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What an honor it was to join Jennifer Lynn, host of National Public Radio's Morning Edition, at the WHYY studios in Philadelphia. We were talking about the Berlin Wall and the conversations I've been having with students at Science Leadership Academy, Downingtown West, Masterman, and Radnor High about freedom, risks, and responsibilities.

The Berlin Wall is down, but what walls still stand?

Would you risk it all for freedom?

Do you know what you desire?

Given a wall and some cans of paint, what mark would you leave behind?

Given a page, what poem would you write?

What matters most in our lives?

I loved the students I met, the stories they told me, the deep respect these students clearly have for those who nurture and teach them. I am incapable, often, of fully articulating just what my interactions with students and their beautiful librarians and teachers mean to me. Jennifer and Joe Hernandez were exquisitely kind to invite me onto their show and to work with me so that we might tell this story succinctly.

The story will air this morning at 7:45 AM. More on the work of these students and the experience can be found here:

On Teaching the Berlin Wall
At Science Leadership Academy: the Huffington Story
At Downingtown West: poems and graffiti art
At Masterman High: poems and graffiti art 
At Radnor High: poems and graffiti art
At Radnor High: photographic outtakes
Common Core Aligned Teacher's Guide
Please go here to read the teacher's guide for Going Over, a Berlin Wall novel

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Earlier today I traveled to the gorgeous WHYY building in Old City to talk with Jennifer Lynn, gracious host of WHYY FM's Morning Edition, about the students I've been meeting during my Berlin Wall talks.

I'll share a link when the segment goes live. Between now and then, my thanks to Radnor High and those who snapped these photos of our Friday conversation.

And my great thanks to Jennifer and Joe.

(And Ellen T!)

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Today I'll return to Radnor High, where I learned the periodic table, Algebra 2, Shakespeare, poetry and a little something about people.

I'll be talking about Going Over and the Berlin Wall.

I'll also be remembering the Beth of long ago and the Beth of 2010, who stood with the great filmmaker Lee Daniels and others celebrating the school that partly shaped us.

I am deeply grateful that so many Radnor alums have returned to my world in recent years. I continue to learn from them.

With thanks to Molly Carroll Newton, Michelle Wtezel, Fran Misener, and Ellen Tractenberg.

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I took the story of the Berlin Wall to Philadelphia's academic magnet school, Masterman—meeting with the students of two exquisite and clearly well-respected history teachers, Liz Taylor and Janel Vecsi.

In the Spring Garden neighborhood, inside a circa-1876 building that has inspired filmmakers and hosted President Obama, we talked about risks, responsibilities, and choices. I met students with a personal tie to East Berlin. Students who knew history and the world around them. Students who watch the news out of curiosity and not out of an assignment. Students who work extremely hard at school and at home—and excel. Students who willingly make art and share it. We hear about the terrible struggles of the School District of Philadelphia. We meet and write about the teachers who work so hard under difficult circumstances. Then we hang out with the students themselves and are (again) reminded how important this teaching enterprise is, how necessary it is to get it right, for them.

I came home with a fat file of graffiti art and poetry. What do you want that you do not have? I'd asked the students, after sharing Wall stories, playing Bruce Springsteen, reading from Going Over. What separates you from your dreams or those you love? What is the cost of desire? What are the consequences of change? What are the lessons of the Wall?

And student after student thoughtfully answered. A mere sampling:

I know why the caged bird sings
because I am that caged bird.
My wings are clipped,
my legs are tied,
yet, I will still warble in
this dark, pressing night.
I will walk up to this barrier,
this solid thing that embodies
all forms of constriction.
I don't care, I will fly,
my ropes are loosening,
my wings are growing.
The bird knows its risks.
Yet it flies, it flies.
The bird has one
thing that I cannot attain:
freedom.
Freedom is on the other side.
Will I jump?
I know why the caged bird sings.
He's telling me to jump.
*

It's safe to stay where I am.
That's what people say, at least.
It's too risky
To risk the distance,
Defy the borders.
Your life is fine here, easy.
But I don't live to feel fine.
I live to feel alive.
To do what I want to do.
To pursue freedom.
To chase my own dreams.
I don't live to listen to washed-up lyrics
Written by tyrants.
I live to dream.
To dance.
To dare.
*

Walls separate
Mentally, physically, emotionally...
On one side, ideals.
The other, truth.
People have ideals,
A set mind on how they
Want to live.
But then there is the truth.
How they are living ...
If there ideal is their truth
There would be no wall.
*

The cost of desire is terror—
the Terror you feel when change occurs,
when it does not turn out the way you thought.
like you wanted it to.
You do not know what answer you will get.
What feelings you will have.
What the long-term outcome will be.
But you try and you try
And you hope change will go your way.
*

Walls.
They protect but also confine.
They keep out the bad but
also the good.
They protect us from the outside world
but also block us from the outside.
So break down the walls
and let yourself free.
Because the walls can't protect you forever.
And when they break,
make sure you're ready.

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Today is not just the 25th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall. It's the 25th anniversary of the remarkable, enduring, smart, and somehow simultaneously huge and intimate Children's Book World of Haverford, PA.

