at the ceremony dedicating the re-built Checkpoint Charlie guardhouse, “I would like it to remain as a symbol of history. You must always remember how easy it is to divide people.”
Indeed, in our own country, where political parties and people are divided by barriers that were magnified by the Florida re-count, the issue of dividing people is a real one. No one is being threatened by tanks, and no one has built any concrete-and-steel walls, but the institutions of democracy were sorely tested in the Election of 2000. President-elect Bush has promised to be a “uniter, not a divider,” and top Democratic leaders are promising the same.
Whether you believe that the Republicans stole the election or the Democrats delayed the inevitable, the specter of Checkpoint Charlie reminds us what can happen when civil discourse breaks down. For the sake of our fragile democracy, we must never forget.