The unsung heroes of German reunification

By: Hatto Fischer, Athens

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Some comments to the news bulletin of Deutsche Welle or about an invisible ladder left standing to look over to the other side of the wall being now remembered symbolically by those who tried to cross no man's land or the death strip and never made it to the other side.

Germany, 30.09.2005

New Berlin Wall Memorial Inaugurated

A new memorial to the victims of the Berlin Wall was inaugurated on the grounds of Germany's lower house of parliament, Berlin's Bundestag, on Thursday. The monument is made up of segments of the original wall, erected along the former borderline which separated communist east from capitalist west Berlin between 1961 and 1989. Berlin artist Ben Wargin has painted each segment with a series of super-imposed numbers, representing a year and the number of people killed trying to cross the border from the east. Among those gathered for the unveiling of the monument at Marie-Elisabeth-Lüders House, the parliamentary library, was the Bundestag's outgoing speaker Wolfgang Thierse. Parts of the Berlin Wall can still be found in the German capital which has seen several monuments, notably at Bernauer Street, spring up since the wall was demolished in 1989 as the communist regime of East Germany was toppled.

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/briefs/0,1574,1726638,00.html?maca=en-bulletin-433-

 

The Berlin Wall celebrated symbolically in such a way is the best way to demonstrate a wrong way to go about reconstructing a painful history. Not that it is wrong to remember symbolically the number of people killed each year when trying to cross no man's land or the death strip between the Eastern and Western part of the wall. Still, such symbolic gestures lead only to further misunderstandings about a history full of pain and misunderstandings due to wrong dividing lines separating even families like the Berlin Wall running through homes leaving part of the family members stranded on one side while the others could not scramble fast enough to the West due to the missing ladder or fear of height to risk the jump. Problematic is always the symbolic elevation of death into the historical chronics. In the case of the Berlin Wall, it does no justice to the number of people whose careers and biographies have been ruined by a division running much deeper through both East and West German societies.

There is the story of the Stasi but much more gruesome was and is the spying on common people by not the secret police but by neighbours and friends. Even parents would denounce their children if they applied for a visa to leave for the West. They did out of fear to loose their careers sponsored as always by either the Communist party in the East or by party interests infiltrated and linked to powerful business interests in the West. There are many biographies written after 1945 that show how Adenauer used integration into the West by joining Nato to get a free hand on how he ousted in newspapers and radio stations not only Communists or those known to identify themselves with the Communist system in the East, but also critical intellectuals who questioned both Eastern and Western ideological premises. Instead those who survived where Nazi judges like Filbinger. While much is said about how people in East Germany suffered under the Communist regime, hardly anything is recognized, retrospectively, as to what happened in the West at the same time. Those stories still to be told imply suspicion and lack of trust marked many social and professional relationships, the so-called 'Berufsverbote' again an example of a distorted view as to what was going on in reality.

Then, it was not only people from former East Germany who made many painful experiences once they could read their Stasi files, but also those living in the West. Over and again they discovered that besides this and that V-man, a friend, the wife, the cousin and who else had given to protocol something about how they had shaped their lives. Willy Brandt toppled by having as a close advisor someone working for the East German government. There are many more stories to be told who was working in the West but whose decisions to go against certain people were based on loyalty to quite different parties. Right now a sensation is being made out of Ratzinger, the new Pope, having been under surveillance as well by the Stasi. During that time with East and West Germany rubbing shoulders under the control of the Four Powers, a system of accompli extended itself through both parts of Germany. As the early Greens in the Bundestag had to discover even Dirk Schneider, their speaker for the German question, turned out to have worked for the East German government. In retrospect it explains why many blockages felt to be unnecessary at that time and preventing really the unfolding of creative personalities, that there was aside from the open a hidden agenda. The relationship to the East and the West was marked in the Cold War period as the drawing of a hard and tough border not only in physical terms, but in ideological categories going well beyond the belief in human reality. The political scientist Richard Loewenthal shrugged his shoulders even after Europe had experienced that terrible squashing of the Prague spring when troops and tanks of the Warszawa Pact entered that city of Kafka to end an experiment attempting to give Socialism a human face. He said to a group of students inquiring into the Problems of Communism under the guidance of Prof. Teresa Harmstone at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada that unfortunately world peace depended upon 'stable borders'. It meant recognizing each side had its sphere of influence. This was said in the light of the Cuba crisis which brought the world nearly to a brink of a nuclear war with J.F. Kennedy involved in a failed invasion of Cuba and which has become known as the 'Bay of Pigs' disaster for the American forces. While Prof. Harmstone coming from Poland and who had studied under Fainsod at Harvard University could say Communism has not solved one major question, namely the question of different nationalities, there were countless other fates in the East and West which fell into disgrace even over a simple joke (Milocz) or worse they ended up being executed by Stalin. Arthur Koestler's 'Darkness at Noon' or Manes Sperber 'A tear in the Ocean' not merely predicted but named these hideous political developments leading straight to the Gulag with Solshenitzyn exposing it with his clear and literal tone.

