Ghosts of East Berlin

November 9, 2014 marked the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In their joint memoir, Ghosts of East Berlin, Santa Barbara, California residents, Celeste McConnell Barber and her son, Eric Friedman, recollect their experience as some of the first and only Americans to live behind the Wall.

It was January, 1988 when Celeste McConnell Barber and her son Eric Friedman departed for six months to live in East Berlin, the city at the center of Cold War politics – among the first Americans to be invited to the Eastern Bloc under Gorbachev’s glasnost (openness) policy. The late Frank McConnell, Professor of English at U.C. Santa Barbara, had been awarded a Fulbright grant by the International Exchange of Scholars to teach at Humboldt University. The Fulbright was part of a global effort to enhance cultural exchange and communications between the West and Eastern Bloc nations.

“Just six months after President Reagan issued his challenge – ‘Tear down this wall!’ -- and suddenly we were traveling in a subway through No Man’s Land. Most remarkable, our family of three became goodwill ambassadors for our country,” said McConnell Barber.

“I was only 10 years old,” added Friedman. “My world instantly expanded from a local to a global perspective. It was a lot to grasp at the time, but the friendships I forged and the foreign view of my home country changed me on a fundamental level. Twenty-five years later and I am still discovering how those six months impacted me as a child and adult, in my understanding of the responsibility of being an American citizen, and the significance that I am a descendant of European Jews.”

The memoir highlights the challenge of everyday life under Socialism, as the family grappled with both the American Embassy and German Stasi and the joys of simply engaging with East Berliners on the most human level, walls be damned!