SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2010
The artist who helped topple the Wall O
“ own identity. by Marc Fisher
n a snowy evening four years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I made a return visit to Baerbel Bohley’s apartment on Fehrbelliner Strasse in
what used to be East Berlin. The build- ing was a typical relic of World War II shrapnel damage, Communist-era ne- glect and post-Berlin Wall materialism — satellite dishes hanging over a urine- stenched entrance hall. Inside, Bohley, an abstract painter and the mother of the East German revolution of 1989, had transformed her home into a bohemian mix of East and West, past and present. She had added a new white Siemens clothes washer in the kitchen since I’d last seen her. But she still lived without central heating. “Like a real Ossi,” a real East German, she said. As the events of 1989 have moved from journalism to history, Bohley’s name has given way to those of politi- cians such as Helmut Kohl and Mikhail Gorbachev, and her death at 65 from lung cancer this month barely registered in the United States. But it was Bohley, a wisp of a woman with a delicate voice, who made the fall of the Wall possible, who lent the East German people the courage to take to the streets that fall and demand rights that had been denied them for 40 years. “Without her, the autumn of 1989 is unimaginable,” the German journalist Stefan Berg wrote in Der Spiegel after her death. “She was the challenge to think for yourself, to get involved.” On that icy dusk four years after the demise of the country that spied on her and imprisoned her, Bohley told me about her drive south to the Austrian-
Over time, her voice faded. East and
West blended, if slowly. Now, who recalls that it was her group, New Forum, that organized the silent candlelight marches that surrounded and eventually stran- gled the regime of Erich Honecker? The group, which grew up in the Lutheran churches of the East, had seemed un- threatening enough to the regime for half a million East Germans to put their names to petitions seeking change with- in socialism. In today’s history books, it can seem
as if New Forum came and went in a matter of weeks, and it’s true that after the fall of the Wall, East Germany’s uto- pian reform movement was overtaken by the prospect of bananas, Deutsche marks and the consumer society that East Germans had seen on Western TV but could never touch for themselves. But for nearly a decade before the
PHILIPP GUELLAND/ DAPD VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS
Baerbel Bohley, an artist and a key figure in the pro-democracy movement that helped end communist rule in East Germany, passed away this month at 65.
Italian border the summer after the Wall opened. There, high in the Alps, she and a friend had pulled off the road. They were beyond what had been, for all their lives, the frontier of possibility. Together, they cried until their eyes hurt. “How,” Bohley wondered, “could anyone have deprived another of this?” Publicly, Bohley never gave the im- pression that she savored her new free- dom. Through the 1990s, she was a reg- ular on television, always at one demon- stration or another, having shifted her critique from communism’s repression to the West’s excesses. Bohley’s public image was joyless, a woman grimly pin- ing for ideological purity, equally offend- ed by the Soviet system of spying on
one’s friends and by the Western system of leaving each person to fend for him- self. In fact, she mainly yearned to be her-
self. “I love the freedom,” she told me, “the possibility to see pictures and read books I want. I like to drink dry wine in- stead of sweet, which was all we had here before. The small freedoms — eat- ing Italian cheese or traveling to New York, seeing buildings repaired and flowers in the windows — are not to be underestimated.” Publicly, she allowed herself to be- come a symbol of growing unhappiness in the East, the regret that East Germany had not survived in some form after the Wall to make its own mistakes, create its
Wall opened, Bohley had been chipping away at communist control of people’s lives. In 1983, she and 30 other women dressed in black gathered at Berlin’s Al- exanderplatz to challenge a new military draft law. Five women were arrested. Bohley managed to slip away, but some months later Stasi agents nabbed her and charged her with “treasonable pass- ing of information” for talking to a West- ern journalist. In 1988, Bohley organized a protest at which people unfurled a banner at the annual state demonstration marking the 1919 murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Leibknecht, founders of the Ger- man Communist Party. The banner quoted Luxemburg: “Freedom is always the freedom of those who think differ- ently.” Bohley was charged with “trea- sonable activity” and deported. She spent a few months in Britain, then chose to return, believing that even in
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We did not talk about Chancellor Rhee staying or going. We talked about the state of education in the city.” — Presumptive Mayor-elect Vincent Gray after a meeting with Michelle Rhee on Thursday
such a system, change could be forced. In 1989, Bohley and a few friends pushed the dissident movement out of its church cocoon. With biologist Jens Reich, Bohley created New Forum. She turned her apartment into its head- quarters, where volunteers hand-copied fliers. Meetings led to demonstrations, which led to marches. The movement snowballed, the government froze, the Stasi crumbled. Bohley and her friends were socialists to the end; they were horrified that they might be the vehicle by which their fel- low citizens gained access to Disney, Mc- Donald’s and Mercedes. But once the Wall came down, it was exactly that crav- ing for the freedom to travel and con- sume — to taste oranges and use soft toi- let paper — that rendered Bohley and New Forum irrelevant. Within three months of their greatest triumphs, Boh- ley and her friends were marginalized. Bohley never painted again after the Wall fell. She went through a dark pe- riod. She moved to the Balkans for a time, working with young victims of war. She never quite found her revolution. She never imagined that people might want their own kind of freedom, the right to have nothing to do with others. “It took me a long time to realize that the people here were so materialistic, that people were more interested in things than in ideals,” she said to me that day in her apartment, with more sadness than anger. Softly in the background, her new washing machine rumbled — a thing, but also an ideal, a product of the free- dom that Bohley had unleashed.
marcfisher@washpost.com
Marc Fisher is The Washington Post’s enterprise editor for local news and the author of “After the Wall: Germany, the Germans and the Burdens of History.”
