School For Independent Learners

November 9th marks 20 years since David Hasselhoff and his magical leather jacket from the future vaporized the Berlin Wall, delivered millions of jelly donuts from communist oppression and single-handedly ended the Cold War…

Okay, so that’s a slightly romanticized summary. As Mary Elise Sarotte shows in The Washington Post, the details of history tend to be much more interesting then the simple narratives that we come to embrace over time:

The “decision” to open the border was not a conscious choice at all. Instead
of a reassuring victory for the forces of freedom, it was a chaotic and potentially violent
mess. One of the most momentous events of the past century was, in fact, an accident, a
semicomical and bureaucratic mistake that owes as much to the Western media as to the
tides of history.

Meanwhile, to get an idea of the dreary world these East Germans were so eager to escape check out the fantastic 2006 film The Lives of Others. The film is set in East Berlin in the eerily appropriate year of 1984 and follows the daily grind of an East German Stasi (secret police) agent assigned to monitor suspected enemies of the communist state.