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UNITED NATIONS -- A decade ago, the Joshua Trumpet sounded and the Berlin Wall crumbled. This hideous symbol of ill-named German "Democratic Republic," fell into the bin of history, relegated to concrete chips to being sold by souvenir hawkers not far from where guard towers once loomed. But the memory of East Germany's discredited regime seems alive and well among some nostalgic communists and even many people in the West who view East Germany through the golden haze of history.
While Chinese emperors constructed the Great Wall to keep the presumed barbarians outside, the East German communists built this barrier to keep their own people inside. This Wall stood as an indictment of a regime whose population kept fleeing the "workers paradise" to West Germany for political and economic freedom.
The building of the Wall in August 1961, in a sense presented a morbid if magnificent moment to Marxism-Leninism and the regimes who hid in its shadow. Its collapse signaled one of the singularly important events of the century, not only for Germany, but for Europe and the world.
During that extraordinary autumn of 1989 protests throughout Eastern Europe grew into an unstoppable tidal wave swamping the socialist regimes. An equally extraordinary constellation of political forces made the next steps possible. Strong leadership from Washington, political paralysis in the Kremlin, accord from Paris, and a calculated risk in Bonn made the subsequent reunification possible a year later.
Chancellor Helmut Kohl spoke of the Eastern landscape blooming in a few short years. Such sentiments fueled by the effervescent emotion of the day sadly became mired in the economic bottom line of revamping East Germany's moribund socialist society. Nonetheless Kohl, standing at the cusp of history showed genuine leadership -- taking a fateful political decision towards unity.
A decade later at a Berlin commemoration, the former Chancellor praised former President George Bush for his contribution "For him the goal was always to help people on the other side of the iron curtain to acheive the right to self detemination; He did not just pay lip service to the goal of German reunification."
That German unity has been expensive is without question. Certainly the euphoria of the day carried emotions ahead of balance sheets. A decade and hundreds of billions of dollars later in massive financial transfers from West to East, the landscape is yet to really bloom. Unemployment stands at 19 percent. East Germany needed more than a coat of paint.
Yet, what was the alternative? An equally subsidized socialist regime, weaned on the wealth of the West Germans but still free to pursue its sovereignty as a communist canton? To have allowed a phased in confederation of two separate but equal German states, West and East, would have posed a political blunder of Herculean proportions.
Having crossed from West Berlin into the East on a few anxious occasions, I always found this experience truly surrealistic, never mind a bit unnerving -- passing from the modern West to genuinely retro East was less the problem than the stark reality that the Wall was as much a psychological barrier as a physical one.
"They call it Ostalgie -- the wave of nostalgia sweeping former East Germany, a hankering after the bad old days of communist rule," writes Quentin Peel in London's Financial Times adding "West Germans are fed up with subsidizing them."
The media reminds us of the East Germans, the Ossis who pine for the predictable "good old days" of an ordered and organized life in the former German Democratic Republic--of the subsidized child care centers and full employment. Few wish to recall the ubiquitous Stasi secret police, the Wall, or the militarized society.
Yet to speak of East Germany outside the context of the Stasi or the suffocating vacuum of civil and political rights is to speak of a treeless forest or a parched riverbed -- the essential element is missing!
Certainly many mistakes have been made by the West German or Wessi cousins in revamping and rebuilding the East. And sadly the political culture in the East, seems to have a penchant for the extremes on left and right. But to argue that most East Germans would wish to turn the clock back to live again in the Wall's shadow is simply nonsense.
John J. Metzler is a U.N. correspondent covering diplomatic and defense issues who writes weekly for World Tribune.com.