At the same time, it was not easy in the West for a thinking person to be critical of Capitalism without thereby endorsing automatically East Germany as the better half of Germany. Repeatedly it was strange to hear, for example, Greek Left Wing politicians visiting East Berlin but refusing in West Berlin to see the Berlin Wall as being not the protection against Fascism (the claim of the East German regime) but as a simple denial that people could travel freely and beyond that express themselves. Many in the West found it difficult to get out of a certain political blindness and instead articulate a position which was free from ideological entanglements with either Positivism in the West or Marxism in the East. Thinkers like Ernst Bloch who had gone originally to East Germany but then left with the help of Gadamer or Th.W. Adorno's attempted to work out a version of Western Marxism.

Still, at university debates about Socialism differed in the theoretical sense of wishing to work together with every free thinker from those confirming only to their own ideological prejudices or inabilities to appreciate what was at stake. In between all of this was, for example, the Sartre reception in East Germany, something Vincent von Wroblewsky could speak about, and how different the reactions in East and West to Sartre's development from exiting the Communist Party in France after the bloody repression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and his trip to Stammheim to visit the Baader Meinhof group shortly before they burned in their cells. Such political action was always under suspicion in the West as being not of a revolutionary character for the sake of freedom but of such violent nature that its consequences could only be terrorism. It became an obsession of the West to demand of everyone renouncement of 'violence' as if coping the Catholic Church and demanding a collective confession.

The GREENS certainly earned their way into power by giving in to the system's demand to be non-violent at all costs when attempting to become a political party recognized by the system. The imperfections of that adaptation became clearly visible once German reunification had taken place, Genscher gave the lone recognition to Croatia and Joschka Fischer as first Green Foreign Minister followed by agreeing to the bombardment of Kosovo to intervene in the genocide warfare going on in former Yugoslavia. Official violence yes, in the tradition of the state having the monopoly of violence and thereby making the political transition into a frightening realization that violence was an institutionalized force ready to be used against people anytime, anywhere again. Compared to how the Soviet System could be dismantled in a non violent way, the military response to the Kosovo crisis reveals what is the real prize of reunificiation: the acquiescence to another type of violence. Indeed, state violence goes with the mask of being a humanitarian response to the problem of lawlessness and broken down governance. Only when it came to Iraq did Schroeder say 'no' in agreement with the majority of Germans in recognition of a deeper promise running through Germany after 1945, namely never to start war again.

Indeed, next to those killed while attempting to cross no man's land, others should be remembered, namely those who got caught in-between the polarized ideological lines of East and West without understanding that political fights were much more geared to hidden than open agendas. Typical for that approach was Richard von Weizsaecker who upon becoming the first Conservative mayor of Berlin West in 1981 had opted for making Berlin again 'German'. He had picked up the popular demand of Berliner citizens wishing to know when Kreuzberg would belong to them again. Seizing property in a public sense of ownership as being a part of the German state has a long history. The city of Gdansk – Danzig can be invoked to just mention one example as to what this means. The false pretence and in not knowing the history of the land means over and again false claims are made so that political tensions increase over trivial matters but with very serious consequences.

