Election slogan that upset Merkel: "We have more to offer"
I was talking to a teacher in Leipzig about his students and their response to the fall of the Berlin wall. “Whether it’s 1789 or 1989—it’s all the same to them,” he told me. “They don’t know much about either.” The aftermath of the German Democratic Republic has lasted half as long as its short, inglorious life, but young east Germans already treat it as a distant world.
The debates, arguments and clashes of that time are still, however, keenly felt by those who were there. They still define friendships and antipathies, what is remembered and what is forgotten. And they are felt most sharply by east Germany’s intellectuals, protestors and politicians. Some were left behind by the speed of unification and a few have risen to positions of power—most notably Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Merkel’s comfortable win in September’s election allowed her to return to central Berlin’s massive glass-and-steel chancellor’s residence, her reward for twice being elected leader of the unified Germany. By contrast, whatever advantages are derived from being the last (and the only freely elected) leader of East Germany, office grandeur isn’t one of them. Lothar de Maizière works on Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse, close to where the main east-west crossing clearance point—the “palace of tears”—used to be. It’s an old-fashioned building in an area given a giant makeover in the past decade. His office is decorated only with legal reference books, a single oil painting and a desk lamp that’s been around since Erich Honecker. Three tins of goulash are stacked on the shelf.
He is my first stop on a trip through the old east, undertaken for Prospect 20 years on from my time as a young journalist during 1989’s autumn of giddying changes. We all remember the earnest intellectuals who shaped events. But what do they make of its legacy now East Germany is, as the late writer Stefan Heym put it, a “footnote in world history”?
De Maizière spans three eras—the old German Democratic Republic (GDR), the transition and the new east. The son of a pastor, he used to defend dissidents, a now redundant legal speciality. Instead he practises commercial law. Back in April 1990, the Christian Democrats (CDU) won a resounding victory in the GDR elections with the promise of a speedy national reunion between the blighted east and prosperous west. De Maizière believes that a lengthier transition would have been better. Not that it mattered. “We were rolled over by Helmut Kohl,” he says, “and I soon discovered that there was no space for anyone else alongside him.” The transition was a clash between reformers—who wanted the east to bring something distinct to the unification process—and the irresistible forcefield that was Chancellor Kohl. He had his eye on history and had a shrewd understanding of the Ossis (easterners), who wanted no more experiments and hurled themselves gratefully into the arms of the Wessis (westerners). The masses left the intellectuals behind.
It’s striking how much this rankles, even now. De Maizière describes his first meeting with Kohl after the elections. “I had been listening to the albums of the [west German] pop singer Herbert Grönemeyer and I suggested to Kohl that he seemed to express the hopes and fears of people better than the political class.” One can only imagine the huge Kohl looking pityingly at the small, bird-like De Maizière as he said this. De Maizière also wanted to set up an advisory commission of academics, theologians and musical experts. “I said there should be a new politics to show that Germany has changed… Kohl said that he didn’t see any reason for anything to be very different… His idea was the same Germany, just larger.” De Maizière was duly sidelined, as unification was completed the same October. The celebrations were moving, if you enjoy flag-waving events with a lot of Beethoven.
Such stories make De Maizière sound like a political simpleton but he’s a thoughtful man. He gave an elegant speech at the final session of the East German parliament, quoting Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hyperion on the limits of state power and articulating the loss and disorientation many felt amid the jubilation of unity. “You have to leave a city,” he once said, “before you realise how high its towers stood over you.” I tell him I remember that line because it is so true of the east. “It’s Nietzsche,” he says, “But I didn’t say that, in case it caused a fuss. You know what it’s like with the Germans and Nietzsche.”
Like a lot of graduates of 1989, De Maizière wasn’t well suited to the politics of an established democracy. There was one notable exception, a protégé of his called Angela Merkel. “I brought her into politics,” he remembers. “She’d come out of the Democratic Awakening movement (the centre-right opposition group of 1989) and she was our deputy press spokesman in the eastern Christian Democrats. She’d whisk through the international newspapers, filleting out the key points, and she had a clear way of approaching problems, an extraordinary focus and rationality. I guessed this wasn’t going to be the limit of her ambitions.” This was Merkel in her “milkmaid” years—a description coined by the political satirists of East Berlin’s Distel cabaret theatre.
