Wow!

I was on my way to doing some work in Mary's Stanford office when by chance I saw a poster outside the first-floor bathroom of Encinal Hall announcing a talk by Peter Schneider, the author of Der Mauerspringer. "The Wall-Jumper" is one of the few books I've carried with me since college graduation--from New Haven to New York, from Frankfurt to Zurich, from London to Eppstein.

And here the author was on campus, giving a talk. 12-1:30 on Tuesday, November 17. Today. In 15 minutes. What to do? Go to Mary's office and accomplish what I set out to do, or get a glimpse of the author of the first book I ever read in German.

Luckily, I chose the wow-I'm-at-Stanford opportunity, and quickly rode my bike over to the History Corner of the Main Quad. Dashed up the stairs to the third floor to find fewer than 10 people around the seminar table at 5 to noon! Only at a university, I thought. A famous German writer and intellectual on campus and only a dozen people can fit the talk into their schedules. We ended up being just shy of thirty and were treated to a wonderful weighing of the balance of the last 20 years since the Fall of the Wall, which Schneider incidentally had forecast in a New York Times article already in May, 1989 . I left the seminar room so completely intellectually stimulated and ready to go out and buy his other book German Comedy.

The talk brought back SO many memories of conversations with my Tante Annemarie, who said the Wall would never fall, and of the delirium I felt living in Germany when the East Germans came pouring over in 1989.