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Germany's wall within Ten years ago, the dreaded Berlin Wall came crashing down. Tom O'Boyle, a journalist in Bonn right up to that moment, explains why unification has failed to result in an all-powerful Germany: Two countries remain, especially in peoples' minds Sunday, November 07, 1999
Do you remember where you were 10 years ago this Tuesday? I'll bet you don't. The date Nov. 9, 1989, does not register in the American consciousness as a day that the world changed. But I'm certain you remember what happened that day -- and recall the moment when you first heard that the Berlin Wall had finally, miraculously, stunningly, come thundering down.
And with good reason. During the 28 years of its existence, there was no more potent or ghastly symbol of the Iron Curtain, of the divide between East and West, between repression and liberty, between communism and capitalism, between a fractured Germany, than the 103 miles of 13-foot-high concrete and barbed wire that encircled the city of West Berlin.
In my case, I had arrived in Pittsburgh with my family just days before, from -- of all places -- West Germany, Bonn specifically, the town chosen as postwar capital of the Federal Republic of Germany because it was, in the words of founding father Konrad Adenauer, "a city without a past." The fall of the wall may have brought shock to the world and jubilation to Germany, but for me, personally and professionally, it represented colossally bad timing. For the four years prior, I had covered the two Germanys for The Wall Street Journal, as the tiresome German story evolved into something historic. And when the two Germanys were about to become one, where was I? Here. In Pittsburgh. When I left the week before, the wall was standing, with only a glimmer of hope that it might not.
One other memory stands out from the events of Nov. 9, 1989, and the days that followed. It was a conversation I had with an editor in New York. An editor with an idea can be a dangerous thing, particularly one on deadline, and this idea was hurtling through the keyboard at breakneck speed.
The idea was this: the German juggernaut. Not an original thought in that it certainly was feared in Britain and France and had occurred to the editors of Time and Newsweek and U.S. News and virtually every news outlet looking for a follow to the news once the news wasn't news anymore. Yet no matter how strenuously I argued with this particular editor, my words were not heeded. He would not be swayed from his provocative thesis, which portrayed a unified Germany as masters of Europe, if not the universe and most certainly all future Olympics, within five years tops.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the juggernaut. It didn't happen. Forecasts of an economic and political colossus were so far off the mark that the whole notion seems now, in hindsight, utterly laughable.
German employers are fleeing their country to escape high wages and a cosseted economy. German unification, now almost a decade old, has proven extremely arduous and extraordinarily costly. Unemployment is above 10 percent nationwide and beyond 20 percent in some regions of the east. Discontent over the situation, not to mention reforms to correct it proposed by the new Chancellor Gerhard Schroder, is so great that the former East German Communists, now known as the Party of Democratic Socialism, have outpolled Schroder's ruling Social Democrats in several recent state elections.
As it turned out, the '90s were America's decade, not Germany's. Why didn't the juggernaut happen? And it will it ever?
They are questions worth considering on this anniversary if for no other reason than as a lesson about the unreliability of forecasts based on spurious assumptions.
The wall was no less baffling the first time I saw it. Seeing something you've imagined is always an eerie experience, and this occasion did not disappoint. A night tour in February 1986 of West Berlin's famed sites ended with a visit to the wall. From a perch atop an observation deck that stood within a stone's throw of the infamous Reichstag, the building from which Hitler orchestrated his Third Reich, I looked down from the West into the East. The quiet and stillness of the night was accentuated by a light snow. As the snowflakes glistened, one could almost hear, in the silence, the sounds of the past.
The wall's appearance underscored the contrasts in the two societies it had split apart. On the Western side, it was aflame with colorful graffiti, a testament to the modern, worldly young West Berliners who kept their half of the city teeming until well after midnight. On the Eastern side, the wall was gray, like the silent streets and drab, bullet-riddled buildings left standing from the war.
The appearances reflected something more fundamental. The people who inhabited each society were different in startling ways. While I despised East Germany and what it represented, I found the people there were, to my surprise, friendlier, less materialistic and generally easier-going and more interested in forming friendships with Americans than their West German brethren.
Don't think I am nostalgic at all about the East German state. Erich Honecker, the man who as security chief built the wall in 1961, and his henchmen were evil, and they ruled with an iron fist. As a police state, East Germany was second to none; it paid informants to betray even family members, maintained a vast security network, with files on virtually every citizen, and tolerated absolutely no dissent. Any unauthorized contact with a Western visitor could land you in jail, which made a journalist's task difficult to say the least.
In the fields, women stooped to hand pick crops. In the streets, red banners proclaimed Marxist verities like "Everyone in Their Workplace is the Best for our Social Peace." In the stores, goods such as fresh vegetables were scarce and poor in quality. Sought-after items like color TVs were staggeringly expensive. The three-cylinder cars they drove, the ugly little Wartburgs and Trabants, spewed out foul-smelling exhaust, had stagecoach-like suspensions and took years to procure.
