It has a collection of everything from East German blueprints to Soviet artwork.

The museum’s most spectacular exhibit is probably its portion of the Berlin Wall. It is the biggest chunk of the wall anywhere outside of Berlin.h

So where exactly is this museum where all this Cold War stuff is amassed?

Hint: It is nowhere near Eastern Europe. It is within the heart of “Screenland” not the heart of the old continent.

The Wende Museum is located in Culver City, a suburb of Los Angeles, Calif.

For many scholars and historians, the Wende is a treasure trove of unusual objects from East Germany and Eastern Europe, which you won’t find in many other archives.

The World’s Matthew Brunwasser recently visited the museum.

The Wende (“Turning point” in German) Museum offers the rich resources of its Los Angeles-based collection to visitors, scholars and exhibitions. Almost 6,000 miles away from the divisive historical debates in Berlin, the Wende hopes to preserve selected physical remains of the Cold War in order to inform present and future generations about its legacy.

An anonymous business park in sunny southern California is the unlikely home for this Cold War archive. It’s hard to imagine anywhere farther away from the emotional debates about Europe’s painful past, but Museum director Justinian Jampol says that’s exactly the point.

“We wanted to have a archive away from it all, to be able to begin to preserve the materials for future generations,” says Jampol.

Europeans have long been ready to move on, so saving the material culture of the unpleasant era isn’t especially high on anyone’s list. Jampol says the museum sends out scouts across Eastern Europe looking for art and artifacts, including Communist-era statues about to be melted down for scrap.

“That happened up until about a year ago,” Jampol says. “We have a 10 foot bronze sculpture, by Bondarenko, one of the very important Russian artists, that was still being melted down. And we got a call saying that this is available and we bought it for the price of the bronze plus five percent.”

Preserving the history of political, cultural and personal life, the Wende collects materials you won’t find in a typical historical archive.

“Ranging from furniture to blueprints to design material, artwork, menus, erotika, photo albums, journals, diaries,” Jampol says.

The collection also includes pop music, like the Puhdys, one of East Germany’s most popular rock bands.

“This is dissident artwork, this is from perestroika in the 80s, critical of both Lenin and Stalin, when the process started of coming to terms with the past,” says Jampol. “In fact, this is one of my favorite pieces…”

One of the iconic pieces is a bust of Lenin which once stood in Leipzig, the Tahrir Square of East Europe back in the tumultuous days of October 1989.

“It was painted to look like a clown using pink and green florescent paints,” Jampol says. “As the main figure of the ideology, if you could paint him like a clown, what next? Where does the state stand? In fact, one month later to the day, the Berlin wall collapsed.”

The main archive has about 75,000 items in its supermarket-sized facility. Many might find this enormous and neatly organized and cataloged collection of historical bric-a-brac – a warehouse full of old junk.

Scholars find it a precious resource of valuable information about the minutia of daily Cold War life. But outside academia, the Wende has another life, trying to make the Cold War resonate with the public today.

It is a living museum after all. The Wende organizes public events like one celebrating the anniversary of the Berlin wall coming down. The Wende built a replica across Wilshire Boulevard — dividing LA for a night into west and east.

One current exhibition displays original surveillance equipment of the Stasi, or East German secret police. The idea is to provoke debate about contemporary surveillance of American citizens.

While Europeans try to put the Cold War behind them, the Wende is trying its best to give life to the memory and the lessons learned.

Syrian Flag (Photo: bleu man/Flickr)

On one side is Iran, an old ally of the Assad regime. On the other is Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf Kingdoms.

Anchor Marco Werman speaks with Jon Alterman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who sees it as a new clash of civilizations.

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The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

Marco Werman: The Arab League led by Saudi Arabia has taken a tough line with Syria. It’s demanding an end to the Syrian government’s repression. That may seem a bit hypocritical given how willing many Arab League member governments have been to crack down on dissent in their own countries. But the pressure placed on Syria may be part of a bigger showdown in the region – the confrontation between Gulf-Arab states and Iran. Some say Syria, a longtime ally of Iran, is just the latest battleground in what’s being called ‘a hidden cold war’. Jon Alterman is Director and Senior Fellow of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. Jon, when people talk of Iran’s enemies, most people think of Israel and the U.S. What is at the root of this hostility between Iran and Saudi Arabia?

Jon Alterman: For centuries there have been tensions across what the Iranians call the Persian Gulf, what the Gulf Arabs call the Arabian Gulf. They are different. The Iranians are not Arabs, they are Persians and the Arabs have been threatened. When I was talking with a Senior Gulf royal a few years ago about Sunni-Shia tensions in Iraq, he said, “You don’t understand. The Iranians have only been Shia for 500 years; they’d been Persians for millennia.”

Werman: How serious is the tension at this moment in time and how is it expressing itself?

Alterman: I think it is serious. It’s partly because of a sense that Iran is on the verge of having a nuclear weapon; that Iran with a nuclear weapon would behave more recklessly and Iran would be harder to deter. I think there’s also a sense that the United States isn’t the same kind of force in the Gulf and that makes the Gulf States feel more exposed. One of the battlegrounds for this battle for influence is Syria which is Iran’s principal Arab ally and a proxy of Iran in the Levant.

Werman: So the big picture is pretty complex. Connect one more dot for us. How does this all play into the other equation in the region – the Israeli threat to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities? Is there a tacit alliance emerging right now between the Saudis and the Israelis?

Alterman: I don’t think there is. I think the Israelis have their own set of calculuses. One of the Israeli concerns is, with the fall of Bashar al-Assad arguably excellent news for the Israelis, if the next government of Syria is pro-Turkish, the Israelis have an increasing number of problems with Turkey. They feel it’s hostile. They feel it’s a Muslim brotherhood-led government. The Israelis are likely to feel even more encircled by Islamic radicals as they see it.

Werman: Yeah. That’s kind of ironic, isn’t it?

Alterman: Yes.

Werman: Do you think the tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia could come to blows between the two countries?

Alterman: It’s unlikely the two sides would have a military confrontation in part because they’re set up to fight differently. The Iranians have really tried not to fight army on army but to fight asymmetrically, that is, using guerillas. They don’t want to go head to head…they precisely don’t want to go head to head with an army like Saudi Arabia’s. So, I think what you are likely to see is a war of attrition. You’re likely to see each side trying to undermine each other using proxies but I don’t think you’re about to see the Saudi and Iranian armies on the battlefield fighting each other.

Werman: Do you think this essentially comes down to a Sunni-Shia split then?

Alterman: I don’t think it does come down to a Sunni-Shia split. To a degree, it’s an Arab-Persian split but it is also about two countries that think that they are the rightful leaders of the Gulf. The U.S. was able to split this difference in the 1970s when they had the Twin Pillars Policy in the Gulf where its key allies were both Saudi Arabia and Iran. That’s harder to do. The Iranians have historically felt like they have been shortchanged by the world and they’re fighting for the respect they believe they deserve. The Saudis believe for any number of reasons, including but not limited to their wealth and the holy mosques in Mecca and Medina, that they are the leaders not just of the Middle East but of the entire Islamic world and who are the Iranians to push them around. Ultimately, you have two civilizations or two countries that feel they represent civilizations, each of which feels that it should be the predominantly power in the Gulf and they can’t even agree what that Gulf should be called.

Werman: Jon Alterman is the Director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. Thank you.

