Richard
09-22-2009, 07:01
Pretty good read.
Richard's $.02 :munchin
Germany's Election: Divided They Stand
Catherine Mayer, Time, 21 Sep 2009
Part 1 of 2
Graveyards are usually about endings. But in December 1961 Waltraud Niebank embarked on a new life in East Berlin's Pankow Cemetery. She might have been mistaken for a young widow as she scanned the headstones, although in truth, her husband was alive. He was living in West Berlin and Niebank had been separated from him for four months. Now she was looking for a concealed tunnel which would reunite them. Soon after their wedding, the cemetery had been divided by a cinder-block barrier, part of a fortification some 100 miles (160 km) in length which would eventually consist of a row of reinforced-concrete panels, a second fence and a "death strip" patrolled by snipers. Its architects called the structure an "antifascist protection wall" but Berliners knew it simply as die Mauer — the Wall. It was engineered not to protect, but to imprison.
As Niebank hovered by an open grave, a voice from below said "Jump," so she did, then scrabbled through the passage toward the husband who waited for her in the West. She still chokes with fear and anger at the memory of what she endured to leave the German Democratic Republic (G.D.R.). "It was so painful," she says. "I never wanted to look at the Wall again."
That simple sentiment — revulsion about the Wall and all it represented — proved powerful enough to reunify Niebank's fractured nation. After Nov. 9, 1989, when the G.D.R. abandoned border controls, the drive for unity provided an overarching purpose that for many years shaped national politics. Reunification was Germany's greatest achievement of the last century — greater, even, than its postwar reinvention as an economic powerhouse. But as Germany prepares for an election just a few weeks before the 20th anniversary of that magical night in 1989, the fall of the Wall has become not just a metaphor for what Europe's most populous nation can do — but also of what it has left undone, of opportunities missed.
In the run-up to the election, there has been no grand new mission, no ambitious vision of remaking Germany — or Europe, or the world — on view. As the continent's largest economy, Germany could have taken a lead to ensure that the European Union came together to weather the worst economic downturn in 70 years; it did not. Germany, to be sure, has contributed 4,000 troops to the NATO mission in Afghanistan. And yet there is deepening unease in Germany about the nation's involvement in the war there. That is partly because German troops are killing and being killed in greater numbers as violence rises. But there seems to be an underlying concern, too, as if such visible engagement in global geopolitics is somehow dangerously unsettling to the good life that Germans have come to expect.
The strongest impulse in German politics is to avoid big changes, to hold the country steady as she goes. The electoral system supports such an impulse by producing consensus-driven coalition governments. It's pretty safe to assume that whatever coalition emerges from the election, it will not include Die Linke, a hard-left party formed by Western socialists and remnants of the G.D.R. communists. But Die Linke's likely decent performance in the eastern states also speaks to promise unfulfilled. Ossis — Easterners — vote differently from Wessis — Westerners — because they still perceive their interests as being different. Ossis earn less, produce less and have higher rates of unemployment than Wessis. According to a recent survey by the eastern German charity Volkssolidarität, 1 in every 10 Ossis wishes he or she were still living in the G.D.R.
Nowhere is Germany's obstinate gulf — a division that Germans call "a wall in the head" — more evident than in Berlin. The physical Wall has been all but expunged. In 1989, Mauerspechte — wall peckers — chipped out and sold pieces of the concrete from the Wall's graffiti-strewn western face; later, municipalities sent diggers to do the job more thoroughly. Like a clumsily retouched image, the Wall was airbrushed out of the picture. But its shadow remains, and with it other fractures in German society: generational fissures, cracks between communities that benefited from the fall of the Wall and those that suffered.
Germany remains at the mercy of conflicting interpretations of history. In that context, one commemorative project is worth a closer look. The Berlin Wall trail, completed three years ago, cuts through the heart of Berlin like a pathologist's blade. It exposes Germany's underlying conditions, and reminds those who care to see of Germany's unfinished business.
What Was Rich Is Now Poor
After the G.D.R. closed its frontiers in 1952 to stanch the flow to the West, Berlin's internal borders remained porous. Niebank met her husband at dance classes. She could have slipped west to join him but she decided to apply for permission to leave the G.D.R. The wedding took place on Aug. 5, 1961; her exit permit was to be granted 10 days later. But during the early hours of Aug. 13, the East German army ringed West Berlin with barbed wire and armed guards. The Wall had been built.
South of the cemetery from which Niebank escaped, the Berlin Wall trail follows a green scar of borderland between Wedding and Prenzlauer Berg, districts linked in Cold War days only by a crossing at Bornholmerstrasse. This was the first of seven inner-city checkpoints to abandon controls in 1989 after an apparatchik named Günter Schabowski announced the lifting of travel restrictions on G.D.R. citizens. At first officers tried to turn away the many thousands who congregated, pedestrians just wanting a look at the other side, and lines of olive green and turquoise blue Trabant cars. Finally the numbers forced the authorities to open the gates. Niebank's brother was among the throng and came looking for her. "There was such celebration," she recalls, "over every Trabi that drove through."
