the fall of the Berlin Wall

The Lazarus Project includes an anecdote about rabbits finding love by overcoming the Berlin Wall despite trigger-happy East German guards firing eagerly during mating season (Hemon 103-4).

Anyway, by chance, it's the 25th anniversary of the famous wall's fall, and I've stumbled upon a couple postings noting this:

"The Berlin Wall, 25 Years After the Fall" from The Atlantic and an image gallery from Yahoo! Finance, "Human Wave of East Germans Surges Across Berlin Wall."

Another time, in another post, maybe I'll describe the refugee father and son who'd just escaped and wound up in the same bunk area as a bunch of us staying in a Swiss youth hostel. I remember well the father describing his escape story, again and again, throughout the night. I couldn't understand his German, or anyone else's, but I could hear the repetition of the words and some of the vigorous physical movements he used to support them. Again and again.

Hemon in Chicago

Because I'm teaching The Lazarus Project right now, I googled Aleksandar Hemon and arrived at an article on his love of his adopted city of Chicago. Although back in Sarajevo his parents were technical people, urban, affluent STEM-folk, Hemon had a humble start in America's "somber city":


With just $300 in his pocket, the young man was forced to scramble for odd jobs—waiter, Greenpeace canvasser—while managing his fear and longing for Sarajevo. He set about learning Chicago by walking its neighborhoods. “Pullman, Beverly, Lakeview, and then the Parks—Hyde, Lincoln, Rogers,” he writes in The Book of My Lives. “I began to sort out the geography of Chicagoland, assembling a street map in my mind, building by building, door by door . . . I was a low-wage, immigrant flaneur.”