Today’s the day! Twenty years ago today, the Berlin Wall fell.

Well, “fell” is the wrong word. It didn’t come toppling down on November 9, 1989. No, it was simply the culmination of a process in which what the wall signified — the restricted passage of East Germans into the West — ended. Really a chaotic process, too; the wall didn’t come down because the people tore it down. It was fraught with confusion, miscommunication, and soldiers unwilling to fire on the crowds. It was strangely peaceful, a Blue Jeans Revolution.

Now, I know I’ve written before about the history of the twentieth century and my abject fascination with the cultural processes of the Cold War. But this is a seminal event that needed to be marked, here of all places. The Fall of the Wall meant the beginning of the end for the Soviet bloc, the crumbling of their external empire very soon followed by the crumbling of their internal one, and the beginning of the painful process of reintegration and rapprochement with the NATO nations, a process that, no, isn’t wholly complete, and probably won’t be until there is no one left alive who remembers Gorbachev.

It always strikes me that the seminal moment of triumph came in Germany. Everything over the next two years would smack of anticlimax: the slow collapse of Soviet instruments of power, the violent overthrow of Ceauşescu in Romania, the attempted hardline putsch of 1991 in Russia, all of that seemed merely the process of historical inevitability following the dramatic events in Berlin, that joyous crossing of Checkpoint Charlie. The war that began in the German invasion of Poland ended with the Germany invasion of Germany.

I could wax theological for a while on the origins of this in John Paul’s papacy, but let’s not right now. Let’s just remember that it happened at all. Because that’s pretty cool, too.