Berlin's Wall Still Casts Shadow: A Reflection On Reunification
Tony Paterson, The Independent (London), 09 Nov. 2004
Visitors to Germany's reunited capital do not have to look far to find the"Berlin Wall". At sundown, near the city's former Allied crossing, Checkpoint Charlie, floodlights glare on a 600ft stretch of white concrete barrier, eerily reminiscent of the real thing.
To drive home the solemnity of the spot, hundreds of man-sized wooden crosses have been embedded in stone around it in memory of the 1,065 East Germans killed by Communist border guards while trying to escape to the West during the 28 years the wall stood.
Yet today's"wall" is a phoney, finished only a fortnight ago, the brainchild of the director of the city's privately run Checkpoint Charlie Museum, who insisted it was important to build a memorial"so people don't forget".
At first, the project was dismissed by German politicians and historians as a garish piece of"Disneyland" that should never have been put up."The real Berlin Wall was a monstrosity, but this thing makes it look harmless," said the historian Hubertus Knabe, an expert on the former East German regime. Yet Berlin's erzatz wall has proved a roaring and (for reunited Germany's politicians) embarrassing success. It has 3,500 tourists a day, far more than most of the city's premier museums and art galleries.
At Checkpoint Charlie last Sunday, many of the Berlin visitors staring at the concrete barrier, yards from a reconstructed Allied sentry-box decked out with British, American and French flags, were not even aware that the new wall was a fake."You mean this isn't the real Berlin Wall?" said Jon Farley, a student from Birmingham on a weekend trip to Berlin with his girlfriend."Well, at least there is something here to give an impression of what it must have looked like." He seemed crestfallen.
Alas, 15 years after the"fall" of the real Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989, it has been all but wiped from the face of the German capital. There are still a few bits standing in remote corners. Without knowing it, Jon Farley would have passed a section in a field on the bus route to Berlin's Schonefeld airport and his cut-price flight back to London. The rest has gone. Some pieces were shipped to America, but the bulk of the former Iron Curtain was ground into concrete granules that form the underlay on autobahns laid across eastern Germany since the Wall's demise.
Tourists can glimpse the real Berlin Wall on a placard-sized black- and-white photograph that hangs on an information stand close to the city's immaculately restored Brandenburg Gate. The picture was taken from a helicopter in early 1989. It shows the Wall with all its murderous trappings, including tank traps, watchtowers, trip wires, dogs, searchlights and Kalashnikov- toting border guards. The area is now covered by bank buildings and a vast construction site on which Berlin's controversial Holocaust memorial is being shaped.
Brian Todd, 37, a visitor from Los Angeles, looked at the photograph and said:"We Americans should have kept a piece of the Berlin Wall as it was and slapped a preservation order on it." The Americans left Berlin a decade ago.
But the city is bankrupt. Its government is run by Social Democrats and the Party for Democratic Socialism, the successor organisation to the East German Communist Party. Neither have shown interest in building a monument that could provide a genuine, lasting impression of what the real Wall was like.
Stephan Hilsberg, one of the few Social Democrat politicians belatedly campaigning for a wall monument, said:"Berlin has not just failed to exhibit its recent history, since 1990 it has actively suppressed it." Memories of the nastiness of the wall and the regime that erected it have been replaced by"Ostalgia" television chat-shows and popular films recalling an essentially cosy Communist East, as in Goodbye Lenin.
Chancellor Gerhard Schroder and leading members of his Social Democrat- led government have also demonstrated extraordinary insensitivity over the issue. Last week, Mr Schroder was at the forefront of a government campaign to scrap German unity day, decreed a public holiday on 3 October every year since the country was formally reunited 14 years ago. Mr Schroder said scrapping the holiday would put Germans back to work, saving the country an estimated EUR2bn (pounds 1.4bn) in hitherto lost revenues."I still think it is a good idea," the Chancellor said on Friday when the plan was dropped after widespread protest.
The Schroder government's blatant disregard for recent history is not difficult to understand. For most of the predominantly west German politicians who govern from Berlin, German reunification is less a source of national pride than tangible evidence of near-catastrophic economic failure, and a constant reminder of a problem that stubbornly refuses to go away.
The"blossoming landscapes" that Helmut Kohl, Germany's former"Unification Chancellor", promised east Germans back in 1990 have failed to materialise. In the years since the fall of the Wall, much of east Germany has become a sort of depopulated rump state where only 40 per cent of the 15 million inhabitants work, and which has become dependent on annual injections of EUR90bn from the West for survival.
Like Mr Kohl, Chancellor Schroder promised great things for eastern Germany when he was elected in 1998. The east was to become Chefsache, the Chancellor's personal project. Nowadays, Mr Schroder does not look east.
