Politically, the west is looking more and more like the east.
HENRYK M. BRODER
Twenty years ago, few Germans were willing to rejoice at the fall of the Wall and the end of the first Workers' and Peasants' State on German soil. Most had made their peace with East Germany's existence. For the right wing, East Germany was a buffer zone between the free world and the Evil Empire, a bit of the homeland under foreign administration, waiting to be liberated sometime in the distant future—the way two parallel lines meet at infinity. But maintaining the status quo was more important. That's why West Germany kept East Germany alive with credits and subsidies. For every political prisoner released to West Germany, the West German government paid around 90,000 deutsche marks to the government of East Germany. What looked like a humanitarian gesture was in fact an incentive for the East German security apparatus to arrest as many "dissidents" as possible and sell them to the West. Without material support from the West, East Germany might have collapsed much sooner.
For the left, on the other hand, East Germany was a piece of foreign territory on which German was spoken—the other, better German state, in which much was still imperfect, but the most important thing had been achieved: the elimination of the hegemony of capital in favor of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The fact that many other things had been also eliminated in East Germany—freedom of speech, freedom to travel, the concept of individual responsibility, free elections, an independent judiciary—didn't much bother them because they didn't have to live there. They observed the experiment from a safe distance, and its sudden end filled them with fury and sorrow.
Günter Grass called the division of Germany a "punishment for Auschwitz" that had not yet been served out, even 44 years after the end of World War II. The writer Stefan Heym, who had been one of East Germany's privileged dissidents, simultaneously courted and spied upon by the government, was disgusted by the behavior of his East German compatriots, who used the opening of the border as an excuse to go shopping in the West. Before the fall of the Wall, Heym himself had often been a visitor to the West Berlin department store "Kaufhaus des Westens," where he bought all the everyday items that were unavailable in East Germany. His American passport allowed him to travel any time he wanted from his home in East Berlin to West Berlin, where he was highly regarded as a customer at the Kaufhaus and, across the street at Café Kranzler, as a non-conformist writer.
Remnants of the wall survive in many Germans’ minds.
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