As I have mentioned before, we went to Berlin for the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. On Friday, November 7th, 8,000 illuminated balloons were installed along a fifteen-kilometer stretch of where the Wall had been in central Berlin. It was called the “Lichtgrenze,” or “light border.” The balloons showed, in dramatic fashion, how the Wall had separated Berlin into two halves. It was interesting to walk along Lichtgrenze, walking in some of the same places we did over 30 years ago, when the Wall was still there. On Sunday, there was a huge “Bürgerfest” or citizen festival at the Brandenburg Gate, and starting a little after 7:00 pm, the balloons were released. It was a great celebration.
You might think it was to be expected that there would be a big celebration for the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Wall. Well, it was – and it wasn’t. A commentator on CNN1 noted that the Germans had not really celebrated the fall of the Wall before the 20th anniversary in 2009. In fact, she said the Germans had been hesitant to celebrate almost anything before 2009 (other than, perhaps, the 2006 World Cup that was held in Germany). We know this ourselves.
Our daughter was studying in France in 2004, and we went to visit her in November. She had to go on a school trip for several days in the middle of our visit, so I said, “Let’s go to Berlin.” Our initial plan was to arrive in Berlin on November 11, but we decided to check to see if there would be celebrations on November 9, which was, after all, the 15th anniversary of the fall of the Wall. There was virtually nothing, so we didn’t change our plans.
Even when we went to Berlin the next time, in May of 2009, memorials on fall of the Wall were limited. (It was still six months before the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Wall.) The Haus am Checkpoint Charlie (by then called the Mauermuseum [i.e., Wall Museum] was there, but it had been around since the early 1960s. At Bernauer Strasse, there was a museum and a section of the original Wall. The Eastside Gallery, where artists had painted on the East German side of the “inside wall” in 1990, was there, but the paintings were in poor shape. (As I indicated above, in most places the “Wall” consisted of two walls, separated by a no-man’s land, the so-called “Death Strip”. The Death Strip had anti-vehicle trenches, barbed wire, dogs on long leashes, and clear fields of fire for the border guards. The paintings at the Eastside Gallery were on the inner wall, and on the side of that wall that faced East Berlin.)
We only found out about Bornholmer Strasse, where East Germans first went through the Wall on the night of November 9, 1989, in a German-language brochure put out by the company that runs the Berlin U-Bahns. When we went to Bornholmer Strasse, there was just one small plaque, with a quote from Willy Brandt, to commemorate the fall of the Wall.
However, as the commentator on CNN said, things started to change in November of 2009. At last, the Germans celebrated. When we returned to Berlin in December of 2010 (yes, we go to Berlin a lot), they had big displays at Bornholmer Strasse celebrating the fall of the Wall.
The celebration this year was a continuation of the one in 2009 In addition to the balloons, there were video screens and information boards all along the route where the Wall had been. On the night of Sunday, November 9th, Daniel Barenboim and the Staatskapelle Berlin played the Fourth Movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, “Ode to Joy,” at the Brandenburg Gate. All along the Lichtgrenze, people gathered, waiting for the balloons to be released.
Which brings me to the main point of my post: With all of the celebration for the fall of the Wall, what is it about the appeal of the Linke, or Left, party in Germany, especially in parts of old East Germany? The Linke was formed in 2007 as a result of a merger of the Party of Democratic Socialism (“PDS”), the direct successor to the Communist Party that used to run East Germany, and left-wing elements of the Social Democratic Party (“SPD”).
In an election in Thuringia, a state in old East Germany, in the middle of September, the Linke received 28.4% of the votes, and the only viable coalition to run the government was one between the Linke, the state’s SPD, and the state’s Green Party.2 With the Linke having won the most votes of the three parties in the coalition, protocol was that the state minister-president would come from the Linke. While there have been other situations where the Linke has been in a coalition government in a German state, this was the first time that a member of the Linke would be a state’s minister-president.3 Not surprisingly, this is a big deal to many people in Germany.
