German Reunification: An Eastern -- and Less Triumphant -- Perspective

Yesterday marked the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. And all over Europe and America, the press has been awash with stories of that historic night and all that it symbolized.

There's no question that the stories surrounding the fall of the wall are fascinating, and in some cases exhilarating:

An editor at the International Herald Tribune recounts how she inadvertently escorted the first East German citizen through Checkpoint Charlie. A mother tells the harrowing tale of being separated her from her critically ill son shortly after his birth, not to be reunited for five years. And, of course, there are all those odes to the steely and quietly resolute Angela Merkel, who never dreamed that Germany could be reunified, let alone that she would one day be its chancellor.

I, too, have consumed these narratives and enjoyed reliving that momentous day. But there's something eerily triumphant about much of the tone surrounding the Western press coverage of this event over the past week or so. It's a combination of "Yay! Freedom!" and "Isn't it great that we had nothing to fear after all?"

I'm not saying there isn't a lot to celebrate about the collapse of communism. And I also understand that for Westerners -- at least those of us who were raised to fear and loathe the "Evil Empire" -- the fall of the Berlin Wall was in many ways the most important global event of our lives, as Walter Shapiro wrote on these pages yesterday. It ended 40 years of a Cold War that defined our country politically, economically and culturally.

But as with most things, the story of German reunification is more complicated than a simple tale of freedom and prosperity. Rather, it's a complex, multi-valent phenomenon, not least for the "liberated" East Germans themselves.

Like most Americans, I suspect, I didn't think all that much about the former German Democratic Republic (or GDR, as East Germany used to be called) before the much-acclaimed, Oscar-winning film "The Lives of Others" came out several years ago and took the world by storm. (If you haven't seen this film, run, don't walk, to the nearest Blockbuster.)

The movie tells of a successful socialist playwright and his actress/lover who are being watched by the East German secret police -- the Stasi -- for possible crimes against the state. It captures brilliantly the atmosphere of secrecy, longing, deprivation and, above all, surveillance that marked communist rule in East Germany. Or, at least, it captures brilliantly how Westerners perceived that communist "other."

I remember the first time I met a German friend of mine here in London; when she revealed that she'd grown up in East Berlin, I immediately said, "Oh! You must have seen 'The Lives of Others'!"

She nodded, cautiously.

"I loved it!" I proclaimed.

She responded matter-of-factly: "I don't know a single Westerner who didn't love that film or a single Easterner who didn't hate it."

Huh?

When pressed, she explained that the movie had been made by a West German. "Who were they to know what we went through?" she asked.

She also objected to the way in which the playwright protagonist was depicted as handsome and comfortable, while the Stasi spy was a homely, pathetic soul dwelling in a spare, Soviet-block flat. "Why not humanize him and make him a family man? Someone with a wife and children, to suggest that this could happen to anyone in a certain environment." Instead, she felt that the movie's over-simplification responded to the West's "desperate need to be told that their side was better."

And as I got to know her better, I realized that "The Lives of Others" was just the tip of the iceberg. For her, as is true for many East Germans, reunification remains, at best, unresolved, and at worst, an open wound that is still felt to this very day.

Economically, reunification does not appeared to have succeeded in merging the two economies. Twenty years on, East Germans still make lower wages, exhibit higher unemployment and obtain lower growth.

Politically, East Germans remain resentful of this unequal relationship. This was not -- as my friend puts it -- a partnership between equals. "We were bought out," she explains. And with freedom and capitalism have come inequality, corruption and nationalism.

Above all, however, it is culturally where the conflicted feelings remain highest. My friend describes how the weekend bungalow she and her family rented from the East German state for some 40 years was repatriated to the children of its former owners after the wall came down:

"They drove up one day in their fancy Western car and they walked onto our property without knocking or ringing the bell. And they told us that it was theirs. Legally, I suppose that was true. But on a human level, it was ours. We had grown up there. Then they opened up the boot of their car and brought out some fancy Bavarian wine, as if to say 'I'm sure you've never had anything as fine as this.' My parents were really thrown by this. In our country, you were defined not by what you owned but by what you did." The new culture of ownership changed everything.

As many have pointed out this week, 9/11 taught many of us that 1989 was not, in fact, "the end of history"; 9/11 also taught us that the world harbors many starkly divergent narratives about what the West means to the rest of the world.

So, too, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification. It is a story of hope and courage, yes. But it is also a deeply contested historical event that is by no means resolved.


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