Berlin Wall gone but divide endures

BERLIN, Germany _ Once a wall ran down Bernauer Street. It stretched both north and south, and it divided the street, and then the city, and then the world’s superpowers. People died in the shadow of the 12-foot wall, gunned down by guards trying to stop them from scrambling to democracy. U.S. presidents stood at its foot and railed against communism, against a government that would imprison its people behind a wall.

When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, throngs of jubilant Germans separated for decades rushed to reunite. Americans celebrated it as a victory for democracy. Revelers tore the wall apart with sledgehammers and pickaxes.

Yet 15 years later, a strikingly different Germany has emerged from the debris than the one publicly imagined by American and West German politicians. Today, the former German Democratic Republic is a region rife with stories of failure, and, to an even greater degree, the expectation of it. Unemployment hovers near 20 percent – twice that of western Germany. Since 1989, more than 1.5 million people have fled to the west, leaving behind a quiet landscape of empty houses, boarded-up railway stations and dilapidated factories that long ago ceased to hum.

On the streets, some people say they are disillusioned by the capitalist democracy.

“We were naïve,” said Dr. Sabine Hubert, a 55-year-old unemployed chemist from Leipzig. “We did not understand what capitalism would bring. It did not work for all of us.”

Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s promise of a “blossoming landscape” in the east has faded. In cities like Berlin, Dresden and Chemnitz, thousands of apartments sit empty. Millions depend on government handouts for food and housing – a bill footed by west German taxpayers. Frustrated by rampant unemployment, eastern voters are increasingly supporting communist and far-right political parties.

“The West promised a much faster ascendancy in living standards than it could deliver,” said Dr. Sabine Lang, a German professor at the University of Washington’s Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies. “In the euphoria of the moment, emotion dominated.”

Rising anger

In 1989, the Berlin Wall’s fall signaled the end of the Cold War. Today, the wall’s few chipped panels stand as a haunting postcard from the past. Gone are the thousands of U.S. and Soviet troops who once patrolled the wall. The concertina wire and guard towers are now harmless memorials.

But while the fall of the wall has cemented its place in American history as a victory for democracy, on the streets of east Germany, the feeling is far more ambiguous.

“Many people are afraid for the future,” said Jorg Weickert, a 38-year-old environmental engineer from Saxony. “This was not the case before the wall came down. Sometimes, I think we would have been better off if we had stayed under the German Democratic Republic. Where is real freedom when you have to worry about everything?”

In the past year, some German academics have sought parallels between the struggles in the former East Germany and America’s attempts to establish democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Dr. Rachel Halverson, a German professor at Washington State University, cautioned against drawing connections between East Germany and Iraq. But, she said, “I don’t think you can easily turn a country into a democracy. East Germany demonstrates that. Contrary to the Bush administration, I don’t think all of the world should look like the U.S.”

While the fall of the Berlin Wall remains a celebrated moment in German history, it is not without its detractors.

This fall, a poll stirred headlines across the country: One in five Germans wants to see a return of the Berlin Wall.

“Some people are very happy,” Halverson said. “But others have been completely unable to get their footing. They lost the world as they knew it. They lost their value in society. Many feel truly disenfranchised.”

Every Monday this summer, thousands of marchers clogged the streets of Leipzig, Berlin and Magdenburg to protest cuts to social welfare programs that acted as a safety net for the past 15 years.

In Leipzig, college students toted backpacks laden with literature calling for political upheaval. German police waded through the crowds in front of St. Nikolai Church to drag out neo-Nazis. Unemployed coal miners in yellow hard hats posed for interviews with television crews.

“They promised equal living standards in the east,” said Christian Waelz, a 25-year-old graduate student in history. “Now masses of people know that this is not true.”

‘We have no money’

The situation confounds many people in western Germany, which has pumped more than $1.5 trillion into the east since 1990. Nearly two-thirds of that money went to supporting hundreds of thousands of people left without jobs when Communist-era factories were shut down. Billions of dollars were plowed into housing and infrastructure, but they have thus far failed to deliver jobs.

There are bright spots. The region’s standard of living towers above other former Soviet-bloc countries. The air, once choked with the fallout of massive coal-mining projects, is cleaner, and fish and aquatic plants now ripple in the rivers. Beachgoers flock to Lake Cospuden, a former coal-mining pit converted into a resort area.

Even as the Leipzig marchers wend their way down the city’s streets, they pass a row of major construction projects fueled by government spending.

