Before the wall came down, Gerd Glanze was an entertainer in East Berlin, telling risky jokes about life under communism.
Occasionally, the feared secret police would wave a warning finger at him, when the jokes became too politically charged. Then he would find new ways of mixing ”the fire and pepper”.
These days, Glanze runs the souvenir stall at Eastside Gallery, the longest surviving section of the wall, in an industrial hinterland close to Ostbahnhof station and the neo-gothic bridge spanning the River Spree.
Once a malevolent partition dividing families and lovers, now the wall that cut Germany in half is a muralled tourist attraction where Glanze sells wall chippings, toy Trabant cars and T-shirts.
The wall is now a few fragmented relics, monuments and museums at more iconic points such as Checkpoint Charlie, but the divide it represented remains firmly lodged in German minds. Last week, a poll commissioned by Berlin Free University reported that — 16 years after the wall came down, and 15 years after political reunification that cost $1,5-trillion and wrecked Europe’s largest economy — a quarter of former West Germans and half as many easterners would like the wall back.
The east-west divisions are defined by history, economics and psychology; by education and job opportunities; even by marriage. Prejudice persists between Ossis (easterners) and Wessis (westerners). Ossis — facing high unemployment and low wages — feel like second-class citizens in new Germany. The Wessis begrudge the Bill for the faltering reunification that has poisoned their economy.
The depth of the split was revealed a decade into reunification when the Berliner Kurier newspaper reported that of 15 000 marriages in Berlin, only 400 were ”mixed” — one spouse from the west and one from the east.
Split personality
Few who have studied the implications of Germany’s split personality have any reason to believe it has changed much in the past few years.
At his stall, Glanze is scathing about those who wish the wall back.
”They are stupid. It is the older generation. For the young people, it’s not a topic. But there are people for whom a border still exists. I heard a taxi driver the other day say that he had never been into east Berlin and would never cross the border. I thought he’s a special Mr Arsehole.”
Sascha Seipel is a west Berliner, and a victim of Germany’s struggling economy. He worked as a sound engineer until six years ago when he was laid off. These days he makes a living — like his father — as a taxi driver. As he drives, he points out the monuments of Berlin’s tumultuous history: the Reichstag, the Brandenburg Gate.
While Seipel is happy to go anywhere in Berlin, he admits there is distaste among many for the east.
”The wall still exists in people’s minds. When I cross the city, I say I’m going over to the east. It does not mean anything to me. But when a lot of westerners say that they don’t mean it in a nice way.
”I think the problem has been that in the east they thought that we had all the wealth, they did not realise we had problems too.
”They did not realise the full meaning of freedom. The wall remains for some as a psychological idea, a safety blanket. In the past everything was guaranteed for them, from education to jobs.”
At the Berlin Wall Documentation Centre, Katrin Passens runs education programmes. She agrees there are still people who have not crossed the city.
”I know someone like that — who has not stepped into the east in 15 years.” Passens says even interest in the wall’s history is divided. The schools most keen on her seminars are inevitably from the east.
”Although there are people who want the wall back, what people are saying is they want a return to better social security, a return to low unemployment. Before 1989, both my father and my mother had jobs. My father has lost his and now my mother only works part-time.”
Professor Oskar Niedermayer, a political scientist at Berlin Free University, was one of the authors of last week’s poll.
”I was not surprised by the figures,” he said. ”All of our studies have indicated to us that the friction between east and west is not decreasing. I think we perhaps underestimated the difficulties created by four decades of very different socialisation for the two societies, especially in the east, combined with the reality that has followed.”
Level playing field
After 15 years of political insistence that a level playing field must be created at all cost, it is only now some have begun to question whether that is possible. Germany’s President Horst Köhler, the former head of the International Monetary Fund, became the first senior politician to break that taboo by saying he thought it unlikely the east would ever have the same living standards as the rest of Germany.
Dr Tobias Just, an analyst with Deutsche Bank, believes the excitement of reunification in 1990 was ”dangerously hubristic” and politicians failed to ”manage expectations better on both sides”.
And expectations are represented by a wealth of data. Three years ago, the Shell Youth Study revealed that German youth from both sides have spent the past 15 years in almost identical leisure pursuits but in other fields have radically different outlooks. Among young east Germans, 65% are deeply pessimistic about their future — 20% more than in the west.
The same study described how almost two-thirds of Ossi youth are critical of democracy in Germany, twice the number in the west.
But there are a few signs of hope. The Allensbacher Institute has been measuring Germany’s mood since 1947. Dr Thomas Petersen believes that as Germany approaches the anniversary of reunification on July 1, a new generation is ready to break with the past.
”What we are seeing is the development of a value gap between young east Germans and their parents. It is exactly what we started to see 15 years after the end of Nazism, and also around the same after Franco’s death in Spain. People under 30 in the east now have more ‘Western attitudes’ than west Germany.”
The Berlin Wall may yet finally fall.
Brick by brick
Inspired by the flight of easterners to the west, an economic crisis and worsening Cold War relations, on August 13 1961 the German Democratic Republic (GDR), under Erich Honecker, began to block off East Berlin and the GDR from West Berlin by means of barbed wire and anti-tank obstacles. Rail links above and below ground were cut.
By the time of its completion, a 107km wall followed the border between East and West Berlin. In most places 4m high, there was usually a concrete tube on top. To the east was an illuminated control area (the ”death area”). Refugees who reached it were shot on sight.
The border cut through 192 streets, 97 of them going east to East Berlin, the rest to the surrounding GDR.
At least 100 people were killed at the Berlin Wall: the last was Chris Gueffroy in June 1989. — Guardian Unlimited Â