Alterman: Thank you Marco.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

A crowd of well-dressed men and women lines up to get into GI Disco, a popular club night held at a posh bar in Berlin. But before they can dance, clubbers have to get past the guy at the door, former U.S. military policeman Smiley Baldwin.
Baldwin said when he’s manning the door, he often doesn’t let the younger people in. “It’s not because I don’t like them. The fact is they wouldn’t get it.”

What they wouldn’t “get” is the music history that GI Disco documents.

Baldwin served in Germany during the 1980s and 90s, when there were hundreds of thousands of American soldiers stationed there. He got together with two Berlin deejays to start this monthly club night.

GI Disco celebrates the music that American soldiers brought to Germany in the ’80s and ’90s, like hip hop, disco boogie and new jack swing.

“The dance music was being brought by the black guys,” Baldwin said. “These guys were partying and just rocking the house. When I got to Berlin, I was going out from Sunday to Sunday.”

American soldiers had the edgiest music in Germany because they brought all of their records with them from the U.S., said Daniel Best, one of the deejays at GI Disco. Best is an American who grew up near a base in Stuttgart. He said spent a lot of his teenage years at the GI clubs.

“It was German women, American soldiers, and us,” he said, laughing. “The music aficionados, you know, the music nerds were there.”

Best said the GI clubs brought local Germans into contact with a mix of music — and people. Many locals attracted to the GI club scene were looking for a dance floor where they felt accepted.

“The children of the people who came here to work –Turkish, Greek, Yugoslavian, Italian, Portuguese people — also went to these clubs,” Best said. “Children of mixed-race parents were looking culturally for a home and they would go there as well.”

Kalle Kuts also spent a lot of time hanging around these clubs in the ’80s. Now Kuts is a popular Berlin deejay. He spins records with Daniel Best at the GI Disco night. Kuts and Best came up with the idea for GI Disco while they were playing a club together. They both started pulling out some of their old-time hip-hop favorites, like “Paid in Full.”

“I can remember hearing it for the first time at a GI club in Berlin where the deejay was making a 10 or 15 minute version out of it, scratching it, cutting it, with the instrumental even rapping on top, and I knew this is really new music and this is a really new style of deejaying.”

Baldwin takes a break from the door to check out the scene. Baldwin said seeing all of these people together, Germans, Americans, the children of Germans and Americans, is the positive outcome of a troubled time. Before the wall came down in 1989, Berlin was a divided city, but a lot of people did come together on the dance floor.

“That’s a part of history that probably won’t end up in a book,” Baldwin said. “Nobody’s going to write about that.”
Maybe not yet, but they’ll definitely dance to it.

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“Windows to the West” – that’s how the US government described the so-called Amerika Häuser in West Germany. They were cultural and educational spaces built in the ruins of post-World War II Germany – places for Germans to learn more about America, and for America to spread a positive message about the West.

With the Cold War long over, the Bavarian state government has decided to close one of those windows. After 54 years, Munich’s Amerika Haus will have to leave its home.

It’s easy to see why the Amerika Haus in central Munich is one of the city’s most coveted pieces of real estate. Just look out the window.

“You have to imagine that this is like Dupont Circle in Washington, only much more fancy,” said Amerika Haus Director Raimund Lammersdorf.

The Bavarian government built the Haus in 1957 out of gratitude to the US for liberating Germany from Hitler. They built it what had been a center of Nazi bureaucracy.

“So we’re here right in front of the library,” Lammersdorf said.

After years of Nazi censorship, the Amerika Haus was one of the first free libraries Germans could visit in the post-war period. These days, the offerings are more modern including DVDs like “Mad Men”.

“We have a DVD collection of those DVDs that you usually don’t get here in Germany,” Lammersdorf said.

An estimated 50,000 visit the Haus each year. Some to get help applying for student exchange programs in the US.

Lammersdorf opens the door to the Haus’s crown jewel.

Raimund Lammersdorf, director of Munich's Amerika Haus, stands on the stage of Christoph Peters Auditorium. (Photo: Tom Dreisbach)

Here, the Haus hosts American jazz and bluegrass bands, organizes mock political debates, and shows American movies.

“There’s a lot of scholarly research done on the Big Lebowski, so we had an event on that, and a lecture before and a discussion, and then later we showed the movie and we also served White Russians,” Lammersdorf said.

For decades, the US government used the Amerika Haus – and others like it throughout West Germany – to promote a positive image of the United States as part of the post-war “re-education” of Germany.

“Particularly during the Cold War, it was a means of American propaganda, which happened all over the world,” Lammersdorf said.

The US no longer determines the Haus’s mission. Uncle Sam stopped footing the bill in 1997, eight years after the Berlin Wall came down.

But some dedicated supporters with a sense of history decided to save Munich’s Amerika Haus. They secured funding from the Bavarian government, and corporate sponsors. The US government still provides small ad hoc grants.

But now one of the few remaining Amerika Hauser faces a new threat.

The Bavarian Government wants to evict it from the historic building and give the space to a German engineering academy. Government spokeswoman Christa Malessa says the Academy is important for Bavaria educationally and economically, and this was the only building that fit its needs.

She says the fact that the US government cut funding for the Haus also played a role in the decision.

“There is no doubt that this relationship still has a strong basis,” Malessa said. “But this is also about seeing what kind of activities still make sense. You could say that this relationship has achieved a sort of normalcy, compared with 30 or 40 years ago.”

But many Germans feel a sense of duty when it comes to history, so the decision to evict the Haus has drawn criticism.

The Munich-based newspaper, Süddeutsche Zeitung, called the move, “one of the greatest diplomatic mistakes the Bavarian government could have made.”

The library at Amerika Haus is free and open to the public and provides access to American research databases as well as a wide selection of books. (Photo: Tom Dreisbach)

The US Consul General in Munich, Conrad Tribble says he’d hoped for a different decision from the Bavarian government.

“I look at someplace like the Amerika Haus as an institution that is also a part of US national security,” Tribble said.

Even though the US cut funding, Tribble says the US State Department still collaborates closely with the Haus on events, and helps coordinate exchange programs. He says these programs make a difference.

“Cause that’s only way we’re going to maintain these relationships that keep us safe, keep us engaged, keep our society engaged with the world in ways that our beneficial to us,” Tribble said.

Still some say the Amerika Haus is an anachronism.

“It seems to me that it would be a little short-sighted to say, you know, if we don’t have this Amerika Haus, therefore we don’t have any more dialog with America,” said Jack Janes, the executive director of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies. “Because that really would be a blind spot with regard to the enormous amount of exposure that Bavaria, in particular, has to the United States.”

He notes the deep economic ties between Bavaria and America, which are not going away. The Bavarian government says it will continue to support the Haus, but it hasn’t named a new location.

As Jack Janes told me, the Haus essentially achieved its goals: the wall fell, Germany reunified. So the Haus’s current predicament may simply be a product of its own success.

Qais Hussain during the 1965 war from Beena's blog

The plane was being piloted by Jahangir Engineer, who along with seven others, died in the incident. An email exchange between the pilot and Engineer’s daughter has generated a lot of interest in the two countries.

Hussain wrote in an email on August 5, Qais Hussain:

“Mrs. Singh, I have chosen to go into this detail to tell you that it all happened in the line of duty and it was not governed by the concept that ‘everything is fair in love and war,’ the way it has been portrayed by the Indian media due to lack of information.”

Pakistani journalist Beena Sarwar first reported on this story for a Pakistani newspaper The News and wrote about it on her blog.

