Timothy Garton Ash, a journalist and commentator who has written some wonderful books on Europe in the 1980s and 1990s (among others, see The Magic Lantern, The File and In Europe’s Name: Germany and the Divided Continent), writes about "1989!" in The New York Review of Books. It is an excellent overview of 1989, and I recommend it highly.
Of 1989, Mr. Garton Ash says:
"The year 1989 was one of the best in European history. Indeed, I am hard pushed to think of a better one. It was also a year in which the world looked to Europe—specifically to Central Europe, and, at the pivotal moment, to Berlin. World history—using the term in a quasi-Hegelian sense—was made in the heart of the old continent, just down the road from Hegel's old university, now called the Humboldt University."
But President Obama, who found time to fly to Copenhagen to try to get the Olympics for Chicago, who later this year will find time to fly to Oslo to get the Nobel Peace Prize for himself, and who found time earlier this week to sit down with such objective journalists as Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow of MSNBC and Frank Rich and Bob Herbert of The New York Times to complain about how unfair Fox News is to him, cannot fit Berlin into his schedule to celebrate "one of the best [years] in European history."
Maybe President Obama is still mad at the German government for not letting him give that campaign speech in front of the Brandenburg Gate last summer. (President Obama was able to fit Berlin into his schedule last year when he wanted to go there to demonstrate his foreign policy gravitas during the campaign.)
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Update (10/26/09 12:30 a.m.): Fixed a typo in the third paragraph.
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