I had encountered the scrutiny a Western journalist could attract. On one occasion, while I was passing through Checkpoint Charlie, East German border guards confiscated unauthorized reading material -- a copy of Tom Clancy's novel, "The Hunt for Red October," which had the unfortunate picture of a Soviet sub on the cover. The discovery landed me in an isolation room, where I was held and questioned for about three hours. On another occasion, while staying at the Grand Hotel, East Berlin's swankiest accommodation, security officers roused me out of bed at about 3 a.m., supposedly seeking to "clarify" my visa status.
But as harsh as their government was, the East Germans I knew seemed oddly accepting of it. Those who left weren't, obviously. Hundreds of thousands emigrated to the West and probably as many fled, illegally, in the 40 years that East Germany existed; indeed, 77 died trying to escape East Berlin. For every one person who left, however, at least 20 stayed -- and many wouldn't have left even if they were free to leave.
Though some who stayed undoubtedly had been beaten down by years of repression, many others, perhaps a majority even, found life under socialism quite livable. They preferred living in a nation separate from West Germany, and were not eager to see their state disappear into a larger Germany. They saw capitalism as a threat to an archaic but comfortable system that guaranteed their jobs, low-cost housing, free health care and education. And they weren't exactly enthusiastic about their new countrymen in the West. In about a dozen visits to East Germany before the wall fell, I heard many people in the East -- known as "Ossis" -- use the word hochmütig ("haughty") for their mysterious compatriots in the West ("Wessis").
East Germany was slower paced, which made for better neighbors and friends, they believed, and was a truer representation of the "true" Germany precisely because it had been sheltered from postwar Western commercialism and materialism. One measure of the degree of separation that still exists is the most recent mayoral election in Berlin, in which the former Communists, the PDS, won 40 percent of the votes cast in the eastern half.
In short, it was clear to anyone who had spent time in both Germanys that the 40 years of division had wrought two distinct societies, each with its own culture and values. It explains why one truly unified German state has not yet emerged.
In the summer of 1987 I visited Wolfgang Albrecht, an East German hairdresser, one of five East-West pairs of people in common occupations that a colleague and I profiled that September, to mark Honecker's first historic state visit to West Germany. Albrecht's Western counterpart, Adolf Hannberger, was a prosperous, barrel-chested man, operating three hair salons in Erlangen. But he was recovering from a recent heart attack -- a sign, he claimed, of too much stress in his life.
Albrecht, on the other hand, had relatives in the United States and West Germany, but he was sharply critical of the "whole Western way of life," where people were judged according to an old German proverb: "Hast du was, bist du was" -- roughly, "You are what you own." Though he complained about some of the idiocies of the East German system -- including, incredibly, cutting hair according to state-approved styles -- he left no doubt which Germany he preferred.
The ultimate irony of German unification is that the "hard," asset-based issues that were anticipated to be major roadblocks -- monetary union, for instance, or the dilapidated infrastructure, or privatization of some 13,000 state-owned businesses -- have been, a decade later, largely resolved (though the public debt incurred in resolving them remains burdensome). Even issues like the once dreadful condition of the environment didn't turn out to be as intractable as early assessments indicated.
But as with many a corporate merger I covered while at The Wall Street Journal, the "soft" cultural issues -- stuff like getting people to think and act with a common purpose and will, which in the final analysis is the glue of nationhood -- won't be resolved anytime soon.
"There is no real exchange in Germany between East and West," says Heinrich Bonnenberg, a member of the University of Pittsburgh Board of Trustees and a Berlin resident. "They exist as separate societies."
I met with Bonnenberg during a recent visit of his to Pittsburgh. A former director of the Treuhandanstalt, the influential organization that privatized all East German assets, he now heads a successor German state agency charged with remediating the environment in the east.
Bonnenberg says much of the environmental damage has been repaired and that the chief problems that remain are recultivation of former strip mines and the demolition and restoration (to a green-meadow state) of six nuclear power sites, which should be mostly done by 2002. Safeguarding radiation, however, is a relatively simple matter compared to the task of trying to get citizens of the two Germanys to relate to one another.
He discovered as much two years ago when he hosted a reunion of former colleagues from a university in West Germany. Bonnenberg invited those who had taught with him 25 years earlier and their spouses, about 60 people in all, to the town of Halle, in the east. About three-quarters of this well-read, elite group had never set foot in the east, much to his astonishment.
The incident reminded Bonnenberg of a phrase common to both societies -- Stunde Null, or Zero Hour, the phrase for the situation at the end of World War II.
It was Stunde Null again when the wall came down. Perhaps there will be a third Zero Hour when Germany someday emerges as a truly unified state.
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