The fallen Wall and a search for history
One of my very earliest memories is of walking with my parents and older sister on the banks of the River Elbe near Dannenberg in what was then (in the mid-1950s) West Germany. At that point the Elbe marked the border between the Federal Republic of (West) Germany and the (East) German Democratic Republic. The river here is very wide, but as I walked with my parents they explained that the men I could just about see on the other side were armed border guards and that they would stop anyone who wanted to swim across the river. The idea of wanting to swim across this vast river seemed absurd to me, and so I quietly thought of the role of these guards as being one of wanting to help people do what was in their best interests. Probably they thought the same. When just a few weeks later my father explained that one such would-be swimmer had been shot by the guards on entering the water, I did think that their particular service of helping citizens had been taken beyond reasonable limits, and as a three-year-old I changed my views.
But right then, East Germany was haemorrhaging citizens. By the end of the 1950s over two million people had fled their republic to seek a new life in ours. And so in August 1961 the most porous part of the East-West frontier – the divided city of Berlin – was closed with the erection of a wall that surrounded the western enclave. Even then, there continued to be regular (and often ingenious, but also often fatal) attempts to flee from the East to the West, including continuing attempts at the River Elbe where I walked as a child.
Today, November 9, marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall; or to put it more accurately, of the decision by the East German authorities (who were at that point in serious difficulty) to open the wall to informal transit in both directions. Not long afterwards the Wall did come down, and not long afterwards again East and West Germany were reunited. And as we know, the American political economist Francis Fukuyama declared at that time that we had reached ‘the end of history‘: the competition between ideologies was over for ever, and the West’s liberal capitalism had won.
Of course history didn’t end – and for the record and to be fair, Fukuyama has developed a much more nuanced view of international affairs since then, indeed last year he supported Barack Obama’s successful bid for the US presidency. There is, it is true, no longer a recognisable global ideological conflict between a capitalist and a socialist world view; but this has given way to lots of other conflicts, some of them very hard to contain in philosophical terms. The events of September 11, 2001, and what followed them were infinitely more alarming in many ways than the articulated and feared threats of the Cold War that, at least in Europe, never produced any actual conflict. Meanwhile in the states of the former East Germany, which often have had to suffer greater economic and social problems than the former West, a significant minority have started to feel some nostalgia for the old times, a condition that has been called ‘Ostalgie’ (a contraction of ‘East Nostalgia’).
Whatever may be the view of it now, the fall of the Berlin Wall was one of the very greatest iconic moments in history, unforgettable to all those who saw it, even if just on a television screen. Even if it made no clear statements about ideologies, it did declare that attempts by a state to suppress its own citizens could not work for ever. But it did not solve all of Germany’s problems for all time, never mind the world’s. Over the years, governments have increasingly failed to deliver a vision of where they think we should go. Economic boom conditions dulled some of the questions about vision, but they have now returned with a vengeance. So the right mood for the 20th anniversary celebrations of the fall of the Wall is not one of triumph and self-satisfaction, but one of re-appraisal of what western developed countries have been doing, and what they intend to do now.
That’s a job for all of us, and the time is right for it.
Explore posts in the same categories: history, politicsTags: Berlin, Berlin Wall, East Germany, Francis Fukuyama, Germany, ideology
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University Blog 
November 9, 2009 at 2:16 am
One of the things that I find hard to believe, you have students that were not born at that time. This is not a problem I have with being twenty years older, but that adults do not need the geo-political mind-set that could be had at any street corner in 1988. We all had this sort of DEFCON measure of threat and could analyse potential changes where some African State leanings would upset things.
Or the collapse of some savage regime,
Portugal, leaving her under resourced colonies to fend for themselves.
November 9, 2009 at 1:00 pm
Ross Douthat’s column in the New York Times addresses the general theme of the West, particularly the United States, external challenges after the fall of Commumisim, I particularly like how he defines Fukuyama’s famous quote:
“Twenty years later, we still haven’t come to terms with the scope of our deliverance. Francis Fukuyama famously described the post-Communist era as “the end of history.” By this, he didn’t mean the end of events — wars and famines, financial panics and terrorist bombings. He meant the disappearance of any enduring, existential threat to liberal democracy and free-market capitalism.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/opinion/09douthat.html?_r=1
November 9, 2009 at 11:53 pm
Just returned from an interesting evening arranged by the Student German Society. They commemorated 1989 by building a wall in our building and covering it with graffiti. In the evening, the professor of German started the process of knocking it down and tried to sell remnants to passers-by! Then, on a more serious note, there was a discussion in a completely full lecture theatre with a panel of speakers from Eastern and Western Germany talking personally about their perspectives before throwing the discussion open to the floor where many interesting contributions were made. It was particularly fascinating to here from those from the East and what they spoke of was not some form of kitsch Ostalgie, but something more profound, about a missed opportunity to reform and transform the East before it was swept away in the headlong rush to unification (or ‘assimilation’ as one put it) -where the chants on protests changed from ‘we are the people’ to ‘we are one people’ – leaving a legacy of unemployment and disaffection.
Anyway, captured the wall bit on my little pocket Kodak Zi8…its first outing..roughcuts at http://blip.tv/file/2827620?filename=Iainmacl-GermanSocietyWallEventAndDiscussion817.flv
November 10, 2009 at 1:09 am
Very interesting, Iain. Though I would have to say that I don’t think there was ever any prospect of the survival of a ‘reformed’ German Democratic Republic (East Germany). Also at the time the model it represented was so discredited that any discussion about the adoption of some of its principles could not have got anywhere. Such talk was only ever going to be possible many years later, as is happening now. Whether it will now make any difference is very hard to say…