During the last few weeks, I have been teaching about the Cold War at the local community college, and this has prompted me to reflect on ways I was impacted by the late Cold War period and the aftermath from the fall of the Soviet Union. As I’ve been reflecting, I asked my dad to send me pictures from this period of my life.
When I was eleven, our family traveled to Germany and stayed on a mixed crop and livestock farm, owned by friends my father had met in the 60s when participating in a college work-study program. Here I am with the farmer, a man named Hans, the son-in-law of the famer my father originally worked for in his college program. I looked up to and admired Hans, and wanted to be a farmer like him.
The experience on this farm, working closely with animals and the land, impacted me deeply and solidified my conviction that I would one day have a farm and ranch of my own.
Here I am mucking out a stall – an activity that had to be done each day by hand.
I also enjoyed working in the kitchen garden, from where a good deal of our vegetables were grown.
Here I am with my brothers, Patrick and Gregory, leading the cows back from pasture for their evening milking.
Although I never achieved my childhood dream of having my own farm, I have always retained a fond love of animals and the outdoors. Also my interest in 20th century history in general, and the Cold War era in particular, goes back to this time. But before talking about the Cold War, I want to share a bit more about the place we stayed.
The farm was situated on the outskirts of Suderburg, within the district of Uelzen in Lower Saxony (part of the larger region of Lüneburger Heide). My father hasn’t finished digitizing all his pictures, so I don’t yet have any he took of the village, but I put Suderburg into Google Images to get a few specimens, so you can understand something of why I found this place so magical.
To the residents of Germany, this environment is nothing special, but to me it was like stepping into a picture book. The combination of this place being real and down-to-earth yet also strange, unfamiliar and other-worldly, with people speaking a language that I could partially understand but held depths of meaning inaccessible to me, left me with the abiding sense—which has served me well in my adult life—that wonder and enchantment have a greater primacy than much of what we take to be real, and that at any moment I might turn a corner to find the secret path that runs east of the moon and west of the sun.
Once we left the farm to go on a road trip to the Bavarian alps, where there was an entirely different type of good magic, which made me feel like I had stepped into a Brothers Grimm fairy tale.
Ok, what does any of this have to do with the Cold War? Well, Suderburg was just 12 miles from the border with East Germany, then the Soviet-controlled DDR. This was in 1986, a time of high tension between the United States and the Soviets, with worldwide tensions concentrated all along the Iron Curtain separating western and eastern Europe.
One day our family drove to the edge of West Germany where I saw the wall separating the Communist world from the free world. It was a dreary sight, and even the dreary weather added to the sense of heaviness I felt.
Here is a picture of my father and two brothers next to the wall. Notice I am absent. I was too scared. It was frightening, knowing that the border fence was sometimes electrified, and it was doubly frightening because we could see a soldier in a guard tower on the other side peering down at us.
Here is my mother with my two brothers standing for a photo op, while I stand at a safe distance.
But just before leaving, I got up my courage and asked to be photographed next to the barrier.
The Iron Curtain separating Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe from the west was such a fixture of how I understood the world, that if you had told my 11-year-old self that in three years the wall would come down, I would have found it hard to take in. But, of course, that is exactly what happened.
The fall of the Soviet Union was something that no one saw coming. The lifespan of empires usually lasts longer than merely sixty-nine years, and it seemed unheard-of that an empire could dissolve without foreign invasion or civil war. The United States had an entire industry of Soviet analysts, while the government and numerous universities spent massive funds to sustain various Soviet Studies departments. Yet nobody anticipated that the Soviet Union would surrender its satellite states and then end, being replaced by the ancient, and much smaller, nation of Russia. Everyone knew the Soviet Union was in a mess during the late 80s, but that didn’t signal its imminent collapse. After all, Russia had been in a mess when it defeated Napoleon, and then Hitler. The Russian people are very resilient. But, of course, the wall came down in November of ’89, and the Soviet Union dissolved shortly after that, in 1991. I remember feeling such amazement, almost like I couldn’t take it in. And I remember puzzling over what the international dynamic would look like next after the dust settled.
A year after the wall came down, and a year before the collapse of the Soviet Union, we traveled back to Germany. This time we drove to Berlin with our German friends, taking hammers and chisels to beat at the wall, glad to be part of tearing it down. In the earlier picture of me standing next to the wall during my first trip to Germany, you can see how scared I looked. I hated the wall and everything it stood for, so you can imagine how exhilarating it was to be hacking away at it with a hammer and chisel, and to even climb up on it. How different this was to my experience four years earlier!
These before and after experiences were perhaps even more meaningful to my father, a baby boomer whose entire life had been, in some sense, defined by Cold War dynamics. Two weeks ago I recorded a conversation with my dad about his experience growing up in the Cold War. He tells how his parents joined with other community members to watch for Soviet planes, how they built bomb shelters in preparation for war with the Soviets, how he was once detained and interrogated by soldiers from the DDR, and how we were in Europe during the Chernobyl explosion. I’ve interspersed my conversations with Dad with a history lesson about why the Soviet Union collapsed, and some general reflections on the Cold War.