The story was then picked up by television stations and newspapers in India and Pakistan, including NDTV – a 24-hour English news station based in New Delhi, India.

In an emotional exchange, Farida Singh, the daughter of the deceased Indian pilot wrote back. She said the death of her father had “defined our lives”.

“But in all the struggles that followed, we never, not for one moment, bore bitterness or hatred for the person who actually pulled the trigger and caused my father’s death.

The fact that this all happened in the confusion of a tragic war was never lost to us. We are all pawns in this terrible game of war and peace.”

In a conversation with Beena Sarwar, she explained to me why this story means more than just an exchange of emails between Singh and Hussain.

“What this incident shows, I think, to me is the very high level of distrust and hostility between India and Pakistan that existed, and perhaps in a way still (exists),” she told Lisa Mullins in our interview for The World’s broadcast.

Indians and Pakistanis have been locked in conflict ever since independence from Britain in 1947. The two nations have fought three wars since then. And relations between the two nuclear-armed nations remain difficult.

Beena Sarwar told me that while the Cold War had ended, the permafrost on the India-Pakistan border has never thawed.

And that is why perhaps when the two people begin to talk to each other, albeit on email, it makes for a great story.

UPDATED

History of conflict

The two countries were created by partitioning what was British India into Hindu-dominated India and the newly-created Muslim state of Pakistan in 1947.

Partition came at a heavy price. Half a million people died during riots that engulfed the sub-continent. Ever since the two counties have lived in conflict with each other.

The biggest stumbling block on the road to peace for the past decades has been the state of Kashmir. The two countries have staked their claim to the region and have fought two wars, including the one in 1965.

I grew up in India and I can attest to Beena Sarwar’s observations. When Indians and Pakistanis meet abroad, there is an instant connection. And that, I think is mainly because they’re meeting for the first time. No two cultures are so similar yet so separate.

“It’s unfortunate that politics of the region have kept us apart. If we were still one country – imagine the kind of cricket team we would’ve had,” a Pakistani taxi driver in London once told me.

You could read more about the history of conflict between India and Pakistan in a BBC article .

From the National Geographic Archives
Laura Lynch: Taking Former Colonial Masters to Court
Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya by Caroline Elkins
Clark Boyd on Yuri Gagarin (and that video of the space flute duet)
Clark Boyd’s tech podcast
Bay of Pigs

For the first time in more than a decade, Russia and the US have a new nuclear arms reduction treaty. The pact promises to strengthen ties between the former Cold War foes.

But even though the Cold War has been over for two decades, many living in the former Soviet Union can’t believe that their government and the US are allies.

Bad habits die hard

Russian political analyst Andrei Kortunov said that many government officials remain shocked that the former Soviet Union and the US are friends and that they’re signing treaties with one another.

“There are many people here in this city who believe that genetically, you know, we are supposed to confront each other,” Kortunov said. “That basically this reset is just an aberration; that sooner or later we will just get back to the traditional confrontational pattern of the relationship.”

So imagine how surprised they’d be to find American tourists visiting Russia’s once top-secret command post for all nuclear communication.

“I wasn’t sure it was real,” said American Laurie Tsarvev. “I thought maybe it was sort of made up just as a tourist attraction to attract foreigners to come and pay a lot of money.”

The Object

Tsarvev was touring Bunker 42, once known merely as “the object” during Soviet times. It’s camouflaged by a fake building right in the middle of Moscow. The facility extends miles below the busy street and covers four city blocks. During the cold war it housed nearly 600 workers.

Tour guide Viktor Baranov took a group through the site. He said “the object” was operational 24 hours, seven days a week, ready to protect Communist leaders from the threat of a nuclear attack, most likely from the US.

“One had to always be vigilant,” Baranov said, “since a nuclear bomb could’ve landed on Moscow and explode at any time.”

Officials with the museum said the facility had enough food, water and air to last top communist officials for about two weeks, in the case of a nuclear bomb.

American Beth Mothershed said she never thought she’s see the day when she’d be allowed a glimpse into something so top secret.

“Now that I’m here in Moscow the impact of Communism is so apparent as we live here,” Mothershed said. “Just kind of want to see how it manifested, where it all took place.”

From Cold War, to a warming peace — at least between US President Barack Obama and Russian leader Dmitry Medvedev. Speaking on Russia Today TV, political analyst Mikhail Troitsky said the ratification today of the new Start Treaty is a big deal.

“Both Presidents wanted this treaty to be a step on the way towards building mutual trust,” Troitsky said. “So these were not arms negotiations for their own sake, and that is very important as long as they were driven by this spirit.”

Despite somewhat fiery rhetoric on both sides of the Atlantic, both countries agreed to reduce their nuclear arsenals by 30 percent and limit their deployed long-range missiles and heavy bombers to 700.

That’s good news to the bunker tourist Laurie Tsarev.

“I think there’s a feeling, maybe a sense that we don’t have to be so afraid anymore. I’d like to believe that’s true,” Tsarev said.

• Video: Bunker 42 : A top-secret underground command post used for nuclear communications during the Cold War

On Wednesday we ran a story remembering Samantha Smith. She was the 10 year old American girl who wrote to Soviet leader, Yuri Andropov, in 1982, to ask why the United States and the Soviet Union couldn’t live in peace. Well, our story brought this response from Jeff Henigson, of Brooklyn, New York:

“Thank you for your piece on Samantha. In 1986, four years after Samantha wrote Mr. Andropov, I was diagnosed with what was expected to be terminal brain cancer. I was 15 at the time, and an organization offered me a wish. I asked to travel to the Soviet Union and meet with Mr. Gorbachev so that I could appeal for an end to nuclear weapons and the Cold War. I traveled there two years later after finishing my last round of chemotherapy …

I share this because I remember watching stories about Samantha on television. While I wasn’t thinking of her when I was offered the wish four years later, I’m sure I’d been influenced by the path she had laid. Thanks for reminding me of her once again.”

Marco Werman talks with Henigson.
Download MP3

• Henigson’s website ‘Letters from Leningrad’
• Remembering Samantha Smith

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: On Wednesday we ran a story remembering Samantha Smith. She was the 10-year-old American girl who wrote to Soviet leader, Yuri Andropov, in 1982, to ask why the United States and the Soviet Union couldn’t live in peace. Well, our story brought this response from Jeff Henigson, of Brooklyn, New York.

JEFF HENIGSON:  Thank you for your piece on Samantha. In 1986, four years after Samantha wrote Mr. Andropov, I was diagnosed with what was expected to be terminal brain cancer. I was 15 at the time, and an organization offered me a wish. I asked to travel to the Soviet Union and meet with Mr. Gorbachev so that I could appeal for an end to nuclear weapons and the Cold War. I traveled there two years later after finishing my last round of chemotherapy. I share this because I remember watching stories about Samantha on television. While I wasn’t thinking of her when I was offered the wish four years later, I’m sure I’d been influenced by the path she’d laid. Thanks for reminding me of her once again.

WERMAN:  Jeff Henigson thanks for getting in touch with us and joining us now on the radio. Clearly, you survived your battle with cancer, but when you got offered your one wish back in 1986, why did you want to go to the Soviet Union?

HENIGSON: I actually wanted to go into outer space first, but that wasn’t an option. So it was my second choice. I had always had a really strong awareness, I guess a political awareness, awareness of Soviet-US relations. My father’s a very political guy and I just – I found the whole nuclear situation abhorrent particularly seeing, when I was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, seeing all of these young kids around me getting sick and dying. And then I’m thinking we’re sitting here pointing nuclear weapons, nuclear missiles at each other. It just made no sense and I was infuriated. It really came out of anger.