To some Germans, what the Communist Party did in East Germany means that the Linke can never be a proper party of government. The stain of its PDS/Communist heritage is too great. For others, it is that there has never been a proper apology by the PDS or the Linke for what happened in East Germany. This is from The Local, an English-language website of German news, on November 11, 2014:
“On Sunday [i.e., November 9], Linke leaders Gregor Gysi, Katja Kipping and Bernd Riexinger proclaimed their party's official apology to East Germany.
The former Communist regime had been one ‘where political caprice could replace law and justice at any time, where tens of thousands of lives were broken and destroyed by state injustice,’ they said.
‘Today we renew our apology for the past injustice and our recognition that we must guard democracy and the rule of law jealously.’
But they said that a ‘black and white’ picture of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) was unfair to its former inhabitants, and that many of those same people were still waiting for ‘recognition’ of what they achieved in their payslips and pension packets. …
It seems that to many Germans, the Linke is so irreparably tarnished by its embrace of the status of heir to the SED [the East Germany Communist Party] that any government in which they are involved would be unacceptable.
A good place to start thinking about why that is would be the sharply political focus of Sunday's apology.
The party could have restricted its remarks to the crimes of the past, but instead tried as well to portray itself as the only legitimate representative of people in the eastern states who it says are getting a bad deal 25 years on.
Laying claim to the people the SED once governed in this way could not help but stick in many people's throats on the day they celebrated freeing themselves of the GDR.
It echoes Gysi's previous dismissals of calls for his party to apologise with references to the SED's apology of December 1989.
In that text, the party excused itself only for the fact ‘that the previous leadership of the SED led our country into this crisis that endangers its existence.’
There was no mention of the thousands killed at the border and the Berlin Wall, the thousands of lives blighted by years in political prisons, the people unjustly executed, children removed from their families, and a thousand other crimes.
Linke leaders may, 25 years on, finally have gestured, grudgingly, to the ways their predecessors at the helm of the SED abused their power over those in the former East Germany.
But their choice of words and the very fact that they do not completely reject the heritage of the past will forever put them beyond the pale for many Germans.”
The position of the Linke leaders, however, does fit with the views of some former East Germans themselves. In Jana Hensel’s 2002 book, After the Wall, she talks about how some of her parents’ generation felt ten-plus years after the fall of the Wall (Jana was thirteen in 1989, when the Wall fell):
“East German parents’ speeches always began with the blanket statement that a lot had changed for the better and that, of course, there was no comparing the Federal Republic of Germany [i.e., West Germany] with the GDR [i.e., the German Democratic Republic or East Germany]. For decades they’d wanted nothing more than to see Italy or Paris with their own eyes, and now they’d been able to realize their life-long dream of buying a house of their own in that new development on the outskirts of town.
‘We’ve been very lucky, really,’ my parents would say. A friend of theirs worked for a house repairs company so they’d gotten the bathroom fixtures and tiles at cost. They’d done a lot of the work themselves in their spare time. More and more people were moving into the development. The roads were now paved, and street signs were being put up everywhere. Especially pleasing was the man-made lake at the old mine, which was beginning to fill with water. No sir, our parents would say with a smile, they had no reason to complain, but ….
There was always a ‘but.’ It was a bit of a shame, Jenny’s father would say softly after a brief pause, that her mother, who had earned a steady income as a book illustrator, was now out of a job and had no prospects on finding work. As if to gather his strength, he would reach for his glass of beer and take a gulp, before setting it audibly – too audibly Jonathan would have said – back on the table. Jenny knew that this was a signal. The tirade was about to start.
