exasperated-viewer-on-air:

I received a phone call from a close friend in the Catalonian television, TV3. “Miguel, you have to come to our HQ, we need you for urgent translation. Something big is going on.”

I took a cab and 15 minutes later I was in the studios. Everybody was like freaking out, they were running like hens around. My friend came running to my encounter and rushed me through corridors to the central studio.

“But what is going on, Tony?”, I asked him on the run. “The wall will fall in … it is falling!”, he shouted to me. “You will have to translate the German feed into Catalan.”

Wtf… the wall… what wall? I thought about a huge natural disaster, but couldn’t remember any wall that would arise such attention. Maybe in the Alps?

Before I could ask again, I was sitting on an edge of a table, got the headset put on, the technician asked me to talk so to adjust it, gave me an OK… and then I had a chance to look at the screens. I saw a huge crowd in all of them. I still was unable to recognize anything.

“Here comes the feed”, cried my friend and my ears got filled with the voice of a hysterical German commenting in loud voice.

“Go, start translating. We are in the air in … 3, 2… go, go!”

And I just started. German to Catalan is not easy, and in the bewildered state I was, receiving the German input in really bad conditions made me even more insecure. My words didn’t seem to make any sense, but I kept on with the simultaneous translation committing one mistake after the other, sweating and at the same time feeling cold.

Then it struck me. It was the wall, THE WALL. It was not falling, but hundreds of people from both Germans were sitting or standing on it, smashing it, shouting, greeting, embracing each others…

I stopped translating. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It seemed so completely faked or unreal… I mean The Wall was so much WALL… it just would never disappear. My mind went in all kind of colors and my mouth wide open.

One of the guys in the studio understood what was happening to me, while nearly all the others were trying to force me to keep on with the translation. He took a microphone and asked me what I was feeling.

So I started to express that, whatever “that” it was. I don’t remember any of my words, which were delivered to hundreds of thousands of Catalonian homes.

I still can’t believe it. You know… that I know, that we all know… but most of you haven’t lived with THE WALL, its unbreakable presence, its evil and disgusting symbol of hate. It was meant to be something eternal, and a terrible result and sign of a war our fathers had loaded on our shoulders. A permanent reminder of guilt, a three dimensional tattoo we all Germans were meant to carry and expose at all our movements, words or thoughts, actions taken or not. And then, all of a sudden, it was gone.

Maybe liberty doesn’t really exist. Only the path to it, filled with all kinds of restrictions and limits. But I know that we will always find a way to break those walls, may it take us one or ten thousand years to do so. And it is not our generation that really advances from such changes. We have got that wall still inside us. The reminder stays in place.

But our sons and daughters… they don’t. The wall wouldn’t catch them, too.

(source here)

Tags:

#Berlin Wall #anniversaries #history #the kind of history nobody bothers to tell you about #because they remember it and they never put two and two together to realise that *you* don’t already know #(which I suppose is the other side of ‘the wall wouldn’t catch them too’) #(I think to this day our teaching of history is still aimed at Boomers) #(the history books stop where *their* recollections begin) #(not where *ours* do) #(I’m sick of history books that end at World War II) #(give me books that end at the new millennium) #(hell) #(give me books that end at Katrina) #(at the Indonesian tsunami) #(at the earthquake that is officially called Tohoku but that everyone knows as Fukushima) #(err on the side of telling me things I already know) #(because *somebody* needs to hear it) #(and I might still learn something) #tag rambles