EDITOR’S NOTE: In the summer of 1989, Paul Young, a native of Limestone and recent appointee to the philosophy faculty at St. Joseph’s College in North Windham, received a one-year Fulbright grant to complete his doctoral dissertation in West Germany. He compiled the following essay from journal entries.

Scattered around my small room are stacks of 200 or so books that I brought with me on my trip from Limestone last summer. I’m diving them into boxes for shipment home. Because the surface mail is so slow, I’m sending the books I can afford to do without now and will save those more critical to my work until the end.

The job could have been finished hours ago except for the lure of the large picture window occupying a prominent place in the center of the wall opposite my desk. It looks out onto several small mountains — each roughly the size of Mars Hill — that form the northern boundary of the Black Forest.

Since I moved to southern Germany more than nine months ago, the window has proven to be an unavoidable distraction, drawing me away from the daily work I set for myself.

Growing up in Maine, one becomes accustomed to spectacular scenery: coastal landscapes, evergreens smothered with snow, gloomy gray clouds suspended over a field at harvest time. The power of my picture window is not as obviously compelling as these. But the hills guarding the ancient forest tarry with my imagination, revealing only enough to suggest the endless range of what may lie beyond.

Today is the first of July — dull, soggy and humid. The German forecasters call this kind of weather “wechselhaft,” which means changeable. Such a word holds out the promise that on a day like today, one might see a ray or two of sun. It seems to be an unwritten law of a German weather forecast, however, the wechselhaft really means rain — all the time, and with no chance of sun.

I know such days well. We have them sometimes for weeks on end in Aroostook County. It’s very strange how a place so far away can yet be so similar.

Though I didn’t realize it the day I left home, events were under way in Europe that would, by Christmas, almost completely sweep totalitarian Communism from that continent.

For most of the show, which was only just beginning, I would have the equivalent of a front-row seat. Indeed, I would see that part of the drama centering on what has, for the last 45 years, been called the “German Question” unfold virtually around me; the tidal wave of refugees, the anxious discussions among neighbors, the excited radio broadcasts from Central European capitals.

Thoughts of European politics were not on my mind as a familiar life disappeared beneath me and an as yet uncertain future grew nearer. In addition to the cold, lonely feeling of being exposed and vulnerable, I had practical fears. Soon I would be working at a German university and would need to interact with students and others in a language I did not know well.

In fact, except for a one-semester crash course, I never studied German.

Once in Europe, I would have no familiar routine to support me. Nothing could be taken for granted, and even the simplest things would have to be relearned.

As part of my grant, I received seven weeks of language training in the Baltic port city of Kiel. After a few days of settling in, I began reading the daily papers. The dominant story was more of a curiosity than real news, and had to do with a number of East Germans who had taken advantage of Hungary’s new open border with Austria to flee to the west.

Since the end of World War II, millions of ethnic Germans from all over Eastern Europe, their right of citizenship guaranteed by a clause in the country’s constitution, had sought refuge in West Germany. This latest exodus seemed noteworthy only by virtue of the fact that the emigres had found a new crack to sneak through.

As the days went on the reports of East Germans coming west became a fixed feature of each day’s conversation. On some days, as many as a thousand or more made their way across the frontier. The newspapers devoted a little spot on the front page of each edition to record the number of new arrivals from the previous day.

The scale of the problem, and the subsequent overcrowding, is hard to imagine. The entire country of West Germany occupies an area approximately three times the size of Maine. The population, however, is more than 60 million and growing daily.

During the period beginning with my arrival in August until about Christmas, more than 200,000 refugees from East Germany arrived. The pace continued in the first three months of 1990 at the remarkable rate of up to 2,000 a day.

While the stream of refugees was making life difficult in the West, it was creating an enormous embarrassment for the East German authorities. The date of Oct. 7 marked the 40th anniversary of the founding of the German Democratic Republic, the East German state.

Since its founding, the East Germans had always been in the throes of a kind of national identity crisis — a consequence of their ambiguous relationship to the larger, more powerful German state to the west, in whose shadow they lived.

To offset the negative effects the exodus was having on public morale, Erich Honecker, head of the East German state and an old-style, Communist dictator, pulled out all the stops to “celebrate” the anniversary, and to show off the “miracle” of communism.

The arrogance and insensitivity of an enormous birthday bash in the midst of widespread public dissatisfaction and discontent was Honecker’s last mistake. In a matter of days, civil disturbances in Leipzig, Dresden, and even Berlin itself, grew so great that the ruling communists faced a grim choice: remove Honecker, or prepare for civil war.

Honecker’s fall, however, was only the overture to the complete collapse of the East German communists. Events raced quickly, almost chaotically, toward this end.

The demonstrations continued. Finally in early November, in desperation and a futile attempt to gain the people’s confidence, the government made the bold move of opening the Berlin Wall.

I visited the wall for the first time on a sunny weekend afternoon in April. Thinking it would be a mistake simply to jump off a bus, spend a few minutes gazing at it, and then return home, I decided to walk the distance of about two miles to the area of the Reichstag and the Brandenburg Gate.

By discovering the wall in this way, I noticed that it, like the hills guarding the Black Forest, both conceals and reveals. The wall partially conceals from view the city beyond. One thus saw what it meant to the city of Berlin on a beautiful spring day. But the wall, and its destruction, reveals what 40 years of Cold War and the changes in the East mean.

Though the wall had been coming down piece by piece since its opening in November, and had been worn down considerably by souvenir hunters, much remained in April. Near the Reichstag, the outer wall had been completely removed. Here, the flat surface of the “death zone” had become a fairground.

East Germans, eager to get their hands on western currency, had set up little booths and were selling articles of Soviet and East German military clothing, and fragments of the wall. The happy tune of an organ grinder completed the carnival atmosphere.

Hidden in the midst of all the fun, I noticed several small white crosses bearing the names of men and women killed trying to cross the “death zone.” The contrast was troubling. The beautiful day and the happy crowd didn’t belong together with the white crosses.

From the Brandenburg Gate south to Checkpoint Charlie — the famous allied entry point to the Soviet sector — the outer wall was still standing. Along this whole length the wonderful patchwork of art and graffiti for which the Berlin Wall was famous had been completely chiseled away.

In places, cracks big enough for a man to step through had been opened up, exposing metal reinforcing bars. Along the length of the wall, as far as the eye could see, people were hammering away, trying to dislodge a piece of history to take home. Whole families were involved in excavating pieces large enough to serve as backyard monuments.

Nearby, two young children and their older brother took turn trying to break off pieces with small stones they found on the ground. They were chattering away in German as they played. I interrupted them to ask where they were from. Shocked by my inability to place their dialect, they exclaimed: “Bavaria, of course!”

After my near yearlong struggle to learn German, I was determined to keep up the conversation.

They all giggled as I slowly built simple sentences in my primitive German. Then the older boy, still speaking German, asked, “You’re American aren’t you?” “Yes,” I responded, “How did you know?”

He smiled and then, in quite perfect English said, “Your German sounds American.”