Berlin, 2014.

Twenty - five years ago, almost to this day, the Berlin Wall as constructed in the early 1960's and fortified many times thereafter was rendered moot as symbol of soviet / Marxist dominion in Western Europe and dismantled, though not overnight:  As a finality that rings in the ears of every soviet person attentive in the day, sections of the wall were taken down and taken away by people with ordinary sledgehammers, jackhammers, and then with cranes and other machines to clear the way for the 40,000 or so refugees from the east that would come over to West Germany in the first month after the wall fell, and then more after that.  The initial responses of the East German authorities at the time first to the burgeoning demonstrations and then to the dismantling of that physical barrier between East and West are well documented and most people by now have seen at least some of them on the television and heard of the great big party at the dismantling of the Berlin Wall was at the time.  Today, and chiefly the area of the Potsdamer Platz, Checkpoint Charlie and associated bridge and other places so dramatically portrayed in the media in the past are simply memories that are kept in small museums at different points along the former path of the wall.  On this day, as one awaits the official anniversary of the dismantling of the wall, in Berlin, the former location of the wall and its path through that town is marked by approximately seven thousand lit balloons that will be released upward into the sky upon official commemoration.

The monetary costs of re - unification, unforeseeably, have been quite high and many parts of East

Germany, especially in Saxony and Thuringia, are permanently economically depressed and no rent can even be made from the land there, apparently.  The burden however, of the challenges that capitalism and freedom suggest and then propose to society, as promised originally in the regimes of Bush, Helmut Kohl, and Gorbachev, have allowed for a brighter future for Central Europe as it is now less of a political pawn to the soviets as then constantly uprooted and even poisoned, and allowed as well for Western Europe is a departure of the politics of buffer states and again a greater socio - economic promise for all.  This has not been nor will it be without its issues as the guarantees of free society to all, everywhere, and not just at this point as commemorated in Central Europe, at first incipient in places and then more prominent are not reified without the efforts of all contributing people on every rung of the social ladder.  It is seemingly greatly easier to change the actions of a person with rewarding incentives, and as is the case with Berlin, much more difficult and as has been done here, to change the mindset of centralizing and enriching the paternalistic state, for one, into an attitude of one and all as to the greater potentialities presented by definition in the economic activity of capital and the overall benefits of this to everyone; even to those on the coattails of those who originally allowed for and then have made possible the Berlin of today. 

New York Times Article - November 7, 2014.
One Berlin Refugee Center.
One Berlin Wall commemorative museum.