Before and after

Some time in the early 1970s the Soviet movie theaters started screening an animated cartoon, a political one. It was shown before movies in lieu of newsreels with the invariable scenes of celebrated steelworkers, miners, weavers, and construction workers or instead of a selection of foreign news that showed people on strike, protesting living and working conditions.

This animated cartoon was something absolutely new, showing revanchists and ex-Nazis running around with torches in West Germany, ready to trigger another world war. They seemed to have succeeded, with a short countdown for the world to explode, but at the very last moment there appeared a wall blocking their way and deterring any aggressor attack. This wall is the German Democratic Republic and its capital, Berlin. Needless to say, any Soviet viewer would appreciate the efforts made by Comrades Nikita Khrushchev and Walter Ulbricht when they resolved, on Aug. 13, 1961, to separate the GDR from the FRG and thus protect the East Berlin against the western ruinous revanchist influence.

This animated cartoon had nothing to say on yet another Berlin crisis that brought the world to the verge of another war, when Soviet and US tanks faced each other separated by only a few meters. All that was history, and the “Wall of Peace” (the communist tag that was as blasphemous and humiliating as could be) would be there, and it seemed at the time that Germany would not become united again, not in that generation anyway.

True, not everyone shared this view. The dissident Andrei Amalrik foresaw the Soviet empire’s quick demise in his well-known essay “Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?” (written in 1969), yet his forecast was ignored. The same is true of Helene Carrere d’Encausse’s book L’Empire eclate. The French Academy’s future secretary wrote it in 1978. At the time, it seemed unbelievable that the giant political entity spanning the vast expanse from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok would fall apart and that tearing down the Berlin Wall would be a sure sign.

To the Soviet man in the street, the GDR was like a big department store where one could buy everything, unlike the empty counters of Soviet stores. Officers of the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany, followed by those of the Western Group, brought home goods that no one could buy anywhere in the USSR. You should see the lines of eager children and abiding parents in front of Moscow’s Children’s World toy store when they were selling GDR-made toy railroads with locomotives, cars, signal posts, bridges, tunnels, etc. Many people in the Soviet Union simply couldn’t grasp what made all East Germans feel dissatisfied with their status. What in the world did they lack? Why were they so eager to get to the West that the Berlin Wall had to be built?

The socialist retail supply became increasingly poor from west to east. In the GDR, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary the situation was better. It was markedly worse in Poland, and in Romania it was as bad as in the USSR. Poles had an easier access to the GDR, so they visited to buy merchandise, leaving their “socialist shop windows” empty. Tensions got so high that there were notes of protest between East Berlin and Warsaw, with complaints sent to the big brother in Moscow. There was nothing the functionaries could do about the situation: people wanted to have adequate food and clothes.

Western radio stations, tagged by Izvestia as “dirty broadcast currents,” informed about incredible cases of individual escapes to the West, sometimes entire families making it across the Wall. More often than not, however, the newscaster would somberly inform about GDR border guards shooting a desperate individual who was trying to jump over the Wall. Similar attempts were made by GDR nationals in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Bulgaria.

Access to Yugoslavia from the socialist countries was limited. In the first place, Tito’s regime was not regarded as totally socialist and the dinar exchange rate was on a par with that of western currencies. Second, it was easy to leave Yugoslavia for Italy or Austria. After that one would have no problems getting to West Germany. And so entry to Yugoslavia was closely guarded.

We say that the Berlin Wall divided Germany, but this is only part of the reality. There were all those rows of barbed wire, plowed and raked areas to reveal any trespasser’s footprints, trenches and other engineering structures, marking the frontiers between Hungary, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and the GDR and making escape from socialist paradise on earth virtually impossible for both East Germans and local citizens.

There was no way to bar crossing the Baltic Sea, so there were daredevils in Poland and the GDR who tried to swim across to Sweden or Denmark. Few succeeded, while most drowned or were shot or caught by border guards. By the way, Walter Ulbricht was an outspoken supporter of the ruthless suppression of the Prague Spring movement. The East German leader hit the roof after he was informed about the increase in the crossings of the Czechoslovak–West-German border. He was the first to raise the matter of intervention and repeatedly asked Leonid Brezhnev to do just that. Brezhnev wasn’t sure and Ulbricht kept telling him it was necessary: “Otherwise they will all run away from us.” We heard about this during the lectures on scientific communism, from a colonel who had worked for the Political Directorate of the Central Group of Soviet Forces in Czechoslovakia.

After the matter was settled by a treaty signed in Moscow in the early 1970s, Erich Honecker, who had decorously retired Walter Ulbricht with Brezhnev’s blessings, found himself forced to ease the burden of border checkpoint procedures. Residents of West Berlin and the rest of the FRG were allowed to visit their relatives in East Germany. He was utterly unwilling to make these concessions and did so under pressure from Moscow. During detente it was very important for the Kremlin to show good will in order to make the SALT agreements with the United States.