That night, jubilant Easterners surged into Wedding, past modern residential high-rises. "The West was flaunting what it could do, building these state-of-the-art apartments right next to the Wall," says Axel Klausmeier, an architectural historian who heads the foundation responsible for conserving and commemorating the Wall and its history. Today, as the trail wends through Berlin, you notice that people in low-status jobs — sweeping streets, cleaning toilets — are Easterners or immigrants. Yet there's also been a striking geographical reversal. The poorly paid and the unemployed were shunted into the high-rises of Wedding, in the west, as rich Berliners swooped on the elegant 19th century housing of Prenzlauer Berg, left to crumble in the East during the Cold War era, now lavishly restored. It's similar along the edge of the neighboring district of Mitte, the focus of the city's bar and restaurant culture. West Berlin was catnip to avant-garde artists, musicians and filmmakers from all over the world; its population swelled still further as young West German men moved to the city to avoid the military service that was compulsory in the rest of the country. But today East is cooler than West. "That's where people with money want to live," says Klausmeier. "Now there's a social border in place of the physical one. It continues to shock me."
A mental border, too. When the earthmovers arrived at Bernauerstrasse, a Lutheran pastor called Manfred Fischer confronted them, arms outstretched. His intervention saved the substantial chunk of the Wall along the Wedding-Mitte border that today forms the core of the Berlin Wall memorial. Plans have been drawn up to add a secular shrine to the victims of the Wall with their portraits embedded in a "window of memory." The list of 136 victims includes eight G.D.R. border guards: two deserters shot by their comrades and six killed by West German police protecting escapees. To exclude them, says Klausmeier, would ignore the extent to which East Germans were coerced by the state.
Whether or not to include the G.D.R. guards is just one more example of the difficulty that Germans still have with their history. For much of the period after World War II, both the G.D.R. and West Germany resisted serious examination of their collective culpability for Nazism. In the West, that denial poisoned relations between the generations, infusing Germany's student and counterculture movements with an anger not matched in other countries. A similar failure to confront the truth about the G.D.R. — its violent repression and the extent to which East Germans accepted and sometimes aided the regime — expresses itself in ostalgie, the rose-tinted nostalgia for a G.D.R. that never was. Ostalgie inspired the 2003 film Good Bye Lenin! and underpins the renaissance of iconic East German brands.
(cont'd)
Richard's $.02 :munchin
Germany's Election: Divided They Stand
Catherine Mayer, Time, 21 Sep 2009
Part 1 of 2
Graveyards are usually about endings. But in December 1961 Waltraud Niebank embarked on a new life in East Berlin's Pankow Cemetery. She might have been mistaken for a young widow as she scanned the headstones, although in truth, her husband was alive. He was living in West Berlin and Niebank had been separated from him for four months. Now she was looking for a concealed tunnel which would reunite them. Soon after their wedding, the cemetery had been divided by a cinder-block barrier, part of a fortification some 100 miles (160 km) in length which would eventually consist of a row of reinforced-concrete panels, a second fence and a "death strip" patrolled by snipers. Its architects called the structure an "antifascist protection wall" but Berliners knew it simply as die Mauer — the Wall. It was engineered not to protect, but to imprison.
As Niebank hovered by an open grave, a voice from below said "Jump," so she did, then scrabbled through the passage toward the husband who waited for her in the West. She still chokes with fear and anger at the memory of what she endured to leave the German Democratic Republic (G.D.R.). "It was so painful," she says. "I never wanted to look at the Wall again."
That simple sentiment — revulsion about the Wall and all it represented — proved powerful enough to reunify Niebank's fractured nation. After Nov. 9, 1989, when the G.D.R. abandoned border controls, the drive for unity provided an overarching purpose that for many years shaped national politics. Reunification was Germany's greatest achievement of the last century — greater, even, than its postwar reinvention as an economic powerhouse. But as Germany prepares for an election just a few weeks before the 20th anniversary of that magical night in 1989, the fall of the Wall has become not just a metaphor for what Europe's most populous nation can do — but also of what it has left undone, of opportunities missed.
In the run-up to the election, there has been no grand new mission, no ambitious vision of remaking Germany — or Europe, or the world — on view. As the continent's largest economy, Germany could have taken a lead to ensure that the European Union came together to weather the worst economic downturn in 70 years; it did not. Germany, to be sure, has contributed 4,000 troops to the NATO mission in Afghanistan. And yet there is deepening unease in Germany about the nation's involvement in the war there. That is partly because German troops are killing and being killed in greater numbers as violence rises. But there seems to be an underlying concern, too, as if such visible engagement in global geopolitics is somehow dangerously unsettling to the good life that Germans have come to expect.