WERMAN: I guess the Soviet Union in 1986 was much like outer space. You got a sense of what was going on there when you went and you got quite a bit of publicity in the Soviet Union when you were there and lots of letters. What happened to those letters?

HENIGSON: The letters were sent from the newspaper, which was called [PH] Snana, a Leningrad newspaper, to the US embassy in Moscow. And I received a phone call three months after I returned to the United States from Jack Matlock who was the US ambassador to the Soviet Union at the time. And Mr. Matlock said, son, what did you do here exactly? And we had a great conversation. I told him all about it and he said, well, listen we’re not the US postal service here, but I’ll send you a package of letters. Apparently he’d received boxes. The package that I ultimately got had about 70 letters.

WERMAN: And who was writing to you and what were they saying?

HENIGSON: They were people of different ages and backgrounds. I mean most of them were young women, but there were some veterans of the Second World War who wrote, really quite a range. I can read you actually some of these if you like.

WERMAN: Yeah. Give us a taste of one at least. Yeah.

HENIGSON: Sure. There’s a 17-year-old girl, her name in Marina, and she talks about her friend [PH] Deema, who I think was her boyfriend, and he was serving his international duty in Afghanistan. She says that often people think about the meaning of life and about purpose of existence during difficult periods in their lives. That’s exactly what happened to me. On April 16, 1988, I lost the dearest friend of my life. Deema died serving his duty. And it just made me think about, we are there now. All in the name of peace. There’s also a very interesting letter to my parents that mentions Samantha Smith. It was by a mother. I don’t think it was ever intended for me to see and it said, I wish you health for the rest of your life. Take care of yourself. Our children will always remember the names of children like Samantha Smith and Jeff Henigson.

WERMAN:  So beating cancer you got this new lease on life. What do you do now? What do you do today?

HENIGSON: I’m actually working on a documentary about this whole experience. The film’s called Letters From Leningrad and it’s a story about a journey that I’m about to embark on to find these people who reached out to me 20 years ago. And what was going on in their lives then that motivated them to write and what’s happened to them since. And what do they think about the world that’s been realized.

WERMAN: You’ve already been in touch with some of those letter writers, those correspondents that you received letters from. What have they said so far? What kind of communication have you had with them?

HENIGSON: Only one person had written in English and she left a phone number. And I just decided, what the heck, I’ll give this number a try and she answered on the second ring.

WERMAN: Wow.

HENIGSON: And she’s since become a real advocate for this project and an investigator, a researcher, for us. So she’s tracked down a whole bunch of the folks who wrote and she’s put us in touch. We’re trying not to talk to them just yet because we want to meet them in person and have those conversations, but really looking forward to getting over there as soon as we can.

WERMAN: Jeff Henigson, former teenage peace envoy, following in the footsteps of the late Samantha Smith. Jeff, very good to meet you. Thank you so much.

HENIGSON: Nice meeting you. Thank you.

WERMAN:  You can find a link to Jeff’s website, Letters From Leningrad, at TheWorld.org. And don’t forget to get in touch with us if you have something to add to any of our stories. You can reach us by leaving a comment at TheWorld.org or by emailing us at TheWorld@PRI.org.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

• Read the Nuclear Posture Review (pdf)
• Foreign Policy: Nuclear Posture Review (or Nuclear Public Relations?)

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN:  The Obama administration says it’s moving away from a Cold War era mindset on nuclear weapons.  The Pentagon today released an official declaration on U.S. nuclear policy.  The so-called Nuclear Posture Review was about a year in the making.  And as The World’s Matthew Bell reports, it represents one step in the Obama administration’s effort to realize the President’s states goal of building a future free of nuclear weapons.

MATTHEW BELL:  Part of the challenge was to take President Obama’s speech in Prague last year, in which he talked about getting to nuclear zero, and then to get U.S. officials to agree on a series of actions to realize that vision.  The review says the administration’s goal is to reduce both the number of U.S. nuclear weapons, and U.S. reliance on its nuclear capability.  It says the massive U.S. nuclear arsenal inherited from the Cold War is poorly suited for today’s threats.  Defense Secretary Robert Gates talked about those threats during a news briefing today at the Pentagon.

ROBERT GATES:  The review rightly places the prevention of nuclear terrorism and proliferation at the top of the U.S. nuclear policy agenda.  Given Al Qaeda’s continued quest for nuclear weapons, Iran’s ongoing nuclear efforts, and North Korea’s proliferation, this focus is appropriate an indeed essential, an essential change from previous reviews.

BELL: There had been a lot of speculation about how the Obama strategy would characterize the role of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.  Would the administration renounce first use of nuclear weapons?  Would the review state that the sole purpose of U.S. nuclear weapons is to deter a nuclear attack on the United States or its allies?  Gates said there was a lot of discussion about these questions inside the government and he said consensus was achieved by describing the “fundamental purpose: of the U.S. nuclear arsenal as one of deterrence.

GATES: We didn’t think we were far enough along the road toward getting control of nuclear weapons around the world to limit ourselves so explicitly and so I think there was general agreement that the term fundamental purpose basically made clear, and other language makes clear, this is obviously a weapon of last resort.

BELL: In a glaring departure from the previous administration, this Nuclear Posture Review, or NPR, says the U.S. will not use nuclear weapons to attack a hostile, non-nuclear state that is also in compliance with the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.  That formulation carves out exceptions for terrorist groups and for countries such as Iran and North Korea.  Again, Secretary Gates.

GATES: If there is a message for Iran and North Korea here, it is that if you’re going to play by the rules, if you’re going to join the international community, then we will undertake certain obligations to you.  And that’s covered in the NPR.  But if you’re not going to play by the rules, if you’re going to be a proliferator, then all options are on the table in terms of how we deal with you.

BELL: This justification for maintaining the U.S. nuclear arsenal is a profound disappointment for advocates of a more aggressive move toward disarmament.  Jonathan Schell is an expert at Yale University on nuclear issues.  Schell says President Obama isn’t moving fast enough or far enough away from Cold War era thinking.

JONATHAN SCHELL:  His vision is extremely positive and the elements are all there.  The problem is the translation of the vision into concrete action.  That’s what we need to see and that’s what we haven’t seen sufficiently so far in my opinion.

BELL: At bare minimum, Schell says the Obama administration’s policy review should have renounced U.S. first use of nuclear weapons and then, it might have also included a commitment to draw down U.S. nuclear defenses deployed decades ago.

SCHELL: The United States has nuclear weapons in Europe which were put there to guard against the Soviet conventional invasion of Europe.  Well there is no, do I have to say it that there is no Soviet Union and the idea that Russia would do any such thing is just beyond absurd.

BELL: But even critics like Schell might be holding out some hope.  Later this week President Obama plans to sign a new arms control treaty with Russia an next week the President will host a nuclear security summit in Washington with several dozen heads of state.  For The World, I’m Matthew Bell.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

• Laura Lynch’s story on the first breach of the Iron Curtain in 1989
• Susan Stone reports how young Germans remember East Germany
• The World’s Gerry Hadden revisits the former East German border
• The World’s Alex Gallafent on owning a piece of the Berlin Wall

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

LAURA LYNCH:  Students at this downtown school attend classes in a building that sits in the middle of Hungary’s storied history, is just blocks from the banks of the Danube where you can see the majestic Buda castle and the houses of parliament.  But being surrounded by history doesn’t necessarily translate into knowing history, especially recent history.