That description captured perfectly her ruddy complexion, pudding-bowl hair and slight lisp. “She was so shy that if you complimented her on a nice dress, she would get so flustered, you almost felt bad for doing it,” recalls De Maizière. And when Kohl asked for a female minister from the east “for soft issues, the family and suchlike,” he sent Merkel along.
De Maizière’s post-unity period hasn’t been so untroubled. His work as a lawyer for dissidents gave him clearance to visit Berlin’s notorious Hohenschönhausen prison, where many political prisoners ended up being interrogated. (It’s the prison recreated in the film The Lives of Others, an accurate depiction of what could happen to those on the wrong side of the state’s limited tolerance for dissent.) After the wall fell, De Maizière was identified as an Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (Unofficial Co-operator) by the Stasi’s central card archive. He insists he did not pass on information to the secret police: “If you went to Hohenschönhausen to see your client or discuss the case with the prosecution, then naturally you were talking to the Stasi. They were the prosecutors, they ran the prisons: you were part of the process.” He accepts that the position of lawyers in the east was invidious. “Did we end up too close to the system, in effect perpetuating it? What would have been the alternative? Refusing help to those who needed it?” After an inquiry, he was allowed to continue practising.
***
Vera Lengsfeld was on the other end of all this. She was part of a recklessly brave group of dissidents who, from 1988, publicly opposed the dictatorship without knowing what the personal consequences would be. She experienced one of the worst aspects of the Stasi state: her husband, Knud Wollenberger, turned out to have worked with the secret police—and informed on her. Yet she was a rare dissident: she came out of the old communist party, the Socialist Unity party, joining as a young academic in 1975. When she was expelled, in 1983, she lost her research post and worked as a beekeeper and translator while organising protests. Such protests—part of a wider dissatisfaction with the one-party state—were gaining in strength during 1988, but there was no sign that the Honecker regime would embrace Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms. Protestors faced prison or expulsion. When Lengsfeld was arrested that January before a demonstration, taken to Hohenschönhausen and charged for “attempted riotous assembly,” it was the latter.
We talk in a cafe in east Berlin’s Pankow district, with rows of kindergarten children drinking milkshakes on the step; one of those niches in the city which looks largely unchanged. She never refers to her ex-husband by his first name. “He warned me about the demo very insistently,” she recalls, “I think he was trying to protect me, by stopping me going—but I was determined. Now I realise that his case officer had warned him I would be arrested.” She disputed the terms of her expulsion with her lawyer Gregor Gysi. (Today Gysi is one of the leaders of the party Die Linke—The Left—the successor of East Germany’s communists.) I tell her what De Maizière said about defence lawyers. She snorts with derision: “Gysi knew everything about the authorities’ plan to get me out of the country. He pushed the solution at me, even when I resisted it. Of course, we trusted these people, they were all we had. But they were hand-in-glove with the Stasi. It sickens me that they now portray it as something else.”
Only on the morning of 9th November, the last day the wall stood, did she return to East Germany. “They were unsure what to do at the border. I was among a lot of pensioners returning home, and the border guard wouldn’t let me pass. But the grannies started chanting ‘Let her in!’ and drumming their feet and their walking sticks. It was unimaginable: a grannies’ revolt at the East German border. I knew at that moment that it was all over.” When the Stasi files were opened she found out that 8o people had monitored her movements—and one of them, codenamed Donald, could only be her husband. “So one day we were a normal, intact family: the next we were completely shattered. I just told him to leave.” Nowadays she sounds more forgiving, not least because her former husband is seriously ill. He came from a Jewish communist household; his father had narrowly escaped being sent to the death camps. “I think he had a very Jewish idea of the integrity of the family and was afraid that what I was doing would threaten that. But he did betray me: you can’t change that. I’ve never understood it wholly. I just get better at living with the fact that I don’t understand it.”
