Identity still uncertain after fall of wall
30 years on, ethnic hatred on the rise in Germany, writes Katrin Bennhold
Abenaa Adomako remembers the night the Berlin Wall fell. Joyous and curious like so many of her fellow West Germans, she had gone to the city centre to greet East Germans who were pouring across the border for a first taste of freedom.
“Welcome,” she beamed at a disoriented-looking couple in the crowd, offering them sparkling wine. But they would not take it. “They spat at me and called me names,” recalled Ms Adomako, whose family has been in Germany since the 1890s. “They were the foreigners in my country. But to them, as a black woman, I was the foreigner.”
Three decades later, as Germans mark the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall today, the question of what makes a German — who belongs and who does not — is as unsettled as ever. The integration of East and West has in many ways been an unabashed success. Germany is an economic and political powerhouse, its reunification central to its dominant place in Europe.
But while unification fixed German borders for the first time in the country’s history, it did little to settle the neuralgic issue of German identity. Thirty years later, it seems, it has even exacerbated it. Ethnic hatred and violence are on the rise. A far-right party thrives in the former East. Ms Adomako says she is still afraid to go there. But she is not the only one who feels like a stranger in her own land.
Germany’s current effort to integrate more than 1 million asylum-seekers welcomed by Chancellor Angela Merkel in 2015 is just the most immediate challenge.
In the decades since the wall fell, Germany’s immigrant population has become the second largest in the world, behind the United States. One in four people living in Germany has an immigrant background.
But two decades after the country stopped defining citizenship exclusively by ancestral bloodline, the far right and others have started distinguishing between “passport Germans” and “bio-Germans”.
Across the former Iron Curtain, a new Eastern identity is taking root, undermining the joyful narrative that dominated the reunification story on past anniversaries. “It’s an existential moment for the country,” said Yury Kharchenko, a Berlin-based artist who defiantly identifies as a German Jew despite — and because of — the armed guards outside his son’s nursery in Berlin. “Everyone is searching for their identity.”’