Politics
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The Berlin Wall arrived in suburban Maryland in a small velvety bag of deeply hued burgundy pulled tightly shut with a golden drawstring.
At an upscale department store in late 1989, hundreds of these bags carrying bits of the Communist Bloc were shipped in and arranged as part of a makeshift display that was nothing more than a sturdy table with some cheap polyester fabric draped over it. The store employees had placed the display on the table next to a lower-level entrance to the young men’s department because they didn’t know where else in the store they should sell the Berlin Wall. Maybe the second-floor jewelry displays, or the furnishings department. Perhaps the cosmetics counter.
Weeks before, I must have seen images of the wall being smashed with hammers and covered in the beer and champagne of celebration. I probably listened to newscasters intoning serious words with self-aware importance. But all I can remember clearly is receiving my first lesson in geo-politics and capitalism in the form of a chip of concrete in a fancy bag — all of the ideological differences of Cold War existence compressed into that quarter-sized chunk in my 13-year-old hand.
“A commodity is at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing,” Karl Marx observed, “but its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.” Standing at the cash register at the mall, holding that bag in my hand, I got a lesson in commodity fetishism long before I read Marx. As the outer reaches of the evil empire were being busted up at its borders, we went to department stores and bought them, or traces of them — the apparent death masks of authoritarian communism. I started to get a sense of how the ideality of history could be transformed into the materiality of the commodity. “Metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” frozen in concrete, historical forces captured in a small bag. Although it must have been hard for many East Germans to imagine, entrepreneurs would turn anything into a trinket at the mall. And we would buy it.
When I left the store and returned home, I placed my bit of Berlin Wall in the top drawer – my own private vault – next to other things that I thought were important but didn’t yet fully understand. It sat next to stacks and stacks of brightly colored swim team ribbons, which I seemed to win for every single race I ever entered, regardless of how well I did. Blue, red, and white were the first three places, of course, but then the color spectrum broke-up in unexpected ways: green, yellow, gold, violet, maroon. How did violet come to symbolize seventh place? And weren’t there only six lanes in most of the pools we swam in?
To the right of the ribbons and the burgundy bag was my baseball card collection, or rather, the cream of my collection — only the rookie cards and the hard-to-find ones with printing errors. I kept my lesser cards in shoeboxes stacked in the closet, but the right side of my top drawer was reserved for the cards that the price guides told me were the valuable ones. I could never really grasp why they were so valuable, but still I kept them organized and preserved in special plastic sheets inside of a hard protective binder. I had a Wade Boggs rookie card because I’d tricked one of my third grade classmates into believing that he’d rather have a ninth-season Dave Winfield. As a kid, I spent hours daydreaming about the value of my mint condition Wade Boggs rookie. After hearing that a single Honus Wagner card from the beginning of the century had recently sold at a higher price than most mansions, I was convinced that Wade Boggs and my other rookies would pay for my first house. I was too young and unsophisticated to know that I had gotten into the market at the height of the great 1980s baseball card bubble and that I was doing my part to inflate it.
Tucked behind the cards was a nice wristwatch that my parents had bought me to wear on special occasions. When my mother first gave it to me (not on my birthday, not on Christmas, not for any minor holiday) I recognized it for what it was: a sign that I was expected to dress-up and look like a respectable middle-class kid every once in a while. Before the wall fell, the watch could have probably bought me a small motorcycle in East Germany, but I took it for granted and didn’t think it was much of a gift. It was just another object to store in my dresser — expensive perhaps, but not truly valued.
The smallest item, but the most resonant and mysterious in my mind, was the combat ribbon my father had won for service in Vietnam. It was a piece of metal covered in colored fabric that you would slide onto a thin metal bar and pin on your uniform, a one-inch representation of warfare. Why I wanted it was as mysterious to me as its meaning or purpose, although I had a vague sense that it offered up some difference between my father’s experience and my life of suburban comfort. It held some remnant of an earlier, more violent phase of the Cold War.
It was still years before I would understand the importance of competition and reward in a capitalist society, the ways that unreasonable enthusiasm could lead to inflated market prices, the relationship between personal appearance and class identity in a “classless” society, or how fears of communism and the theory of containment led young American soldiers into Southeast Asia. But my piece of the Berlin Wall helped me gain perspective on the other curious items in my Cold War cabinet of wonders. As the seriousness of life under authoritarian communism was being dissolved by the fleeting desires of the marketplace, the metaphysical subtleties and ideological niceties of the objects in my drawer became clearer — they stood out in relief against the newly shifting background.
The disparate items in my dresser remained held together in their awkward relationship — only slowly revealing their order and unity — until finally they were pulled apart again. I cleaned out my childhood room definitively soon after graduating college. After two days of marathon sorting, throwing-away, donating, and boxing, I finally moved out of my parent’s house for good. A few of the boxes made their way to my new apartment in Brooklyn. I think my piece of the Berlin Wall is packed away in one of the boxes in the attic.
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