New Barriers Rise Up In a Once-Divided Land
the political discourse of a countrywide shift to the extremes. The farright party Alternative for Germany came in first in the eastern state of Saxony last year, with 27 percent of the vote — more than twice the national average. The Left Party has its roots in the party that ran the Communist East, the German Democratic Republic, or G.D.R.
As for Ms. Merkel, “she is not considered an easterner in the East,” Mr. Krüger said. “She is considered a traitor.”
Helmut Holter, the education minister for the eastern state of Thuringia, recently proposed a student exchange program between East and West — the kind of program Germany has with schools in other countries.
“We don’t just need student exchange programs with Poland and France,” Mr. Holter said, “but between Leipzig and Stuttgart.”
Mr. Grünbein is not sure that the young generation is the problem. His own children are “Germans, Europeans, citizens of the world,” he said.
The bigger challenge, he said, are those who spent most of their lives behind the wall and inside an authoritarian system.
“Even if you don’t like the system, it shapes you, it becomes part of you. How could it not?” Mr. Grünbein said. When they marched on Mondays in 1989 against a crumbling Communist system, many people did not want democracy, he said, “they wanted prosperity and authority.”
And authority is what they are craving again today, he said.
The British historian Timothy Garton Ash has called this “a kind of political- psychological post-traumatic stress disorder.”
Some are marching again. Every Monday in Dresden, supporters of an anti-immigrant movement take to the streets; most are men, and many are over 50.
“There are now more foreigners in Germany than Germans,” a retired mechanic, Klaus Rulow, 57, scoffed.
That is far from true. But the idea of a takeover resonates deeply. “The West took over the East” is another familiar refrain. And in some ways, it did.
The East, some point out, had a complete migration experience without crossing a border. People lost their jobs, their status and their country. Many East German men were quite literally left behind. Eastern women, who were part of the work force and with free child care, were more emancipated than their western sisters, and proved to be more mobile than their male counterparts. Some eastern villag-
The Berlin Wall, gone for as long as it was in place.
es now have two or three men for every woman.
When Petra Köpping was named integration minister in the eastern state of Saxony, she thought she would mainly deal with Muslim migrants. But early on, she was heckled at a public event. “Why don’t you integrate us first?” a German man shouted.
Ms. Köpping ended up touring the East to understand the grievances of East German men.
Antje Weiss, 54, a social worker in East Berlin, grew up with the Berlin Wall — in the East it was called the “anti-fascist protection bulwark.”
Ms. Weiss has no time for the Alternative for Germany. But she thinks it is important to listen to those who do.
“We have to let people speak their mind,” she said. “Otherwise, we are just doing what the G.D.R. did.”