Dissidents find it hard to assimilate into new power structures; they like their own way and don’t adjust easily to hierarchies. Lengsfeld became a Christian Democrat MP, helping to pass a law guaranteeing ongoing access to the Stasi files. But she did not prosper and eventually lost her seat in a boundary change. She doesn’t give up easily though: in September’s general election, she fought the unwinnable seat of Berlin-centre, just “to annoy the old communists.” Even then she ended up in hot water for a poster showing her décolletage next to Merkel’s capacious bosom, under the slogan: “We have more to offer.” Merkel did not see the funny side. De Maizière claimed to me that the files contribute to a sense of lasting division. “I honestly think it would have been better to leave them to historians. If I grew up in Dresden and apply for a job, they can pull out a file on me, without any knowledge of context or circumstance. But if I come from, say, Hamburg, the state has nothing on me. I could be just as much of a swine.” He and Lengsfeld stand on opposite banks of a river, contemplating the same flow of events.
The next day I take the fast train to Leipzig, impressed it isn’t one of the smoking, clanky diesels where the admonishment, “Do not lean out of the windows” was rendered helpfully in Russian. But there’s now graffiti on just about every wall between Berlin and the second city of the east. Freed of the communist disapproval of undesirable self-expression, the urge to spray-paint every surface has been given free rein. Pastor Christian Führer greets me in the busy Leipzig centre, outside St Nicholas church. In 1989, the church was the hub of the peace prayers which gave rise to the demonstrations and earned the city its reputation as the “cradle of the revolution.” Führer is dressed head-to-toe in bleached denim. With a shock of white hair and a briefcase covered in peace stickers, he looks like a 1980s protestor stranded in time.
He is from a religious family: his father became a vicar in 1929, “so I grew up knowing a thing or two about the church in dictatorship.” He never doubted his mission and says, on the risks of protest, that “Jesus would not have passed by on the other side.” Führer’s habit of referencing the Lord is disconcerting and hard to argue against. He brings the same conviction to his pacifism as he did to his anti-communism. I challenge him, saying it’s a moral deficit when military intervention can save lives, as in the former Yugoslavia. We don’t get far. “Jesus says no to violence in the Sermon on the Mount.” There’s no such thing, he says, as a just war. Führer’s unwavering positions seem unworldly now, but they helped him to thrive as a clergyman in the fraught late 1980s. He dared to host punk concerts and was a steadying presence when there were rumours of body bags and a Tiananmen-style crackdown by the government. From the pulpit he now opposes the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and holds prayers for German hostages in the Yemen. But he doesn’t regret the speed of unification. “We lost the central role of that autumn quite quickly—and I was happy to hand over to the politicians. We still have people coming to the church to talk about their lives and beliefs. I’m not short of troubled souls to minister to.”
***
The paradox of the east, 20 years on, is that the mood is often worse than circumstances merit. Leipzig is the revelation of my visit: a place whose jewels were hidden under layers of grime, now an attractive city of food markets, antique shops and cafes. There is still high unemployment, but decent welfare provision too. And if not all the landscapes are “blooming” as Kohl promised, the swift restoration of towns and cities is impressive. A desire to reinforce the blessings of unification persuaded Hubert Burda, head of a publishing empire that flourished after the war, to launch a product for another period of rebirth: Super Illu a magazine aimed at a mass audience in the old east Germany.
Intellectuals loathe Super Illu in the way that the British thinking classes used to fixate on the Sun. It peddles a message of unalloyed optimism and focuses on the material advances east Germans have made. “The facts of unity are better than the mood,” is one headline in the “1989, 20 years on” special edition. Readers are reminded of the investment that flowed eastwards since 1989: more than 1 trillion euros.Some headlines are even reminiscent of the old state press’s diet of good news: “The Semper opera house in Dresden earns international praise,” and “Prosperity for all: high satisfaction with living standards and living conditions.”
