## A Story the World Needed
Halvorsen said, in the last decade of his life, that he believed the candy drops had resonated because the world needed them. By this he seemed to mean something specific: that the postwar world, in 1948, was full of stories about enmity and division and the machinery of large-scale power, and that a story about a pilot breaking his gum in half and passing it through a fence was the kind of human-scale event that people on both sides of various divides needed to be able to hold onto.
This is Halvorsen’s own interpretation, and it has a self-serving quality that he was probably aware of. The candy drops had made him famous and had given his life a particular shape, and it would be surprising if he did not believe they had been important. But the longevity of the story’s resonance — the fact that it was still being commemorated, still being taught in schools, still drawing Berliners and Americans to anniversary events into the 2020s — is at least consistent with his claim.
The world in 1948 was indeed full of stories about enmity and division. The Cold War was just beginning to take its shape. Germany was occupied and divided. Europe was rebuilding from a catastrophe that had killed tens of millions of people. In this environment, a story about one pilot and some children at a fence was not trivial. It was a demonstration that the people embedded in the large-scale historical process were still capable of small acts of genuine connection, and that those acts could matter.