As part of the celebration, CBW hosted The Caldecott Panel at Friends' Central School—the very best of the very best right there on City Line Avenue. Chris Van Allsburg. David Wiesner. Brian Selznick. And Jennifer M. Brown as moderator of what quickly became a wide-ranging conversation about black and white vs. color, visual narratives, filmic translations, the plot power of the artistic media, the certain school of design attended by all three of these great storytellers (RISD), and who taught who, or who might have taught who, or who wished they had taught who.

There they sat on one long couch and two book-ending chairs, surprising each other, while Jenny Brown, who knows this business better than anyone anywhere (our Ambassador of Children's Literature, I've always said), asked her intelligent questions, sat back, and enjoyed the surprises, too.

A packed house. An eager audience. Dozens of hands flying up during the Q and A—half of those hands belonging to children.

You want to celebrate one of the top children's book stores in the country? I can think of no better way.

Congratulations, CBW. The lovely lady with the dark tresses, by the way, is CBW's own Heather Hebert.

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LICHTGRENZE from Fall of the Wall 25 on Vimeo.

These past two days, 8,000 lit balloons have been floating above a ten-mile stretch of the original Berlin Wall.

Tonight, 8,000 citizens with keys will each unlock a separate balloon and it will escape, free, to the atmosphere.

It's part of the 25th anniversary of the Fall of the Wall, an art installation by Christopher and Marc Bauder that has been in the works for many years.

My friend Bill sent me this video and article. I am pleased to share it here and encourage you, too, to watch this New York Times coverage of the installation. It's extraordinary art and essential history.

Tomorrow, I will take my Berlin Wall novel, Going Over, into Masterman, a Philadelphia school, and talk about history, risks, freedom, and responsibilities. On Friday the conversation will move to my alma mater, Radnor High. 

But today I wish I was in Berlin to see those 8,000 balloons fly free.

More on the wall and what it did, who tried to escape, how much it hurt, can be found here. 


Today your job is this: Take nothing for granted.

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As we head towards another General Election in 2015, once again politicians from the Right and Left will battle it out, hoping to persuade the electorate that either a big state or small state will best address the challenges facing our society. For 40 years, Germans living behind the Iron Curtain in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) had first-hand experience of a big state, with near-full employment and heavily subsidized rent and basic necessities. Then, when the Berlin Wall fell, and East Germany was effectively taken over by West Germany in the reunification process, they were plunged into a new capitalist reality. The whole fabric of daily life changed, from the way people voted, to the brand of butter they bought, to the newspapers that they read. Circumstances forced East Germans to swap Communism for Capitalism, and their feelings about this change remain quite diverse.

Initially, East Germans flooded across the border, bursting with excitement and curiosity to see what the West was like – a ‘West’ that most had only known through watching Western television. For some, sampling a McDonald’s hamburger – the ultimate symbol of Western capitalism – was high on the to-do list, for others it was access to Levi’s jeans or exotic fruit that was particularly novel.

At the same time as delighting in consumer improvements however, many East Germans felt ambivalent about the wider changes. Decades of state propaganda that painted Western societies as unjust places where homelessness, drugs and unemployment were rife, had left its mark, and many East Germans felt unsure and slightly fearful of what was to come.

From a position of full employment in 1989, 3 years after reunification 15% of East Germans were out of work. For those who struggled to put bread on the table after reunification, the advantages of having a wider range of goods to buy remained a largely theoretical gain. For others however, reunification led to greater freedom to pursue individual career choices that were not dictated by the state’s needs.

The end of East Germany’s ‘big state’ model led to the disbanding of its Secret Police, the Stasi, which had rooted out opposition to the State’s dictates. In the 1980s, 91, 000 people worked for the Stasi full time and a further 173, 000 acted as informers. To enforce socialism, they tapped people’s phones, wired their houses, trailed suspects and even collected smell samples in jars, so that sniffer dogs could track their movements.

For those who were made to feel vulnerable and afraid by a regime that watched, trailed and threatened to imprison them, such as political opponents, Christians, environmental activists or other non-conformists, the fall of the Wall and the end of the GDR most often brought relief: the Western set-up allowed for greater freedom of expression and greater freedom of movement.

For the majority of East Germany though, this was not how they felt: since many say they had no idea of the extent to which the Stasi was intertwined with daily life, the end of the GDR did not bring with it a sense of relief. In fact, many East Germans felt that there were many things the West could learn from the GDR, and were resentful at the lack of openness to incorporating any East German policies or practices in the reunification process.

Leaving a Communist society behind and joining an existing Capitalist one brought concrete advantages for East Germans, but it simultaneously threw up a whole new set of challenges. For East Germans, unfamiliar cultural norms in reunited Germany, and also the absence of their usual way of life was profoundly unsettling. As one East German woman put it in a diary entry from December 1989:

“Everywhere is becoming like a foreign land. I have long wished to travel to foreign parts, but I have always wanted to be able to come home … The landscapes remain the same, the towns and villages have the same names, but everything here is becoming increasingly unfamiliar.”