Super Illu, which claims more than 3m readers, is an upbeat corrective to some of the moodier introspection the 20th anniversary has produced. Monika Maron, who won the prestigious German Kleist prize in 1992 for her novels about the old GDR and its transition, has carved out something of a niche as the author who doesn’t complain about unification either. Instead she decries the “eternal hint of regret” that surrounds literature about the GDR, and takes a slap at the grand old man of German letters, Günter Grass, a unification Eeyore. Her own story might account for her perspective: she was born in west Berlin to a communist mother who took her to live in the east and then married a prominent politician. In east Berlin, Maron became a fashionable young writer—until she published a novel highlighting problems at an east German chemical factory. She emigrated to the west in 1988 and has just published a much-discussed work following the stories of entrepreneurs who build up a lucrative solar energy business in the place of the declining traditional industries.
After the disillusioned dissidents and former office holders I’d met, Maron’s perky approach was refreshing. She defends Kohl’s “certainty of instinct” and his handling of the aftermath, including the massive subsidies to rebuild east Germany’s blighted “chemical triangle.” I ask her why the dissident movement made no impact on post-unity Germany. “Because they had nothing to say,” she cries and smacks the table. “They perpetrated a downbeat mood. When it came to the big decisions they should have been stopping, like the introduction of an illiberal abortion law in line with west Germany, they couldn’t join forces to do anything.” The prominent ’89ers don’t enjoy a high standing. “All those round tables and to what end?” says Maron. “Our intellectuals were running around saying they wanted a ‘different east Germany.’ Oh please. We’d have ended up with no currency union, cut off from the world. People had had enough.”
***
On the whole, east Germany’s intellectuals don’t like The Lives of Others. They say it reduces memories of the period to a mere reckoning with the Stasi bad guys and want a more differentiated approach to remembrance. This debate broke out again earlier this year, when Wolfgang Thierse, a prominent Social Democrat from east Germany, ended up in a bad-tempered war of words with Hubertus Knabe, the forceful head of a museum that commemorates the activities of the Stasi and it impact on victims. “Not until the communist dictatorship is as firmly in mind in Germany as the criminal regime of the National Socialists will we really have succeeded,” says Knabe. “You have to ask why mainstream politicians like Thierse want to avoid that.”
Wolfgang Thierse is the classic bearded intellectual ’89er—albeit with facial hair more neatly trimmed—and is now a stalwart of the Berlin establishment and vice president of the parliament. “This whole rhetoric is about equating people’s experience of the GDR with the Stasi state,” he told me when we met. “It’s a morbid fascination with one aspect of life, which makes people in the east feel like second-class citizens.” The political landscape in the east after unification quickly divided between the old Socialist Unity party and the eastern branches of west German parties. The Left party, the successor to the Socialist Unity party, is now a wide coalition, including hardline anti-capitalists but excluding Trotskyites. It won 28 per cent of the vote in the east in September’s election, compared with just 20 per cent for the SPD.
Many of the old battles of the German left still resonate here. Thierse reserves a special anger for The Left because it “takes away progressive votes from the SPD—as its forebears did at a dangerous time in Germany.” That said, the far right were still the big losers in the recent elections, with the protest vote moving leftwards. Thierse is gloomy about the SPD’s immediate future, as well he might after such a defeat. He alludes to the “uncertain direction after Schröder’s chancellorship,” but that hardly covers the bewildering array of leaders and lack of grip on the public imagination which have driven it to its worst result in decades. As for Merkel, a fellow campaigner in 1989, Thierse is more critical than most. “She’s been chancellor for a term already and who really knows what she believes? I didn’t know then, when she followed the drift and ended up in the CDU. I don’t know now.”
Watching the newly elected chancellor, it’s striking how her speech has become gesamtdeutsch, or “unified German.” That Mecklenburg accent of the milkmaid years is just an echo. Her blandness seems calculated to make her appear unspecific to one part of Germany. Yet divisions still play on her mind; on election night, one of the first remarks she made was that she wanted to be “the chancellor of all Germans.”
It is the ultimate tribute to Germany’s unification that she is. At the end of my odyssey, I visit my oldest friend in the country, who first showed me East Berlin when we were students and used to walk with me to Checkpoint Charlie, to wave goodbye as I disappeared back to my world which he had never seen. He lives in his crumbling tenement flat, votes for The Left and still grumbles about the imposition of western ways and vices. After he’s finished complaining, he hands me a cheeky postcard saying, “Give Wessis a chance.” We really have come a long way from the wall.
