The Berlin Wall, Your Gift with Purchase
Drew Gowing | July 2011
I first came into contact with the Berlin Wall, believe it or not, at the Estee Lauder counter at Macy’s New York City Department Store. My purchase of $35.00 (or more) entitled me to a “Free Gift” which included Super Luxurious Face Wash, a Red Dreamy Lipstick, a Travel Tote, and, last but not least, a tiny piece of the Berlin Wall.
Begun in 1961, the Berlin Wall ultimately grew into 97 miles of concrete and barbed wire, which created the official demarcation line between East and West. While the East claimed the wall was erected to protect its people from Fascism, the West maintained the wall was intended to prevent its people from escaping. Indeed, before the wall’s construction, some 3.5 million people circumvented eastern block emigration restrictions to defect to the West. And of the nearly 5000 who attempted to migrate over the wall after its completion, not one lived to tell of their flight into freedom.
What isn’t widely known is that this squabble began 10 years earlier. Following World War II, and the deployment of the first Atomic Bomb, the people of the world had grown, well, rather suspicious of one another. Indeed, when the US flexed its nuclear muscle at both Hiroshima and Nagasaki Japan in 1945, it demonstrated how it could exterminate nearly 200,000 people, annihilate an entire city landscape, and effectively curl the DNA of the human family in a single instant. And because only Russia and the USA possessed the Nuclear Bomb, a Weapons Race ensued as these two Superpowers began to spar, engage, and ultimately square off against each other.
NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) was conceived in 1949 and began recruiting allies into an organized system of collective defense and unified response to any external attack. The Warsaw Pact, alternatively, came along in ‘55, and was also designed as a mutual defense treaty between Russia and her allies. As the United States and USSR persuaded the countries of the world to pick sides, they effectively carved up the human race between them by instigating political conflict, military tension, and, most importantly, competition throughout the world.
The Cold War ended almost as abruptly as it began. After a stalemate from 1946 to 1991, ignorance and want (I mean us and them) formed an unlikely friendship. “Tear down that Wall, Mr. Gorbachev,” signals an end to the Cold War, yet somehow is sullied by the pictures of Gorbachev and Reagan giggling in cowboy hats on the veranda of the Gipper’s California Ranch. Could this chat have begun prior to the proxy wars of Vietnam, Korea, or the Middle East? What about Angola, Latin America, and Afghanistan? This almost 50 years of contempt between our two countries ended with the bankruptcy of the Soviet Union, the subsequent fall of communism, and the liberation of the Eastern Bloc into free market Republics of their very own. And with Arab Revolutions currently underway, I question if or whether they too will join the new global economy from a position of compromise, or rather from an egalitarian resolve to indemnify their own customs whilst cooperating with and contributing to a New World Order?
While Big Macs and Levis were the novelty in post communist Russia, tiny crumbles of the Berlin Wall were making their way to America. As the very symbol of a classless society and common ownership, where all articles of consumption were free, I found it perfectly appropriate that my encounter with the Berlin Wall took place at the Cosmetic Counter at Macy’s -- albeit for a $35.00 dollar purchase (or more).
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