This view was echoed my many East Germans, who were conscious that they, for example, dressed differently from their Western compatriots, didn’t know how to pronounce items on the McDonalds menu when they were ordering and didn’t know how to work coin-operated supermarket trolleys in the West. With the fall of the Wall, a whole way of life evaporated. The certainties on which day to day routines had been built ceased to exist.

Swapping Communism for Capitalism has prompted diverse reactions from East Germans. Few would wish to return to the GDR, even if it were possible. However while many delight in having greater individual choice about what they eat, where they go, what they do and what they say, they often also have a wistful nostalgia for life before reunification, where the disparity between rich and poor was smaller and the solidarity between citizens seemed to be greater.

The post Big state or small state? appeared first on OUPblog.

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The collapse of the Berlin Wall twenty-five years ago this month prompted a diverse range of musical responses. While Mstislav Rostropovich celebrated the momentous event by giving a very personal, impromptu performance of Bach’s Cello Suites in front of the Wall two days after it had been breached, David Hasselhoff regaled Berliners from atop of what remained of the Wall on New Year’s Eve of 1989 with a glitter-studded rendition of his chart hit “Looking for Freedom.” The values ascribed in the West to the demise of communism were captured especially clearly in the role assigned to Beethoven during this heady period. From the free concert of the First Piano Concerto and Seventh Symphony that was offered to the newly-liberated East Germans by West Berlin’s flagship Philharmonic Orchestra three days after the fall of the Wall to Leonard Bernstein’s performances of the Ninth Symphony in the East and West of the city a month later, the message was consistent; Beethoven’s music was deemed to embody both the triumph of liberal democracy and the unification of a once-divided people. This symbolism was particularly apparent in Bernstein’s two concerts. While the emancipation of East Germany was reflected in his substitution of “Freiheit” (freedom) for “Freude” (joy) in the choral finale, the performances themselves staged a musical act of universal brotherhood; the orchestra compromised of musicians from both Germanies and all four of the Allied powers, and the events were broadcast live across the globe.

Such unironic celebrations of the universal Beethoven obscured the complex relationship that East Germans had with the composer. Cultural policy in the German Democratic Republic was driven by an Enlightenment conviction in the transformative, unifying, and humanizing powers of art, and from the outset the government had harnessed Beethoven as a pivotal figure in their plans to implement state socialism. His revolutionary zeal was hailed as a template for East German citizens and his heroic style as the ultimate expression of socialist ideals. This narrative persisted in official portrayals of the composer for the duration of the state’s forty-year existence. Beyond the sphere of official rhetoric, however, Beethoven’s reception was far more conflicted. As the promised socialist utopia failed to materialize and the chasm widened between the rhetoric of revolution propagated by the party and the realities of life in the socialist state, Beethoven was approached increasingly not as an iconic statesman but as a vehicle for exploring of the problematic position of art and the artist in East German society.

An early example of this phenomenon can be observed in Reiner Kunze’s 1962 poem “Die bringer Beethovens” (the bringers of Beethoven), in which Beethoven serves as an allegory for totalitarianism rather than Enlightenment humanism. Published in the 1969 collection sensible wege, the poem relates the battle of “the man M.” against the faceless “bringers of Beethoven,” who inculcate the masses by subjecting them to a recording of the Fifth Symphony. The man attempts to resist this indoctrination by retreating inside his house only to have the bringers first fix loudspeakers over his windows, and then force their way in armed with the record. He responds by beating them with an iron ladle. A trial follows at which he is judged to be redeemable. Redemption, however, inevitably lies in the Fifth Symphony to which he is sentenced to listen. His punishment kills him, but death provides no release: at his funeral his children request that none other than the Fifth Symphony be played.

In the years that followed, alternative readings of Beethoven became increasingly prominent. Characteristic, for instance, is Reiner Bredemeyer’s short piece for orchestra and piano Bagatellen für B. of 1970, which sets the opening chords of the “Eroica” Symphony against the Bagatelles op. 119, no. 4 and op. 126 no. 2. Bredemeyer’s focus on the Bagatelles was a pointed challenge to the socialist Beethoven. Grounded in the femininity of the nineteenth-century drawing room rather than the revolutionary public sphere, these piano miniatures represented a significant affront to the one-dimensional heroic portrayals of the composer that dominated in the German Democratic Republic. A similar confrontation can be observed in Horst Seemann’s 1976 biopic Beethoven – Tage aus einem Leben. Here Beethoven is depicted not as a socialist deity, but as a very human and conflicted individual, plagued by failed love affairs, domestic ineptitude, and an inability to reconcile himself with society around him.

Driving these works was a pointed questioning of the social and political efficacy of art. Striking in this context are the opening scenes of Seemann’s film, which cut between a live performance of Beethoven’s “Battle Symphony” and a gory re-enactment of the Battle of Vittoria itself. Far from heralding the symphony as a revolutionary force, however, this juxtaposition of concert hall and battlefield exposes the fallacy of the Beethoven myth. Graphic images of wounded and dying soldiers sit uncomfortably with frames of the concert audience, who clap delightedly in response to the music and eat chocolates as they listen. Art serves here not as a harbinger of political change but simply as a mode of entertainment.

