With Wall Just a Memory, German Divisions Fade/The Legacy of 1989 Is Still Up for Debate

With Wall Just a Memory, German Divisions Fade
By NICHOLAS KULISH
Copyright by Reuters
Published: November 7, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/world/europe/08germany.html?th&emc=th


BERLIN — “The Quiz of the Germans,” a lighthearted entry amid a crush of serious examinations of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, pitted three West German celebrities seated behind the sloping hood of an old Volkswagen Beetle against counterparts from the East perched above the front of a clunky Trabant.

On a television stage emblazoned with an oversize map of unified Germany, the questions about the divided old days were as symmetrical as the antique cars. The topics — nude beachgoers in the East and sex education in the West, vacation destinations or the funny dialects on either side — struck a note of shared Germanness that endured even at the peak of the cold war.

The anniversary on Monday has prompted a powerful national conversation, not just about a moment two decades ago, but about Germany today. It is more united and less turbulent than many here or abroad expected and, given its 20th century history, than many thought it deserved to be. Especially among the young, there is the sense that the aspiration to transcend Germany’s dark history and simply become normal may finally be within reach.

The latest round of news media accounts on the tumultuous final hours of the wall have emphasized not some sense of historical inevitability driven by economics and geopolitics, but rather the capricious human side of the event. That is reflected in last week’s cover story in the magazine Der Spiegel, which meticulously reconstructed, hour by hour, the events of the day that built up to the wall’s unexpected opening, titled “The Error That Led to Unity.”

Bureaucratic confusion over new travel regulations led crowds of East Berliners to gather at border checkpoints on Nov. 9, 1989, prompting guards to open the gates, bringing a sudden end to the division of the city with a night of spontaneous celebration and reunion.

In recent weeks polls have been released on the differences, and as often as not the similarities, between the former East and the former West in matters of love and real estate, table manners and car ownership. In ways both typically serious and atypically jocular, Germans seem to be groping for an understanding of what happened and what, along the way, they have become.

Beneath the trivial differences lies a country more unified than anyone expected. That is not to say that there are not still some hard feelings, and particularly among those from the East, known officially as the German Democratic Republic. Despite great strides and an estimated $2 trillion in assistance since 1989, many there have not quite caught up to the West materially and saw their everyday way of life disappear along with the wall.

“The things from the G.D.R. are no longer around, and have to be hauled out of museum cabinets, whereas in the West they don’t have to remember because those things are still there,” said Jana Hensel, a writer who grew up in the eastern city of Leipzig, when asked about the quiz show. “For East Germans it is still painful to have to remember the things they have lost,” she said.

But the fading divisions between the sides are most apparent among those with no memories of the wall or the G.D.R., the generation born after 1989.

“For people from our generation, it’s just a part of German history,” said Sebastian Melchior, 19, a student at the Alexander von Humboldt High School here in the district of Köpenick in the former East. “For us this division doesn’t really exist anymore.”

“My parents ask if people are Wessis or Ossis,” he said, using the colloquial and slightly derogatory terms for the two groups, “but I just can’t identify with that at all.”

In this way he is far from alone in his postwall generation. A representative survey of more than 1,300 people published by the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag found that just 11 percent among those between the ages of 14 and 19 defined themselves as East German or West German, compared with 36 percent of Germans between the ages of 40 and 49.

Wolfgang von Schwedler, the principal and a graduate of the Humboldt school, vividly remembered being taken to a police station for questioning because he was the editor of a student newspaper when he attended in the 1970s. He also recalled how half a dozen fellow teachers were dismissed after reunification for having worked with the East German secret police, known as the Stasi.

But he said his students found the annual ritual of dissecting the events surrounding the country’s reunification to be boring. “It’s like when we would say, ‘Oh no, Grandpa’s telling stories about the war again,’ ” Mr. Schwedler said.

After a century of war, of guard towers and barbed wire, of tanks and gas chambers, “boring” sounds tantalizingly close to that much desired national normality.

The reality of Germany today makes it difficult to remember the immediate concerns in Europe after the wall fell. Leaders like President François Mitterrand of France and, in particular, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain, worried aloud that a reunified Germany was likely to drift away from the NATO alliance and the structures of the European Union and at worst might return to the path of extreme nationalism.

“The fear was that this thing in the center of Europe, if it were allowed to become unified, was going to be a cancer once again and lead to Act III of the great European tragedy,” said Robert E. Hunter, a senior adviser at the RAND Corporation and an ambassador to NATO under President Bill Clinton.