Things were great today, he would continue – for young people. People from the older generation were happy that their children could now go to university anywhere in the world. They themselves had traveled to London to inspect the campus and lecture halls. They couldn’t be more pleased if their children took advantage of all the new opportunities. But today’s times weren’t for them. Those on the other side of the Wall didn’t understand anything. (At this point Jenny’s parents would lean over toward Jonathan.) And to be honest, if they had known what was coming, they might have stayed home on Monday evenings in the Fall of 1989. They hadn’t marched through the streets for the way things were now.”4
Jana Hensel explains that for some in her parents’ generation, i.e., people in their 40s and early 50s when the Wall fell, it was as if they had emigrated to a new country where their old jobs didn’t exist anymore and there was nothing for them to do, but they were still in their old homes and everybody spoke German. It was an unusual emigration: they didn’t move, the country did – or, rather, it ceased to exist and a new country took over.5 For some of them, things turned out poorly, and their response was to reject what had happened and wish the past was back (though only that part of the past they were now remembering).
In one way, I understand how Jana Hensel could feel about the country of her childhood disappearing and how some in her parents’ generation feel about what happened to them. But in another way, I don’t. I don’t think anybody feels that way about the disappearance of the Third Reich. There were children who were Jana’s age when the Third Reich disappeared in May of 1945. There were adults who could not make a go of it in the new world that came after the end of the war. Still, I don’t believe any of them were nostalgic for their lost country. Part of the reason, or course, is that everybody understands how bad the Nazis were.
But the Communist Party in East Germany was very bad in its own way. Its security service, the Stasi, had over 90,000 full-time employees plus another 170,000 unofficial informers – in a country of just 17 million people.6 According to Peter Schneider, the joke in East Germany was, paraphrasing the Bible, that wherever five or six were gathered together, one of them was a Stasi informer.7 Unlike the Nazis, however, the Stasi did not rely primarily on physical terror and concentration camps. According to Hartmut Richter, who had escaped from East Germany and was then imprisoned when he went back to help others get out, the physical beatings were not as bad as the psychological terror the Stasi imposed: “The Stasi was better than those who trained them, the Soviets.” The Communists effectively turned the whole country into a concentration camp. You had to go along because it was so hard to get out.
In East Germany, children who were baptized couldn’t get into higher education. People who tried to leave would be imprisoned (if not killed). People who complained too much, like Wolf Biermann, an East German dissident singer and songwriter, were allowed to travel to the West and then not allowed back in. Neighbors were recruited to spy on neighbors. For that matter, family members reported to the Stasi on other family members.
In spite of this, leaders of the Linke, such as Gregor Gysi (who was a member of the Communist Party in East Germany before 1989), can’t seem to unreservedly apologize for East Germany. And people like some of the adults in Jana Hensel’s book wish they were back in East Germany. Why? People don’t feel that way about the Third Reich.
Part of it may be, as I said, that people now accept how bad the Nazis were. But I think it is more than that. People understand that the Nazis totally destroyed their own country. In 1945, Germany was defeated and devastated. The catastrophe was so great that many in Germany, at least in the parts that became West Germany and West Berlin, called it “Stunde Null,” Zero Hour.
Perhaps that is the difference between the end of East Germany and the end of Nazi Germany. It was clear to all how big of a disaster, and evil, Nazi Germany had been. The devastation, the results of twelve years of Nazi rule, could not be denied.
East Germany ended differently. It didn’t end in devastation. It ended in an election. In March of 1990, in the only free election in East German history, the East Germans voted, in effect, for unification with West Germany, and it happened less than seven months later. Therefore, the East German economy never collapsed. It would have, at some point, not unlike what happened in Cuba in the early 1990s when the Soviet Union dissolved and the subsidies from Moscow stopped coming.8
In 1989 East Germany was still getting subsidized, by payments and loans from the West and forced purchases of its products from other East Bloc countries. But the loans would not have continued. At some point, the lenders would have stopped lending. At some point, the borrowing to subsidize the living standards of the East German people would have come to an end. The jobs and living standards could not have been maintained. The economy would have collapsed.9 But East Germany collapsed politically before it collapsed economically.