The demise of the German Democratic Republic did little to quell this disillusioned perspective, and the triumphant narratives of Beethoven that resurfaced in 1989 stood decidedly at odds with the prevailing mood among East German artists. Crucially, the euphoria that accompanied the fall of the Wall was tempered for the latter group by a sense of a loss, a loss not for their repressive country but for the ideals and hopes that this country had once promised. Key among these was the notion that art could serve as a force for good and play a profound role in effecting social reform. From this perspective, the failure of the German Democratic Republic was not just a failure of socialism. It was also a failure of art. As Bredemeyer observed in a 1992 interview with reference to the East German composer Hanns Eisler: “If music is an instrument of intervention in the sense of Eisler … then I have to say, very well then. Eisler lost, I too; it doesn’t work anymore.”

Headline image credit: Partly destructed Berlin Wall with border police, view from west, Brandenburg Gate in the background in November 1989. Photo by Stefan Richter. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The post Beethoven and the Berlin Wall appeared first on OUPblog.

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Today is both Remembrance Day and the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. 11th November - 'real' Remembrance Day, would also have been the 116th birthday of my granny, who died in 1970. War and the wall were defining icons of my childhood, and she was my favourite relative.

I was born closer to the First World War than my children were to the Second, though of course it was the Second that people talked about most. My parents' characters were forged by the Second World War - by rationing and evacuation and air raids and watching the planes fly over.

Imperial War Museum

But my mother was born eight years after the end of the First World War and that also shaped her childhood. It also produced that generation of women teachers who had never married, or had been early widowed. The First World War was in my classroom. I knew nothing about my father's family in the First World War - it was never mentioned. My mother's father, an ARP warden in the Second World War, was in the merchant navy in the First and so had an easier time than most. He had three brothers, and I think one was in the 'proper' navy, and one was too young to serve. No one died.


It's easy to think that everyone who went to war was slaughtered, but in fact 90% came back. Fairly obviously, most of us are not descended from those who died, or even who were horribly wounded or traumatised. Those young men were not the ones to marry and have families. They were people like the old man who ran the shop at the end of the lane where I grew up: partly blind, scarily angrily for no apparent reason (not apparent if you're six and just wanted to buy sweets), living alone with a dog and a limp. We remember those who died, but we should also remember those who survived, as it wasn't always the better alternative. And, of course, the families who survived, their lives rent apart by loss or by the return of destroyed young men. We should remember them.

'Lyricmac', 1982 - creative commons licence

The Wall existed from soon after I was born until the time I was pregnant with my own first child. As my father made frequent trips to Germany on business, the East/West split was something I was aware of in a shadowy way. When I began to travel in Eastern Europe as a teenager, it was unpopular - seen as fraternising with the enemy. But it was more a keen desire to understand what this 'other' was like that was presented as the enemy.

I was in Budapest when the Wall fell. I went to the railway station to get a ticket to Berlin. It was packed. I realised it wasn't my fight. The people around me wanted to go to Berlin to reach the West. I couldn't take their seat, so went back to the hotel and watched it on TV instead. I would have loved to have been there, but in the end it was better not to be.

My granny didn't kill anyone and was killed by a heart attack, so although I will remember her fondly, she doesn't need much of a paragraph here. Just a loving hello across the lost years. 

Mostly, today is about the First World War. The poppies at the Tower of London are an impressive and moving memorial. There will be 888,246 poppies - one for every British soldier who died. Not that there is a definite number of known casualties, but hey, you can't make an approximate number of ceramic poppies. Perhaps there could have been some way to show, though, that we don't even know how many people died. (The figure of 888,246 is the number reported by the War Graves Commission in 2010-2011 and includes names from war memorials and all named burials.) Non-British soldiers who fought for the Empire are not remembered at the Tower, even though The Mirror erroneously stated that the poppies commemorate the '888,246 British and Commonwealth servicemen' killed. The German memorial exhibition in the Deutsches Historisches Museum simply says that 15 million died, without singling out German soldiers for special note (and around twice as many German troops died as British).

It all looks more real in colour - French troops

Britain got off lightly in the First World War by comparison with some other parts of Europe. Approximately 10% of British (and Empire) troops died and a further 20+% were injured. The British (and Empire) death/casualty/missing rate was about 35% of troops mobilised. That's truly terrible. But the death/casualty/missing rate for Romania and France was over 70%, and for Russia it was 76%. A British soldier had a better-than-evens chance of surviving intact (or what passed for intact) - a Russian soldier had only a one-in-four chance. But wait: in Germany, 65% of soldiers were killed , missing or injured. In Austro-Hungary, it was 90%. Yes, 90%. OK, they started it. But not the individual young men dying on the battlefields. They didn't start it. Let's remember them all - not just the notional 888,246 who warrant a ceramic poppy. Four million people will have visited the Tower exhibition. Just look at the crowds in any photo. Imagine wiping them all out at a stroke - probably several thousand in any picture, but it would only be a tiny fraction of those represented by the poppies, and the poppies only represent a tiny fraction of those who died. It makes you think. The poppies make you think in ways that just numbers on a page don't.

