When I was in Berlin last fall, Germans were still complaining about reunification. Speaking about that invisible but real wall in people’s minds that divides East and West, they often called each other “griping Easterners” and “know-it-all Westerners.”
At times even this summer, when telegenic German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder voyaged theatrically to the burgs of eastern Germany, it seemed as though he were more a French or Belgian tourist than the leader of a united Germany. Politicians sniffed at the journey as “educational travel,” and Der Spiegel featured a cover showing the chancellor standing on the edge of a desert and wearing a safari hat as he set off on his “expedition in an unknown land.”
Yet “unification” is working and is already one of the great accomplishments of recent history. This week marks the 10th anniversary of that historic autumn when communist East Germany collapsed. Contrary to the many dire predictions a decade ago that a reunited Germany would again become a threat to Europe or end up a permanently stunted nation, the country is becoming further incorporated into Europe.
More Top Picks Why Reading Is Hard After A Concussion
What’s more, despite the discouraging fact that the communists won 40 percent of the vote last year in the five Eastern states and the fact that Eastern salaries remain low compared to the West, East Germany is preparing well for the future. It now has a new infrastructure that will soon make it a tremendous European resource. Easterners and Westerners now even cheer for each other’s athletic teams and applaud “German” symphony orchestras and operas.
“Ten years from now, the problems will be far fewer than today,” observed Peter Voss, a German radio chief executive officer, at a symposium on “10 Years of German Unity” at the Freedom Forum’s Newseum here just before the Oct. 3 anniversary. “What’s more, the speed of normalization is now increasing. These were the most difficult years.”
What happened after the high drama of reunification–when 50 years of communist dominance seemed to collapse in the East overnight–can now be seen as less accidental than inevitable. The West Germans substantially underestimated, as did most of the West, the disastrous shape of the Eastern economy. It also did not expect that the Soviet market, upon which East Germany depended, would also collapse, leaving a void that could not quickly be filled.
Perhaps even more serious, most outsiders could not grasp the mental and spiritual destruction that the vicious utopianism of communism had wrought in the East Germans. When communism collapsed, the very identity of the Easterners collapsed with it. Religion had largely been killed, but until reunification, the Easterners could receive state sacraments instead of religious ones. The state answered all.
If there has been one single greatest problem of the last 10 years in Germany it is that men and women whose spiritual life had been lobotomized by communism now could find a substitute for their old “truth” only in the “better ways” of the West. Secular society is an inadequate substitute for faith–at first.
Making the situation even more emotionally loaded was the fact that, after the end of the war in l945, communist East Germany did not go through the intense de-Nazification that the Allied powers imposed upon the former Nazi powers in West Germany. The communists explained that this was not necessary in the East because they already had a cleansing ideology and because “We are already a totally new society.”
So when this ideological state of affairs and certain state of mind exploded into shards, the East Germans were faced with a particularly implacable truth: They had been wrong in their Nazism and wrong in their communism. What was left?
“In the beginning, unification just meant the deutsche mark,” Peter Voss said, “and equal salaries and to be able to travel. But people in the East had no conception of the risk involved in these changes. Today, they understand that there are risks in freedom. They begin to realize that you can’t have total social security and economic freedom at the same time.”
There were many dramas then at these l0th anniversary celebrations on Oct. 3, which marked the date the East accepted Western laws and thus hegemony.
Former Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who fervently believed in and who impassionedly carried out the unification, was tragically absent, in disgrace because of campaign-finance irregularities. Although the Jewish population of Germany is now l00,000, up from 30,000 when the wall fell (and down from 500,000 before Hitler), the ceremony was marred by a gasoline bomb attack against a synagogue in Dusseldorf.
And yet the history of modern Germany since l945 and of reunified Germany since l990 are both inspiring success stories for our times. Today’s Germany has no territorial claims on anyone, and only friends as neighbors. Its democracy has strengthened over the past decade. Today, Germany, including its Eastern states, has been totally integrated into Western structures. Almost alone among the aggressor states of the 20th Century, Germany has paid enormous sums to the survivors of its terror, thus establishing new norms of international behavior.
That is why this week’s anniversary of reunification is so important.
———-
Georgie Ann Geyer is a Washington, D.C.-based syndicated columnist. E-mail: [email protected]