SPEAKER:  What are you going to be doing on November ninth?  Do you know what November ninth is?  Anybody?

LYNCH:  The anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall isn’t a notable date for this class of seventeen and eighteen year olds.  Their parents may talk about the events of twenty years ago, but Norbert Nag and Fahnee Kerestesh are pretty much unmoved.

NORBERT NAG:  What it means to my mother is not the same what it means to me so of course she felt it much more personally as I did because I wasn’t even born at that time.

FAHNEE KERESTESH:  I see it like any kind of other Hungarian historical event because it was important but not personally.  Emotionally, it’s nothing.

LYNCH:  Daniel Szabo says his parents describe it as a time when life was simpler and safer.

DANIEL SZABO:  They said that there were more security on the streets and the police guys were on the streets not for get money from the bad guys but for make security on the streets.

LYNCH:  The students do study Hungary’s history but the events of 1989 aren’t covered in the official curriculum.  That’s frustrated for teacher Yanas Varga.  He thinks students really don’t understand or appreciate the monumental change that took place.

YANAS VARGA:  Sometimes I have time to tell them my stories.  For example, when I was a student in the 1970’s, reading an English newspaper or reading a weekly such as the Newsweek was a serious offense.  I was summoned by the deputy headmaster and I was threatened to be thrown out of school.  I was really frightened.  They laugh at it.

LYNCH:  That apparent complacency is one of the reasons Hungary opened the so-called House of Terror a few years ago inside the former headquarters of both the Nazi and Communist era secret police.  School groups are led through exhibits detailing the horrors of life back then.  The trains that shipped thousands off to the Gulags, the harsh living conditions and toward the end, the killings.  As an elevator descends to the basement prison cells, a video screen shows a former guard dispassionately describing the execution process.  Curator Maria Schmidt complains Hungary’s transition to democracy was so quick, so relatively smooth, Communist leaders were never really forced to account for what happened.  The story was never told from the victims’ point of view.

MARIA SCHMIDT:  I wanted to win the battle against the monopoly of the left wing, narrative on Hungarian history of the mainly, particularly on the twentieth century. I think that’s the most important part of democracy that you cannot monopolize the way of people are thinking on history.

LYNCH:  But twenty years ago it seemed there was no time for reflection.  Instead, it was a headlong rush into the future and the future was capitalism.  Few sense that better than George Hemingway.  Today the American-Hungarian businessman is investing in the next generation himself, buying a soccer team and building a training ground in the suburbs of Budapest.  Hemingway has been in the game of investing here from the moment Communism ended, flying in from his home in Las Vegas to do business.

GEORGE HEMINGWAY:  When we came here in 1989, everybody thought I was making a foolish decision.  And we made a ton of money.

LAURA LYNCH:  Hemingway bought dozens of restaurants, food stores, a computer company and more.  He introduced Hungarians to Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Dunkin Donuts.  But a few years ago, the economy started to stumble.  Government debt soared.  Hemingway saw it happen and got rid of half of his portfolio.

GEORGE HEMINGWAY:  The government was spending, spending and spending without any idea where the country, where it was taking the country.  Even what they were spending, they were spending badly and Hungary became a basket case.

LYNCH:  The global financial crisis made matters worse.  Last year, Hungary had to turn to the World Bank, IMF and EU for a twenty five billion dollar bailout.  There are new austerity measures in place.  Hemingway thinks Hungarians still haven’t come to terms with the sometimes harsh realities of the free marketplace.

HEMINGWAY:  Yes they won freedom and yes they want to make money and yes they want capitalism as much as they understand it, but they also want free healthcare, they want free schools, they want free universities, they want to go to the mayor and get some money if they don’t have it.

LYNCH:  It’s a combustible mix for a country still rising from the ashes of its Communist past.  The disappointment has led to deep political divisions and as in other former Eastern Bloc nations, a rise in popularity for extreme right wing groups.  Historian Attila Pok finds the shift disturbing.

ATTILA POK:  For the great euphoria of ten years ago totally vanished and people who have no option, find these black and white answers appealing.

LYNCH:  High school student Norbert Nag says he knows people who miss the stability that came with Communism and he kind of understands it.

NORBERT NAG:  You don’t want to know my opinion.

LYNCH:  I do, go ahead and share.

NAG:  No, it’s just a childish opinion, you know.  Dictatorship maybe because no, that’s not going to work, really.  It’s just a joke, a childish joke.

LYNCH:  This generation may not know that much about what happened two decades ago, but there’s no doubt these young men and women carry the weight of the past.  The expectations of 1989 have come to land at the feet of those who will have to move forward into the country’s uncertain future.  For The World, I’m Laura Lynch in Budapest.

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Retired border guard Arpad Bella remembers when the fences at the border were electrified. (Photo: Laura Lynch)

• Hungary’s role in the 1989 revolutions
• 1989: Europe’s revolution
• The World’s Gerry Hadden revisits the former East German border
• The World’s Alex Gallafent on owning a piece of the Berlin Wall

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI, and WGBH in Boston. The Berlin Wall came down 20 years ago signaling the end of the Cold War. That of course happened in Germany but some, including a former German leader, say it was communist Hungary that kicked the first stone out of the wall. It all involved some critical decisions by a handful of Hungarians and a fateful picnic. The World’s Laura Lynch has the story from Western Hungary.

[TRAFFIC]

LAURA LYNCH: Cars cross freely into Austria on this narrow road just outside the border town of Sopron. There are no guards, no one checking passports. Under European Union rules everyone can pass freely. Retired border guard Arpad Bella remembers when it wasn’t like that at all. The fence was electrified, land mines were underfoot and he was ready to shoot.

ARPAD BELLA: [SPEAKING HUNGARIAN]

TRANSLATOR: It was an order up until 1989 to fire if someone tried to cross the border illegally. If someone wanted to cross and he didn’t stop when he was ordered to do so, when that person tried to flee we had to use our guns.

LYNCH: But things were starting to shift at the beginning of 1989. The then prime minister, Miklos Nemeth, decided to order guards to switch off the electricity and dismantle the barbed wire billing it as a cost-saving measure. Advisors warned him against it. They feared there would be a repeat of the violence of 1956 when the Soviets cracked down on an uprising in Hungary. So in March of 1989 Nemeth went to Moscow to tell Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev about his plans.

MIKLOS NEMETH: I was not asking for permission from him but I briefed him. I told him that we made already the decision to pull down the Iron Curtain between Hungary and Austria mainly for financial reasons. For us, or for me, it was the most important thing – to check how strong Gorbachev position was that time. So then I told him we destroying, physically destroying, the barbed wired. First test. No negative reaction.

LYNCH: The fence at Sopron was dismantled. Nemeth made certain everyone knew about it. Laszlo Magas, a professor in a nearby town, got the message loud and clear. Magas had his own personal reasons for wanting to see the Iron Curtain fall.

LASZLO MAGAS: [SPEAKING HUNGARIAN]

TRANSLATOR: In the 50s for political reasons my mother was in prison for one and a half year precisely because she tried to escape to the west and she was caught.