Edna Gertrude Urwin

The best writing I know about the the First World War is Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (German) and Wilfred Owen's poetry (English). Perhaps some of you know of equally good writing in French or Russian or Greek or Romanian. There must be some. Maybe a good way to spend the day is in reading, remembering all the men on both sides - and the 4.5-5 million men, women and children who died of malnutrition and disease as a result of the War. And let's remember, too, the 200 or so who died trying to escape East Berlin and the millions whose lives the Iron Curtain ruined. That's a lot of remembering to do. And I'll add my granny, too.

Anne Rooney
(Stroppy Author)
Latest book: Space Record Breakers, Carlton, 6 Nov 2014

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Yesterday, as part of the Speak Up for libraries program (which I wrote of in the Philadelphia Inquirer here), I spent four consecutive periods with the very special students of Downingtown West and their beloved (for such good reason) librarian, Michelle Nass. We talked about the role of libraries in our lives, and the treasures we've found there. We learned some of the history of the Berlin Wall (history libraries helped me uncover) and reflected on the metaphorical and physical walls that still separate us. We listened to Ada and Stefan of my Berlin novel Going Over weigh the consequences of freedom, asked ourselves when, if ever, we'd take the risk to jump a wall, wrote poems, and made graffiti art.

After school during the book club hour, we talked about how books get made, what editors do, the difference between writing and publishing, and the writer friends I've come to love.

I was staggered by the receptivity, creativity, and generosity of these students. Their willingness to dig in deep, to answer hard questions, to write—and eagerly share—their work. I came home with a fat file of poems and art, wanting to share every sentiment and drawing here. Space is my limitation. I share a few poems below, a collage of art above, but please know this, Downingtown West: all of it was special, and so are you.

Write about what risks are worth taking, and freedom is, I prompted. This is what happened:

What is life
but a bundle of risks
a handful of desires.
We get thrown in the mix
of temptations and hopes
but in order to obtain
the things that we want
we must go through pain.
— Mike Lodge

Freedom isn't free.
Yes, that's the irony.
We hear its cry.
We hear its call.
Yet here we are
at an ancient all.
A wall we cannot live without.
A wall that fills us up with doubt.
And some of us will take a risk.
Some of us will die to have it all.
That freedom filled with irony.
For that I would fall.
— Micky

Freedom
It's not impossible,
but it's not clear.
It's what lies in the future that is feared.

But what's life without freedom?
A life of being caged?
The only thing that gives us freedom
is change.
— August Walker

Not much is worth risking my life for.
Family, friends, love, freedom come to mind.
Would you risk everything now for a chance at freedom?
If everything could be lost, would you try?
One moment you're there, the next you're gone.
Never to see your loved ones again.
Is it really worth it, for a chance at freedom?
— Samantha Goss

Can you go against the stream?
Fight the system?
Make your own path?
It will be hard.
Blood. Loss. Isolation.
You are a soldier with no army.
You are a lone soul looking for a place
to call home.
Stay strong.
— Megan

To rebel against the evils which control
our very lives.
In hopes to prevail against the wings of Freedom
and its vibes.
These days our right to think different is
challenged by all.
Yet without the help of others our ideas
will surely fall.

What is worth my life?
What is worth my death?
What will hold me back?
What will set me free?
Love
Freedom
Freedom
Love
That is all I need.
— Emily Gibbs

Many, many thanks to Michelle Nass for organizing this day. Thanks to the students. Thanks to the librarians who do what they do and keep their doors open for us. And thank you to Jennifer Yasick, with whom I began this beautiful day.

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In just a few days the world will turn its eyes to Berlin, which will be celebrating the 25th anniversary of the fall of the wall.

In the days to come I'll be taking that story, and GOING OVER, into a series of schools—Downingtown West, Masterman, Radnor, others—to look back, through, over walls. Why was the wall there? What did it mean? What did it do? What stories has it left behind?

Readings and workshops. Conversations and research. A few poems, a few songs, an animation. I look ahead with optimism, as I always do when I am about to meet with teens.

(With thanks to the ever gracious Ellen Trachtenberg for her great help in all of this.)

In the meantime, an utter surprise, Sister Kim of Little Flower Catholic High School for Girls, will be teaching the book in the third semester this year. A joy for me.

Also in the meantime, unbeknownst to me, GOING OVER was found in the window of the University of Pennsylvania bookstore by a friend not long ago. Thank you, Kathye, for stopping to take this photograph.

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There is no sound in this video shot across the Berlin Wall in 1971. There doesn't have to be. The faces here say it all, the blown kisses, the raised binoculars, the East Germans who do not wish to leave the friends they spot in the West across the many walls, the many divisions.

This is chilling, heartbreaking, telling, historic, and I have my friend Paul Steege, writer and historian at Villanova University, to thank for sharing it with me.

Paul also sent along a link to this Julia Baird New York Times story about the rise of female graffiti artists around the world, which ran earlier this week. The story is fascinating, end to end, and begins like this:

For decades it was thought that the reason street art was almost exclusively male was because men were more comfortable with peril; many sought it. After all, street art is notoriously dangerous, exhilarating and risky.

