November 9, 1989

Coming back from a short trip to our home in Philadelphia in the US, where we both were on graduate studies from 1988 to 1990, we switched on the old black&white TV that my uni supervisor had given us (we were very thrifty as we were both on academic scholarships that provided tuition and basic living expenses but only one flight home). What a surprise on the regular evening news:   we saw people dancing on the Berlin Wall back home in Germany, hacking at the wall, chiseling off pieces!
In utter delight we saw the "Trabi"-parade passing through Brandenburg Gate  watched by armed East German border guards but unharmed,  where people had been shot at only weeks before! That was my 27th  birthday on November 9, 1989.

 
After the travel restrictions had been lifted, we had a huge influx of people from East Germany and from the former East Bloc countries. Over 2 mio. ethnic Germans from the dissolving Soviet Union, mostly from Ukraine and Kasachstan, arrived in Germany between 1990 and 1996 and since then have mostly successfully assimilated into the German society. 

Nowadays we seem to see a repetition - refugees, whole families from Syria, Afghanistan and other failed states on the Mediterranean Sea, in search of a life in safety, are coming in huge numbers to the European Union, over a million this year alone to Germany, sometimes walking on their own two feet over months and years the whole distance of over 3000 km from Syria .... 

So far the overwhelming majority of Germans have been very welcoming. Nearly everyone seems to be involved or knows someone involved in help efforts, collecting warm clothing and shoes, providing housing,  if only freeing up sports halls and moving training to other facilities to provide temporary shelter before the winter comes.  
Is that because so many of us have experienced  being a refugee in their own lives and families? When millions of Jewish people tried to flee Germany before WW2 and had huge difficulties in finding a country that would take them? Or when the German population of East Prussia, Pommerania, Sudentenland and Silesia - more the 11 Mio. people - were expelled after the war with the restructuring of the German map, escaped with bare necessities and had to build new lives from scratch in the rest and what was left of Germany? Or maybe it is our sentimental touch and we want to relive the Trabi-parade of 1989? 

Maybe, we just want a challenge, we want to make it a success, we try harder, we make it work - and then we will have a celebration!

guardian angels in dreary weather in November ...