We may be 18, but we understand and we care
This year is 18 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The end of the Evil Empire, the death of one manifestation of totalitarianism that the free world squared off against for half a century.
We know. By we I mean those of us born during or after 1989. By know I mean, unlike the ever-popular notion that children take the present moment and their liberties for granted, there are millions of children across the world captivated and fully aware of the significance of what happened that year, before they were born.
Films like The Lives of Others bring these decades into sharp and immediate focus but the real history is to be found through the work of Wired magazine which recently investigated the meticulous shredding undertaken by the Stasi in its last throes.
History reminds us of the most poignant and pivotal moments; the darkest of years and the most hopeful. 1989 represented a fundamental shift from stable hatred to unstable turmoil. Those of us who did not live through those times are no less prepared to speak about them, and speak about them authoritatively.
It is important that we treat our history with reverence and never forget how hard our parents and grandparents fought now-vanquished enemies for the liberties we, today, consider ‘normal’. They weren’t normal then, and it is dangerously foolish of us to neglect that.
However, it is equally dangerous to brand the new generation of citizenry unaware and apathetic. In every generation it is easy to find broad swathes of the population who seem totally incapable of thinking about things beyond what will bring them utmost pleasure in the here and now.
But in every generation, without fail, you will find hundreds of thousands of bright young men and women in whom the hope of tomorrow resides.
Yes, Mr Cohen you found the children whose accounts will add colour to your article. Heike Krupa’s students like Felix Blanke may be unaware of what communism was. He may be happy and content playing with computers, networking online and killing Orcs on World of Warcraft, but he is not the whole story. Don’t lose hope in our generation, don’t think we don’t care about the past. There are many of us who care deeply about history, who are truly passionate about learning about who did what, and when, and why, and how.
For Ricardo Westendorf ignorance may be bliss, but for many others of our generation, ignorance is extremely dangerous, and apathy even more so because it turns its blind eye to horrors. We know what 1989 meant, just as we know what 1933 meant. Rest assured that there are those of us out there who will never forget. But know that in 2019 I won’t write in the IHT portraying only the 18 year olds who don’t know what 9/11 means, because there will be those who do; and they are the ones upon whom we should focus our attention.
