The Fall of the Berlin Wall: A Negligible Anniversary

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So, it has been 20 years since the Berlin Wall came down and Germany embarked on its journey towards reunification? Really? 

If my friends from the US, Canada, Norway had not made me aware of this anniversary, maybe I could not care less. What a stark contrast from the feelings that day, November 9, 1989 which seemed like a defining moment in history. Sure, as would be the case with other turning points in history, I can answer the question "where were you when the wall came down?" 

I had already gone to bed then with my Portuguese fiancée, snuggled warm and cosy beneath the blanket, when I went to the kitchen to get myself a glass of warm milk. Passing by the TV, for some strange reason, I decided to press the "on" button one last time that day - and saw the news were already full of clips and pictures which made me beleive to be part of a SF-scenario for a short moment. When I saw  celebrity-politicians of the day sing the national anthem, I realized the news was real. The wall had come down. I rushed to the bedroom next door and shouted out: "The wall has come down, the wall has come down!" Quite understandably, my fiancée looked at me with an expression of horror 
longing for her morning gown. Her understanding was: This building will collapse any moment now, we have to evacuate! 

After a few minutes of calming down both of us - for different reasons - the night went on in peaceful sleep for her, and in front of the screen for me. I was in tears, rejoycing. 

Now, 20 years on, I realize that her apporach was probably by far more pragmatical, and had I known then what I know now, I would have preferred to peacefully snuggle away as well. 

With 19 years of German reunification now behind us, I realize that neither has the wall persisted inside my head, nor am I particularly enthusiastic for a unified nation. The truth is: I simply don't care all that much. That may have to do a whole lot with geography. I am a Western European by upbringing and culture, living just some 50 Miles away from the Dutch and Belgian borders to the West. I can say that I have probably visited Paris more often than Berlin. If I wish to travel to the East of Germany or Berlin, I have to surround the mountainous Harz-area, the geographical weight point of today's Germany, quite thinly populated, but towering between the populous West and the East (with its centers to the tune of Berlin, Dresden, or Leipzig) like a buffer. 

It is this geographical buffer, standing like a symbol for other rifts, that regularly lets me say "Paris" if the question is where to spend a metropolis-weekend. 

Why?

When, in early 1990, prior to political unification in October of that year, then-chancellor Helmut Kohl initiated the economic union between the former communist Germany and what was the West Germany or the Federal Republic, he promised "blossoming landscapes" in the East. What happened instead:

Gangster capitalists made much of what was left in terms of industrial infrastructure a feast and their prey, under the stewardship of a state run agency, called the Treuhand, responsible for the transition of then communist state owned companies into private  ownership. To an extent lesser than what was the case in Russia, the lingering taste remains that many earned fortunes without deserving them. As a matter of fact, a dark velvet reft of secrecy still surrounds the circumstances under which the Leuna petroleum refineries changed ownership. The suspicion of a quagmire of corruption still surrounds the case, but due to an above-the-law refusal of Unity-Chancellor Helmut Kohl (in office until 1998)  to testify over the circumstances back then, investigations have come to a standstill for good. 

Secondly, with the intruduction of Deutschmark (West)-parity with the then East German currency, East Germany lost all of its trade partners in former Eastern Europe. This resulted, not in "blossoming" landscapes, but a general breakdown of all but a few industrial infrastructures in Eastern Germany. Plus a massive East-West exodus.

Cities and villages in the East have been pepped up by massive transfers from West German taxpayers into East German recosntruction projects. The result is quite peculiar: While one can measure wide open spaces on modern Autobahns and rail tracks in the East, many West Germans get the impression that they are trying hard to earn the East's peace dividend, driving to work on potholed streets, and crammed, neglected trains and rail infrastructures in the West part of Germany, being a rip off to passengers and a virtually non present state sponsorship. Cloaked as privatization of the rail system, of course. Ahead on the agenda: The intruduction of toll on the German Autobahns, and the abolition of what could be called the German Dream of mobility. 

Few would probably speak out, with regard to the German code of Political Correctness, but it is my impression, deep inside, very few here in West Germany could now care less about the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989 and subsequent reunification, in October 1990. 

After a flash-in-the pan of emotions in 1989, the aftermath of which we have lived until the mid 1990s,  the unofficial opinion may have settled in the West that West Germany paid a huge peace dividend to a pityful effect: The East is practically an industrially stripped region, with a few beacon-projects, and largely depopulated.

Very fine: We now have a chancellor raised in Eastern Germany, able to speak with great pathos about freedom to the joint chambers of Congress in DC.

Also, German reunification maybe paved the way for an Eastward extention of the European Union. But many in Western Europe now see the new member countries in the East as providers of cheap industrial labor and corporate tax havens, giving employers blackmail-like leverage in bargaining wages with trade Unions in the Western European countries. 

What did we get in return - the peace dividend?

Reagonomics and the Chicago Boys have given capitalism in the former Soviet Union of the early 1990s such a bad name that Russians turned away in disgust from the Yeltsin-model, towards the perspective of an authoritarian one-party state system, albeit without a communist label. Pay as we might for a peace dividend, the jury is still not in with a final verdict on increased security in Eruopeean-Russian relations. 

The world has not become a safer place. It seems we a paying the peace dividend to the wrong contractor. Not the East-West conflict is the dominating conflict any longer. It is the question over how the Islamic world and the Euro-American block will define their relationships over urgent socio-religious and cultural questions. 

The positive effects of reunification in Germany are too few to mention, beyond the above mentioned new infrastructures in void spaces, some theme park-like rebuilding  projects in historical centers of East German cities and a fata morgana of pride in being a unified Germany, now quickly waning.

In 2009, Germany's problems are dominated by the World Economic crisis, aggrievated by an obviously overwhelmed government unable to shoulder the lingering costs of reunification, unemployment, and possible social unrest on the road ahead.  

In this light, on Monday, November the 9th, 2009, I will be in bed early. Nothing special to commemorate. After all, evacuating my country may not be such a bad idea after all, as an individual project.