Some East Germans joke that the government paints and constructs buildings, but there are no workers to fill their hallways and offices.

On a recent Monday, Stefan Spaarman and his 18-year-old daughter took a bus from the town of Taucha to Leipzig to join the protests.

Unemployed and suffering nerve damage after decades of work in an East German factory, the 61-year-old Stefan sat on a sidewalk, his hands shaking and his head bobbing slightly. Each month, he receives a government check for 1,000 euros, or about $1,200. He believes the cuts would take hundreds of dollars a month from his check.

It is not the life he imagined in 1989, when he cheered the opening of the Berlin Wall. Within weeks of reunification, the inefficient Communist-era factory and his job were gone. As the days, then months and years piled up without work, he grew frustrated and angry, his daughter said.

“At first, he thought, ‘Now we are free. Now we have democracy,’ ” she said. “But now he thinks it is no better. Yes, we can travel to the west, but we have no money for this.”

Even in the most troubled regions, many agree that cuts must be made to the country’s welfare benefits. Germany’s once-powerful unions have had to make concessions as the country’s companies try to compete in a global economy. With the unemployment rate stubbornly high and billions in tax money still flowing to the east each year, many are filled with zuloftangst, the German word for fear of the future.

“Nobody told the people that it would be hard,” said Thomas Bersch, a 37-year-old television journalist from Dresden. “People thought maybe it will be five or 10 years, and then everything will be equal. Now, it may be 20 more years.”

Bleak landscape

In Chemnitz, once a model of communist urban planning, the picture is bleak. On street after street, apartment buildings sit empty. In the buildings that haven’t been boarded up, broken windows dot the facades and glass shards lie in the doorways.

In the 1980s, Ulrich Krossin worked as an electrical engineer in a computer factory in Chemnitz. He rose early each morning for breakfast with his wife. He worked long days and joked with his co-workers. In his spare time, he made plans for the weekend.

Now, Krossin has more free time than he can handle. Immediately after reunification, a supervisor laid off 15 of the 17 engineers in Krossin’s division. He was among the casualties.

At age 50, he often finds it hard to get out of bed in the morning. His wife and young daughter keep him going. He volunteers part time for an environmental group, just to keep busy.

Throughout the 1990s, he watched the government pour billions into propping up welfare recipients like himself, while providing few opportunities for work. Only 35 years old in 1989, he envisioned a long and prosperous career in a capitalist economy.

“In the first years, the money made people blind,” he said, as his daughter squirmed in his arms. “With a little more distance, people can see that money is not all you need. You need a job. You need development. You need prospects. I don’t want to go back to the GDR. But I want a job. I am not the kind of man who can sleep all day.”

Krossin, like many in eastern Germany, felt swallowed up by the larger and richer west. He blames the government for doing little to encourage innovation and training among eastern professionals, instead relying on western companies. Indeed, the most promising eastern enterprises, such American Micro Developments’ computer chip factories in Dresden, are dominated by western investors.

It has left Krossin and others feeling they have no stake in the region’s future. Though he longs to stay where his family has been for decades, he may soon join the stream of people leaving the east.

“If these problems go on, I will leave east Germany,” he said. “I must. No jobs. No money. What can I do?”

The poverty spawned a spate of racial incidents in the 1990s. Far-right groups have gained a footing in the region, worrying a country that still harbors a deep shame about the horrors inflicted by the Nazis. Some say it is only a vote of protest meant to antagonize the West. Others fret that it hints at deeper problems.

Perhaps even more striking has been the return of the Communist Party in East Germany, which secured seats in the state Parliament this year for the first time since 1968. Even in the west, some 25 percent of the people support a return of the wall that divided the country.

At the Berlin Wall Documentation Center, across the street from one of the few remaining sections of the wall, Norbert Frederich shuttles crowds of giggling schoolchildren past life-size black-and-white photos, coiled strands of razor wire and books about those who died fleeing the East. An interactive screen allows visitors to watch footage of an old woman dangling from an apartment window as an East German police officer tugs at her arm, trying to stop her from plummeting to the West.

“I am from a generation that saw this,” said Frederich, 50, as a group of students milled around him. “They think the wall is a postcard or some paintings on concrete. It is not real for them.”

In 1976, as a college student, Frederich fled communist East Berlin with the help of an aunt in Hungary. He remembers the fear and confinement of life behind the wall. He worries that for others, the memories are fading.

“Fifteen years is a long time,” he said. “Some people have forgotten.”