Motherboard

Over the last few days a lot, of course, has been written about the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall falling. When U2 shows up, you know it’s a big deal — well, it’s either a big deal or the MTV Music Europe Awards are in town, tough to know which one.

No, for real, it clearly is a big deal in several ways. The first and most important way being the obvious historical momentousness and implications. But the anniversary also seems especially poignant now when life is so much darker and less hopeful (our ever-hopeful President’s efforts notwithstanding).

It can be difficult these days to conjure the feelings of euphoric optimism brought on by the Berlin Wall’s demise. Yet there are pockets of joy, for sure, and I feel lucky to have stumbled across one such pocket today. It comes in the form of illustrator Christoph Niemann’s account of moving with his family from New York to Berlin and his memories of being there before the Wall came down and after. Niemaan tells a sweetly personal tale of living in the city 20 years after history happened. And, as is the case with other installments in his New York Times series, Niemann’s story is accompanied by simple, utterly charming art work. Thanks goes to zefrank for hipping me to this series — if you have a few minutes, it is well worth perusing.

One of Niemann’s lines stuck me as especially memorable: “Germany, with a history so full of iron-fisted terror, war and wanton violence, had finally experienced a revolution without a single bullet being fired.”

That is the 20-year-old legacy we remember this week.