Instead, Mr. Hunter said, “the German problem, which emerged with the unifying of Germany beginning in the 1860s, is one of the few problems in modern history that has been solved.”

If anything, Germany is more firmly anchored to those Western institutions than ever, after pressing allies to bring its eastern neighbors and former enemies like Poland and the Czech Republic into those same institutions that were built after World War II to bind West Germany with France and the rest of Western Europe.

Between opposing the Iraq war and contributing to the defense and reconstruction of Afghanistan, and trumpeting its strict recycling programs and booming solar-power industry, Germany is trying to shed the ghosts of its past and may be succeeding.

“I’ve never been ashamed to come from Germany,” said Björn Viergutz, 18, who also attends the Humboldt school. “One can be proud. When you compare to 20 years ago, an immense amount has happened. The fact that there are differences between East and West is really normal. What surprises me is that they’re so minor, actually.”

Most of the students in the classroom at the Humboldt school were entirely unaware, until a reporter’s question, that one of their classmates, Berit Eisele, 18, commuted each day from the former Western district of Tempelhof, where American and British planes flew supplies into West Berlin to break the Soviet embargo, in what was known as the Berlin Airlift.

Ms. Eisele, in turn, found it no more unusual that she was going to high school in Köpenick than that she did her synchronized ice-skating training in the city’s Hohenschönhausen neighborhood, best known as the site of the infamous Stasi prison. As she put it, “It’s just not an issue anymore.”






The Legacy of 1989 Is Still Up for Debate
By STEVEN ERLANGER
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: November 8, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/world/europe/09berlin.html?ref=global-home


PARIS — The historical legacy of 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell and the cold war thawed, is as political as the upheavals of that decisive year.

The events of 1989 spurred a striking transformation of Europe, which is now whole and free, and a reunified Germany, milestones that are being observed with celebrations all over the continent, including a French-German extravaganza Monday evening on the Place de la Concorde.

But 1989 also created new divisions and fierce nationalisms that hobble the European Union today, between East and West, France and Germany, Europe and Russia.

Some of the intensity of those divisions is evident in the tug of war, in both Europe and the United States, over the achievements of 1989 — whether they owe more to the resolute anti-Communism of Ronald Reagan or its inverse, the white-glove embrace of the East by many in Western Europe.

And while many in the West saw the wheel of history spinning inevitably, causing the rise of democracy and banishing serious rivals to American power, China forestalled its own revolution in 1989 and catapulted itself to prominence through an authoritarian capitalism that the leaders of Russia are now studying.

“The Chinese ended up with a Leninist capitalism, which none of us imagined in 1989, and which is now the main ideological competitor to Western liberal democracy,” said Timothy Garton Ash, a chronicler of 1989 in his book “The Magic Lantern.”

It is a tribute to 1989, not unlike the French Revolution 200 years before it, that its meaning is hotly contested. Different groups in different countries see the anniversary differently, usually from their own ideological points of view.

In general, said James M. Goldgeier of George Washington University, a historian of the period, “the big question out there for 20 years is who gets the credit.”

For many in the United States, he said, most of the credit now goes to President Ronald Reagan and his aggressive military spending and antagonism toward Communism. That view has largely eclipsed another American perspective, which was that globalization and democratization were so powerful that a Mikhail Gorbachev was inevitable, and that the cold war ended through “soft power” — propaganda, diplomacy and the Helsinki accords.

“As the partisan divide over Reagan has dissipated, I think over time most Americans, if they think back at all, say it was Reagan who said, ‘Tear down this wall,’ and down it came,” Professor Goldgeier said.

Robert Kagan, a historian with the Carnegie Endowment in Washington and an editor of The Weekly Standard, said conservatives won the debate. “The standard narrative is Reagan,” he said.

This is not the case in Europe, Mr. Kagan said. “If 90 percent of Americans say it was the U.S. being firm, 99 percent of Europeans think it was they being soft — that the wall fell through Ostpolitik and West German TV.”

For many Americans of both political parties, 1989 seemed a wonderful example of the embrace of universal values that happened to be theirs, and some believed it was only a matter of time before all dictatorships crumbled before the same forces of strength, openness, economic liberalism and people power.