LYNCH: Magas says what happened to his mother inspired him to organize what he and other activists called pan-European picnic at the end of August in 1989. They wanted to hold the picnic at the border, open it up for a few hours as a symbolic gesture, then go home. What neither Magas nor guard Bella Arpad knew was that bus loads of East German’s were on their way to their border intent on escaping to the west. They were in effect refugees who had come to Hungary on holiday and stayed until they saw posters written in German advertising the picnic. Hungary’s government was responsible for the posters – part of a plan to encourage the refugees to the border that day. Arpad and his fellow guards weren’t told about the plan or what to do when the East German’s approached.

BELLA: [SPEAKING HUNGARIAN]

TRANSLATOR: It was impossible for the five of us to stop 600 East German’s who were coming toward us. The only way to stop them would have been to use our weapons. The government simply dumped the responsibility onto our shoulders.

LYNCH: Arpad had only seconds to make a decision.

BELLA: [SPEAKING HUNGARIAN]

TRANSLATOR: If we had tried to stop them it would have made things worse. If we had fired warning shots there would have been so much panic. There would have been violence. We would have had to use force. But if we let them go without doing anything then I would be responsible for it because I didn’t obey the orders.

LYNCH: Arpad told his fellow guards to stand aside. All day long the East Germans kept coming. Six hundred and seventy one of them in total. Laszlo Magas watched in amazement and also with a little bit of fear.

MAGAS: [SPEAKING HUNGARIAN]

TRANSLATOR: Obviously we all thought this might have consequences and in the evening we did get threats. But the next morning people said we made history. And something really important had occurred.

LYNCH: Over the next few weeks more and more East German’s poured over the border. Within three months the Berlin Wall had fallen and Prime Minister Nemeth was presiding over a new Hungary.

NEMETH: I did not do the impossible. But I have done all it was possible that time. And that’s why I am so proud of the very fact that when I stepped down in May 1990 and I went back to see in my native village my father, he clapped my shoulders and said to me son well done.

LYNCH: Two decades later the country is struggling. The economy is in tatters. There are deep political divisions and a recent poll suggests many Hungarians say they’ve lost more than they gained since 1989. Standing at the site of that momentous picnic Laszlo Magas acknowledges the problems but he believes it’s all been worth it.

MAGAS: [SPEAKING HUNGARIAN]

LYNCH: He says, I think yes the fact we got freedom that my family is living in peace. As for the conflicts we’re facing now they’re part of human nature. I’m not going to get into that now.

For The World I’m Laura Lynch, near Sopron, Hungary.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

• The World’s Gerry Hadden revisits the former East German border
• The World’s Alex Gallafent on owning a piece of the Berlin Wall
• Former leaders recall Berlin Wall’s fall

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: German Chancellor Angela Merkel delivered a speech today to a joint session of the US Congress. Merkel grew up in what was communist East Germany. Today she thanked US law makers for America’s support in the years leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall. That happened 20 years ago next week. Now there’s a whole generation of German’s born after the wall came down and as Susan Stone reports from Berlin many young Germans know little about their country’s recent painful past.

SUSAN STONE: As the autumn sun sets a group of 15 and 16 year olds from the central western city of Selm have just about had their fill of history. Still they crowd around Hans-Michael Schulze, a guide at Berlin’s DDR Museum. The boys perk up when we get to the Trabant exhibit. Schulze tells them how long East Germans waited to get these cheap plastic polluting cars and why they were nearly the only autos available.

HANS-MICHAEL SCHULZE: [SPEAKING GERMAN]

TRANSLATOR: Giving a tour like this now, 20 years after the end of East Germany, well it’s really astounding how little is known.

STONE: The kids have the basics. They know there was a Berlin Wall and the Stasi, the secret police, but not much more. History teacher Nicole Abendroth is accompanying her class. East Germany is on the lesson plan for later in the year. She says the tenth graders don’t have much of connection to the former East.

NICOLE ABENDROTH: [SPEAKING GERMAN]

TRANSLATOR: I think in the end the DDR amounts to a feeling. What people experienced here essentially confined to their country and that is truly how to convey I have to admit. That’s why I think it’s important to come here. That the students really get a chance to get to know what it was like.

STONE: Across town at the Stasi Museum 18-year-old Kathrin Weiss and her classmates gasp and laugh as a guide describes the miles of files the Stasi kept on ordinary citizens. Weiss says she’s heard a bit about East Germany from her godmother who grew up there. It wasn’t so bad, her godmother told her. As long as you didn’t criticize the system you could have a normal family life just like in the West. But Kathrin is starting to question that.

KATHRIN WEISS: [SPEAKING GERMAN]

TRANSLATOR: It’s not right what she said but she probably just didn’t know. She never realized. She never noticed. And maybe, my God, when you’re not seriously confronted with it you don’t really deal with it. She grew up that way so she didn’t know anything else.

STONE: Kathrin is from Bavaria what was once part of West Germany. Students like her often know more about the former East than young people living in the region today. That’s according to the Stasi Museum’s Uwe Hillmer. He and colleagues at Berlin’s Free University spent three years interviewing students about this period. But Hillmer says it’s not just students who are uninformed.

UWE HILLMER: [SPEAKING GERMAN]

TRANSLATOR: The division of Germany in the post-war period is probably one of the most documented in history. But the reality is that the collective historical memory is at zero. And all these countless 20^th anniversary events aren’t changing everything. We’re stuck at zero.

STONE: Not far from the Stasi Museum sit two teenagers, Robin and Robert, whose parents grew up in East Germany. Have they visited the Stasi Museum, the DDR Museum, or the Berlin Wall Memorial?

ROBIN AND ROBERT: [SPEAKING GERMAN]

STONE: The answer each time is no. And that’s not uncommon for young people in Berlin. Robert says he’d like to visit a museum with his father to give them a better venue for discussing this history than the car or the breakfast table. Robin hasn’t talked much about East Germany with his parents but he does remember this comment.

ROBIN: [SPEAKING GERMAN]

TRANSLATOR: My mother told me for example, it was a very socially-minded time. That there was work for everyone. Not like today where we have so many unemployed people just sitting around. Actually it wasn’t such a bad time. I think it was good.

STONE: These are troubling statements for some Germans who view it as a dangerous nostalgia. But they’re also legitimate memories that contribute to a national fabric of understanding says Leopold Gruen. Gruen is a Berlin-based film maker who grew up in East Germany, later married a West German woman, and had two kids. The fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification paved the way for his family.

LEOPOLD GRUEN: [SPEAKING GERMAN]

TRANSLATOR: For me the most important thing in relaying history is that you have to search for traces in your own biography, in your family. Then ultimately you have the chance to share the experience of history. Private histories are the tiles of the mosaic. They’re like the pieces of a puzzle that can somehow be put together.

STONE: As successive generations grow up and pass on complex histories to their own children, it’s important again in Germany not to forget the past. The hope is that in this anniversary year marking the fall of the Berlin Wall somehow the shadows of the past will illuminate Germany’s future. For The World I’m Susan Stone in Berlin.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Next week marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In Berlin, only a tiny stretch of the wall remains as a memorial. From 1961 to 1989, 89 people were killed trying to escape over it. Such attempts are well documented. But a less talked about Cold War border was even deadlier. We’re referring to the northernmost section of the border separating East Germany from West Germany. Twenty four years ago, our Europe Correspondent Gerry Hadden lived along that dividing line, in the tiny beach town of Travemunde, West Germany. He recently went back to see how things have changed, and to learn more about those who tried to escape there. Download MP3

Gerry also produced this slideshow:

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JEB SHARP: I’m Jeb Sharp, and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI, and WGBH, Boston.  You could say the Cold War ended when the Berlin Wall fell on November 9th, 1989.  Organizers of next week’s 20th anniversary festivities hope to recapture the euphoria of the moment.  But there are also sober memories of the split between East and West Germany.  Eighty-nine people were killed trying to cross the wall.  Even more died trying to flee East Germany at the northernmost section of the border.  That’s where The World’s Gerry Hadden used to live, in the beach town of Travemunde.  He recently returned and sent us this report.