The strongest impulse in German politics is to avoid big changes, to hold the country steady as she goes. The electoral system supports such an impulse by producing consensus-driven coalition governments. It's pretty safe to assume that whatever coalition emerges from the election, it will not include Die Linke, a hard-left party formed by Western socialists and remnants of the G.D.R. communists. But Die Linke's likely decent performance in the eastern states also speaks to promise unfulfilled. Ossis — Easterners — vote differently from Wessis — Westerners — because they still perceive their interests as being different. Ossis earn less, produce less and have higher rates of unemployment than Wessis. According to a recent survey by the eastern German charity Volkssolidarität, 1 in every 10 Ossis wishes he or she were still living in the G.D.R.
Nowhere is Germany's obstinate gulf — a division that Germans call "a wall in the head" — more evident than in Berlin. The physical Wall has been all but expunged. In 1989, Mauerspechte — wall peckers — chipped out and sold pieces of the concrete from the Wall's graffiti-strewn western face; later, municipalities sent diggers to do the job more thoroughly. Like a clumsily retouched image, the Wall was airbrushed out of the picture. But its shadow remains, and with it other fractures in German society: generational fissures, cracks between communities that benefited from the fall of the Wall and those that suffered.
Germany remains at the mercy of conflicting interpretations of history. In that context, one commemorative project is worth a closer look. The Berlin Wall trail, completed three years ago, cuts through the heart of Berlin like a pathologist's blade. It exposes Germany's underlying conditions, and reminds those who care to see of Germany's unfinished business.
What Was Rich Is Now Poor
After the G.D.R. closed its frontiers in 1952 to stanch the flow to the West, Berlin's internal borders remained porous. Niebank met her husband at dance classes. She could have slipped west to join him but she decided to apply for permission to leave the G.D.R. The wedding took place on Aug. 5, 1961; her exit permit was to be granted 10 days later. But during the early hours of Aug. 13, the East German army ringed West Berlin with barbed wire and armed guards. The Wall had been built.
South of the cemetery from which Niebank escaped, the Berlin Wall trail follows a green scar of borderland between Wedding and Prenzlauer Berg, districts linked in Cold War days only by a crossing at Bornholmerstrasse. This was the first of seven inner-city checkpoints to abandon controls in 1989 after an apparatchik named Günter Schabowski announced the lifting of travel restrictions on G.D.R. citizens. At first officers tried to turn away the many thousands who congregated, pedestrians just wanting a look at the other side, and lines of olive green and turquoise blue Trabant cars. Finally the numbers forced the authorities to open the gates. Niebank's brother was among the throng and came looking for her. "There was such celebration," she recalls, "over every Trabi that drove through."
That night, jubilant Easterners surged into Wedding, past modern residential high-rises. "The West was flaunting what it could do, building these state-of-the-art apartments right next to the Wall," says Axel Klausmeier, an architectural historian who heads the foundation responsible for conserving and commemorating the Wall and its history. Today, as the trail wends through Berlin, you notice that people in low-status jobs — sweeping streets, cleaning toilets — are Easterners or immigrants. Yet there's also been a striking geographical reversal. The poorly paid and the unemployed were shunted into the high-rises of Wedding, in the west, as rich Berliners swooped on the elegant 19th century housing of Prenzlauer Berg, left to crumble in the East during the Cold War era, now lavishly restored. It's similar along the edge of the neighboring district of Mitte, the focus of the city's bar and restaurant culture. West Berlin was catnip to avant-garde artists, musicians and filmmakers from all over the world; its population swelled still further as young West German men moved to the city to avoid the military service that was compulsory in the rest of the country. But today East is cooler than West. "That's where people with money want to live," says Klausmeier. "Now there's a social border in place of the physical one. It continues to shock me."
A mental border, too. When the earthmovers arrived at Bernauerstrasse, a Lutheran pastor called Manfred Fischer confronted them, arms outstretched. His intervention saved the substantial chunk of the Wall along the Wedding-Mitte border that today forms the core of the Berlin Wall memorial. Plans have been drawn up to add a secular shrine to the victims of the Wall with their portraits embedded in a "window of memory." The list of 136 victims includes eight G.D.R. border guards: two deserters shot by their comrades and six killed by West German police protecting escapees. To exclude them, says Klausmeier, would ignore the extent to which East Germans were coerced by the state.
Whether or not to include the G.D.R. guards is just one more example of the difficulty that Germans still have with their history. For much of the period after World War II, both the G.D.R. and West Germany resisted serious examination of their collective culpability for Nazism. In the West, that denial poisoned relations between the generations, infusing Germany's student and counterculture movements with an anger not matched in other countries. A similar failure to confront the truth about the G.D.R. — its violent repression and the extent to which East Germans accepted and sometimes aided the regime — expresses itself in ostalgie, the rose-tinted nostalgia for a G.D.R. that never was. Ostalgie inspired the 2003 film Good Bye Lenin! and underpins the renaissance of iconic East German brands.
(cont'd)