Mom and dad had brought me to Berlin when it was still communist. Dad would park the car on empty stretches of West Germany, near the border - the places where 'The Wall' was just fences and minefields and mud trenches. He would throw rocks at the minefields, and say, "look at the towers, they are all turning to us." I asked if the dark figures in the distant towers would shoot at us, but dad said they couldn't, because we were West Germans.
That is how I learned about the world, dad saying, "look, that's where they let the dogs out to kill you if you try to escape."
My childhood fantasies about the dark world behind the iron curtain, about ‘Red Dawn’ and the nuclear siren warnings in Minnesota, are shattered by the reality of communist Europe. It was far worse. East Berlin was perfumed with gasoline and waste, and the city-dwellers appeared to have constipation - their faces gray with sweat. East Berlin, the crown jewel of western communism, was a place you awoke from in a cold sweat. It wasn’t until after all this that we found our ‘behind the wall’ relatives were just like us. Although, too much Metallica and not enough English. These cousins, who once met me for a meal of Korean bulgogi in Los Angeles, spent their post-communist youth traveling. One cousin’s family once gave him up for lost, when he disappeared traveling across Africa, by bicycle.
