My piece of the Berlin Wall

It's possible that I'm just regurgitating it out of a desire to romanticize it, but I think that the first time I really wanted to become a journalist was on that fantastic November evening in 1989, when I was shocked and delighted at the same time, absorbing every word that Mihajlo Kovač uttered while reporting live on the fall of the Berlin Wall.

A few months before that, Slobodan Milošević promised his fans wars, so the demolition of the Berlin Wall seemed to me to be a guarantee that his plan would not come true, because in my thirteen-year-old heart at that time idealistic, naive blood cells were beating.

It didn't take me long to realize that I was drowning in utopia, so the fall of the Berlin Wall remained an eternal frustration for me. With my whole being I envied Europe, which began to unite with his fall, while the country that expected me to serve it under arms and pay taxes if I overtook it, decided to stay out of that magnificent project.

However, thanks to the "Pulse of Europe - EU media visits" project, I finally saw Berlin for the first time on an April night this year, no less wonderful than when the Wall came down. Immediately after checking into the hotel near the Friedrichstrasse station, I set off on a feverish night walk through Berlin.

It was the middle of the week, there were only a few cars passing by on the wide boulevards, and the sidewalks were empty, so the geometric harmony that rules the German capital, devoid of the arbitrariness of people's contours, came to the fore even more.

I glimpsed the Brandenburg Gate as soon as I emerged onto Unter den Linden boulevard, glowing in its magnificence, and I sped towards its turquoise quadrilateral at the top as if pursued by the four horsemen of the apocalypse. She was the Holy Grail for me, a never-extinguished spark of freedom and unity that I believed would follow my country as I watched the Wall fall. The embassies that surround it even today testify to the division of the world in which Berlin once played a central role. Everyone is there: the British, the French, the Americans and the heirs of the Soviet Union - the Russians. The Brandenburg Gate was, and turns out to be again, the navel of the Cold War.

As I pass under its central arch, experiencing myself for the first time in my life as a truly free European, I turn left (and is any other turn right?), towards the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. As I enter among the concrete blocks of unequal height and slope, but of the same length and width, lined up like a thread, at right angles, I realize with my whole body the horrible industrial systematicity of the Holocaust: the victims as individuals differed in their physical and mental specificities, but they were all killed precisely and coldly, as only geometry can be. The complex created in this way, although it is all at right angles, essentially acts like a labyrinth, and while you are between the blocks, the sounds from the street are completely dampened, so the impression of the camp's alienation, paranoia and powerlessness is complete.

With a shiver that is the product of simultaneous elation and anxiety, I return to the hotel with an insatiable desire to see the remains of the Wall in the coming days.

The business segments of the trip followed, numerous conversations from which the ominous message that Europe is hastily arming itself realizing that Trump has left it in the lurch in front of Putin emerged more and more clearly. Germany alone, we were told, will borrow 500 billion euros and all that money will be wasted on armaments. The question hangs over everyone's head: "Is this the last peaceful summer in Europe?".

Then, finally, on the last day of the visit, I came to the Wall. Most people look for the famous Brezhnev and Honecker mouth-to-mouth kiss mural, but I, as a true Pink Floyd believer, search and find a section of the Wall with a mural inspired by their album Wall (The Wall). The mural has everything it needs to be, the sadistic Master, his meticulous Wife, his Mother and Judge embodied in the same person, and the Marching Hammers leading directly into stripped-down fascism. That part of the Wall is in the shadow of the surrounding buildings, so it is cool even on a sunny day.

I touch it, again with a mixture of elation and anxiety, humming to myself the line of the song during which the Floydian Hammers march, a fascist phantasmagoria: "Would you like to see Britannia rule again?", realizing with horror that it is actually a precursor to the isolationist and no less fascist Trump phrase "Make America great again".

Is the last summer of peace in Europe really upon us? Will a Wall be erected again? In an unknown number of years, will some little boy in this country watch its demolition again, thinking that the time of freedom and community has come, dreaming of Europe as his undivided home?