Definitely the opening of the Berlin Wall should mean recognition of the countless many travelling back and forth in an effort to keep open human relationships and this without subordinating themselves in a political opportune way to the ideologies prevailing in East and West during those years 1945 – 89. There are as many countless false heroes as there too many unsung heroes. Remembered should be those who did something as a human gesture by not allowing people to be separated but who did not want this to be misunderstood as a contribution towards German national unification. That process has been falsified ever since Bismarck used war to bring, for example, Baveria into the national fold. War as a principle of unification is always the father of a false entity. The process was falsified also when the Leipzig Monday demonstrations before the fall of the wall were suddenly co-opted by people coming from Baveria and putting themselves at the head of these demonstrations so that people no longer shouted "we are the people" and instead started to chant "we want national unification."

Reunification was made by a formal trick of converting a provisional constitution applicable only to West Germany into a legal framework which allowed the dissolution of the East German state. Once that state ceased to exist because West Germany had stopped all financial support, East Germany disintegrated into its 'Laender' who then joined as legal entities the Federal Republic of Germany. It meant in sequences that East Germans would vote first for the D-Mark and then in their own election in March for joining Western Germany. By the time the first federal elections came around and Kohl managed to secure his staying in power only thanks to the vote of Eastern Germany, it meant that 68 million West Germans had not been asked what they would like to do. They confronted a fait accompli. As Habermas and Guenter Grass pointed out at that time, preferable would have been the other legal option: both West and East Germany dissolve and through a new Constitutional act reconstitute themselves on the basis of mutual respect and agreement. Since this was not the case, the normal functioning of consensus politics in Germany ceased to exist. It explains all subsequent problems because consensus can only be used as basis for decisions if it means consulting openly all citizens on an equal basis.

There are other abnormalities. Cultural consensus can only be brought about in recognition of these deeper set backs many suffered out of unfair and unjustified reasons. They suffered above all due to an inner German national group who had survived the Nazi era unscathed in both East and West. That deeper consensus is what prevailed even before the wall came done. What it means to be Pro-American or Pro-Soviet Union while deeply nationalistic and therefore interested in a certain kind of survival within the system, that can be reflected on hand of what is going on in Iraq. Occupation of a land is occupation. It brings out the best and worst in people but it is certainly a set back because never really in the open. One of the most frightening thing about the international world was that they never knew really what was going on in Germany until it was too late and Hitler had all the power. And even then it took the Western Allies years to recognize fully the extent to which death camps existed and Jews and others were terminated according to a state plan and not just because some lunatics decided to take out their hatred against Jewish people. If all this is truer than what has been said so far explicitly about the two German halves before they came together again, it means the Extreme Right in both West and East Germany were much closer to one another as part of the continuity of the system than what outsiders believed all along to be the real difference between the two halves of Germany. Continuity means here an unbroken national self understanding which had been also the power base of Hitler until he abused it, but with no one able to offer from those circles any resistance, it made almost everyone into accomplice of the system. That broken spirit of people having not the courage and only the fear, so that they fail to stand up for human rights, is the terrible political heritage both German sides bestow upon future generations.

Uwe Johnson in his novel 'Days of the Year' describes very well this continuity of people who were frightened citizens in the Weimar Republic, staunch Hitler supporters in the period 1933 – 45, devoted Communists after the end of the war especially if there was still alive a strong left wing leaning touching upon Rosa Luxembourg, Spartakus and the Communist Party with roots as far back as the times of the Russian Revolution and Lenin travelling through Germany on his way to power, and after 1989 disorientated democrats unable to make a sense of history or of the present. Uwe Johnson's continuity is clearly recognition of the human being attempting to exist no matter what superstructure and ideological notion of state and of politics prevails. Unfortunately no memorial plague is given to such continuity in recognition of the difficulties that lie still ahead when it comes to reconstructing the German past in the light of not only its uncertain present but much more doubtful future. It does matter if only those killed physically are remembered and not those unsung heroes who never gave up their true dreams about humanity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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