With the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall upon us, what can we make of these two sets of polls? First, a poll this past summer reported that 49% of east Germans agree with the following statement: "The GDR had more good sides than bad sides. There were some problems, but life was good there." A further eight percent agreed with this: "The GDR had, for the most part, good sides. Life there was happier and better than in reunified Germany today."
On the other hand, a poll by the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project conducted from August 27 through September 24 reported that 81% of people in east Germany said that they approved of reunification and 85% approved of the change to democracy. Similarly, according to a poll for the German broadcaster ZDF that was published earlier this month, 91% of people in east Germany are happy with the way reunification has gone.
So what do these results tell us? Do they tell us that, while east Germans are happy with reunification, they now think East Germany wasn’t that bad. But how can this be reconciled with the thousands of East Germans who were so desperate to leave the GDR in 1989, and with the pictures of pure joy on November 9-10, 1989, when the Wall opened, and West Berlin hosted a spontaneous street party for East Berliners? Here are a couple of possibilities:
- There is a natural tendency to defend your family if somebody criticizes it. You may not like all of your relatives, but when somebody attacks them, you defend them; they’re family. For many people, it’s the same with their country.
- Time passes; memories fade. It’s human nature to remember the better things and forget or ignore the bad things.
- Germans already have the burden of Hitler and the Nazis. Maybe the east Germans don’t want the GDR to be a similar burden, so they remember it better than it was.
Nicholas Kulish reported in The New York Times on an interview with Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, who grew up in and lived in East Germany:
"‘No one’s life, even in a dictatorship, is completely formed by that dictatorship,’ Mrs. Merkel said. Everyone had fond memories and good experiences as well as the much chronicled bad ones, the chancellor said, and no one wanted to have to abandon all those aspects of their lives all at once."
But the danger is that the good will be remembered more than the bad. It is fine to remember that not everything was bad, but one also has to remember that the bad was, ultimately, more important. When we were in Berlin in May we talked with two men at a restaurant. They work together now. One grew up in a little village in West Germany. The other grew up in East Berlin. The one who grew up in East Berlin said he had been lucky that "die Wende" (German for "change" or "turning point" and the name the Germans have given to 1989) happened at the right time for him, just as he was leaving college. But, he said, the GDR was a good place to grow up.
The GDR may have been a good place for him to grow up in, but it was not a good place to grow up if your parents wanted to baptize you. If you were baptized in East Germany, it was hard to get to go to college. While not East Germany, look at what communism did to people such as Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia. His attempt to merely "live in truth," as he called it, wound him up in prison several times.
Most people were able to get along in East Germany, if they were careful and did not care, openly, about the kind of government they had to live under and the restrictions the government placed on them. But it was a system that brought out the worst in many people. There is good and bad in everyone. The system in the GDR let the bad flourish. James Madison, in Federalist Papers number 51, said, "If men were angels, no government would be necessary." But men aren’t angels, so we need government. But we need a government that restricts and controls the bad in people, not one, like communism in East Germnay, that effectively gave free rein to, if not encouraged, the bad in people.
And this must be remembered because we need to make sure such a system does not come again.
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