GERRY HADDEN: Travemunde literally means Mouth of the Trave River.  The Trave empties here into the Baltic Sea, and it once divided West from East.  I lived here, on the west side, as an exchange student in 1986.  The town is much the same today:  tidy, wealthy, built mostly around sailing and tourism.  During the summer months it really comes alive.  But during the Cold War, the warm months brought constant reminders of a divided country in the form of people trying to   escape over the sea.   I lived here in winter, so I never saw an escape attempt, but locals, like 45 year old Torsten Eichhof, did.  Fishing along the Trave’s bank recently, he recalls a night twenty years ago when he was bartending in a nearby beach hotel.

TORSTEN EICHHOF:  [speaking German]

HADDEN:  He says, “I was working a night shift in the pub when suddenly the door swung open.  Standing outside were these four soaking wet people, a couple and two kids.  They said, ‘Can someone call the authorities?  We’ve just escaped from East Germany.’  They’d made it in a little dinghy.  We wrapped them up in warm blankets, then cooked them some big steaks.  Only after they’d had a good first meal did we call the police.”  According to researchers nearly 6,000 people

tried to cross this stretch of Baltic during the Cold War.  Nearly a thousand made it; 174 people died.  The rest were caught.  I remember what made the crossing here so dangerous.  Less than a mile from Travemunde’s beaches, East German military gunboats patrolled day and night.  On land a triple fence, covered in barbed wire and surrounded by mines, reached right to the water’s edge.  You never saw anyone just out walking on the East side.   It made you wonder what life was like over there.  Today a ferry plods across the mouth of the Trave.  It leaves us about a mile from the old East/ West checkpoint.  But just before going through that checkpoint, I stop in at the   house of Cristina Volkt-Mueller and her husband Bodo.   The Muellers are from the former East.   In the early 1980s they tried  to escape in a sailboat, but they were caught before clearing port.

CRISTINA MUELLER: [speaking German]

HADDEN:  Cristina says, “It’s still hard to describe the feelings. You think, my god, what is going to happen now? There’s nothing you can do.  You’re trapped.  It’s a terrible feeling of powerlessness and fear.  We’d spent a lot of time working this escape out, anticipating freedom.  When that gets quashed you are just devastated.”  The Muellers, like tens of thousands of others, ended up in a Stasi jail.  After their release, they spent years under state surveillance.  Today Cristina and Bodo research Baltic escape attempts.  Bodo tells me of one man who invented a hand-held underwater jet that pulled him to freedom.  Another guy painted his sailboat sails black and tried at night.  He got nabbed.  A third man, a doctor, swam 30 miles to the West, fueled by methamphetamines.  But Bodo says most people tried to flee simply on whatever was at hand, on whatever floated.

BODO MUELLER:  [speaking German]

HADDEN:   Bodo says many people tried to paddle across on air mattresses because having a

boat was complicated, because you had to smuggle a boat to the beach in pieces and assemble it there.  But if you were staying in a legal campsite you could have an air mattress.   So many people tried to escape spontaneously.  But the sea is cold and often there are heavy waves.  Lots of people drowned.  On this day I make the crossing in the other direction on land in a car.  It’s the first time I visited this once off limits area.  In the nearby village of Poetenitz I meet Sabina Kieler.  While I was studying in Travemunde, Kieler was working on a farm I could literally see, right across the border.  She says only a select few were allowed so close to the enemy.

SABINA KIELER: [speaking German]

HADDEN:  She says, “You had to finish your work by 8 PM.  If you were still in the fields after that or you didn’t have your passport they’d lock you up for three days.  It was very confined work.  You couldn’t go left or right.  There were no toilets so we would go into the bushes, but you had to be careful.  If you took one step too far the guards would descend on you.”  Kieler says one day in early November, 1989, someone came running across the fields yelling that the border had opened.  At first no one believed him, then the joy set in.  As the news spread, Kieler and other East Germans poured into Travemunde by the tens of thousands.   And West Germans came out to greet them with champagne and gifts.   But 20 years later Kieler says reunification has been a mixed bag.

KIELER:  [speaking German]

HADDEN:  She says, “Some things are better.  You can travel anywhere and buy whatever you want. But some things are worse, for example, childcare. Back in the old days there was guaranteed space for all kids in daycare.  Today hardly anyone gets in because there just too few spots.”  The other thing is the economy, she says, Lots of the old manufacturing here was destroyed with reunification.  And the West, she says, didn’t invest much in revitalizing the local economy.  But overall Germany has spent hundreds of billions of dollars to help the East get backs on its feet.  And as time passes it’s clear that the differences between the two Germanys have lessened.  That’s good news for everyone, but for Ingrid Schatz it also presents a danger.    Schatz runs the Lubeck Border Museum.   It’s housed in a former East German passport inspection house just across the old line from Travemunde.

INGRID SCHATZ:  [speaking German]

HADDEN:   On a recent morning, Schatz is showing the black and white photos of the massive border installations that once dominated the countryside.  She says, “Everything you see in the photo is gone.  The big border station, the fences, everything.  The only thing remaining is this one house.  That’s why we started this border museum.”  She says a German border like this, as deadly as it once was, should not just be forgotten. For The World I’m Gerry Hadden, Travemunde, Germany.

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• BBC Archive: The Berlin Wall
• BBC Audio Documentary: How the Wall Fell

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KATY CLARK: I’m Katy Clark and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI, and WGBH Boston. IN Berlin today, German Chancellor Angela Merkel was sworn in fro a second term. Merkel famously grew up in communist East Germany. And 20 years ago in the weeks before the wall came down she was helping organize protests against the government there. The wall of course was the most potent symbol of the cold war dividing the city of Berlin in two. Many who attempted to cross form east to west were killed at its base. The collapse of the wall signaled the collapse of communism across Eastern Europe. Here’s Dan Rather on CBC.

DAN RATHER: In Berlin this is the definitely the “in” place to be. The sites and sounds – all the joy and the history in front of the Brandenburg Gate with West Berliners partying literally on top of the Berlin Wall in front of the gate.

CLARK: But when the wall came down it didn’t disappear. It just went other places as The World’s Alex Gallafent reports.

ALEX GALLAFENT: When I started working on this story I put something up on Facebook which just said, “Do you own a piece of the Berlin Wall?” The answers came flooding in from the United States, Britain, and beyond.

MONTAGE OF VARIOUS VOICES: My husband has a piece in his office. There was some at a lunch I went to last week. I think my brother’s got a piece. My sister owns a tiny, tiny chunk.

GALLAFENT: The Berlin Wall is kind of everywhere now – especially in the West. It wasn’t just bulldozers and wrecking balls that took the wall down. It was hammers and chisels – individuals claiming fragments of history, wrapping them up to keep or sending them home to family or friends – to people like Noah Isenberg. He owns a chunk too.

NOAH ISENBERG: It was just in this little yellow cardboard container that I used to always have on my bookshelves and yet for some strange reason it’s gone missing.

HOWARD ROSENBERG: Well it’s interesting. I sort of feel like I have a piece of the wall too but it’s a different kind of a piece. It’s the piece that’s in my memory.