Visitors to Germany's reunited capital do not have to look far to find the"Berlin Wall". At sundown, near the city's former Allied crossing, Checkpoint Charlie, floodlights glare on a 600ft stretch of white concrete barrier, eerily reminiscent of the real thing.
To drive home the solemnity of the spot, hundreds of man-sized wooden crosses have been embedded in stone around it in memory of the 1,065 East Germans killed by Communist border guards while trying to escape to the West during the 28 years the wall stood.
Yet today's"wall" is a phoney, finished only a fortnight ago, the brainchild of the director of the city's privately run Checkpoint Charlie Museum, who insisted it was important to build a memorial"so people don't forget".
At first, the project was dismissed by German politicians and historians as a garish piece of"Disneyland" that should never have been put up."The real Berlin Wall was a monstrosity, but this thing makes it look harmless," said the historian Hubertus Knabe, an expert on the former East German regime. Yet Berlin's erzatz wall has proved a roaring and (for reunited Germany's politicians) embarrassing success. It has 3,500 tourists a day, far more than most of the city's premier museums and art galleries.
At Checkpoint Charlie last Sunday, many of the Berlin visitors staring at the concrete barrier, yards from a reconstructed Allied sentry-box decked out with British, American and French flags, were not even aware that the new wall was a fake."You mean this isn't the real Berlin Wall?" said Jon Farley, a student from Birmingham on a weekend trip to Berlin with his girlfriend."Well, at least there is something here to give an impression of what it must have looked like." He seemed crestfallen.
Alas, 15 years after the"fall" of the real Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989, it has been all but wiped from the face of the German capital. There are still a few bits standing in remote corners. Without knowing it, Jon Farley would have passed a section in a field on the bus route to Berlin's Schonefeld airport and his cut-price flight back to London. The rest has gone. Some pieces were shipped to America, but the bulk of the former Iron Curtain was ground into concrete granules that form the underlay on autobahns laid across eastern Germany since the Wall's demise.
Tourists can glimpse the real Berlin Wall on a placard-sized black- and-white photograph that hangs on an information stand close to the city's immaculately restored Brandenburg Gate. The picture was taken from a helicopter in early 1989. It shows the Wall with all its murderous trappings, including tank traps, watchtowers, trip wires, dogs, searchlights and Kalashnikov- toting border guards. The area is now covered by bank buildings and a vast construction site on which Berlin's controversial Holocaust memorial is being shaped.
Brian Todd, 37, a visitor from Los Angeles, looked at the photograph and said:"We Americans should have kept a piece of the Berlin Wall as it was and slapped a preservation order on it." The Americans left Berlin a decade ago.
But the city is bankrupt. Its government is run by Social Democrats and the Party for Democratic Socialism, the successor organisation to the East German Communist Party. Neither have shown interest in building a monument that could provide a genuine, lasting impression of what the real Wall was like.
Stephan Hilsberg, one of the few Social Democrat politicians belatedly campaigning for a wall monument, said:"Berlin has not just failed to exhibit its recent history, since 1990 it has actively suppressed it." Memories of the nastiness of the wall and the regime that erected it have been replaced by"Ostalgia" television chat-shows and popular films recalling an essentially cosy Communist East, as in Goodbye Lenin.
Chancellor Gerhard Schroder and leading members of his Social Democrat- led government have also demonstrated extraordinary insensitivity over the issue. Last week, Mr Schroder was at the forefront of a government campaign to scrap German unity day, decreed a public holiday on 3 October every year since the country was formally reunited 14 years ago. Mr Schroder said scrapping the holiday would put Germans back to work, saving the country an estimated EUR2bn (pounds 1.4bn) in hitherto lost revenues."I still think it is a good idea," the Chancellor said on Friday when the plan was dropped after widespread protest.
The Schroder government's blatant disregard for recent history is not difficult to understand. For most of the predominantly west German politicians who govern from Berlin, German reunification is less a source of national pride than tangible evidence of near-catastrophic economic failure, and a constant reminder of a problem that stubbornly refuses to go away.
The"blossoming landscapes" that Helmut Kohl, Germany's former"Unification Chancellor", promised east Germans back in 1990 have failed to materialise. In the years since the fall of the Wall, much of east Germany has become a sort of depopulated rump state where only 40 per cent of the 15 million inhabitants work, and which has become dependent on annual injections of EUR90bn from the West for survival.
Like Mr Kohl, Chancellor Schroder promised great things for eastern Germany when he was elected in 1998. The east was to become Chefsache, the Chancellor's personal project. Nowadays, Mr Schroder does not look east.