The debates, arguments and clashes of that time are still, however, keenly felt by those who were there. They still define friendships and antipathies, what is remembered and what is forgotten. And they are felt most sharply by east Germany’s intellectuals, protestors and politicians. Some were left behind by the speed of unification and a few have risen to positions of power—most notably Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Merkel’s comfortable win in September’s election allowed her to return to central Berlin’s massive glass-and-steel chancellor’s residence, her reward for twice being elected leader of the unified Germany. By contrast, whatever advantages are derived from being the last (and the only freely elected) leader of East Germany, office grandeur isn’t one of them. Lothar de Maizière works on Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse, close to where the main east-west crossing clearance point—the “palace of tears”—used to be. It’s an old-fashioned building in an area given a giant makeover in the past decade. His office is decorated only with legal reference books, a single oil painting and a desk lamp that’s been around since Erich Honecker. Three tins of goulash are stacked on the shelf.
He is my first stop on a trip through the old east, undertaken for Prospect 20 years on from my time as a young journalist during 1989’s autumn of giddying changes. We all remember the earnest intellectuals who shaped events. But what do they make of its legacy now East Germany is, as the late writer Stefan Heym put it, a “footnote in world history”?
De Maizière spans three eras—the old German Democratic Republic (GDR), the transition and the new east. The son of a pastor, he used to defend dissidents, a now redundant legal speciality. Instead he practises commercial law. Back in April 1990, the Christian Democrats (CDU) won a resounding victory in the GDR elections with the promise of a speedy national reunion between the blighted east and prosperous west. De Maizière believes that a lengthier transition would have been better. Not that it mattered. “We were rolled over by Helmut Kohl,” he says, “and I soon discovered that there was no space for anyone else alongside him.” The transition was a clash between reformers—who wanted the east to bring something distinct to the unification process—and the irresistible forcefield that was Chancellor Kohl. He had his eye on history and had a shrewd understanding of the Ossis (easterners), who wanted no more experiments and hurled themselves gratefully into the arms of the Wessis (westerners). The masses left the intellectuals behind.
It’s striking how much this rankles, even now. De Maizière describes his first meeting with Kohl after the elections. “I had been listening to the albums of the [west German] pop singer Herbert Grönemeyer and I suggested to Kohl that he seemed to express the hopes and fears of people better than the political class.” One can only imagine the huge Kohl looking pityingly at the small, bird-like De Maizière as he said this. De Maizière also wanted to set up an advisory commission of academics, theologians and musical experts. “I said there should be a new politics to show that Germany has changed… Kohl said that he didn’t see any reason for anything to be very different… His idea was the same Germany, just larger.” De Maizière was duly sidelined, as unification was completed the same October. The celebrations were moving, if you enjoy flag-waving events with a lot of Beethoven.
Such stories make De Maizière sound like a political simpleton but he’s a thoughtful man. He gave an elegant speech at the final session of the East German parliament, quoting Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hyperion on the limits of state power and articulating the loss and disorientation many felt amid the jubilation of unity. “You have to leave a city,” he once said, “before you realise how high its towers stood over you.” I tell him I remember that line because it is so true of the east. “It’s Nietzsche,” he says, “But I didn’t say that, in case it caused a fuss. You know what it’s like with the Germans and Nietzsche.”
Like a lot of graduates of 1989, De Maizière wasn’t well suited to the politics of an established democracy. There was one notable exception, a protégé of his called Angela Merkel. “I brought her into politics,” he remembers. “She’d come out of the Democratic Awakening movement (the centre-right opposition group of 1989) and she was our deputy press spokesman in the eastern Christian Democrats. She’d whisk through the international newspapers, filleting out the key points, and she had a clear way of approaching problems, an extraordinary focus and rationality. I guessed this wasn’t going to be the limit of her ambitions.” This was Merkel in her “milkmaid” years—a description coined by the political satirists of East Berlin’s Distel cabaret theatre.
