Germany: Still divided by an invisible wall

The fall of the Berlin Wall set off an “explosion of wishes, hopes, dreams, and expectations,” said Rainer Eppelmann in the Berliner Kurier. We East Germans were out on the streets for weeks agitating for democracy, an end to one-party rule, freedom of speech, and freedom of travel. When the wall finally came down on Nov. 9, 1989, we were euphoric. Certainly, “life today is better than it was then.” Living now in a democracy, anyone is free to complain about the government, and “nobody fears being hauled off by the secret police.” But many former East Germans—particularly the many who are unemployed or on welfare—are disappointed, even bitter. Twenty years later, many of our dreams remain unfulfilled.

That’s because political freedom hasn’t been matched by economic freedom, said Heike Göbel in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The crowds of East Germans who danced on the Berlin Wall in 1989 were celebrating their freedom—“freedom to say what they thought and to travel wherever they wanted.” Turns out, though, that while speech may be free, travel is actually quite expensive. And most Easterners still have much less money than their Western cousins, earning just 70 percent, on average, of Western incomes. Meanwhile, Westerners complain that their high taxes have gone mostly to fund services in the East. No wonder fully one in eight Germans—in both the East and the West—say that reunification was a mistake.

The more important statistic is that the other seven in eight Germans are committed to being one nation, said Richard Schröder in Der Tagesspiegel. Of course our unification isn’t entirely complete. “As any marriage counselor can tell you,” a partnership requires constant work. Some Easterners wax nostalgic for communism, perhaps out of “a feeling of inferiority” that they were part of a failed system. Some Westerners gripe about the “ingratitude” of the Easterners, as if freedom were a gift that the West bestowed, rather than a right the Easterners fought for and won. Despite these differences, German unity is a reality—“even if, as in a garden, there will always be more work to be done to keep it going.”

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Soon enough, the differences between East and West may fade away, said Brigitte Fehrle in the Berliner Zeitung. An entire generation has grown up that never experienced either East or West Germany. In one sense, that’s sad: They know nothing of the “crazy excitement” of the wall coming down “and will, at best, smile sympathetically at the old-timers who tell of the night of November 9th.” But at the same time, they are “unencumbered by the ideological baggage of those who were standing on one side or other of the wall when it fell.” So they may be better able to make judgments based on today’s challenges and circumstances, and not yesterday’s. Of course, they may also have an entirely different take on how we handled reunification, and what mistakes we made going about it. “The youth will judge us.” Let’s hope their verdict is kind.