The Berlin Wall (72 page)

There has been a lot of talk of the ‘Wall in the head’, as if East Germans were somehow dramatically different from West Germans. Statistics, spurious or otherwise, are regularly published in German newspapers or quoted on radio and TV to the effect that such-and-such a percentage of Germans in East or West ‘wish the Wall could be rebuilt’. In truth, the situation between ‘Ossis’ and ‘Wessis’ is not that different to the feelings the Scots have about the English, and vice versa. It is rare to find a Scotsman with a good word to say about the larger country south of Hadrian’s Wall (that wall thing again), but on the other hand they somehow never quite cut loose. As for East Germans, their history was certainly different to the West’s for forty years or so, and largely worse. It will probably take a whole new generation, growing up since the end of the Wall, to begin properly integrating the ‘two Germanys’. With a new woman chancellor, Angela Merkel, who grew up in the East and saw the fall of the Wall from the Eastern perspective, perhaps the process will accelerate. But maybe the problem is not the ‘Wall in the head’, but the simple fact of unemployment and hopelessness in one part of Germany versus prosperity in the other.

The ‘Wall in the head’ may represent a rationalisation of this hope-lessness. Communities in crisis tend to blame others, and to fall back on the things and people they consider ‘their own’. Hence the wave of so-called
Ostalgie
(‘Eastalgia’) in the ex-GDR, with its selective reminiscing about the ‘good old days’ of Ulbricht, Honecker, FDJ uniforms, guaranteed jobs and that shabby sense of belonging. It is to be found at its most harmless in hit films such as
Good Bye, Lenin!
(which has the advantage of being genuinely funny and charming) and
Sonnenallee
, and at its most toxic in votes for the PDS and resentment against caricatured West German ‘yuppies’. We can hope that tougher, more realistic films such as the recent ‘The Life of the Others’ (
Das Leben der Anderen
),
showing the grubby and life-destroying abuse of domestic surveillance for political purposes by the
Stasi
, will help redress the balance. This was a society where brother was encouraged to betray brother, husband betray wife. Life under the pitiless, probing gaze of the
Stasi
was composed of a hundred thousand tiny betrayals in the intimate sphere, between people who in any decent society should have been able to trust each other. To see life in the GDR any other way is to inhabit a rose-tinted fantasy world.

None of this means that, more than a decade and a half after the Wall tumbled, the former GDR does not have serious problems. The region’s ancient and often beautiful small towns, though in many cases rebuilt and cleaned up with Western money since 1989, are decaying and losing their young people.

The population of the former GDR is ageing at a terrifying rate, and the birth rate is at a record low. In total the region has lost 8 per cent of its population since 1990, amounting to 1.3 million people (as of 2003). In 1949, 25 per cent of the population of Germany lived in the area that would become the GDR. Fifteen years after the GDR’s demise, the figure was down to less than 18 per cent. It is predicted to fall to 13 per cent by 2050.
8
The tax base of the new provinces is still fragile, in some areas almost non-existent, and in a few years the rate of Western financial aid for the East is due to fall dramatically. Leipzig and Dresden show clear signs of life, as do Jena and Eisenach, where optics and automotive engineering respectively have revived, but the old manufacturing centre of Chemnitz, the ‘German Manchester’, has lost more than 15 per cent of its population since 1989 and has by some calculations the lowest birth rate
in the world
. Small cities such as Schwerin and Rostock have lost more than 20 per cent, and the population of the once-key chemicals centre of Halle, with more than one in five unemployed, has declined from 310,000 to 240,000, a loss of 22.6 per cent.
9
Recently (and expensively) renovated apartment buildings are now being torn down because the city authorities cannot afford their upkeep and there is no hope of finding tenants. In the Halle suburb of Silberhohe, of 14,000 apartments, 3,500 stood empty before the recent wave of tear-downs started.
1O

The Easterners have reason to be disappointed and unhappy, and also-despite the generosity of the Westerners since 1989-reason to be bitter.
The problem is that they often blame the wrong people-that is, the West, and not the SED bosses who kept them behind the Wall while the world changed around them, until it was all but too late to cope.

