Legacy of a Wall
By Dr. Jackson Janes

An Important Anniversary
This past Monday, August 13, was the forty-sixth anniversary of the construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961. It would probably not have earned much more than a memorial reference to that fateful day and its meaning from the government and some media, had it not been for a recent discovery - a memo found in the archives of the agency that administers the Stasi files stating a shoot-to-kill order for anyone trying to flee over the Wall. That was not news, as the many cases tried after the Wall came down proved with the evidence of hundreds of dead, perhaps as many as a thousand victims of that order. Yet the memo reminded everyone - despite the denials of all those responsible for the regime - of how deadly serious the German Democratic Republic was about preventing its citizens from leaving, be it with threats, intimidation, prison sentences, torture, and in the end, murder.

The record of the GDR has been an ongoing subject within Germany since the fall of the Wall in November 1989. Reminded by the criticism of not having dealt effectively with the Nazi past after World War II, the Federal Republic of Germany set out to make the history of this regime as transparent as possible and to show how it was able to sustain itself through the four decades following 1949, until it eventually imploded under the force of the very people it sought to hold under its control.

That effort continues seventeen years after unification, officially through the work of the Stasi files agency, also known as the "Birthler Authority," named after its head, Marianne Birthler. The task is complicated and sometimes controversial. Coming to terms with personal and institutional responsibility in this troubled era will remain a long-term challenge in Germany; the debate surrounding the recent film The Lives of Others illustrates the problems.

What is the Legacy of the GDR?
The questions still being asked today are not only about the causes but also the consequences to be drawn from a clearer understanding of the legacy of the GDR. Those answers are not only relevant for Germans. They transcend the German experience and speak to the phenomenon of dictatorships worldwide.

The answers also speak to those who were not living under dictatorships, but were seeking ways through which one should understand how to respond to them. During the Cold War, for example, American foreign policy was driven by choices faced within the framework of confrontation with the Soviet Union. In Europe, Germany was the front line in that battle. Yet there was no serious effort in August of 1961 to prevent the Soviets and their East German clients from building the Wall. There was also no move to step into the uprising between the Hungarians and the Soviet troops in 1956 or between the Czechs and the Soviet tanks in 1968. Choices were made in what was thought to be the interest of the United States, as well as within the framework of what was understood to be the Cold War's primary directive: avoiding nuclear war. Toward that end, certain things were going to be tolerated - one of them was the division of Germany and Europe.

In contrast, there were other occasions when other decisions were made. In 1961, the U.S. decided that there was to be an eyeball to eyeball confrontation with the Soviets over the placement of strategic weapons in Cuba - a situation which could have launched World War III had it not been for decisions taken in both Washington and Moscow to draw back from that precipice. After the bloody Korean War was brought to a halt, the agreement over the division of the Korean peninsula was the price both sides were willing to pay to stop the bloodshed, a division which has also lasted for more than half a century.

American decisions to intervene elsewhere in the world were made on the basis of carrying out proxy wars with the Soviets or the Chinese under the rubric of the Cold War stakes. But clearly, the lines drawn after World War II in Europe were not seen as being moveable, and the Berlin Wall seemed to embody the standoff, which many believed would last a very long time. "Not in my lifetime" was the frequent answer to the question in West Germany when asked whether Germany might be reunified some day. June 17, the official day in West Germany marking the 1953 uprising of East Germans against the GDR regime that was put down by Soviet tanks, evolved over the years into a series of speeches which seem to be powerless against the status quo.

My Introduction to the Wall
Almost four decades ago I saw the Berlin Wall for the first time. In the spring of 1968, I first looked at the Brandenburg Gate from a bus traveling slowly in carefully-delineated lines as it passed the monument, guarded by East German soldiers. The drill was to then pass by the Soviet army memorial depicting the defeat of the Nazis in 1945. I passed through Checkpoint Charlie and made my way around East Berlin. I was trying to understand what this state stood for, whether there was some sort of real alternative worth considering when it came to social, economic, and political order. I had just been to Moscow where I was told that the Soviet model would soon overtake the U.S., as demonstrated in the Russian space program. Of course, the U.S. was to take another year before Americans landed on the moon.

At a time when there was a wave of self-criticism sweeping through the United States driven by the war in Vietnam, the civil rights movement, and the 1968 cultural challenges, a twenty-year-old American student in East Germany was prompted to want to see the "other side" of the picture of the Cold War. Would it not be possible to accommodate our differences, even respect them, and reduce the threat of nuclear annihilation? All it took was to recognize the realities of different political, economic, and social systems.

From that first exposure to the Berlin Wall in the summer of 1968, I was to cross that divide multiple times over the next two decades, primarily to go to West Berlin. I did not travel through the GDR and had no friends there. During that period, I did not question that the division was more or less permanent. The efforts Willy Brandt and his successors made as chancellor to bridge the divide was, as far as I could see, based on realities that needed to be recognized. Those who accused these policies of betraying the goal of ever achieving unification appeared to be denying those realities. Most people I knew, American and German, had reached that "not in my lifetime" consensus.

