Foreign affairs correspondent Jonathan Rugman explains that the story of the Berlin wall needs to be explained again, not only to a new audience, but also to put the modern world into context.
I have just had my version of a “senior moment”. Reporting yesterday on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, I discovered that the lovely producer working alongside me was just six years old back in 1989.
Aside from feeling rather old, I also seem to have reached an age when I am telling stories which, however familiar they may be to me, need re-telling for a new generation.
A generation which may never have heard of Lech Walesa (I am not sure my producer had) and a generation for which the falling of the Twin Towers, not the Berlin wall, is the defining political event.
So, thanks to said producer, I found myself writing a script which assumed the viewer knew nothing about the Berlin wall at all.
At worst this can come across as patronising to those who remember the tumult only too well, but audience research suggests we have one of the youngest audiences of any news programme, and we forget this at our peril.
The point I was trying to make in yesterday’s Berlin blog, that Berlin’s anniversary is so much bigger than 9/11, is made rather more clearly by Ross Douthat, a columnist in today’s International Herald Tribune.
“Twenty years later, we still haven’t come to terms with the scope of our deliverance”, he writes. “Even 9/11 didn’t undo the work of 89…Islamism isn’t in the same league as the last century’s totalitarianisms…yet nobody seems to believe it. Instead, we keep returning to the idea that liberal society is just as vulnerable as it was before the Berlin wall came down.”
Douthat suggests that Osama Bin Laden just doesn’t make the grade in terms of a global threat. And that we pose far more of a threat to ourselves than Mahmoud Ahmedinejad or Kim Jong-il are ever likely to, though the IHT’s columnist sees our fears of self-induced implosion as a “pseudo-Marxist vision of global capitalism, destined to be undone by peak oil, climate change, or the next financial bubble.”
Doutha, who does a good impression of a psychotherapist with the west on his couch, concludes that we are paranoid, afraid to reckon with our own apparent permanence.
That we are a Rome in search of somebody to sack us, a Nineveh in search of a Yahweh to chastise us, because the “possibility of dissolution lends a moral shape to history”. In other words, we still see reds under our beds everywhere, even though, 20 years after the Berlin wall fell, the reds have well and truly gone.
But what if there is indeed a new existential threat, in the shape of climate change? Mr Douthat doesn’t quite say this is paranoia, but he does suggest that mind games lurk behind all our fears: “it may be that the only thing more frightening than the possibility of annihilation is the possibility that our society could coast on forever as it is.”
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