That description captured perfectly her ruddy complexion, pudding-bowl hair and slight lisp. “She was so shy that if you complimented her on a nice dress, she would get so flustered, you almost felt bad for doing it,” recalls De Maizière. And when Kohl asked for a female minister from the east “for soft issues, the family and suchlike,” he sent Merkel along.
De Maizière’s post-unity period hasn’t been so untroubled. His work as a lawyer for dissidents gave him clearance to visit Berlin’s notorious Hohenschönhausen prison, where many political prisoners ended up being interrogated. (It’s the prison recreated in the film The Lives of Others, an accurate depiction of what could happen to those on the wrong side of the state’s limited tolerance for dissent.) After the wall fell, De Maizière was identified as an Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (Unofficial Co-operator) by the Stasi’s central card archive. He insists he did not pass on information to the secret police: “If you went to Hohenschönhausen to see your client or discuss the case with the prosecution, then naturally you were talking to the Stasi. They were the prosecutors, they ran the prisons: you were part of the process.” He accepts that the position of lawyers in the east was invidious. “Did we end up too close to the system, in effect perpetuating it? What would have been the alternative? Refusing help to those who needed it?” After an inquiry, he was allowed to continue practising.
***
Vera Lengsfeld was on the other end of all this. She was part of a recklessly brave group of dissidents who, from 1988, publicly opposed the dictatorship without knowing what the personal consequences would be. She experienced one of the worst aspects of the Stasi state: her husband, Knud Wollenberger, turned out to have worked with the secret police—and informed on her. Yet she was a rare dissident: she came out of the old communist party, the Socialist Unity party, joining as a young academic in 1975. When she was expelled, in 1983, she lost her research post and worked as a beekeeper and translator while organising protests. Such protests—part of a wider dissatisfaction with the one-party state—were gaining in strength during 1988, but there was no sign that the Honecker regime would embrace Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms. Protestors faced prison or expulsion. When Lengsfeld was arrested that January before a demonstration, taken to Hohenschönhausen and charged for “attempted riotous assembly,” it was the latter.
We talk in a cafe in east Berlin’s Pankow district, with rows of kindergarten children drinking milkshakes on the step; one of those niches in the city which looks largely unchanged. She never refers to her ex-husband by his first name. “He warned me about the demo very insistently,” she recalls, “I think he was trying to protect me, by stopping me going—but I was determined. Now I realise that his case officer had warned him I would be arrested.” She disputed the terms of her expulsion with her lawyer Gregor Gysi. (Today Gysi is one of the leaders of the party Die Linke—The Left—the successor of East Germany’s communists.) I tell her what De Maizière said about defence lawyers. She snorts with derision: “Gysi knew everything about the authorities’ plan to get me out of the country. He pushed the solution at me, even when I resisted it. Of course, we trusted these people, they were all we had. But they were hand-in-glove with the Stasi. It sickens me that they now portray it as something else.”
Only on the morning of 9th November, the last day the wall stood, did she return to East Germany. “They were unsure what to do at the border. I was among a lot of pensioners returning home, and the border guard wouldn’t let me pass. But the grannies started chanting ‘Let her in!’ and drumming their feet and their walking sticks. It was unimaginable: a grannies’ revolt at the East German border. I knew at that moment that it was all over.” When the Stasi files were opened she found out that 8o people had monitored her movements—and one of them, codenamed Donald, could only be her husband. “So one day we were a normal, intact family: the next we were completely shattered. I just told him to leave.” Nowadays she sounds more forgiving, not least because her former husband is seriously ill. He came from a Jewish communist household; his father had narrowly escaped being sent to the death camps. “I think he had a very Jewish idea of the integrity of the family and was afraid that what I was doing would threaten that. But he did betray me: you can’t change that. I’ve never understood it wholly. I just get better at living with the fact that I don’t understand it.”
