The economic crisis (which is not over) has exposed the fragility of our institutions and of our social contracts, which we have taken for granted. Twenty-five years later, we are fifty-somethings-about the age when Germans are reluctantly acknowledged to be possibly-good-for-something by their elders-and we find ourselves in the midst of the greatest challenge to our prosperity, freedom, and peace that Europe has seen since 1989, indeed in our lifetime. A gift which we had done nothing to deserve, for which we were unprepared, and whose meaning we took a long time to decipher. So for me, and probably for most of my West German generation, the reunification of Germany and of Europe, for which so many had risked so much, was a miraculous gift. Some West German students pitched in, smuggling samizdat, printers‘ ink, or dissidents‘ letters. and, at twenty-seven, the same age as the man-made frontier between West and East Berlin-by the courage and determination of many: the 70,000 who marched in Leipzig, the East German Volkspolizisten who decided not to shoot, their leaders who decided not to resist, Mikhail Gorbachev, Helmut Kohl, Hungarian and Czech activists, Polish shipbuilders and steelworkers, Ronald Reagan, Willy Brandt, Russian dissidents, and multitudes of others. The Wall was brought down in 1989-when I was a German graduate student in the U.S.
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