Germany’s former chancellor Helmut Kohl on Tuesday admitted that 15 years after the demise of the Berlin Wall the divisions between East and West Germany ran ”much deeper” than he had originally anticipated.
Speaking on the anniversary of the wall’s fall on November 9 1989, Kohl said that Germans had ”every reason to be proud” of their country.
But he admitted that a lot needed to be done to create the ”flowering landscapes” he famously promised East Germans in 1990, immediately after Germany’s reunification.
In another indication of the frustration that is felt over the process of integration, Germany’s opposition leader, Angela Merkel, who grew up in East Germany near the Polish border, on Tuesday accused Gerhard Schröder of not understanding what unification meant. ”He’s not interested,” she said.
Tuesday’s anniversary of the day East Germany’s communist rulers opened the wall almost by accident, sparking off scenes of joyous celebration, comes at a time of pervasive national gloom.
The lingering and sometimes bitter divisions between the former communist east and the west of the country have not gone away — not least because of the high unemployment in the east, currently running at 18%.
In a subdued and rainy ceremony in Berlin, the city’s mayor Klaus Wowereit on Tuesday laid a wreath at a preserved section of the wall, in memory of the 250 East Germans who died while trying to cross it between 1961 and 1989.
A service was also held in a reunited chapel near the old border.
Germany’s Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, meanwhile, called November 9 ”a day of triumph for freedom and democracy”.
In the 15 years since the fall of the wall Germany had achieved a lot, he said, thanks to the efforts of both lots of Germans. But the country now needed to make ”a real national effort” if it was to complete the job of German reunification, he added.
One former East German pro-democracy activist, though, on Tuesday hinted that there was not a great deal to celebrate.
”Many people no longer value the wonderful gift of freedom because they say what use is freedom if they are shut out from their jobs,” Friedrich Schorlemmer, a Protestant minister, told German radio.
Unemployment in former East German states or Länder is twice as high as in those of the West. The disillusionment shows in elections, when about one in five East Germans regularly votes for the PDS, the successor party to the Communists.
As time has passed, Germans have also focused on the staggering cost of rebuilding the East, rather than the peaceful revolution that brought about the demise of the German Democratic Republic, as the former East Germany was officially called.
Commentators pondering yesterday’s low-key anniversary admit that stereotypes persist. West Germans regard ”Ossis”, or East Germans, as lazy and difficult; East Germans regard ”Wessis”, or West Germans, as pompous and stuck-up.
”The feeling of happiness of that fairytale night when the wall fell and the Cold War ended has not disappeared. But this historical moment cannot be perpetuated for ever without becoming kitsch,” the newspaper Die Welt said.
Tuesday’s papers were also full of articles recalling how the wall fell — after a Communist official, Günter Schabowski, announced that the East German state was lifting restrictions on travel to the West.
Asked by an Italian reporter when the new regulation came into effect, Schabowski fumbled, before adding as an afterthought: ”Immediately, without delay.” By 9pm East Berliners were jamming the first crossing to West Berlin.
Later that night thousands of Germans from both sides were dancing on the wall.
The patriotic credentials of Germany’s Social Democrat-Green coalition government have recently been under fire after it suggested last week that Germany’s Day of National Unity could be abolished. The move would boost growth, it argued.
The plan was swiftly dropped. – Guardian Unlimited Â