Abundance and Apathy: Remembering the Berlin Wall

Life is easy right now. Most of the people I know have a car (more than one), a phone (more than one), a T.V. (more than one), they often take vacations (more than one) and even own a home (some have more than one). 

I don’t personally know anyone going hungry, and even friends of mine who’ve experienced a “downsizing” in their job status are still able to make ends meet and live comfortably. Some would call our current standard of living “the abundant life.” And it is very abundant. However, we must be very careful that the “abundant” life doesn’t become the “apathetic” life. This week is a good time for a wake-up call.

My wake-up call came when my teenage son excitedly told me one day that he had seen a piece of the Berlin Wall. 


“It was behind glass,” he explained. “A real piece of the Wall. Imagine that!” I waited for him to finish the story of his trip to the museum before I replied.

“Actually, I have a piece of the Wall downstairs,” I told him. 

“You do?” He didn’t believe me. 

“And, you can touch it,” I added. As he eagerly followed me to the basement, I realized that I had never shared with him two important experiences of my youth.

Various circumstances took me to Germany twice as a teenager. The first time was in 1988, to visit Hans and Inge Wittke, Scouting friends of my Dad’s. They lived in Dusseldorf, and I stayed with them for a month while I practiced my junior high school German skills. As active German Scouters, the Wittkes provided an opportunity for me to attend a German Scout camp for two weeks. Hiking, bicycling, and backpacking through the green fields and hills of West Germany is an experience I will never forget.

Just as sharp in my mind as the campfires, German Scout songs and quaint German towns are, is the memory of a one-day trip to the East German border. We climbed to a high castle, where we could look over barbed wire and “no man’s land” into East Germany. It was frightful to see people -- actual people -- on the other side. 

Later, we drove right up to the border and stopped at the sign that read, “Halt! Hier Grenze.” I could see the guard towers and the soldiers inside, and they could see me. I couldn't imagine a life without freedom, like living in a cage. The experience touched my 14-year-old heart.

Coincidentally, I traveled to Germany exactly two summers later, as a 16-year-old, to spend a month with a German family in Nurnberg. The year was 1990. Just nine months earlier, the Iron Curtain had fallen. One week of the student exchange involved a trip to Berlin. We traveled by bus from Nurnberg, driving through East Germany.

As we approached the old border crossing station, the teenagers on the bus became silent. We pressed our faces against the bus window, straining to see everything, and drove without a sound past deserted guard shacks, dog runs, now-broken barbed wire fences, still stretching for miles through the green countryside. The silence -- and significance of what once was -- was eerie. Once the old border was behind us, we started our cheery chatter again.

Soon we reached our first East German town, and the silence settled in again. Traditional German houses were grey, without flower boxes or well-maintained cobblestone streets. People stood in line for oranges, in their grey clothes. Remains of what was just nine months earlier were still painfully evident.

After hours of grey houses, grey broken streets, and grey “Travies” (cars big enough to fit two people and a sack of potatoes) we finally reached the old West Berlin. Warm beds, orange juice (not available in the East) and colorful flower boxes were a welcome sight.

Our tour the next day took us to Checkpoint Charlie. It was now a museum, and we walked uninhibited from one side of the city to the other. The Berlin Wall had been cleared from the Brandenburger Tor, but the rest of the wall remained. The other students and I rented hammers and chisels from the street vendors, and chopped away pieces of the wall to take home as souvenirs. There was plenty of wall for everyone.

Viewing the East - and the grey poverty - first through barbed wire, and then from the other side, was another experience I will not soon forget.

But the Berlin Wall fell a long time ago. My children read about it in history books now. Visitors to Germany can no longer chip away their own souvenir wall piece, and the once grey East German houses are now filled with typical flowerboxes again. Will we forget the Iron Curtain? Will we become apathetic in our abundance? Have we perhaps even forgotten the American Revolution?
Abundance is all around us, but it could turn into apathy if we allow it to. 

This week we remember twenty-five years ago, November 9, 1989, when the wall fell. It's a is a good time to discuss freedom; a good time to teach children. I think I’ll bring out my piece of the Berlin Wall and use it as a centerpiece on our dining room table. We can look at it as we eat dinner and discuss our blessings and our freedoms: our two cars, our spacious house, our open lands, and our opportunities.

In fact, we’ll do more than look at the wall, I’ll let my children touch it and hold it. I hope it touches their souls like it touched mine. I want the wall and the experiences I share to stir in them a gratitude for the abundant life, a fire of freedom that will teach them to avoid apathy, so that their liberty is never placed behind glass and made a museum piece.