The Week in Germany
Dear TWIG Readers,
This weekend, Germany - and the world - will reflect upon the most powerful symbol of the Cold War. Construction began on the Berlin Wall as a clandestine operation under the cover of darkness on the eve of August 12, 1961.
Bewildered and distraught Berliners awoke to this new reality on August 13. West Berliners stood by helplessly as their neighbors in East Berlin were literally sealed off from them. There was nothing they could do to stop the plans of the repressive East German communist regime. Before the entire inner-city border was fully secured, many East Berliners jumped over to friends, neighbors or lovers in West Berlin from windows and balconies. And an East German border guard in a bold bid for freedom famously caught on a film clip that went around the world leapt over the barbed wire marking the future site of the Wall and made it over to West Berlin without a scratch. Others were not so lucky. Countless lives were lost as people sought to flee across the border, but were gunned down in the process. (Although a lucky few did manage to defect from the former GDR, via tunnels, via armored trucks, even via air balloons.)
After 28 years the Berlin Wall fell during the peaceful revolution of November 1989. It has now been torn down (22 years) for nearly as long as it stood. Yet it was such a powerful symbol of the Cold War that it still evokes a strong response today, a half century after its construction commenced.
Germans will gather this weekend on the spot where the Wall once stood and reflect on how it shaped their lives. While most of the Wall is gone, a section still stands in the center of the city on a street called Bernauer Strasse. When the city was divided this area was part of a vast swathe of no-man's-land that cut through the heart of Germany's largest city, covered in barbed wire and constantly monitored from watch towers by guards with shoot-to-kill orders.
But to hear many East Germans tell it when they reminisce about their day-to-day lives, at least, not everything was all bad in the former East Germany, or German Democratic Republic (GDR). Some East Germans still applaud the benefits of a system in which everyone felt some level of social security, in which every child had a spot at a day care center, in which every married couple could expect to find an apartment or new home (one reason East Germans tended to marry much sooner than West Germans). As illustrated by the excellent tragi-comic film "Goodbye Lenin!" (2003), starring Germany's cinematic boy wonder Daniel Brühl, there are still many now mostly defunct products, from pickles to furniture to puppets, that East Germans fondly recall in a phenomenon known as "Ostalgie" (East-stalgia).
This is not to say that all East Germans, or "Ossis" (Easties), want to go back to the "good 'ol" GDR days - they were largely in favor of instant unification with West Germany and joining the "Wessis" (Westies) in their free-market lifestyle, a historic event that took place on October 3, 1990, now celebrated as the Day of German Unity. The regime they lived under was a repressive dictatorship that destroyed many people with its paranoid attempts at "re-conditioning" them in special "centers" where they were imprisoned and brainwashed to believe their system was "great" and protected them from the "imperialists" and "fascists" of West Germany. (The Berlin Wall, incidentally, was also known as the antifaschistischer Schutzwall, or "Anti-Fascist Protective Wall"). And the myth of this airtights system of equally distributed social security went up in smoke like a ludicrous chimera after German unification - the GDR was not exactly flush with cash and its industries were hopelessly outdated, not to mention often very harmful compared to their far more technically advanced West German counterparts to human health and the environment.
At the end of the day, these benign "Ostalgie" feelings are perhaps more than anything else a reflection of the marvelous human capacity simply to recall - to borrow an old cliche that evokes every Hollywood World War II epic ever made - "the best of times, even at the worst of times".
Holger Teschke, 53, a Berlin-based playwright, poet and essayist, in an interview that aired on National Public Radio on August 12 told NPR reporter Renee Montagne that he believes it will still take at least one more generation before German identities aren't attached to the ideas of East or West. He cited his own son, who was 10 years old when the East German regime ended, who still identifies himself as an East versus a West German.
He was "now convinced" that more time is needed before these separate identities are truly overcome. Part of the reason, he underscored, was that, for four decades, the people of the former East Germany were not really allowed to determine their own destiny.
"With freedom and democracy there are many more challenges (...) including that you have to think for yourself," he said. "That was taken away from the people (of the former East Germany) for 40 years."
Although it may sound surprising to, for instance, most Americans, accustomed to such notions of individual self-determination, Teschke suggested this has been the primary overarching challenge for East Germans going forward after German unification.
"It is not actually very easy to learn to be a free person," he said in citing a statement once made by German literary legend Thomas Mann's late daughter, Elisabeth Mann-Borgese.
These words should serve to remind us all what it means to be responsible, reliable and upstanding citizens in any democracy as we strive to achieve the greatest possible good for the greatest number of people, a simple yet noble notion spanning from the great minds of antiquity to the Enlightenment which is easy to lose sight of sometimes in a fast-paced, globalized world.
Karen Carstens
Editor, The Week in Germany
Webteam Germany.info
Thanks for the reminder, Karen... I guess.
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