The Fall of the Wall: Reunification revisited

By Naomi Conrad

3rd November 2009

“Do you remember it?” – A group of us, French, Russian and English, standing in front of a photo exhibition celebrating the 20th anniversary, black and white, grainy photos of protestors waving flags, two men embracing, a man furiously, deliriously attacking a wall with a hammer, covering the ecstatic, if dazed onlookers with splinters and dust like confetti, children scaling the wall.

‘It’, the fall of the Berlin Wall and with its demolition the crumbling of the Cold War, when East finally met and was merged into West and eastern Germans were warmly, if somewhat patronisingly, welcomed back into the folds of the German motherland and its economic system.

Yet born in the 1980s in the West, my memories of it are only vague, grainy to the extent of nonexistent: My mother listening to the radio, hoarse with emotion as she explained History I failed to comprehend. Too young to comprehend a world outside of our immediate surrounding, my generation of Germans, at least the Westlers, grew up in a world already united, one Germany taken for granted, its unity seemingly irrefutably proved by the election of a Chancellor from the East.

The Cold War separation was learnt through history books and parents’ stories of barbed wire borders and walls that no longer exist apart from painted remnants serving as warning reminders and colourful fragments stuck to postcards sold in tourist shops of Berlin’s Alexanderplatz. One prosperous united country forging ahead, its segregated History ended with the wall turned into colourful confetti.

However, the story of the re-founding moments of the Republic has turned into a different reality. While they may have been torn town and no longer exist physically, the separating walls have yet to metamorphose solely into vague, grainy memories to be celebrated every year. Indeed, the differences between East and West are still strongly, acutely felt. It is not one united Germany, but rather two, coexisting rather than merged. The wall continues to exist, in peoples’ perceptions and today’s economic realities.

While many a Western student of my generation headed east to study, drawn by cheap housing and lower fees, young, especially well educated eastern Germans continue to be pushed the other way. The East is rapidly becoming depopulated, 2 million people less live there than in 1989. Hence the cheap housing for students: As many as a third of the old ornate town houses are empty and falling into slow disrepair in the university city of Leipzig.

With fewer jobs in eastern Germany after the economic collapse which followed the reunification and reintegration into a capitalist system, people in the East earn less than their brothers and sisters in the West, and have lower savings. The blooming landscapes which were promised during the heady days after the wall came down, have yet to emerge. Instead of flowers, desertification.

The initial euphoria has soured into resignation and dissatisfaction, which has fed extremism. The politics and history students in Leipzig and Dresden that migrated in search of cheap housing spend many a Sunday demonstrating against, and sometimes clashing with, rightwing extremists in black ankle boots and shaven heads.

As the East refuses to bloom, millions of euros continue to pour east to finance pensions and social security systems, the West-Ost-Gefälle of funds flowing from the rich heights of the West to the East. When asked how long it will take for an economic equilibrium to be reached between the two, young east Germans estimate another 23 years of economic difference. In 1990 the answer was six years.

I do not remember the Monday demonstrations in Leipzig, which drew ever bigger circles, the refugees in the embassies in Prague and Warsaw, the hammers and pick axes that tore down the Wall, the euphoria and emotional embraces of the black and white photos. So, no, I do not remember ‘It’.