GALLAFENT: When the wall came down Howard Rosenberg was the TV critic for Los Angeles Times. He remembers how each of the major networks sent an anchor to be live at the wall. As Rosenberg puts it, “to validate the story for Americans back home.”

ROSENBERG: I mean television does this all the time. I always think of these stories as like a whale being carved up by Eskimos in which they use every bit of the whale – every part of it goes for something and everybody takes a little chunk out of it as if they were … . In this case individually taking a chunk out of the wall. A couple of them even climbed the wall on a ladder. You can’t say that they eclipsed this momentous event but they certainly chipped into it.

GALLAFENT: Even as it came down the wall and its meaning were being claimed. It meant the end of oppression or the triumph of freedom or capitalism. Today in Los Vegas it means something … . Well I’m not quite sure what it means. At the Main Street Station Casino Brewery and Hotel there’s a hefty section of the wall positioned behind the men’s urinals.

ROSENBERG: [LAUGHING] Oh I love it. That’s just great.

GALLAFENT: Since 1989 the wall has been sold, bought, and donated. It’s been broken apart and reconstructed. There were the small fragments. Some real. Some fake. And then there are the larger pieces. Entire sections of the wall transplanted to new homes. A few of that type are here in New York including one in the heart of the Midtown Business District. A section of the wall has been placed in a courtyard next to an office building.

JULIANE CAMFIELD: It’s still very intense. It seems so out of place.

GALLAFENT: I met someone who knew the wall when it was still The Wall.

CAMFIELD: It almost seems unreal. It seems like … . It looks like a movie prop. It seems to me like it can’t be really here.

GALLAFENT: Juliane Camfield was born in West Berlin in 1968, seven years after the wall went up. She left in 1989, the year it came down. Now she’s a New Yorker. Camfield is her married name. She studies this section of the wall from a distance. It’s painted with colorful graffiti faces, as much of the western side was. And set behind the wall there’s a fountain, a curtain of water framing the whole thing.

CAMFIELD: I think that’s part of what makes it so unreal for me. To have this weird fountain thing in the background because the fountain is sort of something soothing and you know a little tacky. And I think the wall it’s not beautiful, it’s something very provocative and shocking and symbolizing terror and death and separation and I don’t want it to be smoothed out.

GALLAFENT: Juliane Camfield more than anyone else I spoke to, seemed like she really owned a piece of the Berlin Wall. She had relatives in the East. The wall prevented her from knowing them. Her only link was what she learned from her two grandmothers on walks around West Berlin, a little island of freedom.

CAMFIELD: And we’d eventually end up at the wall because wherever you went at some point you would end up at the wall and they really, I guess, they kept their memories alive. They kept their connections to their nephews, nieces, cousins, uncles, aunts. It was very close to their heart. So when I heard them speak about it I guess these two grandmothers more than anything for me established the outrageousness of that piece of architecture.

GALLAFENT: Not everyone has a story like Juliane’s. Even people in Berlin itself are no longer defined by the wall as they once were.

CAMFIELD: When I think about Berlin it is mostly a divided Berlin because I grew up in a divided Berlin. When I go back and visit I realize it’s a very different city now and the people I knew when I grew up and who did not leave Berlin, for them I think it is much less present even thought hey live there, than it is present for me even though I live away from Berlin. It’s a paradox.

GALLAFENT: But Camfield’s certain of one thing. She will never own an actual piece of the Berlin Wall. In fact she says she doesn’t even think of it as an object. Thinking about its meaning is enough.

CAMFIELD: Do I need to look at it to be aware of that? No, I know that. I don’t need to have it.

GALLAFENT: And so she walks away carrying only the idea of the long gone Berlin Wall. For The World I’m Alex Gallafent in New York.

CLARK: You can see photos of Juliane Camfield and the Berlin Wall at The World dot org.

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LISA MULLINS: I’m Lisa Mullins, and this is The World, a co-production of the B-B-C World Service, P-R-I, and W-G-B-H, Boston. One of the architects of the Vietnam War died today, Robert McNamara was 93 year old. He passed away this morning at his home in Washington. Robert McNamara had a varied career, but his legacy lies in the advice that he gave two US Presidents. McNamara was the Secretary of Defense for John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. The World’s Jason Margolis has this remembrance.

JASON MARGOLIS: Robert McNamara had a long and distinguished career. He was President of the Ford Motor Company. He ran the World Bank, where he expanded programs to combat poverty. But McNamara will primarily be remembered as an architect of the Vietnam War. Presidential historian Robert Dallek says at first, McNamara honestly thought that American forces would overwhelm a small undeveloped country.

ROBERT DALLEK: The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said convictions are a greater enemy of truth than lies. And that’s what I think operated with, happened with McNamara. He had this conviction that they could manage this war, Johnson believed this. They just didn’t think they could lose that conflict. Who the heck were they fighting?

JASON MARGOLIS: Dallek says by 1967, however, McNamara came to understand that the war in Vietnam was a quagmire. And this realization got to him. His boss couldn’t help but notice.

ROBERT DALLEK: Johnson was troubled by how uneasy and upset actually McNamara seemed to be over his continuing service as Secretary of Defense. And Johnson said to some people, he was afraid that McNamara was having some kind of collapse or breakdown. So he was as eager to push McNamara out, as McNamara was eager to go.

JASON MARGOLIS: McNamara later said he wasn’t sure if he quit or was fired as Defense Secretary. McNamara was a brilliant man, but he also didn’t seem to completely understand his enemy. And it showed.

BUI DIEM: His attitude is very, very insensitive about the Vietnamese people.

JASON MARGOLIS: Bui Diem served as the South Vietnamese ambassador to the US from 1966 to 1972.

BUI DIEM: We South Vietnamese people, we think that when the US intervene in Vietnam, it would be more, well human, if I can use that term, to think in terms of the suffering of the Vietnamese people too and the consequences of the US intervention in Vietnam.

JASON MARGOLIS: Many Americans also hold McNamara in part responsible for the deaths of 58 thousand US troops. McNamara felt compelled to act in Vietnam though, to contain the threat of communist expansion. McNamara also helped build up the nation’s nuclear arsenal to thwart the Soviet Union. Here he is speaking in 1963. That was the year after the Cuban missile crisis brought the US and Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war.

ROBERT MCNAMARA: I don’t regard the present communist leaders as wholly reckless. But recent experience in Cuba, and on a lesser scale in Berlin, has not persuaded me that I can predict with any confidence the sort of challenges that communist leaders will come to think prudent and profitable. If they were to again to miscalculate, as dangerously as they did last year at this time, it would be essential to confront them wherever that might be, with the full consequences of their decision.

JASON MARGOLIS: Later in life, McNamara spoke frequently about how close much of the world had come to annihilation. Steven Miller of Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs says McNamara came to believe that nuclear weapons served no military purpose.

STEVEN MILLER: Because the level of destruction was be so great. The implications and consequences would be so massive of any even limited use of nuclear weapons that they were essentially useless devices. And that’s one of the reasons why he became more and more passionate as his life went on about nuclear arms control.

JASON MARGOLIS: This stance reflects a tension between McNamara, the Secretary of Defense, and the man in his twilight years. In 1995, McNamara published a memoir, largely accepting responsibility for the failings in Vietnam.  Many saw the book as admirable, others were less generous. A New York Times editorial said McNamara offered the war’s dead only a prime-time apology and stale tears, three decades late. For the World, I’m Jason Margolis.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.