Hilton - After the Berlin Wall: Putting Two Germanys Back Together Again

CHRISTOPHER HILTON

First published 2009

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2011

All rights reserved

Christopher Hilton, 2009, 2011

The right of Christopher Hilton, to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the authors and publishers rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 7996 5

MOBI ISBN 978 0 7524 7995 8

Original typesetting by The History Press

Can Germans still claim a common identity after forty years of partition or are there now two different ways of thinking and living?

Peter Daniel, The German Comedy, 1991

Carlo says he does not regard himself as East or West; he has no prejudice. Is that the future?

Yes. European. I believe his is the generation which will just grow up thinking of themselves as Germans or Europeans. Even among the three children there is a difference. For instance, the little one Elisa goes to a school where the children learn Spanish and part of the lessons are in Spanish. For Elisa, Honecker, the GDR and The Wall have no meaning but Hitler somehow does. He is always there. He is in the newspapers every day.

Heike Herrmann, interview, 2008

The first part of Adolf Hitlers war ended with a single shot one April afternoon in 1945.

In the concrete Berlin catacomb he had had built so deep underground that hed be safe from everyone except, as it turned out, himself he fired the shot into his temple while he bit on a vial of poison. The Third Reich he created to last 1,000 years limped on for another seven days, morally bankrupt and directionless, but the real end came with the shot.

In the aftermath, Germany would be divided and Germans forced to live in different countries, East and West, with a wall and shoot-to-kill guards between them. The catacomb was dynamited years later and, by chance, The Wall ran directly across the ground above it, then looped round the Brandenburg Gate symbol of the city and now symbol of its division a short walk away.

The second part of Adolf Hitlers war ended with an explosion of champagne corks one November night in 1989 and people dancing on that loop of The Wall at the Brandenburg Gate.

The German Democratic Republic (GDR), a self-proclaimed sovereign state whose leader, Erich Honecker, had insisted The Wall would last for a hundred years,1 could not withstand this dance of death. It limped on for another five months, morally bankrupt and directionless, but the real end came with the champagne corks.

After that, Easterners had a real election and used it to vote themselves out of existence. As far as I am aware, no other country except Austria in 1938 has ever done this, and whether Austria under extreme Nazi pressure to join the German Reich actually did remains problematical. The Nazis gave them an election and 99.73 per cent of the population said yes, a highly suspicious total made even more suspicious because of its familiarity to so many totalitarian regimes.2

From the outside, the GDR had a look of immovability and permanence, every aspect of life tightly controlled by the ruling Party and monitored by the security service, a monstrous, malign octopus. Strategically it was a key Soviet ally, the guarantee that these Germans at least would never again attack the Russian Motherland and were consequently locked into the Communist trading bloc (COMECON) and military alliance (the Warsaw pact). The Soviet Union had 350,000 troops stationed there.

Four weeks after Honecker said what he said, The Wall had gone and with it the GDR, gone without a shot fired or even a sprained ankle. The decision to open The Wall was announced by Gnter Schabowski, a member of the Politbro with responsibilities for East Berlin, at a press conference in the early evening of 9 November 1989. He was speaking in answer to a question (initiated by an Italian journalist) and had been given papers covering new orders but not actually read them. He read them now and they said the border was to open. He was asked when; he consulted the papers and said immediately, without delay. This was a defining moment for millions of people all over the Germanys, even though Schabowskis replies were reticent because he hadnt read the papers, creating a sense of ambiguity. His jowled face and sonorous voice became a defining image, too.

In this book many people will refer to it quite naturally as something central to their memories and their lives.

The third part of Adolf Hitlers war began one October day in 1990 when East and West reunited, although everybody knew the truth. The FRG with three times the population and the third largest economy on earth was about to ingest the GDR whole, a python and a piglet.3 Wolfgang Schuble, the FRGs chief negotiator, wrote:

In my talk to them I kept saying: Dear folks, this is about the GDRs affiliation with the Federal Republic, not the other way around This is not the unification of two identical states. We do not start from the very beginning with equal starting positions. There is the Basic Law and there is the Federal Republic of Germany. Let us proceed on the assumption that you have been excluded from both for forty years.4

This new Germany would be run from the Reichstag, a very short walk from the Brandenburg Gate, as politicians put East and West back together for the first time since 1945. That involved marrying totalitarian communism with democratic capitalism, both of which had been constructed with characteristic German thoroughness, heightening every difference between the two.

Nobody had ever done this, either.

The takeover touched everything in the East: government, law, the judiciary, the police, whatever the East German government owned, including all the farmland, property and industry. It involved teachers and education, the whole medical profession and hospitals, crches and kindergartens, foreign policy and the military, because one week two armies had been prepared to kill each other, the next they were in the same army. It involved bringing together two phone systems and the two postal services, two railways, all the roads and different speed limits. It involved womens rights, abortion, every aspect of welfare, pensions, the rights of trade unions, arts and food subsidies, rents, housing, the price of milk and what you could buy in the corner shop. It involved one currency replacing the other, dismantling the Easts vast internal intelligence network with all the nightmarish revelations that would have to bring, fundamental alterations to newspapers, magazines and television. And then there was the shoot-to-kill policy at the wall, something else with nightmarish consequences.