How do Americans see Germany today, some twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall? Well, I’d just like to share some impressions. So let’s start with a true story from the dark days of the Cold War. In the Spring of 1987, I attended one of those church-organized East-West workshops that were fairly commonplace back then. It took place in an old church in a village near Gera, in East Germany. There were many light-hearted moments over the weekend, such as when the East German men stood in line to take turns driving my VW Polo. And there was the usual gallows humor when our hosts would joke about our “chaperones”, two Stasi agents pretending to be tourists who followed us everywhere we went.
One afternoon we discussed how to change the world. I was the only non-German and was astounded as East Germans and West Germans discussed everyone’s problems – except their own. So, exploiting my host’s understanding for my American naiveté, I blurted out what seemed to me the most obvious question: “What would happen if the Wall fell tomorrow?” Both the East Germans and West Germans were united in their horror. The silence was deafening. Then one of the East Germans said: “The West would flatten us.” One of the West Germans threw in that West Germany would be overwhelmed, that change couldn’t happen overnight.
I’ve often thought of this exchange over the past twenty years whenever Germans talk about the Wall in the mind. I remember getting completely lost on one of my first visits to Berlin after the Wall was gone. Without the Wall, I had lost my orientation in the city. For Germans, too, the Wall was more than just a division. The Wall was more like a compass. It helped them navigate both the past and the future and told them who they were in the present. Wessi or Ossi. Winner or Loser. And ever since the Wall fell in 1989, they’ve been looking for a new compass.
Germany today is, of course, a completely different place. Germans find great hope in the political changes happening in the United States, yet doubt there is any hope for change in Germany. To find that hope, they first need to find a past they can believe in. And that, I guess, is what remembering 1949 and 1989 is all about, not to forget the darkness of the night but to celebrate the light of a new day.
Perhaps many Germans still don’t understand that the Wall was so much more than a physical dividing line. After Barack Obama spoke in Berlin and said that toppling the Wall in 1989 gave us hope that all barriers can be overcome, I was asked by a German journalist what he meant. Why did the destruction of the Berlin Wall in Germany mean anything to an American? I asked, why do you think that victory is yours alone?