This has allowed some people, like some of the adults in Jana Hensel’s book, to remember “a better life” in old East Germany, even though it was a life that couldn’t have continued to exist economically and that was available only to those who went along with a totalitarian state.
More unfortunately, it has allowed politicians of the old East German Communist Party to avoid both accepting responsibility for what the East German government did and giving the unqualified apology that the people in former East Germany deserve.
There seems to be, in many politicians (though sometimes it seems more pronounced in those on the left), a kind of fairy tale belief in their own ideas. It’s true that communism didn’t work in East Germany, they say, and that the East German Communist Party went too far and did things it shouldn’t have done. But “Next Time,” we’ll get it right. Next Time we won’t make mistakes. With better conditions, without foreign enemies, Next Time we can get it to work.
Chicago Cubs fans believe in “Next Year.” With just a little more pitching and a left-handed power hitter, we can do it next year, they think. Sometimes, the more realistic Cubs fans will think it might take two years (or even three), but they are still looking forward to Next Year, whenever it occurs.
There is a difference, however, between Chicago Cubs’ fans belief in Next Year and the Linke’s belief in Next Time. Chicago Cubs fans are just believing in a game. If Next Year doesn’t happen, that’s okay. Nobody’s hurt, except for a few hopes.
It’s different with the Linke. The Linke is talking about government – and force. The Linke is claiming that Next Time will be different for a system that gave us East Germany the last time it was in power. If Cubs fans get tired of management’s talk about Next Year, they can complain or leave. When politicians from the Linke ran East Germany, people could do neither.
Ultimately, Cubs fans’ belief in Next Year is harmless when it doesn’t happen. The Linke’s belief in Next Time isn’t. Because we have seen what can happen when they get it wrong.10
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1 I think it was Hope Harrison, a professor at The George Washington University.
2 The Thuringia SPD refused to renew its coalition with the local Christian Democratic Union (”CDU”), which actually received the most votes, and the CDU refused to be in a coalition with the Eurosceptic Alternative for Germany (“AfD”), which calls for Germany to leave the Euro. (Here and here.)
3 One line remains to be crossed, however. The Linke’s candidate for minister-president of Thuringia, Bodo Ramelow, is a trade union official who grew up in West Germany, so it is not a former member of the Communist Party who will be the state minister-president. Also, see footnote 10.
4 Jana Hensel, After the Wall (2002, 2004), p. 67-69. The ellipsis was in the original. The reference to “Monday evenings” is to the marches in East Germany on Mondays in September, October, and November of 1989. The original title of the book in German was Zonenkinder, literally Zone Children; i.e., children of the Soviet Zone of Germany, East Germany.
5 After the Wall, p. 71, 174.
6 Mary Elise Sarotte, The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall (2014), p. 9.
7 Peter Schneider, Berlin Now (2014), p. 180.
8 Yoani Sánchez talks about this in her book Havana Real. It was called “a special period in a time of peace”. Yoani Sánchez, Havana Real (2009, 2011), p. 6, 235.
9 Among the books that cover what was happening in the East German economy are Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany by Charles S. Maier (1997) and The Politics of Economic Decline in East Germany, 1945 – 1989 by Jeffrey Kopstein (1997).
10 There is one small hope. As I mentioned above, Linke politicians at the national level have avoided a full, unqualified apology for what happened in East Germany. However, in order to get agreement on the coalition in Thuringia, the local Linke party in Thuringia had to agree to a preamble in the three-party coalition agreement that included a recognition of the injustices in East Germany. The BBC article on the election of the Linke candidate said that the “coalition was agreed on condition that the new prime minister acknowledged that former East Germany was an ‘Unrechtsstaat’ – an unlawful state. It is an emotive admission for the party, not least because the same word is applied to Nazi Germany.” This statement is very important in Germany. We will have to see if leaders of the Linke at the national level are ever willing to say it – and if they can be trusted to mean it.
Do you travel anywhere else besides Berlin?
Posted by: Jennie | December 12, 2014 at 12:21 PM