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Thinking back on East and West Berlin

In the end, it was easy to tear down that wall. The physical one, anyway.

By JOSEF JOFFE

Last update: November 5, 2009 - 10:19 AM

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BERLIN - Imagine waking up one fine Sunday morning to learn that they are laying down barbed wire in your city. Over the next three years, the steel wire is replaced by a wall of concrete 12 feet high. Now you are trapped. Grim guards at checkpoints go through your papers and your car before you may proceed on special transit roads.

This is what happened in Berlin, starting on Aug. 13, 1961, and lasting until Nov. 9, 1989. I was there both times: when the Berlin Wall went up and when it came down. Did I know that history was being made? No, certainly not as the teenager I was back in 1961. But Karl Marx was right when he said that history plays out first as tragedy, then as farce.

The tragedy came in two parts. Part One looked like the runup to World War III, as battle-ready American M-48 and Soviet T-55 tanks took up positions on either side of the Brandenburg Gate. But given the deadliest rule of the Cold War -- that whoever shoots first dies second -- the worst was averted.

Part Two was a 28-year prison term for the East Germans. Until 1961, some 3 million of them had absconded just by taking the subway from East to West Berlin, where they were flown elsewhere in West Germany. No more. The wall saved the so-called German Democratic Republic from death by a thousand cuts.

The wall divided the city, the country, the continent and the world. A million soldiers on either side -- NATO in the West, Warsaw Pact in the East -- plus thousands of nuclear weapons squelched all temptation to change this map by force. There was no end in sight, for how could the Soviet Union ever give up the very bastion of its empire in the West?

But ultimately, it did -- and this is when farce followed tragedy. Mikhail Gorbachev, the new kid on the Bloc, merely wanted to reform the empire, not relinquish it. But once his grip loosened, the empire evaporated in the "velvet revolutions" of 1989.

In East Berlin, it was pure slapstick. Guenter Schabowski, the ruling party's propagandist, showed up at a news conference on Nov. 9 to announce eased travel policies. Totally unprepared, he was asked when the new rules were to go into effect. Flustered, he replied, "As far as I know ... immediately, right away."

That was the end of the German Democratic Republic. Thousands of East Berliners soon thronged the wall, milling all night. Happily soused, they sang soccer ditties, not "Deutschland uber alles." The next day, East Berliners foraged farther into West Berlin, just to test whether they could get back in again -- or to buy bananas.

History was being made, all right, yet even then I could not believe that I was witnessing the collapse of a state, let alone of the Soviet empire, which would abolish itself on Christmas Day 1991. This was the first time that revolutions were "velvet," with not a drop of blood shed.

Does this happy beginning have a happy end? Not yet. It takes more time to rebuild a nation than to raze a wall.

In a poll this year, 50 percent of easterners agreed with the statement that "East Germany had more good sides than bad sides." Eight percent signed off on the statement: "People there were happier and better off than today in reunified Germany."

Just as some easterners long for their lost paradise, many westerners think they would have been better off without reunification.

In the federal elections on Sept. 27, the big winner was Die Linke, the Left Party, which has grown out of the former Communist ruling party of the GDR. In western Germany, the Left Party got 8 percent; in eastern Germany, 26 percent, more than the Social Democratic Party of former chancellors Willy Brandt, Helmut Schmidt and Gerhard Schroeder.

So eastern Germany now has its own party (a bit like the historical American South, which voted Democratic for 100 years after the Civil War). Will that redivide the country along old lines and hinder its economic progress?

No. But it takes time to move through the desert, as the children of Israel learned; memories of Egypt must die out first.

When we celebrate this anniversary in another 20 years, few will remember what life was like in Walltown, Germany. On the eastern side, they will have forgotten the crumbling buildings, the daily shortages (bananas only at Christmas) and the fear instilled by wall-to-wall surveillance. On the western side, they will have forgotten that East Berlin once was farther away than Beijing. It will all be history.

Josef Joffe, editor of the German weekly Die Zeit, is a senior fellow of the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies and an Abramowitz Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He wrote this article for the Washington Post.

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