Don’t you forget about them ...
BY SUSANNAH GORA
It’s been 25 years since “a brain, a beauty, a jock, a rebel and a recluse” spent an unforgettable Saturday together in high school detention. But rather than going the way of acid-washed jeans and VHS, “The Breakfast Club” seems to take on more cultural resonance with each passing year, as new generations of teens fl ock to the movie, fi nding themselves refl ected perfectly onscreen. ¶ We know what has happened in the lives of fi lm’s stars since 1985: Molly Ring- wald, Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, Anthony Michael Hall and Emilio Estevez have continued to act in fi lm, television and theater. Most of them reunited at the Oscars in March in memory of the fi lm’s late writer and director, John Hughes, and again Monday in New York for a 25th anniversary screening. ¶ But what about the iconic characters those actors brought to life onscreen — what might have happened in their lives over the past quarter-century? When asked if he’d ever make a sequel to the fi lm, Hughes once told a reporter: “I know everybody would love to watch it. But I’m too fond of those characters.” ¶ I, for one, am too fond of them not to imagine.
ALLISON REYNOLDS played by Ally Sheedy
Allison majored in women’s studies at Oberlin, then moved to Seattle, where she spent the early ’90s working as a barista at a fair-trade coff ee bar. She leſt town right around the time it stopped being cool to live there, worked as a volunteer for the fi rst Lillith Fair and then moved to Austin, where she went to grad school and became an adolescent psychologist. She recently wrote a best- selling book that encourages teens to retain their individuality and to focus on inner beauty. She oſt en tells her teenage patients, “When you get old, your heart doesn’t have to die.”
BRIAN JOHNSON played by Anthony Michael Hall
Despite getting an F in shop class, Brian wrote a brilliant college-application essay inspired by his poignant response to Principal Vernon’s detention- day assignment to the group (a 1,000-word paper answering the question: Who do you think you are?). T at essay, titled “Does T at Answer Your Question?,” won him a scholarship to MIT. He later moved to Silicon Valley to become an Internet entrepreneur, but aſt er turning down off ers to sell his startup for $300 million, he wound up with nothing when the tech bubble burst. He realized, though, that there was a future in social networking. As an early investor in MySpace, he made enough money to impress and later marry a swimsuit model who makes him PB and J with the crusts cut off . He recently endowed a new library at Shermer High and keeps a ceramic elephant lamp in his offi ce to remind him how far he’s come.
The jock
The recluse The brain
The rebel
The beauty
ANDY CLARK played by Emilio Estevez
T e stressed-out jock used to wish that his knee would give out, and it fi nally did — not on the wrestling mat, but during a particularly intense punch-dancing session. During his treatment, he realized his true calling and went on to become a physical therapist, much to the frustration of his overbearing father. He once ran into Allison at O’Hare; they hadn’t talked since that day in detention, but he asked her if she still had the badge she tore off his letterman jacket. For the most part, people from school have lost touch with him — he never comes to reunions.
CLAIRE STANDISH played by Molly Ringwald
Susannah Gora is the author of “You Couldn’t Ignore Me If You Tried: T e Brat Pack, John Hughes, and T eir Impact on a Generation.”
Claire and John Bender began a intense, clandestine romance aſt er their day in detention; it was followed by an equally intense breakup. She moved to New York to study fashion at FIT but cheerfully put her career aspirations on hold aſt er she met a banker at a Tommy Hilfi ger show. T ey married, then she “squeezed out a few puppies” (as Bender predicted) and lived the life of a Wall Street wife: apartment on Park Avenue, summers in the Hamptons, winters in Aspen, sushi every night. She played tennis at her club and had lunch at the right places, but still hated “having to go along with everything my friends say.” Aſt er sticking by her husband through his fi rm’s accounting scandal in the early 2000s and a short-selling scandal at decade’s end, she divorced him when she learned that he was seeing a younger woman. Recently, she and her kids moved back home to Shermer. She never stopped thinking about Bender and is almost ready to accept his friend request on Facebook.
JOHN BENDER played by Judd Nelson
Aſt er spending the remainder of 1985 in Saturday detentions,
Bender dropped out of high school and spent a few years feeling aimless and working odd jobs in auto repair shops. But when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, it really ticked him off . He never liked malevolent authority fi gures, so he joined the Army, joking that it was his way of saying, “Eat my shorts, Saddam Hussein!” Appreciating the structure and discipline of military service, Bender stayed in uniform until the mid-1990s, when he returned to Chicago (he couldn’t aff ord Shermer). He never married because he never got over Claire. Aſt er Principal Vernon retired, Bender was invited to speak at a career day at his old high school. T e experience inspired him to do something to make students’ lives better, so he went to college and got his master’s in education. He went on to become one of the most beloved teachers at Shermer High and currently serves as its principal.
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