It is, of course, usually illegal; many street artists work at night, in wigs or masks, wearing shoes made for running. One night, when the Australian artist Vexta, who is now based in Brooklyn, was painting neon-splattered, psychedelic images in an abandoned building with friends, the police arrived. She jumped through a hole in the wall, rolled under a shutter door and ran down the street to hail a cab. No one would pick her up, since she was smeared with dirt and paint.

 Ada, I think, as I read. Ada (Going Over). She might have been Vexta. She might still be.

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A few weeks ago I taught the Berlin Wall at a Philadelphia school where graffiti is part and parcel of the capstone process. 

I tell that story today on Huffington Post.

I speak of this young man, the s

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With gratitude, as always. I do know how lucky I am.

Additionally, my wonderful friend Karen Bernstein—she of gifts from Diane Keaton, she of brilliant Going Over pots—reports that she found Going Over on page 71 of the new issue of Main Line Today Magazine listed as one of the "ten great beach reads by local authors." Huge thanks to Karen, and to the magazine.

I have always loved being local.

Speaking of local: Come celebrate the first year in the life of Main Point Books next Saturday, when a fleet of super cool local authors will be signing books. I'll be there at three o'clock with both Going Over and Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir. More on the day can be found here.

Finally, more on Going Over can be found here, through the hugely generous BCCB review.

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In just a few hours, I will at long last meet the girls of Little Flower Catholic High School. These girls who are led by the endearing, catalytic, life-changing Sister Kim.  These girls who read Undercover and House of Dance with such love in their hearts. These girls with whom I will sit and write a little memoir, sit and talk a little Berlin, sit and then maybe stand and dance.

This summer, the girls will be reading Going Over and writing a poem somehow evoked or provoked by this story about love on either side of the Berlin Wall 1983.

This morning, I give this poem to them:
-->

Good morning, Sister Kim, Kate Walton, my fellow authors, and all the Little Flowers. This poem is for you. And here, thanks to kind Serena Agusto-Cox, is another poem, written on another day, about the lit-up glass of others' stories.

The world, my girls, is your oyster.

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Many moons and books ago, someone sent me a link to The Flyleaf Review. Read this, the linker said. Words about Small Damages. Words about Spain. Words by this exquisite reader/writer.

Oh. My.

Sometimes, when I was writing Going Over, I would think about this Heather of Flyleaf. Wonder what she would think of this Berlin story. Wonder if I would disappoint her. Wonder. Publishing a book is, in the end, such a personal thing. It is only, ever, reader by reader.

Weeks ago, Heather surprised me with a Twitter link. She'd read Going Over. She'd found this most amazing Wall-Love photo. She'd had thoughts. She'd shared them. She had taken so much time and care in assembling those thoughts, and she had so deeply moved me, and then she said, But wait. Come April, there will be more.

How do these bloggers—all of these incredibly generous bloggers—find or make the time to be so thoughtful about books, to share so many ideas, to join the writer in the process of going back in time, or deep into a story?

I do not know. But today Heather teaches me many things about Berlin, showcases new images of the Wall, posts the fabulous Chronicle links, offers a giveaway, and shares a small piece of writing that I did about the book that nearly wasn't.

It's all here. And I'm in awe.

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This is the 25th anniversary year of the fall of the Berlin Wall—an anniversary that is being commemorated with lights, balloons, exhibitions, proposals of hope. And yet, in so many places, for so many different reasons, we remain a world divided.

I write of those contradictions, those residual fears, in today's Publishing Perspectives, in a piece that begins like this:

We live in a world of infinite gradations and restless infiltrations. We live in a world of checkpoints, watchtowers, walls. We are free to go, or we are not. We are here, but never entirely there. We are fenced in or fenced out. We are on the move (some 232 million around the world left one country for another in 2013, according to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs) or we are hunkered down—stuck—behind a fortress of distance-making words: “Aliens.” “Illegals.”

We are global.

We are divided.

... and continues here.

My hope, today, is that you'll find time to read this piece and, if you are so moved, to share it.

My hope, too, is that you will send Miss Serena Agusto-Cox, most faithful and intelligent reader and writer, all kinds of yellow-tulip thoughts, for she has written such kind words about Going Over and soft launched the blog tour with all kinds of goodies, including the offer of a free book to one reader. You can find the whole thing here. I share, below, Serena's final words about the book:

Kephart’s Going Over is stunning, and like the punk rock of the 80s, it strives to stir the pot, make readers think, and evoke togetherness, love, and even heartbreak — there are lessons in each.

 Thank you.

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Sorry. I can't resist. I'm going to be sharing these Berlin Wall-inspired songs by sometimes expected, sometimes unexpected classic artists every Monday as we move toward the launch (less than a month away!) of Going Over. This is Elton John singing "Nikita," a song (with a somewhat controversial history) that appeared on his 1985 album Ice on Fire. John says that he did know that Nikita is a man's name in the Russian language, even though the love object depicted here is a beautiful blonde East German border guard.

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Oh, I said, earlier today, in the shivery cold. Look! A package from Chronicle Books.

What is it? my husband asked.

