Unveiling Western Superiority

In December 1960, just months before the Berlin Wall was constructed, my grandparents told my mother, who was at that time a mere eleven years old, to go with her grandparents to the train station and meet them in a train headed for Berlin. The plan was to fly out of West Berlin to West Germany. Whereas the preparations which had been carried out in the months prior to departure had had to be made secretly, for fleeing East Germany was dangerous and could lead to imprisonment,1
My first conscious encounter with the subject of a divided Germany was watching the fall of the Berlin Wall on the German news in 1989. This moment was especially powerful because my mother wept tears of joy. The borders opened, and the following year I travelled with my family, including my grandparents, to East Germany to see the places where my grandparents used to live. I remember thinking that this Germany was the journey itself was to any outsider a regular one. However, underneath my family's stoic facial expressions lay a web of conflicting emotions: