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30 years fall of the Berlin Wall: The mistake is in our memory

2019-11-03T14:52:52.819Z


For 30 years, we have been hoping for everything that does not fit in with the picture of the happily united country: nostalgia and Nazi marches, the upswing of left-wing and right-wing populists. But we turn in a circle.



We are since '89

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"A society is what it remembers."
(Albert Wendt)

My memory of the change is daily blue: I sit with my parents in front of the TV and watch the news. Shots of people flattening holes in a wall flicker across the screen. I am still too young to understand the meaning of these pictures, but I understand the expression on the faces of my parents.

I was born in 1981 in West Germany, near the then capital of Bonn. In 1989, our world got a long forgotten compass heading there overnight. North, south and west the east. At the age of 19, I set off there, after graduating from high school first to Dresden and then on for a year to civil service in St Petersburg.

That would not have been possible without the fall of the Iron Curtain.

For me, the turnaround has been a blessing and an asset. That it was different for many people, I first had to learn. That was difficult for everyone involved because I am a product of the West German education system of the 1990s. It has let me into the world with this rather German mixture of demonstrative cosmopolitanism and narrow-minded know-it-alls.

Our motto was: will grow out already!

Social studies lessons have given me the certainty of living in the best of all worlds: in 1989/1990, the market economy, democracy and the Basic Law have finally proved to be superior and without alternative. Recent German history, as I learned it at school, was therefore evolution, a logical development to the optimum. This has also shaped my view of the upheaval in the former GDR and in the Eastern bloc as a whole.

What I did not want to fit into this pattern, I hoped away as routinely as all the others: the reports of disturbingly high unemployment in the East, extreme right-wing riots in the 1990s, nostalgia with PDS and Spreewald cucumbers, the debate on no-go areas before the 2006 World Cup If it grows out, we thought. Maybe just take a little longer.

Today I look around, and have the impression that meanwhile irritated irritation has taken the place of the Wegoff. Since nothing has grown.

Nearly three decades of German unity - but the East still does not choose as I and my social studies teacher wish. What is proposed as alleged solutions, most acknowledge in the West with a shake of the head: It is called for "Ossi quotas", pension equalization, again billions for infrastructure. Yes, what else do they want?

Is there any reason why the inner-German debate is so circling? That the mutual reproaches of East and West are not evolutionarily less - but even stronger again? In other words, some societies learn from their mistakes. Why do not we do it?

The historian Marcus Böick believes that the cause has something to do with the rhyme we make of the story (see his interview here). This rhyme is reminiscent of my old social studies and is something like this: With the turn of the post-war history ended and it began the time of unified Germany in unifying Europe. Happy End, East and West ride together in the sunset.

Our view of history keeps us going against each other

This is the reading of the story, which is listed in the public files for October 3 each year. Hence, this strangely sterile glow of the annual celebrations of the "Day of German Unity", with which so few people can even do anything.

The disturbed feeling stems from the fact that the frame no longer fits, in which we try to squeeze the story. He probably never did. Instead of bringing land and people closer to each other, this narrative creates a field of tension that even tends to raise them even further.

In the old happy ending logic, there is no prominent place for negative consequences of the turnaround. We therefore filed them routinely, either as consequences of the GDR dictatorship ("The East is your own fault") or as necessary adjustments on the way to a thriving landscape and prosperity ("The East is ungrateful").

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However, two million jobs destroyed between 1990 and 1992, and the pacification of the population in the East to the level of 1905, are not marginal for millions of people in the East. These developments are among the most formative experiences in millions of German biographies. Anyone who has experienced this tells their children and grandchildren. These memories live on in the families. Oddly enough, they have not found a place in the country's official collective memory.

This is not a problem that would be limited to Germany. The old West as a whole is struggling to find a way to deal with the transformation experiences in the former Eastern bloc, the pains of upheaval.

That is one reason why relations in the East often pop up, like in Russia: for many people there, the turnaround and its aftermath are not only associated with good memories, but also with some existential needs that followed them on the heels.

The question is, why do Western politics and the media so often try to talk away some of their identity in the East? Perhaps behind it lies the concern, not only to question a picture of history, but also democracy and the market economy itself.

At the same time, they are surprised that there is dissatisfaction in parts of the East, even though the economic situation - measured in income - has improved rapidly. But the feeling of being set back has many dimensions. And the contents of the purse are just one among many.

Transfiguration has become part of our DNA

This is forgotten and shortened, for example, in the discussion about an "Ossi quota": it is less about promoting East Germans than a backward minority. It concerns the indication that the experiences and positions of the East in the structure Federal Republic have until today a very weak representation.

This runs like a red thread through German history since reunification. I grew up firmly convinced that the people in the East had brought down the wall and wanted to join the system of the old Federal Republic.

The first part is true and important, and every year is rightly remembered. But it has been forgotten that the second part is historical lapsing. It comes from the government of then-Chancellor Helmut Kohl, but it's curious why this cabbage actually made it into the DNA of the Berlin Republic. Although he was above all the attempt of the then government to present controversial decisions as without alternative.

That's why the path to unity seems as clear and inevitable today as it never was in 1990. If you look in the archives, you come across it quickly: At that time - the wall was already gone - there was an Infas survey, which also reported the SPIEGEL. 42 percent of the then GDR citizens wanted their own constitution at that time, 38 percent a new, all-German constitution, and just nine percent wanted to take over the Basic Law.

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Photographer Daniel Biskup: The invisible East-West border

It was bitterly disputed whether reunification should be carried out by virtue of Article 23 of the Basic Law ( accession without a new constitution ) or Article 146 ( drafting of a new constitution ). Kohl called Article 23 "the royal road", but for Willy Brandt it was the "Holzweg".

This is not to say that the Basic Law is bad, on the contrary. But the vague sense of helplessness and inefficiency that is spreading in the East has real roots. Yes, the people in East Germany have brought the wall to collapse. But shortly thereafter, Bonn took over the direction and enforced what it thought was right.

Maybe that's it: right, no alternative. But a discussion about it hardly takes place on the anniversaries of unity, neither in politics nor in the media. Germany treats its story like a bronze sculpture: Once a year it is polished to a high gloss - and quickly closed off, someone could notice the many scratches.

However, united Germany in 2019 is not just glamor. The scratches are part of us. We know for a long time that 1989/1990 was not an "end of history", but the starting point of a new, complicated and very contradictory time.

Admitting that does not really cost much - just a bit of overcoming.

Source: spiegel

All news articles on 2019-11-03

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