Journal Entry 11

21. Juni 2020

Years from now, when I pick up this journal for reference, I want to remember how old my children and the king’s children were during this unpredictable year of 2020.

Otto (16) and Emma (13)

King Jonas’s children:

Princess Emily (16), Prince Boris (14), Princess Sophie (12) and Princess Tatiana (12)

It is hard to believe at this time next year, all of our children will be teenagers. It seems like it was only yesterday that it was the king and me who were the teenagers. Times are different now. The world seems more complicated, more demanding than it had 25 years ago. I suppose our parents probably thought the same when they were our age.

During World War II, my father and Jonas’s father, King Edwin, were not even teenagers. I wonder what a post-war teenager’s life was like. I suppose those teenagers had some of the same trials and tribulations as my generation had and the same my children will encounter.

Jonas and I were lucky. By the time we were teenagers, the Cold War had already ended between the West and the Soviet Union.  We were only ten years old when the Berlin Wall fell. I can still remember the days that led up to the reunification of Deutschland. The front pages of the newspapers, like the Los Angeles Times, Die Welt, and Dorstenland Zeitung, were printing pictures of East Germans climbing the US Embassy walls in East Berlin, desperate for safe passage to West Germany.

The Dorstenland Embassy was no exception to East German citizens seeking shelter in a foreign embassy. I still remember I was in awe when I first viewed East Germans climbing our embassy walls in East Berlin as the Dorstenland flag waved in the wind. It was a scary and exciting time. I remember wondering if Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev would intervene to halt the exodus. I asked my parents if the Soviets would declare war. I wondered if true peace had finally arrived throughout Europe. It was a time I will never forget.

When US President Ronald Reagan proclaimed in 1987 from West Berlin, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” I could not help but feel excitement for a world drained from the anxiety of the possibility of nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States. I am not sure that many eight-year-old children paid attention to President Reagan’s famous words, but I had. My father educated me often on state matters since as far as I can remember. As I look back on this time in my life, I think my father was grooming me for a career as a king’s private secretary, just as King Edwin was grooming eight-year-old, Jonas, to become the King of Dorstenland.