I still carry that image somewhere deep inside.
When the Wall fell.
I was in ninth grade in a beautiful little harmonious provincial town in Freedom. I remember coming late to Danish class that morning. A habit I dragged around with me for too many years. I don't know how much of the day itself I remember, and how much I've simply added afterwards, but I remember the atmosphere. Something great had happened out in the world, our teachers knew it, and we sensed it, and the room was suddenly a different room than it used to be.
Eastern Europe opening up. A hundred million people stepping out of a shadow that had lain over them for fifty years loosening. An evil, ideological totalitarian and anti-human empire toppled by reality itself before our eyes, faster and more completely than anyone had dared hope.
The order of the Western world was right.
Harmonisation with Lie is not something you can build anything solid and stable on.
And now everyone could see it with their own eyes. The struggle was decided. Settled. The Lie and all its infections checkmated - by itself.
Back then I believed that history had a direction. My whole world, and everything I sensed around me, carried a completely natural belief that we were heading upward, forward, towards more light.
That same year, those same months, Khomeini issued the death sentence on Salman Rushdie for a novel. A writer in London had to go underground because a religious leader in Tehran had decided his words should cost him his life. It happened simultaneously with the Wall falling. We only really saw the one.
In the late eighties and early nineties there was nothing in me that could see what is happening in these years we now stand in 37 years later. No clue. No premonition. No dark sense that we were heading somewhere I wouldn't like. It didn't exist as fear, not as a possibility, not even as something I pushed away. It simply didn't exist as a reality I could form in my consciousness. The young man I was didn't have the categories, or understanding of Man, that would be needed to imagine it.
Nazism we had never felt ourselves, but we knew that the dark monster had been defeated once and for all by men of earlier times who understood what was at stake and acted accordingly.
What we didn't know then was that a system can be defeated without its innermost poison following along down. That the hatred of Jews, the oldest hatred in the world, wasn't dead. Just put on hold.
Communism had just fallen before our eyes.
The third force we had beaten back centuries ago. Twice. First time in southern France in 732. Second time at the gates of Vienna in 1683. It was so long ago that no one remembered it had been a struggle. It had become landscape. Inheritance. Something self-evident.
The theocratic, totalitarian social forms still existed, we knew that, but they existed somewhere else. In a world we didn't really have anything to do with, and which we assumed didn't have anything to do with us either. A closed order where truth was given in advance, and where man's task was not to seek it, but to submit to it.
Three systems. Different in form, identical in structure. All three stunted the same thing in man - nature, the creative urge, the innate freedom. One defeated by the fathers. The second just collapsed. The third so far away it wasn't even a point on the map in my head.
Now, thirty years later, we're fighting all three again. Not Nazism as an order, that still lies beaten to pulp. But its deepest hatred has moved into the other two. Wrapped in a language about justice on one side. Theologically anchored on the other. And after October 7th 2023 back on the streets in European cities, openly, loudly, without anyone really daring to call it by name. At once. In the same space. In the same city. In the same institutions.
How in the world did that happen?
While we celebrated victory outwardly, another force was working inwardly. Quietly. Through the universities, through the media, through popular culture, through the institutions we had built to carry our own story forward. A force that ridiculed us. That relativised us. That taught an entire generation to despise their own inheritance, and to confuse self-dissolution with formation.
We didn't forget to teach the next generation who we were. We taught them the opposite. That it wasn't worth anything. Some places that it was a stain. That any other culture had priority over our own, simply because it was another. We relativised the entire foundation that had taken the reckoning to bring us out into Freedom here.
Everything we thought was so obvious it didn't need to be said aloud wasn't just forgotten. It was torn down while we watched.
And while that happened, we opened the doors wide for the third force. Under a banner called multiculturalism. Diversity. Enrichment. Without a single question about what was coming in, what it believed in, what it was about to do. And the few who asked the question were silenced, shamed, called all the words that shut down a conversation before it begins. The Mohammed cartoons. Theo van Gogh. Charlie Hebdo. Stamped. Isolated. Threatened. Some quite literally.
It's the same method all three systems live by. Making it dangerous to think aloud. Moving the boundary of what may be said, until you can no longer describe what you're standing in.
And in the vacuum that arose, the old moved in again. Not as ideology first. As confusion. As guilt. As unwillingness to say who we were. Who we are. Who we have the possibility of becoming. A people who can no longer point to its own foundation can't defend it either. You don't even need to attack it. It falls by itself.
Were there no adults at all paying attention?
Regardless. When I walked into the classroom that day in 1989 and for many years ahead, it wasn't on my bingo card that I would spend a single adult year on the three.
Yet. Here we are.
But. Ok. Then the Man of the House must rise up once again.
