Being part of history...

Last April I posted about how I finished a quilt for the German-Korean joint exhibition about the experience of living in a divided country. (Read here.) The exhibition has been shown in several different places by now, has been invited to Ste. Marie-aux-Mines next September, and is waiting for a verdict on whether it will be shown in Houston. When I was making my quilt, I was struggling with my family's and my personal involvement in history by having lived through some of the times I represented in the quilt. My aunt, who lived all her yound and working life under dictatorship, first the Nazis, then 'Socialism', and only a few years in 'freedom', after she was retired. My memories, how my mother always was preparing some package for relatives and friends, marking it as 'presents, no commercial value', taking care not to include printed matter, records or cassette tapes, or jeans. How on November 9, 1989 suddenly a room mate of my then fiancée ran through the apartment and shouted 'They are opening the wall!' and nobody dared believe it, after weeks of rising fear and insecurity with regard to how the East German government would react towards the rising numbers of protesters in the Monday marches, demanding change.
So there was a lot of broohaw about 30-years-end-of-the-Wall this past November. Speeches, self-praisal, groups of youn people from abroad being shipped to Berlin to participate in some events to commemorate the happenings then.
Ever since it happened I have been unhappy with how the even in 1989 has overtaken that specific date. Yes, it certainly was an important date, I would never contradict that. But there were other important things that happened on or around November 9 in German history in the 20th century - it seems unfair that the fall of the Wall is the one which receives most attention nowadays.
End of World War I. The 1938 progroms against Jews (link in German, link in English). The first attempted attack on Hitler in 1939 by Georg Elser (link in German, link in English), which had an 80th anniversary and was mentioned much less. These, of course, I have not lived through. But somehow they always affected me, because we were living in the aftermaths of what Nazi-history had done to my country. My son, now a sound 14 years old, had not been born in 1989 and has a very distant relationship to that part of history, as he told me recently. He has read The Diary of Anne Frank, but different from my own experience many years ago, it was 'just another story' for him. And 'I was not even on your horizon when the Wall came down, and then it is 30th anniversary and what does that mean to me?'
Those were interesting conversations we had, and he is right in a way. It is not the kind of history he has lived through. And obviously school and our family narratives have not given him the feeling of connectedness and enough context to put things into perspective.
I do hope our exhibition gets accepted for Houston, and I do hope I get to go, because it will be really interesting to be there and talk to people about it.