Dissidents find it hard to assimilate into new power structures; they like their own way and don’t adjust easily to hierarchies. Lengsfeld became a Christian Democrat MP, helping to pass a law guaranteeing ongoing access to the Stasi files. But she did not prosper and eventually lost her seat in a boundary change. She doesn’t give up easily though: in September’s general election, she fought the unwinnable seat of Berlin-centre, just “to annoy the old communists.” Even then she ended up in hot water for a poster showing her décolletage next to Merkel’s capacious bosom, under the slogan: “We have more to offer.” Merkel did not see the funny side. De Maizière claimed to me that the files contribute to a sense of lasting division. “I honestly think it would have been better to leave them to historians. If I grew up in Dresden and apply for a job, they can pull out a file on me, without any knowledge of context or circumstance. But if I come from, say, Hamburg, the state has nothing on me. I could be just as much of a swine.” He and Lengsfeld stand on opposite banks of a river, contemplating the same flow of events.
The next day I take the fast train to Leipzig, impressed it isn’t one of the smoking, clanky diesels where the admonishment, “Do not lean out of the windows” was rendered helpfully in Russian. But there’s now graffiti on just about every wall between Berlin and the second city of the east. Freed of the communist disapproval of undesirable self-expression, the urge to spray-paint every surface has been given free rein. Pastor Christian Führer greets me in the busy Leipzig centre, outside St Nicholas church. In 1989, the church was the hub of the peace prayers which gave rise to the demonstrations and earned the city its reputation as the “cradle of the revolution.” Führer is dressed head-to-toe in bleached denim. With a shock of white hair and a briefcase covered in peace stickers, he looks like a 1980s protestor stranded in time.
He is from a religious family: his father became a vicar in 1929, “so I grew up knowing a thing or two about the church in dictatorship.” He never doubted his mission and says, on the risks of protest, that “Jesus would not have passed by on the other side.” Führer’s habit of referencing the Lord is disconcerting and hard to argue against. He brings the same conviction to his pacifism as he did to his anti-communism. I challenge him, saying it’s a moral deficit when military intervention can save lives, as in the former Yugoslavia. We don’t get far. “Jesus says no to violence in the Sermon on the Mount.” There’s no such thing, he says, as a just war. Führer’s unwavering positions seem unworldly now, but they helped him to thrive as a clergyman in the fraught late 1980s. He dared to host punk concerts and was a steadying presence when there were rumours of body bags and a Tiananmen-style crackdown by the government. From the pulpit he now opposes the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and holds prayers for German hostages in the Yemen. But he doesn’t regret the speed of unification. “We lost the central role of that autumn quite quickly—and I was happy to hand over to the politicians. We still have people coming to the church to talk about their lives and beliefs. I’m not short of troubled souls to minister to.”
***
The paradox of the east, 20 years on, is that the mood is often worse than circumstances merit. Leipzig is the revelation of my visit: a place whose jewels were hidden under layers of grime, now an attractive city of food markets, antique shops and cafes. There is still high unemployment, but decent welfare provision too. And if not all the landscapes are “blooming” as Kohl promised, the swift restoration of towns and cities is impressive. A desire to reinforce the blessings of unification persuaded Hubert Burda, head of a publishing empire that flourished after the war, to launch a product for another period of rebirth: Super Illu a magazine aimed at a mass audience in the old east Germany.
Intellectuals loathe Super Illu in the way that the British thinking classes used to fixate on the Sun. It peddles a message of unalloyed optimism and focuses on the material advances east Germans have made. “The facts of unity are better than the mood,” is one headline in the “1989, 20 years on” special edition. Readers are reminded of the investment that flowed eastwards since 1989: more than 1 trillion euros.Some headlines are even reminiscent of the old state press’s diet of good news: “The Semper opera house in Dresden earns international praise,” and “Prosperity for all: high satisfaction with living standards and living conditions.”
Super Illu, which claims more than 3m readers, is an upbeat corrective to some of the moodier introspection the 20th anniversary has produced. Monika Maron, who won the prestigious German Kleist prize in 1992 for her novels about the old GDR and its transition, has carved out something of a niche as the author who doesn’t complain about unification either. Instead she decries the “eternal hint of regret” that surrounds literature about the GDR, and takes a slap at the grand old man of German letters, Günter Grass, a unification Eeyore. Her own story might account for her perspective: she was born in west Berlin to a communist mother who took her to live in the east and then married a prominent politician. In east Berlin, Maron became a fashionable young writer—until she published a novel highlighting problems at an east German chemical factory. She emigrated to the west in 1988 and has just published a much-discussed work following the stories of entrepreneurs who build up a lucrative solar energy business in the place of the declining traditional industries.
