The fall of the Wall in 1989 was a joyous occasion for me. I lived in West Berlin in 1981-2 and understood the brutality, ugliness and the simple lack of convenience that the Wall brought to the great city of Berlin. The Wall was an interesting geo-political artifact of the Cold War but it was also very offensive, as walls that imprison populations tend to be.
I visited East Berlin several times when I was living in West Berlin. East Berlin was a strange but fascinating place. At that time I never thought the Wall would fall. I thought that this was just how Berlin was always going to be: a divided city with a curious no-man’s land snaking right through its centre.
Checkpoint Charlie, which was the main crossing into the East, was a wonderfully arcane place of switch-back paths, barbed wire, clanking doors and stern-faced East German border guards. It was like a movie set for all the bad Cold War movies you had ever seen. Checkpoint Charlie was a bit frightening, but it was also so comically repressive it almost fell into self-parody. You almost expected the Monty Python gang to burst in at any moment to perform the Spanish Inquisition sketch.
Once you got into East Berlin, there was an eerie quiet and sense of paranoia. Few people were out on the streets. The goods in the shops were minimal–except that slightly stale loaves of heavy dark bread seemed to be in abundance. The locals were drably dressed and looked at Westerners with suspicion.
In West Berlin the scene was completely different. It was spread out, almost in a North American style, and had surprisingly large amounts of green space (it still does). It had some comfortable leafy suburbs such as Tegel and Dahlem. The ritzy neighbourhood of Charlottenburg formed its cultural centre. But West Berlin as a city seemed a bit unfocused, in spite of its dominant urban axes such as the Ku’damm and Bismarkstrasse. That was because the true jewels of the city lay east of the Brandenburg Gate in East Berlin. East Berlin held the historical, central core of Berlin and was where most of the grand, old buildings were situated. This is something I had little knowledge of prior to my first visit there.
In the central district of East Berlin called Mitte there were neoclassical treasures such as the Museum Island and Schinkel’s Altes Museum. You ran into these monuments after about a ten minute walk from Checkpoint Charlie. For a naive Canadian the existence of so many massive, historical buildings was very surprising and a bit humbling. But beyond the architectural and urban attractions of the east, East Berlin didn’t mean that much to me beyond being a Cold War theme park. I never felt that atomic annihilation between East and West was imminent. I never thought that the Communists were a serious threat to Western Europe. I believed that the next zone of world conflict would be far from the pleasant plains of central Europe.
But like most other people, I was astounded when the Wall fell.
Right-wing politicians like Reagan, Thatcher and Bush pretended to play some pivotal role in the whole process of the Fall of the Berlin Wall. But I think they just happened to be in power at the time when Communism was falling all on its own. Communist regimes were notorious for their internal weaknesses such as low productivity, low worker morale, environmental degradation, the high cost of feeding an expensive military/police state, and their isolation from natural markets and investment capital in the West. In my opinion, Communism fell because it was spectacularly unsuited for generating wealth and in creating acceptable standards of living for ordinary people, not because of anything ideologically-driven politicians from the West may have said or done.
In its time though, the Berlin Wall did create much misery. Many who tried to escape over the Wall were shot in the back. The Wall was there to keep East Germans in, not to protect them from outsiders. Life in East Germany was oppressive for all except those with the greyest of personalities. Even more surprising was the fact that East Germany was the most advanced and prosperous of the Communist countries. If life in East Berlin was bad, just imagine how miserable life in Minsk or Wroclaw must have been.
Almost everyone was overjoyed when the Wall fell in 1989. However, as many commentators have noted, even though the disappearance of the Wall itself was undoubtedly a good thing, the reunification of Germany and the social impact of this reunification has not been all good for all concerned. We could see this foreshadowing during the time we spent in the newly-unified Berlin in 1991: not all was right about reunification, or how it had played out in Berlin.
When the Berlin Wall fell, my wife and I were living in Toronto. About a year later we decided to move to Berlin, which we did in the Spring of 1991. We stayed about six months and then moved back to Canada. We lived in the former East Berlin in an apartment at Erbeskopfweg 11, in the Berlin suburb of Nordend, just north of Pankow. It was a charming place in its own way. Our neighbours there had not seen too many Canadians so we were a bit of a novelty.
The fall of the Wall meant that one political system had been taken over completely by another. It was not two systems getting together and working out what would be acceptable to both sides. It was one side having all the cards with the other side having none. A sense of triumphalism emanated from the West: the Communists had lost and the West had won. This sense infiltrated ordinary people, on both sides.
Triumphalism tends to be a negative emotion. When one country triumphs over the other, the sensibilities of the losing side tend to be given short shrift. The Easterners had suffered since WWII in an unusually repressive police state. Now–even though they could buy as many bananas as they wanted–they had to suffer some more, under their sometimes boorish western neighbour.
We were shocked that the dominant emotion of West Berliners seemed not to be sympathy or compassion for those in the East for having the misfortune of living in a police state for the last 45 years, but rather that of pity or disgust. Time under Communism was seen as wasted time regardless of what people had spent their time doing. How were these poor Ossis going to cope under the so-called rigours of capitalism? Their experience under Communism was considered less than worthless. The failure of the Communist state became the failure of its citizens, regardless of whether they had participated in the repressive regime or not. Victim or oppressor, East Germany had instantly became a country full of losers.
In the West the fall of the Berlin Wall is usually portrayed as the Easterners rejecting Communism and accepting Capitalism wholeheartedly. Yet, at the time Easterners had little knowledge of the West and the West little real knowledge of the East. East and West Germany had grown apart in the intervening years and had developed strikingly distinct civic cultures.
Curiously, after the Wall, both sides took it as an article of faith that the model for both sides would be the Western model. This I believe was a mistake. A much happier outcome for both sides would have worked from the premise that despite the horrors of Communism, it was a bit insulting to assume that your marriage partner-to-be had lived a complete lie for the last half-century of her existence. The idea that the West had ‘won’ and that the East’s traditions were of no value lead to some humiliating and corrosive social policies. A stable and equitable union of different peoples should not have the flavour of a shot-gun wedding.
What then could have made the transitions less painful for the East? For one, there should have been negotiations in which both sides had some say about the direction the future union would take. They didn’t seem to take nearly long enough in creating a mutually agreeable ‘pre-nup.’ What could have been a joyous reunification of a divided country to me seemed more like a semi-hostile takeover of one country by another with little concern about the feelings of the weaker side. For some reason, at the time it seemed like most East Germans were fine with that. I suspect this was because they were so demoralized by their experience under Communism that they naively believed that the West held all the answers.
In the end, perhaps they shouldn’t have even joined together into a single state so quickly. If the Czechs and the Slovaks can live reasonably happily in separate countries, why not the East and West Germans? Union and amalgamation sometimes creates as many problems as it solves.
When we lived in Berlin in 1991 a young Ossi shopkeeper in Prenzlauer Berg asked what we thought of the East. We both replied that the Easterners seemed nicer–much more unassuming and gentle, while many West Germans seemed a bit too loud and arrogant for our taste. I think many people would have felt the same way if ideology were taken out of the equation and the rights and aspirations of ordinary citizens were taken into account. Just a little respect for the lives and traditions of the East by the West would have gone a long way in making German reunification more palatable and less painful for ordinary people.
