by Debby Pattiz

It was late December 1989. The Wall was down. The border was open. My East German roommate and I planned to take the ferry to Denmark together. What could go wrong?

The dehumanizing complexity of national border and immigration policies is nothing new. The prevailing rhetoric I recall from my teen years during the “hot” Cold War years of the 1980s—when the world was on the brink of East-West nuclear armageddon—impressed upon naïve, young me that freedom of movement for hundreds of millions of people who lived behind the Iron Curtain was restricted by their own authoritarian governments. Not by my democratic one. Not by the democratic governments of Western Europe.

Imagine my shock, therefore, when (naïve, young) Anneli and I went to purchase our tickets for the ferry to Copenhagen. The Wall had been down for seven weeks. The border was open, right? Not so fast. Now that East Germans were allowed OUT, neighboring nations of Western Europe prohibited them from coming IN. The ferry office refused to sell a ticket to Anneli.

You’ll have to wait for #MyColdWarColdCase for the whole story, but naïve, young, and tenacious me found this arrangement untenable. I blush to recall the antics that ensued. But . . . here’s a photograph of the two of us sitting on Hans Christian Anderson’s lap. In Copenhagen.