Election slogan that upset Merkel: “We have more to offer”
I was talking to a teacher in Leipzig about his students and their response to the fall of the Berlin wall. “Whether it’s 1789 or 1989—it’s all the same to them,” he told me. “They don’t know much about either.” The aftermath of the German Democratic Republic has lasted half as long as its short, inglorious life, but young east Germans already treat it as a distant world.
The debates, arguments and clashes of that time are still, however, keenly felt by those who were there. They still define friendships and antipathies, what is remembered and what is forgotten. And they are felt most sharply by east Germany’s intellectuals, protestors and politicians. Some were left behind by the speed of unification and a few have risen to positions of power—most notably Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Merkel’s comfortable win in September’s election allowed her to return to central Berlin’s massive glass-and-steel chancellor’s residence, her reward for twice being elected leader of the unified Germany. By contrast, whatever advantages are derived from being the last (and the only freely elected) leader of East Germany, office grandeur isn’t one of them. Lothar de Maizière works on Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse, close to where the main east-west crossing clearance point—the “palace of tears”—used to be. It’s an old-fashioned building in an area given a giant makeover in the past decade. His office is decorated only with legal reference books, a single oil painting and a desk lamp that’s been around since Erich Honecker. Three tins of goulash are stacked on the shelf.
He is my first stop on a trip through the old east, undertaken for Prospect 20 years on from my time as a young journalist during 1989’s autumn of giddying changes. We all remember the earnest intellectuals who shaped events. But what do they make of its legacy now East Germany is, as the late writer Stefan Heym put it, a “footnote in world history”?
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