Assistant Professor of Music Ralf Gawlick (Photo by Lee Pellegrini)
Memories of Wartime: Another View
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Assistant Professor of Music Ralf Gawlick has a Berlin Wall/Cold War perspective different than most in the Boston College community.Gawlick was born in Munich, in what was then called West Germany, eight years after the Berlin Wall had been erected. He spent his childhood living in several West German cities, including Frankfort, Hanover and Düsseldorf, as well as in the United States.
But Gawlick and his family, like many in West Germany, had relatives and friends on the East Berlin side of the Wall. This circumstance made the Cold War a far more personal issue for the Gawlicks than many Americans, caught up in the political debate over US policy toward the Soviet Bloc, seemed to appreciate.
“My family felt that the rhetoric we heard left out how West and East Germany was like a divided family,” he says. “The Communist regime was one thing, but the people in East Germany who were caught up in all this — few appeared to consider them as individuals. They were simply ‘East Germans.’ There was so much anger and pain caused by the division, and nobody really seemed to understand this.”
Gawlick was studying in Vienna when the Wall came down in 1989, and had a special reason to rejoice over the ebbing of the Cold War era. He had recently met his wife-to-be, Barbara, who had entered West Germany from Poland as security at the East-West borders relaxed in the period leading up to Nov. 9.
“That would have been impossible just a few months before,” says Gawlick. “I would have had to find some other way to meet her.”
Gawlick says he is “amazed” at how little college students seem to know about the Berlin Wall — not only the years it was in existence, but its very purpose. “I try to explain how, besides being a physical wall, it was an ideological wall, and that is most the terrifying kind
of wall.
“I don’t blame students for not knowing the details, but they should understand what the Wall, the Cold War, all meant. It was not all that long ago, after all.”
Gawlick, who composed the score for the recently released documentary “Writing on the Wall: Remembering the Berlin Wall” produced by Boston College filmmakers, says he and his wife have no plans for an elaborate commemoration of the events of 20 years ago.
“We have never had a tradition of celebrating. There is always a pause in my family to remember, and we have made sure to talk about the Wall with our son and daughter. The Wall shaped our lives in so many ways, and at the end it actually became the cornerstone on which our relationship came to be.”
For more on how Boston College is reflecting on the Cold War: