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The Wall is gone, but the difficult task of reunification goes on
Sunday, November 07, 1999 By Joshua Benton, Block News Alliance
BERLIN -- It's the first question any tourist asks: Where was The Wall?
Driving through the Mitte district, taxi driver Ranier Quambusch points to a thin line of cobblestones snaking through a city street, two feet from the curb. "There it is," he says. "That was the big bad Berlin Wall."
When the wall came down in 1989, Berlin officials had to deal with suddenly open spaces that formed a gash through the middle of the city. In some places, buildings went up; in others, parks opened.
On this stretch, the wall's location was integrated into a street, with cobblestones added as a reminder of what once stood there. On either side are sleek new office buildings, and construction crews putting up more.
Tuesday is the 10th anniversary of the wall's fall. For nearly three decades, the wall was the most visible reminder of the planet's ideological divide, the metaphorical "Iron Curtain" made real.
When, in a rush of rejoicing, the wall came down, Germans both east and west looked forward to a dynamic future, a united powerhouse confidently pushing ahead in the world. And while Germany is the largest economy in Europe and has become a significant global player, it is still dealing with the pains of reunification.
For every newly vibrant stretch of the former East Berlin -- flush with coffeeshop urbanism and cosmopolitan apartment life -- there are still plenty of places that still have the dull, depressing gloom of old socialism. Growing groups of Neo-Nazi skinheads threaten immigrants and minorities in the east.
The East and West still often feel estranged from one another, and the optimism of 1989 has been replaced with the realities of assembling one nation from two. Like much of the rest of the former Warsaw Pact countries, the former East Germany has come to realize that the end of the Cold War didn't end all of its problems.
"There's still a lot of differences between west and east," said Curt Heissig, who left a rundown part of East Berlin who now makes drinks at an upscale bar in the west. "It's like people speak a different language sometimes. It will take a lot to adjust."
Berlin's division dates back to the aftermath of its lowest moment, the dictatorship of Hitler and the Nazis. When the Allies finally reached Berlin, the city was divided into four sectors, one each controlled by France, Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States. With the start of the Cold War, it became a perfect staging ground for the superpowers to antagonize one another.
First, in 1948, the Soviet Union cut off all land transportation links between West Berlin and East Germany, forcing an 11-month airlift of fuel and food from the west. Then, in 1961, came the most dramatic move: the wall.
The East German government called the wall the "Anti-Fascist Protection Barrier" and it did succeed in stopping the flow of East Germans to the west. In the days before the wall went up, 1,500 easterners were moving west every day.
The wall didn't just divide the city geographically. It also created a cultural and economic gap. Western powers saw West Berlin as an island of capitalism in the communist east and pumped millions into the city to make it a showcase for Western money. Storefronts hawked the finest luxury goods; the Kufurstendamm strip became the Berlin equivalent of New York's Fifth Avenue.
Meanwhile, the east stuck to boxy, dirty socialist architecture, with depressing street scenes and smoke-belching factories. The division between the two cities was clear from the air. Even the wall's two sides showed the gap: the east guarded by armed men in uniforms, the west covered in colorful graffiti and the work of political artists.
Even with the wall, East Germans still tried to escape to the west, often by scaling the wall or tunneling under it. In all, 239 East Germans were killed trying to flee. Eastern border guards were given a holiday on the Baltic for every escapee he shot.
But a lucky 5,043 managed to make it across the border.
The beginning of the end came in May, 1989, when Mikhail Gorbachev made a state visit to West Germany and informed Chancellor Helmut Kohl that the Soviet Union would no longer use force to prevent democratization in its satellite states in Eastern Europe.
"We could feel the change coming," said Oskar Wohlrabe, then an East German factory worker. "The direction was changing, and it couldn't be stopped."
That month, Hungary opened up its border to Austria. Thousands of East Germans realized that they could travel freely to Hungary, cross the border into Austria, and then reach free West Germany. Within six months, 220,000 East Germans had made the trip.
In a last-ditch attempt to save the government, East German leaders decided to allow free travel. On Nov. 9, shortly before 7 p.m., Gunther Schabowski, a member of the Politburo, announced that the border to West Berlin would be opening.