Democrats argue that President George W. Bush learned the wrong lesson from 1989, about the utility of force, and Republicans argue that President Bill Clinton and President Obama learned the wrong lesson — that “engagement” with totalitarian power, whether in China or Iran, will weaken or destroy it.

For all the disagreements, however, said Ronald D. Asmus, a deputy assistant secretary of state for Europe in the Clinton administration and Brussels director of the German Marshall Fund, what happened was simply amazing.

“If someone asked me in ’89 if we would have all these countries in NATO and the European Union, I would have been incredulous,” Mr. Asmus said. “We’ve lost sight of an incredible historical achievement — the heart of Central and Eastern Europe is at peace. All problems are not fully solved, but they are tempered, controlled and contained, and we have a better chance of solving them.”

Even the brief war last year between Georgia and Russia would have been very different without NATO, Mr. Asmus argued. “These are not existential issues anymore,” he said. “They’re not presidential problems, but assistant secretary of state problems.”

Russia remains a challenge for both the United States and Europe, but a much safer one, argues Sergei Karaganov, who leads the Council for Foreign and Defense Policy in Moscow and was an adviser to the Russian presidents Boris N. Yeltsin and Vladimir V. Putin.

In Russia, Mr. Gorbachev, the last Soviet president, is widely despised for indecisiveness and for permitting the collapse of the empire, an event that Mr. Putin called the greatest geostrategic catastrophe of the last century.

Not all Russians agree, but many do argue that the end of the Warsaw Pact should have led to the disbanding of NATO, or at least a decision not to expand the alliance to include states that were once part of the Soviet Union.

“The U.S. regarded itself as the victor in the cold war, but Russia does not regard itself as the loser,” Mr. Karaganov said. “At the very least we expected an honorable peace. Like Britain, we have never been defeated, and we remain ready to fight.”

“Hindsight is seductive, but there were a number of alternative futures from 1989,” said Mary Elise Sarotte, who has just published “1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe.” “The West chose a future that perpetuated a divided Europe and left Russia on the periphery.”

One result of 1989 was the end of a bipolar world, but after a brief 20-year reign the period of American unipolarity is also ending, many Europeans say.

For Hubert Védrine, a former French foreign minister who worked then for President François Mitterrand, 1989 led to a Western arrogance that is only slowly deflating with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and against Islamic radicalism.

“People mix the fall of the wall with the fall of Jericho in the Bible, as in, ‘We’ve won; history is over,’ etc.,” he said. “But to me it’s the beginning, it’s the prologue of an opera with a cymbal crash, the prologue of 15 to 20 years of Western arrogance.”

A scramble for power and influence among several nations and blocs of nations — Europe, China, Russia, India, Brazil and the United States — now seems likely. Dominique Moïsi of the French Institute for International Relations said, “America is in relative decline, but has not yet accepted the changes, speaking of multilateralism but not accepting the consequences.” In this transitional world, he said, “nothing can be done without America, but nothing can be done by America alone.”

But Americans are not likely to agree with this interpretation. Robert D. Blackwill, a longtime diplomat and adviser to Presidents George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, argues for the necessity of American leadership. “I see no evidence that America is in decline,” he said.

In Central Europe itself, there are serious divisions over 1989, symbolized by the long and bitter rivalry in the Czech Republic between Vaclav Havel and Vaclav Klaus, between a softer collective polity, anchored by Europe, and a fierce individualist liberalism reluctant to give up sovereignty to the European Union that was so recently regained from the Soviet collapse.

In the eyes of many in the old West, the events of 1989 enlarged but also diluted the European Union. The union has struggled ever since over how to deepen and solidify the alliance. “There is a kind of melancholia toward Europe for part of the French, because in this whole, one has to negotiate with everyone,” Mr. Védrine said.

For Mr. Garton Ash, the divide remains between Western and Eastern Europe. “We hoped as Europeans that 1989 would be a second founding moment for the European project, and that this would become a pan-European memory and a shared cause for celebration,” he said. “But that hasn’t happened. ‘Eastern Europe’ still exists in the collective memory and we haven’t purged it.”

Many people in the East, of course, suffered from 1989 and the sudden, even brutal switch to capitalism. “They feel the transition was very tough on them and feel cheated and even betrayed, and are open to conspiracy theories about shady deals done at the round tables,” Mr. Garton Ash said.

“It’s not like the way in Britain we remember V-E Day,” when Nazi Germany surrendered, he said. “It’s really quite divided.”