Berlin ?

My father's fears must have made quite an impression on me in my early years.  Now I am trying to grasp and reconcile what I saw in Berlin with what he felt about Germany.
As usual, there is a free walking tour where the guides live on their tips.  They relate the short version of what happened during the cruces of Hitler's rise, war, Cold War, wall up, airlift, wall down, re-unification.

Beginning when I was a child I heard my father's intermittent and vehement statements of concern that America was headed down the path that Hitler had taken Germany.  I piece together bits of remembered stories of how my father's family, though safely fled to Turkey, was never able to fully reconstruct what they'd had in Berlin.  My father left for the USA as a teenager and didn't see his parents, sibling, aunts/uncles again until many, many years later.  My father embraced the USA and he did quite well in this land of opportunity and its freedoms.

Now that I've visited this city I've still only an inkling of what transpired back then.  The walls that separated east and west are now visible in only one segment and there is talk of removing that.  I vote for what remains of the walls to stay so that the visual acts as a greater reminder of history.  I prefer to use the plural because it was not a single wall but multiple walls that were constructed to make it as difficult as possible for anyone to leave.  You might get over one wall but not 2 or 3.  And the distance between the walls gave ample opportunity for soldiers to kill escape attemptors.

When I first went to Germany in the early 70s my father forbade me to go to Berlin.  The trip was on his nickel and I had no burning desire to go there so I didn't see how Berlin was.  Now I understand why he feared he could lose a daughter if I went to Berlin and, at that moment, politics changed for the worse.  Being raised in the land of the free I had no perception of worst case possibilities.  There is a potential penalty for that lack of knowledge.  As I consider the continuing loss of citizens freedoms due to a governmental 'concern' for citizens safety the seriousness of politics becomes a whale in my goldfish bowl.