Walls Remain In a United Germany

BERLIN — Durs Grünbein was conceived two months after the Berlin Wall was built, in the winter of 1961. “I spent one life as a hostage and another life free,” he said.

Early this month, the wall that once divided Berlin, Germany and the world 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.

Mr. Grünbein, a poet, 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. But walls remain, in people’s heads. “German unity is still a work in progress,” said Thomas Krüger, who served as East Berlin’s last mayor.

Now head of the Federal Agency for Civic Education, Mr. Krüger runs an institution whose mission is to “educate the German people about democratic principles and prevent any moves to re- establish a totalitarian regime.”

He worries about the fault lines that remain between East and West. The West is still richer. The East is now more nationalist. There are more immigrants in the West. But immigrants are viewed as more of a problem in the East.

Eight in 10 judges and prosecutors in the East grew up in the West, and none of Germany’s flagship listed companies have their headquarters in the East, Mr. Krüger said.

But easterners increasingly control