After the disillusioned dissidents and former office holders I’d met, Maron’s perky approach was refreshing. She defends Kohl’s “certainty of instinct” and his handling of the aftermath, including the massive subsidies to rebuild east Germany’s blighted “chemical triangle.” I ask her why the dissident movement made no impact on post-unity Germany. “Because they had nothing to say,” she cries and smacks the table. “They perpetrated a downbeat mood. When it came to the big decisions they should have been stopping, like the introduction of an illiberal abortion law in line with west Germany, they couldn’t join forces to do anything.” The prominent ’89ers don’t enjoy a high standing. “All those round tables and to what end?” says Maron. “Our intellectuals were running around saying they wanted a ‘different east Germany.’ Oh please. We’d have ended up with no currency union, cut off from the world. People had had enough.”
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On the whole, east Germany’s intellectuals don’t like The Lives of Others. They say it reduces memories of the period to a mere reckoning with the Stasi bad guys and want a more differentiated approach to remembrance. This debate broke out again earlier this year, when Wolfgang Thierse, a prominent Social Democrat from east Germany, ended up in a bad-tempered war of words with Hubertus Knabe, the forceful head of a museum that commemorates the activities of the Stasi and it impact on victims. “Not until the communist dictatorship is as firmly in mind in Germany as the criminal regime of the National Socialists will we really have succeeded,” says Knabe. “You have to ask why mainstream politicians like Thierse want to avoid that.”
Wolfgang Thierse is the classic bearded intellectual ’89er—albeit with facial hair more neatly trimmed—and is now a stalwart of the Berlin establishment and vice president of the parliament. “This whole rhetoric is about equating people’s experience of the GDR with the Stasi state,” he told me when we met. “It’s a morbid fascination with one aspect of life, which makes people in the east feel like second-class citizens.” The political landscape in the east after unification quickly divided between the old Socialist Unity party and the eastern branches of west German parties. The Left party, the successor to the Socialist Unity party, is now a wide coalition, including hardline anti-capitalists but excluding Trotskyites. It won 28 per cent of the vote in the east in September’s election, compared with just 20 per cent for the SPD.
Many of the old battles of the German left still resonate here. Thierse reserves a special anger for The Left because it “takes away progressive votes from the SPD—as its forebears did at a dangerous time in Germany.” That said, the far right were still the big losers in the recent elections, with the protest vote moving leftwards. Thierse is gloomy about the SPD’s immediate future, as well he might after such a defeat. He alludes to the “uncertain direction after Schröder’s chancellorship,” but that hardly covers the bewildering array of leaders and lack of grip on the public imagination which have driven it to its worst result in decades. As for Merkel, a fellow campaigner in 1989, Thierse is more critical than most. “She’s been chancellor for a term already and who really knows what she believes? I didn’t know then, when she followed the drift and ended up in the CDU. I don’t know now.”
Watching the newly elected chancellor, it’s striking how her speech has become gesamtdeutsch, or “unified German.” That Mecklenburg accent of the milkmaid years is just an echo. Her blandness seems calculated to make her appear unspecific to one part of Germany. Yet divisions still play on her mind; on election night, one of the first remarks she made was that she wanted to be “the chancellor of all Germans.”
It is the ultimate tribute to Germany’s unification that she is. At the end of my odyssey, I visit my oldest friend in the country, who first showed me East Berlin when we were students and used to walk with me to Checkpoint Charlie, to wave goodbye as I disappeared back to my world which he had never seen. He lives in his crumbling tenement flat, votes for The Left and still grumbles about the imposition of western ways and vices. After he’s finished complaining, he hands me a cheeky postcard saying, “Give Wessis a chance.” We really have come a long way from the wall.