The reform was supposed to be phased in over some time, but Schabowski mistakenly said the border would open "immediately."
All across the city, people heard about the change and rushed to the wall.
In the next few hours, the wall became a relic of the past, and Berlin became the site of the world's biggest party.
"It was amazing," said Wohlrabe, who was at the wall that night.
"Everyone was excited, jumping around, hugging people they never knew. It was like the whole place was drunk, everybody was so happy."
Angelika Wohlrabe, then his girlfriend and now his wife, was with him. "We went around to all the shops and looked in the windows at all the west had," she said. "People thought that the wall would be there for their children and their grandchildren, and that it would always be there. It was magic. It was real magic."
Germany's national high lasted for about a year. After the wall came down, the nation's thoughts turned to reunification. On Oct. 3, 1990, East and West were officially united into one Germany.
Then came the hard part, the part Germany is still struggling with: making that unification more than just official.
"The Ossies [Easterners] don't understand how to run their land," said Quambusch, the Wessie (Westerner) taxi driver. "I feel a lot more in common with young Italians, Americans, or French than with these people in my own country. It will take generations for them to learn."
Berlin is the centerpiece of Germany's struggle for unity. Like the entire country's, the city's reconstruction has been a mix of unrelenting optimism and disheartening division.
When the wall came down, enormous swaths of prime property in the middle of Berlin were suddenly open to development. City planners set about hurriedly trying to determine how Berlin would be rebuilt.
The result has been the largest construction site in Europe, the second largest in the world only to Shanghai.
Certain districts of east Berlin, like the newly hip Prenzlauer Berg, have seen massive reconstruction efforts, with fancy new stores, luxury apartments, and office complexes. This summer, the German government moved its capital from sleepy Bonn to Berlin, creating a rush on property for the thousands of bureaucrats, officials, and lobbyists moving to the new capital.
But there are still some districts which look out of sorts, with socialist architecture, grimy buildings, and the depressing shadow of the east.
"It makes you sad to be in some of the places in the east," said Heissig, who recently moved from his home in grim, decaying Marzahn to the west. "Everything is so decayed."
East and West Berlin are still quite different, but not in the way they used to be. In the days of the wall, the capitalist playland of the west stopped at the wall; a few feet away was the sad grayness.
Now, the area just across from the wall is filled with the fresh cleanliness of newly constructed buildings, along with a few bustling shopping districts. The sad grayness is still there, but it's been pushed back a bit farther into the east.
Nov. 9 isn't just the anniversary of the Berlin Wall's demise. It's also the 61st anniversary of Kristallnacht, one of the first bursts of organized terror from Hitler's Nazis. On Nov. 9, 1938, rampaging mobs roamed the streets of Germany, attacking Jews, burning their homes, and destroying their synagogues. In the end, at least 96 Jews were killed, 7,500 Jewish businesses were destroyed, and 30,000 Jews were rounded up and sent to some of Hitler's first concentration camps.
And the significance of November 9 doesn't end there. It was on that day in 1918 when Kaiser Wilhelm II, his nation crushed in World War I, was forced to abdicate and the Weimar Republic was declared.
It was this event, many scholars believe, that caused the then young Hitler to dedicate his life to fighting the Jews, who he thought were responsible for Germany's defeat.
That is the difficulty inherent in celebrating Germany history: how to separate the good from the bad, how to evoke national pride without reviving the totalitarian past.
"In the United States, you had a Civil War that lasted four years, and people in your country are still working out north against south," said Alec Hauptvogel, a shopkeeper in the Kreuzberg district of western Berlin.
"You still have people with Confederate flags. In Berlin, we had the Cold War for a generation and a half, and it will be a very long time before people are actually united again."
"Rebuilding takes a long time," Quambusch said. "Before, the two sides were going in different directions because the governments made them. But now, the division is personal, and that makes it harder to put the country back together."
The Block News Alliance is a joint venture of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and The Blade of Toledo, Ohio, both Block newspapers.
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