뉴스게릴라들의 뉴스연대


German Unification Built on Broken Dreams
[Analysis] Polls reconfirm the feelings of many that uniting the two nations was a mistake

Email Article Print Article	Michael Johansen (mfjohansen)

Polls taken recently in what used to be West Germany say a quarter of the people think that unification with the formerly socialist east may have been a mistake. Many East Germans have believed this from the start.

While celebrations erupted all over the newly united Germany on a night in October 1990, a funeral took place in the back courtyard of a squatters' house in the city of Dessau, Sachsen-Anhalt. The yard was hemmed in with old high walls supported by the ivy growing up the bricks and the trees that grew alongside. A dozen men and women, most in their early twenties, many of whom squatted in abandoned buildings nearby, filled the damp space around a shallow grave that had been dug into the middle of the open ground.

The waiting coffin was a simple wooden box with a hinged lid, but no lock. It was just big enough to hold a modest collection of momentos: coins, ostmarks, matches, a pack of cigarettes, passbooks, badges, and even a flag of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (D.D.R.), where the German colors supported a wreath of wheat surrounding a hammer and compass. That was the promised dream, that agriculture, industry and science would strive together for a prosperous future. It didn't quite work out that way.

The people who attended the funeral were artists, writers, students, architects, and librarians. They were poor and single and free to take risks. They had been raised by the state to take part in communal activities and they participated still, but now as community volunteers and members of the city council, not as Young Pioneers or party members. They had taken the principles of democracy taught to them for propaganda purposes by the Socialist Unity Party and set them to practice. For a while they actually worked.

The night of the funeral was cold and damp, befitting the event. It might have been warm and mild elsewhere under the glow of fireworks, but in the shadows of the tenements that had survived the bombs of the last world war dampness made the mourners huddle into themselves for warmth.

Most of them had been born and raised under a regime where every fourth friend or acquaintance (and maybe even you) was an informant for state security, where you spoke your mind openly only to your closest family and even then you were taking a grave risk, where you feared a knock at your door at night and wished with all your heart never to be taken inside any Stasi headquarters.

The coins in the casket were made of nearly weightless aluminum, worth nowhere near the few pfennigs stamped on them. The matches had been common for decades and well known to the many heavy smokers of the country's harsh tobacco. The matches, like the cigarettes, were cheaply made but they eventually did the job. The pages of the green and red passes -- not belonging to the state, but rather to youth organizations and patriotic societies -- were made of low quality paper and the ink from stamps smudged easily. All these things -- plus more personal keepsakes like photographs and keys -- were meant to represent a life that had been rightfully and irrevocably ended, but one that could nevertheless have left behind a valuable legacy.

These young people, like redheaded Markus with the sparse beard who studied at Bauhaus on some days and argued with councilors in the Rathaus on others and like librarian Suzi who worked with most of her friends and dreamed of moving into a proper flat with papered walls, had come of age into a society where few lacked money, but where there was nothing to buy. Many had more than enough ostmarks to get things like the East German car called the Trabant, but one had to wait for years for even a used one. When they became adults it looked like the only choice they had for their future might be between death and self-betrayal, the same choice their parents had to face. The end of the D.D.R. freed them to choose for more.

What they mourned using the symbols of repression was what they and their fellow citizens had achieved in their country in the months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, by themselves and with the co-operation of the old state. It had been a peaceful convulsion, a miracle of history in the league of the bloodless change in South Africa, which led to citizen government and rational reforms. What East Germans mostly knew about politics were the promises of equality and prosperity taught by the governing party to mask its failure to achieve either of them, or even try. These youth knew it for lies, but that didn't stop them from learning the basic principles of co-operation that are necessarily embedded in communist propaganda.

The citizens of the D.D.R. brought down the regime that repressed them by standing up to the Party and refusing to move. They stood in the churches and in the squares outside the churches and down all the streets in their thousands and thousands. The Stasi were among them, but they were without power. The state had finally decided to stop the bloodshed and do nothing against the demonstrators.

But before they could learn to stand fast, many had already been forced to flee through the newly opened borders of neighboring Warsaw Pact countries, safely attempting something that had previously gotten people shot on sight. They took only what they could carry, abandoning their belongings, their apartments, and sometimes their cars, still running with all the doors wide open as the occupants dashed across the frontier to the west on foot. Armed guards stood and watched, but no one interfered as almost one-third of the East German population fled into exile, nudging, as they did, the East German state towards its demise.

The young democrats who freed the state with politics lost control of it through economics. It's an old German practice. Otto von Bismarck used tariff agreements in the late 1800s to prepare many states and principalities for unification under Prussia. Helmut Kohl used a currency union to do the same in the east. Replacing the ostmark with the Deutschmark didn't bring instant prosperity, but it did give Ossies money they could use to buy what they believed to be superior West German goods. West German firms moved into the market, shouldering local manufacturers and suppliers aside. The local state-run producers closed and unemployment, almost unknown in socialist times, became widespread. Now there were things to buy, but no money to afford them.

The buildings abandoned in the last years of socialism sat unprotected against vandals and looters and most eventually lay open to the weather with windows missing and holes knocked through their roofs. With jobs and money scarce many single young adults took up residence where-ever they could, living free where they could find dry rooms and maybe even electricity and running water. Committees worked to deal with the housing problem in all the East German cities, but they could do little. New owners were expected to take over if old owners didn't come forward to claim what they had lost after the war. No one knew what would happen to the houses or to all the residents.

These squatters, these mourners, knew that a union with the Federal Republic was inevitable, but they wanted it to take place after negotiations protected their rights. Their fondest hope was to join the European Union first and then become one people, one nation, one Germany as free and equal voters.

That's not exactly how it happened. West German Chancellor Kohl wanted unification as quickly as possible. The quickest way was to simply absorb the eastern states into the western federation, discarding all remnants of the socialist system and all the reforms that had been achieved since it collapsed. The demand for a new Constitution was ignored. The Ground Law of the German Democratic Republic was abolished outright as if it was of absolutely no worth, which of course it wasn't. Unfortunately, it was not replaced by a new consensus, but only by its federal counterpart. That American-inspired document, written for another people at another time, has worked well in the west, but it has not proven to be a perfect fit for Ossies.



	▲ Michael Johansen

What the Ossies could have given to an equal union was what they had learned as they overthrew a dictatorship. They were learning to govern as if all citizens have a voice and as if the government should serve the common good. All their efforts faded away under western laws as the two Germanys became one. They mourned the future they were building for themselves, the future that had been replaced by one not their own.

One story told that night still holds true. All the years the socialists had talked about the evils of capitalism the people had secretly known they were hearing lies. But the joke was on them. It all turned out to be true.

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Michael Johansen is a novelist and professional freelance journalist in eastern Canada with regular columns in several newspapers and magazines.

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