One dark, ambiguous footnote to all this is provided by the fate of Conrad Schumann, the young border guard who was so famously photographed as he leapt the wire from the Bernauer Strasse into West Berlin on 15 August 1961. At first sight, his was a success story. He integrated well into Western society, married a young West German woman and went to live in Ingolstadt, a prosperous town in northern Bavaria. He worked for almost twenty years in the Audi car factory, and brought up a family. Then the Wall came down. Schumann was finally able to visit his relations and friends, in a small Saxon town between Dresden and Leipzig. Cause for joy, it would seem. There, however, he found that he was not entirely welcome. He was the iconic Wall-jumper. Or, as he had been portrayed in the East, iconic traitor and tool of the imperialists. These were the accusations from which the Wall had protecred him. Schumann could nor reconnect with the friends and comrades of his youth, the ones he had left. behind when he took that impulsive jump to the West all those years ago. With that ‘desertion’ he had excluded himself from being one of them, and never could be again.

Conrad Schumann hanged himself on 20 June 1998 in the orchard of his house near lngolstadt. The family blamed his suicide on personal problems.

And Berlin? The Wall was not just, or not even, about Berlin. It was about imprisoning an entire country’s population. Since reunification, surprisingly, Berlin’s population has also declined, by around 45,000, despite the fact that it became the seat of government in 1991. And Berlin is broke. What used to be the Western sectors no longer receive the generous aid from the federal government that they enjoyed during the city’s time as a protected capitalist island in the Communist sea. The same goes for East Berlin, which as capital of the GDR and the Workers’ and Peasants’ State’s tourist showcase was also lavishly subsidised by East Bloc standards.

Berlin still mirrors the nation’s differences.

The historic centre of the city, just inside what used to be East Berlin,
has now been renovated and seems virtually indistinguishable from the West. However, in the areas east of the Alexanderplatz, where there are still tram services, the continuing difference becomes clear. The horizon is dominated by the looming, monotonous
Plattenbauten
(literally slabbuilding) apartment blocks that were built between the 1960s and the 1980s in the rush to house East Berliners in a manner that Ulbricht, Honecker and comrades thought fit. The clothes are cheaper and often drabber, the cars older. There’s an old-fashioned clannish feeling here, a closeness and an often attractive lack of pretension. The east end of Berlin was always the working people’s area, the place where a century or more ago the immigrants from the countryside and abroad tended to gather. So it’s not just because of forty years of Communism that it looks and feels this way. All the same, as someone who got to know the East during the 1970S and 1980s when the GDR was in its deceptively solid heyday, when I’m there I don’t need a street sign to know where I am.

But the city as a whole has survived, will survive, and will grow together, as Willy Brandt predicted back in 1989, because it belongs together. Individuals and companies are moving into the old East of Berlin because it is cheaper and, frankly, in many ways more interesting than the somewhat sedate and sanitised, often strongly middle-class, districts westwards of where the Wall used to be. The East is where most of the clubs are, the experimental theatres and venues, the funky restaurants and less expensive apartments. It has an edgy, unexplored feeling that for Westerners is attractive as well as slightly unnerving.

And strangest of all, the Communists now rule again in Berlin. Or rather, they co-rule. Since 2001, the PDS has been in coalition with the Social Democrats at city hall, to the shock and ourrage of some and the wry amusement of others. PDS senators, many of them former SED members, run various departments of the united city administration. The comrades are back, in modernised form of course. At the 2001 elections, to city hall, they had gained a respectable 23 per cent of the vote to the SPD’s 29 per cent. Although their vote dropped noticeably in 2006, they continued to participate in the capital’s government. The PDS fraction from the Berlin city assembly even dares to lay a wreath at the Berlin Wall monument in the Bernauer Strasse every 13 August, or at least it did so in 2005. On that occasion, the tribute disappeared in a matter of
minutes. I never managed to find out exactly why, or where it went. The so-called ‘Red-Red’ coalition seems to work, but the wounds of the Wall have not yet closed. Maybe, even in an age of post-modern irony, it is still possible to take some things too far, too fast.