Don't know, I said. And then, within minutes, I did—a beautiful note, indeed a gold-seal note, from Junior Library Guild, noting the selection of Going Over for this great honor.

I had no idea there was a gift beyond the gift of being selected. I was truly stunned.

And then, over at Twitterland, that gorgeous Heather R. of The Flyleaf Review started sending me sly little winks. What is that girl talking about, I wondered (while I was supposed to be doing my day job)? I clicked and took a look — and — well — wow.

What a review of Going Over that gracious woman wrote. What a review, and, Heather says, this is just a tease, in advance of the Going Over blog tour. A tease that includes one of the most incredible photographs I've ever seen of lovers at the Berlin Wall.

There's your Ada and your Stefan, Heather said. And yeah. Absolutely. That's them.

(Tears, actual tears, fell.)

Please go on over and check out the link. I don't want to summarize, I don't want to give you any excuse not to experience The Flyleaf Review—and those lovers—for yourself.

I'm so lucky out here.

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This morning, putting together my play list for the GOING OVER blog tour (thank you, Lara Starr and Chronicle Books), I found myself transfixed by this video of our own Bruce Springsteen singing Dylan's "Chimes of Freedom" to the East Berliners one year before the wall came down.

Look at the faces of that crowd. Look at him. I can't even speak. Watch all the way through, as Springsteen answers an interviewer's questions about the people of Berlin.

Interested in joining the blog tour? Let us know.

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By Michael Dear

Not long ago, I passed a roadside sign in New Mexico which read: “Es una frontera, no una barrera / It’s a border, not a barrier.” This got me thinking about the nature of the international boundary line separating the US from Mexico. The sign’s message seemed accurate, but what exactly did it mean?

On 2 February 1848, a ‘Treaty of Peace, Friendship, Limits and Settlement’ was signed at Guadalupe Hidalgo, thus terminating the Mexican-American War. The conflict was ostensibly about securing the boundary of the recently-annexed state of Texas, but it was clear from the outset that US President Polk’s ambition was territorial expansion. As consequences of the Treaty, Mexico gained peace and $15 million, but eventually lost one-half of its territory; the US achieved the largest land grab in its history through a war that many (including Ulysses S. Grant) regarded as dishonorable.

In recent years, I’ve traveled the entire length of the 2,000-mile US-Mexico border many times, on both sides. There are so many unexpected and inspiring places! Mutual interdependence has always been the hallmark of cross-border communities. Border people are staunchly independent and composed of many cultures with mixed loyalties. They get along perfectly well with people on the other side, but remain distrustful of far-distant national capitals. The border states are among the fastest-growing regions in both countries — places of economic dynamism, teeming contradiction, and vibrant political and cultural change.

Yet the border is also a place of enormous tension associated with undocumented migration and drug wars. Neither of these problems has its source in the borderlands, but border communities are where the burdens of enforcement are geographically concentrated. It’s because of our country’s obsession with security, immigration, and drugs that after 9/11 the US built massive fortifications between the two nations, and in so doing, threatened the well-being of cross-border communities.

I call the spaces between Mexico and the US a ‘third nation.’ It’s not a sovereign state, I realize, but it contains many of the elements that would otherwise warrant that title, such as a shared identity, common history, and joint traditions. Border dwellers on both sides readily assert that they have more in common with each other than with their host nations. People describe themselves as ‘transborder citizens.’ One man who crossed daily, living and working on both sides, told me: “I forget which side of the border I’m on.” The boundary line is a connective membrane, not a separation. It’s easy to reimagine these bi-national communities as a ‘third nation’ slotted snugly in the space between two countries. (The existing Tohono O’Odham Indian Nation already extends across the borderline in the states of Arizona and Sonora.)

But there is more to the third nation than a cognitive awareness. Both sides are also deeply connected through trade, family, leisure, shopping, culture, and legal connections. Border-dwellers’ lives are intimately connected by their everyday material lives, and buttressed by innumerable formal and informal institutional arrangements (NAFTA, for example, as well as water and environmental conservation agreements). Continuity and connectivity across the border line existed for centuries before the border was put in place, even back to the Spanish colonial era and prehistoric Mesoamerican times.

Do the new fortifications built by the US government since 9/11 pose a threat to the well-being of borderland communities? Certainly there’s been interruptions to cross-border lives: crossing times have increased; the number of US Border Patrol ‘boots on ground’ has doubled; and a new ‘gulag’ of detention centers has been instituted to apprehend, prosecute and deport all undocumented migrants. But trade has continued to increase, and cross-border lives are undiminished. US governments are opening up new and expanded border crossing facilities (known as ports of entry) at record levels.  Gas prices in Mexican border towns are tied to the cost of gasoline on the other side. The third nation is essential to the prosperity of both countries.

So yes, the roadside sign in New Mexico was correct. The line between Mexico and the US is a border in the geopolitical sense, but it is submerged by communities that do not regard it as a barrier to centuries-old cross-border intercourse. The international boundary line is only just over a century-and-a-half old. Historically, there was no barrier; and the border is not a barrier nowadays.

