"History fatally intersected with the fate of a single individual," says the sister of Peter Fechter. She sought prosecution for the guards who shot and killed her brother, whose unheeded screams for help went on for almost an hour as he lay dying at the foot of the Wall in a neighborhood that had once been Berlin's lively newspaper quarter.
To its credit, Germany has documented the atrocities of the Holocaust and is now meticulously identifying every person who died trying to flee the tyranny of the East after the wall went up, including Ida Siekmann, who jumped out of her third floor window right in front of the Wall when she realized that the barbed wire and cement that was climbing up in front of her apartment building was meant to deny her freedom. She was the first to die when the border was closed.
After the wall fell, many of the border guards responsible for killing innocents were brought into court and found guilty of manslaughter, but because they had been only 19 years old and had committed crimes legalized by the state, most of them were sentenced to little more than a year or two of probation.
Some recited the familiar refrain that they were merely following orders. Others said they did what they were trained (indoctrinated) to do.
Of course, some people successfully escaped from East Berlin, and we'll probably never learn the names of those guards on duty who refused to take an innocent life. (Many border guards also found opportunities to flee.)
The 20th century was witness to great horrors against humanity, inflicted by the state collectively and by individuals. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, in his new book "Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity," observes succinctly what is true for both genocide and murder: "People make choices about how to act, even if they do not choose the contexts in which they make them."
As we recall Kristallnacht and what followed in the Holocaust, we wonder how such things happen. When we celebrate the fall of the wall and think about other kinds of walls that are continually being built between people and countries, we look for ways to prevent them. We can ask, along with Goethe, the German poet who understood the importance of second chances for fallen man in "Faust," his masterpiece, "We all grow old -- but who grows wise?"