But Berlin has seen worse, a lot worse. It likes to party, and parrying is what it does well, even when the city coffers are close to empty. Especially in the summer of the World Cup. The city has an openly gay mayor, Klaus Wowereit, who also has a high fun quotient and continues to enjoy high popularity.
Berlin bleibt Berlin
. Berlin remains Berlin. And with a little luck and hard work, perhaps Germany’s time of punishment will soon be truly over.

For anyone who knew the city when the Wall cast its pall across Berlin, nothing can beat the pleasure of being able to stroll through the Brandenburg Gate and across the Pariser Platz, maybe heading for an espresso in one of the boulevard cafés on Unter den Linden. And nothing is sweeter than the awareness that, compared with twenty years ago, the greatest danger you run when taking these few unhurried paces is of being knocked into by an over-enthusiastic bicycle courier, not cut in half by a burst of automatic fire.

When we’re doing this, and the sun is shining, sometimes we can believe that Hitler never happened, that Auschwitz was just the German name for an obscure village in Poland, and that the Berlin Wall was just a figment of somebody’s mad imagination.

NOTES

1 Marsh Town

1
Entries in Clausewitz, Berlinischer Stadtbuch
, cited in Alexandra Richie,
Faust’s Metropali: A History of Berlin
p. 29.

2
Giles Macdonogh,
Berlin
pp. 116f.

3
Richie,
Faust’s Metropolis
p. 66.

4
Nancy Mitford,
Frederik the Great
p. 291.

5
Macdonogh,
Berlin
p. 117.nd Its Legacies: German Modernities, Imperialism, and the Meanings of Reform, 1890-1930 ed. Geoff E

2 Reds

1
For a particularly interesting overview of this era, see
Wilhelminism aley and James Retallack.

2
Bebel’s speech quoted in Jonathan Sternberg,
Yesterday’s Deterrent: Tirpitz and the Birth of the German Battle Fleet
p. 195.

3
Fot this quote and details of Ulbricht’s early life and political apprenticeship see Mario Frank,
Walter Ulbricht: Eine deutsche Biografie
pp. 64ff.

4
See Frank,
Walter Ulbricht
pp. 90ff.

5
Richie,
Famt’s Metropolis
p. 401.

6
Quoted in Frank,
Walter Ulbricht
p. 105.

3 ‘It Must Look Democratic…’

1
Cf. Frank,
Walter Ulbricht
pp. 122f. Neumann, for instance, was shot in 1937. His wife, Margarete Buber-Neumann, was sentenced to five years hard labour in Siberia, but then handed over by the Russians to the Gesrapo in 1940. She was imprisoned in the Ravensbriick women’s concentration camp until April 1945. There she met and became close friends with Milena Jesenská, once the lover of Franz Kafka. Jesenská died of her privations in 1944. Miraculously, however, Buber-Neumann survived to write ‘Between Two Dictators: Stalin and Hitler’ after the war as well as many other works, including a biography of her friend Milena. She died in November 1989, in Frankfurt-on-Main, three days befote the Berlin Wall was breached.

2
See interview with Wolfgang Leonhard,
Zuruck in die Zukunft in Der Spiegel
, 6/2005 8 April 2005.

3
David Clay Large,
Berlin: A Modern History
p. 371.

4
See Richie,
Faust’s Metropolis
pp. 616ff. And in even more detail, with little horror spared, Anthony Beevor,
Berlin: The Downfall
pp. 406ff. (Chapter 27,
Vae Victis!
).

5
Quoted in Frank,
Walter Ulbricht
p. 193. And for the details of Ulbricht’s work with Galadshev and Serov.

6
Figures in Mike Dennis,
The Rise and Fall of the German Democratic Republic
1945-1990 p. 4 1.

7
Wolfgang Leonhard,
Child of the Revolution
p. 373.

8
Betzarin was made a posthumous honorary citizen of East Bedin in 1965. After 1989 he was not accepted as an honorary citizen of the united city, but after the ‘Red-Red’ coalition took power in Bedin a successful campaign was mounted to have the honour restored.