[...] Berlin was a capital city, but those infernal terms like “desirable location” were still foreign to us, because all of East Berlin lay outside of the world in which desirable locations existed. Idyll. Innocence. Indecency. Inbreeding. My parents’ furniture was in the Biedermeier style, and our money was light like play money. So I could certainly talk about the fall of the wall — and if someone asked me about my feelings at the time, I would say something like: It dragged us into this big, wide world so quickly that there was no time to think. Did it drag us forward or backward? Backward, I felt. Only after several weeks of refusal did I set foot in that foreign land that spoke the same language, even the same Berlin dialect, only then did I cross the border for the first time. A door that only opens once a century had opened, but now that century was gone forever. Something was going too quickly, going wrong, I felt. If nothing else, the skeptical attitude that we had cultivated toward our own government had taught us once and for all to keep a critical distance, to maintain our independent thinking in light of the government’s flawed stewardship of our common goal. None of my friends believed that the world in which we had lived was the best of all possible worlds — but now, all of a sudden, we were supposed to believe that that best of all possible worlds had been found? There was a lot of talk of freedom now, but I couldn’t make much of this word freedom, which floated freely in all sorts of sentences. Freedom to travel? (But will we be able to afford it?) Or freedom of opinion? (What if no one cares about my opinion?) Freedom to shop? (But what happens when we’re finished shopping?)