Читаем Berlin полностью

Looking back in 1992 on the cultural hemorrhage from East Berlin that began in the mid-1970s, Wolf Biermann wrote: “One thinks immediately of a sinking ship. The exodus of many writers, actors, painters, and scientists after 1976 was the beginning of the end for the GDR.” On the contrary, it is more likely that the exodus of dissident artists and intellectuals helped to prolong the life of the GDR. The expulsion of dissident intellectuals, like the sale of political prisoners to Bonn, proved to be an effective way to retard the development of a strong political opposition.

For all its inadequacies—cultural, economic, and political—East Germany seemed in the mid-1980s to be a solid and permanent fixture in the international community. The regime was begrudgingly accepted by the West, even by the new conservative West German government under Helmut Kohl, which like the SPD regimes before it sought to ease tensions over Berlin through extensive negotiations with the GDR. While continually paying lip service to German reunification, Bonn helped to keep the GDR afloat with generous loans. In 1983 a consortium of West German banks, backed by Bonn, lent the GDR a billion marks on very favorable terms. Franz Josef Strauss, who had brokered the loan, later explained that the German question could no longer be solved with “blood and iron.” In that same year West Germany’s new president, Richard von Weizsäcker, declared that “the German question will remain unanswered as long as the Brandenburg Gate remains closed.” This turned out to be a prophetic pronouncement, but at the time it was made almost no one, probably not even Weizsäcker himself, believed that the Berlin Wall would come down any time soon.

President Richard von Weizsäcker and Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher protected by a police cordon during the president’s speech at Berlin’s Lustgarten, November 8, 1992

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FROM BONN TO BERLIN

Did German reunification really occur only five years ago? Are Berlin [West] and Berlin [East], once the ideologically opposed show-windows of the West and East, really one city again?

—Berlin Mayor

Eberhard Diepgen, 1995

WHEN GERMANY WAS UNIFIED under Bismarck in 1871 the selection of Berlin as the national capital displeased many Germans, but that choice had seemed virtually inevitable given the way in which the Reich had been pulled together by the Iron Chancellor. By contrast, there was nothing inevitable about the Bonn parliament’s momentous decision in 1991, following the nation’s second unification, to move Germany’s seat of government back to Berlin. Few decisions in modern German history have been more hotly debated or more divisive. As the newly united Germans set off in the early 1990s on the journey that would put them back in Berlin by the end of the decade, many wished fervently that they could turn back.

Although Berlin emerged as the victor in its bitter battle with Bonn, in some ways it did not seem like a winner. An economic boom that followed immediately upon the fall of the Wall and reunification turned quickly into a bust. Although the city was physically whole again it was by no means spiritually whole; on the contrary, it emerged as a microcosm of the famous “Wall in the Head”—that amalgam of social, political, cultural, and psychological barriers that replaced the old concrete wall in keeping eastern and western Germans apart.

The Fall of the Wall