After all, it seemed, the Soviet Union would never permit unification anyway. Working out some way of moderating relations across the Berlin Wall seemed the more effective thing to do under the circumstances. Change might come through accommodation and getting closer to each other, one way or another. The repression of human rights in the GDR and the shoot-to-kill order on the Wall were still in effect. But nothing was going to change with force.

The End of "Not in My Lifetime"
Helmut Kohl was to continue those efforts after he became chancellor in 1982. The Cold War parameters did not seem to offer any real options. West Germany paid millions of Marks to buy prisoners from GDR jails and credit loans were made available to East Berlin. By the time both East and West Germany were preparing for their respective fortieth anniversaries in 1989, there was an invitation delivered to the East German leader Erich Honecker to visit Bonn. When he came in 1988, it seemed to many that the next steps toward German-German relations were moving towards recognizing the division and forgetting about the idea of unification ever being a realistic goal. Ronald Reagan's speech in 1987, which demanded that Gorbachev should tear down the Berlin Wall, was seen by some in and outside of Germany as rocking the boat of stability in Europe.

Yet, throughout the whole period, the door to unification was always open not only according the preamble of the West Germany's Basic Law but also according to official American policy. It was just that most of us on either side of the Atlantic never expected to see it "in our lifetimes." When that opportunity was to emerge, it was grabbed by a collection of people, and in particular a talented group in Washington and Berlin who worked together like a well-oiled team, and turned a long-term goal into reality in 1990.

The speed of events leading to November 9, 1989, and the fall of the Berlin Wall could not have been anticipated by many in Berlin or in Washington. The events occurring throughout Eastern Europe, whether it be in Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, or even in Moscow had built up a momentum which, in retrospect, might have made the collapse of the GDR and its other Warsaw Pact government partners inevitable. Yet it was never that. Many unpredictable decisions had to fall in line for all of what happened in the end. That is what history continually tells us.

In retrospect, the permanence I saw in the division I first encountered in 1968 was based on what I assumed was a permanent control of the GDR by Moscow. I did not anticipate a Gorbachev. Yet another assumption I made was that most of the seventeen million East Germans had somehow come to grips with the division, as had most of West Germany. When I witnessed the GDR soccer team defeat the West German team during the World Cup in 1972, I thought I saw evidence of some pride among East Germans. I followed from a distance the writing of many West Germans who were reporting on the leading role the GDR played in Eastern Europe, some suggesting it was the tenth-strongest economy in the world.

In retrospect, the flaw in my perception of the pre-1989 status quo lay in not appreciating the power of people willing to change their futures. The thousands who had turned their backs on the GDR before the Wall went up and those who tried afterwards, as well as those who fled eastern Europe in multiple and dangerous ways throughout the Cold War period, was ample evidence that "real socialism" was not working there any better than it was working in the Soviet Union. More importantly, even after four decades of living in the GDR, there remained a powerful pulse desiring more freedom and opportunity than the system wanted to offer.

The same pulse could be found in Nelson Mandela's jail cell, or that of Vaclav Havel, or in Lech Walesa's Solidarnosc, and so on. It remains captured in Tiananmen Square's legacy of 1989.

Lessons for Today's Struggles for Freedom
Drawing the lessons from all of this has led many to support the policies of the current administration in Washington and its freedom agenda. It was clear that the same forces of dictatorship in Iraq or Afghanistan, not to speak of many other countries around the world, were oppressing people in the same way those in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union had suffered. Yet, what one saw in the streets of Dresden and Leipzig, Prague and Bucharest, Johannesburg and Moscow, and throughout many other cities, were the forces of the people throwing off their own yokes, and assuming ownership of their own states. There was no need for an outside army to intervene; their civilian armies were home grown.

The decision to intervene in Iraq assumed that the same forces would rise up in Baghdad as they had in Europe and take hold of their own society. Yet the method of making that happen turned out to be the main obstacle, i.e., an American military occupation. What took place in an historical blink of an eye in Europe in 1989 will take far longer in Iraq and Afghanistan, if it is to occur at all, because of that mistake.

Some years ago, I asked a friend of mine, a leader of the opposition in the last years of the GDR, now a member of the German Parliament, where he was on November 9, 1989. He answered me immediately that the question was irrelevant. The more important question was where he and his colleagues were a year or earlier in laying the foundation for what happened in November of 1989. Markus Meckel set me straight about what led to the demise of the GDR. It was his courage and those of the many hundreds and then thousands of East Germans who kept the pulse going for many years despite all odds.

The anniversary of the Berlin Wall's rise and its fall are major milestones in Germany's history, and both should be remembered equally. They both send messages of the need for vigilance and hope not only for Germans, but for citizens around the world, especially in a time of increased global conflict. Let's hope that the messages are received.

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This essay appeared in the August 16, 2007, AICGS Advisor.

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Want to know more? Check out these links for more information.

Reagan's Brandenburg Concerto, By John Kornblum, The American Interest.

"German Politicians Criticize Stasi Documents Institute," Deutsche Welle Online, August 14, 2007.

"New Find Evokes Horrors of the Berlin Wall," by David Crossland, Der Spiegel Online, August 13, 2007.