The walls between Mexico and the US will come down. Walls always do. The Berlin Wall was torn down virtually overnight, its fragments sold as souvenirs of a calamitous Cold War. The Great Wall of China was transformed into a global tourist attraction. Left untended, the US-Mexico Wall will collapse under the combined assault of avid recyclers, souvenir hunters, and local residents offended by its mere presence.

As the US prepares once again to consider immigration reform, let the focus this time be on immigration and integration. The framers of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo were charged with making the US-Mexico border, but on this anniversary of the Treaty’s signing, we may best honor the past by exploring a future when the border no longer exists. Learning from the lives of cross-border communities in the third nation would be an appropriate place to begin.

Michael Dear is a professor in the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Why Walls Won’t Work: Repairing the US-Mexico Divide (Oxford University Press).

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Second Fiddle by Rosanne Parry. Random House, 2011

As a veteran of the "I can't hear you practicing" skirmishes,  I am heartened by stories of young people, devoting themselves to music (and practice) which this lovely book cover promises.  Band, orchestra and choir programs play a huge role in many teens' lives.  One of my students used to credit Virginia Euwer Wolff's The Mozart Season for inspiring her to All State success.
 
Parry begins her book with this cracking opening line: 

"If we had know it would eventually involve the KGB, the French National Police, and the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, we would have left that body in the river and called the Polizei like any normal German citizen; but we were Americans and addicted to solving other people's problems, so naturally, we got involved." 

This is a very cleverly imagined mystery, set in the distant past of 1990, in Berlin, not long after the Berlin Wall came down. Also, as promised, there is music.

Three girls have become friends by playing together in a string trio. Their music has linked them in friendship even though they come from different social worlds.  Giselle's father is the commanding general of the American Forces in Berlin and Vivian's mother is the U. S. consul general to West Berlin.  Jody's family lives in enlisted soldiers' quarters. Musically, Jody also plays second violin in the trio. As political change takes hold  in Germany, many American diplomatic and military families are preparing to leave Berlin. These girls will probably not see each other again.

Their  apprehension worsens when they learn their music teacher will not be able to take them to a music competition in Paris,  This is a blow after all their practice and preparation so on their way home, they decide to cross into the East Berlin to console themselves with some gelato.  The ease of their crossing is still somewhat unnerving as this used to be enemy territory.  While there, they witness a terrible crime against a Soviet soldier and despite years of Cold War distrust, the three resolve to help him.  As they plan, Jody sees a way to help the soldier and also get to Paris so they can perform together, one last time.

Parry conveys a sense of what it is like to be part of a military family living overseas.  Despite frequent moves and her father's long work hours, Jody's family enjoys a sweet closeness. The author also captures the time and place perfectly.  One side of the Brandenburg Gate is prosperous and booming, the other side is poor and grim.   Parry inserts lovely detail such as the mouth-watering aroma from a Parisian crepe cart and the quiet interior of a church which puts the reader there, on the streets of Berlin and Paris. Her descriptions are so spot on, we can follow the action with a city map.

A useful and

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Jeffrey A. Engel is Associate Professor and Evelyn and Ed F. Kruse ‘49 Faculty Fellow at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University.  He is also the editor of The Fall of the Berlin Wall: The Revolutionary Legacy of 1989, which takes a fresh look at how the leaders in four vital centers of world politics- the United States, the Soviet Union, Europe, and China- viewed the world in the aftermath of this momentous event. In honor of the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which happened twenty years ago today, we have excerpted some of Engel’s words on the event.

…On November 9, the once unthinkable occurred: the Berlin Wall fell, not to a conquering army, but to the regime’s own citizens. First erected in 1961, the Wall symbolized the permanency of the Cold War divide. Dozens had lost their lives in the intervening years in vain attempts to cross its iron and wire in search of a better life on the other side. The Wall did more than divide East from West. It also made real the notion that Europe’s future offered two distinctly different paths: one socialist, the other capitalist. American presidents ritualistically travelled to the Wall when on European tours, using it as a backdrop to proclaim their personal opposition to tyranny. The images are iconic: John F. Kennedy stood above the newly constructed barrier in order to declare: “All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin. And, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words, ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’” A generation later, Ronald Reagan stood before the Wall in order to call for wholesale change behind it. “General Secretary Gorbachev,” Reagan thundered in 1987 (to the great dismay of his own state department, which loathed such fiery rhetoric and urged its removal form the president’s prepared text), “if you seek peace-if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe…come here to this gate, Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

For a generation of Communist leaders raised to believe that theirs was a particular claim to mankind’s future, the demise of the Wall and, more broadly, the erosion of the Soviet empire were traumatic blows indeed. “We will not change our positions, our values, or our thinking,” Gorbachev promised Reagan in 1985, “but we expect that with patience and wisdom we will find some ways toward solutions.” Four years later, Gorbachev was largely out of solutions to the problems that plagued him. With the Soviet Union’s empire in disarray, with the loss of the lands won at such great cost in the Great Patriotic War against Hitler’s Germany and subsequently ruled so tightly and at such investment, the society Gorbachev longed to preserve through transformation had lost its very reason for being. As Anatoly Chernyaev, one of Gorbachev’s close

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