After West Germans started visiting the GDR, driving their nickel-and-chrome shining limousines, whistling past local ugly Trabants, no one would believe any propaganda about the benefits of socialism. There appeared yet another problem. West Germans who visited their GDR relatives would give them Deutschmarks, so they had to set up special stores in East Germany, where one could buy quality goods for this currency. In the Soviet Union we had our Beryozka stores. Immediately, the GDR population became divided between those with Deutschmarks and those who had neither West Germany’s currency nor any relatives in the FRG. This, of course, didn’t serve to improve the GDR’s social climate.

People sensed that the Berlin Wall would be destroyed before long after the Hungarian government ordered to dismantle the rows of barbed wire along its border with Austria. People in the GDR were quick to grasp the opportunities this move offered. There appeared long waiting lines in front of the West German embassies in Budapest and Prague and also before the West German Representation in Berlin. In August, they had to cut the lines short. On Sept. 11, 1989, the Hungarian government opened all frontiers. After that the Berlin Wall had no meaning. Within three days over 15,000 people left the GDR through Hungary. Rallies with demands of human rights and freedoms swept over East Germany.

After the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, a number of hardcore communists in the Soviet Union started talking about so many lost opportunities. No one could predict the USSR’s downfall at the time, although quite a few saw the dam springing a leak and the cracks lacing its foundation. In September 1989, Ukraine’s Rukh held its first congress; a year earlier the Sajudis Reform Movement of Lithuania and the People’s Fronts in Latvia and Estonia were formed. Uniting the two parts of Germany meant not only the long-awaited national unity but also the proximity of yet unclear changes.

The present author first visited Berlin in the summer of 2000. There was Checkpoint Charlie (now a museum) with a big sign reading in English, Russian, French, and German: “You are leaving the American Sector”. There was also a suspended portrait of a handsome Soviet soldier, and a short walk behind the remains of the Berlin Wall, kept intact as a reminder and reference source for the generations to come, and an open-air museum of totalitarianism located on the premises of the Gestapo headquarters, which were destroyed by RAF bombs in January 1945.

Even so many years after the historic reunification of Germany, one was instantly aware of the differences between the two German states. It is easier to formally unite than to really integrate. This is a long and sophisticated process. It is hard to get rid of the communist heritage, above all in terms of mentality. Being free in a politically free country make one leave behind the rudiments of Brezhnev-Ulbricht socialism.

Twenty years back Germans were divided between the Ossis and the Wessis — people who lived in East and West Germany, respectively. Has this distinction disappeared? There are numerous signs pointing to its decline, but that it is still there. I heard a sad joke in present-day Germany: An Ossi says to a Wessi: “So why are you looking down on us? We are one people!” The Wessi replies, “Right, we are also one people.”

Soviet megalomania, which had been borrowed by the GDR without any reservations or consideration for local conditions, offered a dim view of the abandoned industrial factories I watched them from a train window. They were privatized in the early 1990s and then closed down, because revamping their obsolete equipment or retraining personnel was unprofitable. Hence the high unemployment rate in the “new lands” and a heavy burden on the federal budget. Young people here can’t find jobs they like, so they travel to the West where they expect better wages and living conditions.

The German state has invested over one trillion euros in its eastern lands, yet the situation isn’t improving as quickly as desired. For a number of Germans the romantic expectation of the manna in the form of reunification was replaced with disillusionment and nostalgic memories of the GDR. People lived on a lower but more reliable basis then. The last Bundestag election was won by the Leftists in the East, although there were supporters also in the West. It is anyone’s guess how long it will take this sore of division to heal.

There is a striking resemblance between what is happening in Germany and Ukraine. All those gray, ugly Ulbricht-cum-Khrushchev-style apartment buildings in the suburbs of East German cities. There are so many of us still living in these monstrosities in Ukraine, without hopes for any kind of improvement. However, we are in a worse condition compared to East Germans, because they now live in the FRG, an advanced democracy that will never leave them without aid.

All we have is our Ukraine, and we are the only ones to make it a European country. They will lend us a helping hand — after they are convinced that we have rolled up our sleeves and are working hard to build our nation-state without any reservations about who is the number-one patriot.

October 3 went down into German history. On that date, back in 1533, Michael Stifel foretold the end of the world: he became obsessed with the Holy Bible’s numerology. The scared residents of villages in the vicinity of Wittenberg were selling their property, yet the end of the world never came, and the sun rose on October 19, 1533, the way it always did. Stifel served a term in prison for his false prediction. Afterward he paid attention to more important matters. In his book Arithmetica integra he was put forward an idea that would subsequently become part of the logarithm theory. This earned him a place in the history of science.

FRG’s first Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who earned the nickname Der Alte, the Old Man, said time and again that Germany would be eventually made whole again, and that Bonn was a temporary capital city. His forecast proved true, unlike that of Stifel. His cherished dream started coming into life with the fall of the Berlin Wall.