Germans quietly pass an equinox of unity, but walls remain
BERLIN — Durs Grünbein was conceived two months after the Berlin Wall was built, in the cold winter of 1961. He spent half his life behind the wall, or, as he prefers to put it: “I spent one life as a hostage and another life free.”
Last week, the barrier that once divided Berlin, Germany and the world quietly passed an equinox of German unity. The wall was gone for as long as it stood: 28 years, 2 months and 26 days.
Roughly one generation lived with the wall. Roughly one generation has now lived without it. There is poetry in that symmetry, Grünbein says. A poet himself, he has written about being one of the first East Berliners to cross into the West.
One image lingers, he says: An empty Trabant, the standard East German car, parked under a tree in the West, its keys dangling from a branch. Freedom.
Other than the traces of the wall zigzagging across Berlin, laying out the no man’s land where 140 people died trying to escape, there are few obvious signs that this was once a divided city. Berlin’s gleaming main station sits near the former border, trains running in both directions. The city’s trendiest neighborhoods used to be run-down districts east of the wall. And for the past 12 years, the country has been run by Angela Merkel, a woman who grew up in East Germany.
As Willy Brandt, a storied former chancellor, famously said: “What belongs together, grows together.”
But this being German history, it is more complicated than that. The concrete blocks have come down. But walls remain, in people’s heads.
“German unity is still a work in progress,” says Thomas Krüger, who served, in January 1991, as East Berlin’s last mayor.
Now head of the Federal Agency for Civic Education, Krüger runs a quintessentially German institution whose mission is to “educate the German people about democratic principles and prevent any moves to re-establish a totalitarian regime.”
In a nutshell: Learn from history to inoculate the future