Anne McElvoy Don’t forget the ideals of the foot soldiers who brought down the Berlin Wall
ANNIVERSARIES are d e c e p t ive t h i n g s . Nex t month will mark the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. There will be solemn speeches and Merkel-rich events celebrating the moment a dictatorship crumbled into dust. Having covered the events of that year from my perch in the old East Berlin, I am happy to raise a large glass of artisanal vodka to the end of a system which placed unconscionable l i mi t s o n human freedoms and fell to an uplifting demonstration of People Power.
But the yellowing cuttings of my articles tell a different and more uncertain story than the neat commemorations. The weeks leading up to the triumph of Wir sind das Volk (We are the People) and especially the days from October 7-9 were ones of fear at the thrill of challenging a repressive system, mingled with anxiety about the risks.
This is what it feels like, to stand against the threat of force before the happy ending and nostalgia kicks in. I had friends in the opposition peace and church movements Plauen and Leipzig who were rounded up in the demonstrations which marked the 40th anniversary of the GDR that week.
They were roughed up and slung into police vans, their details taken to ensure the Stasi state surveillance system had clocked their dissent and could record them as Feindliche Elemente (hostile elements), barring their way to professions and university places.
Yet I also knew what it was like to feel painful conflicts of loyalty from those brought up in the East German elites, whose parents were warning them that they might end up on the other side of the barricades from fellow students.
To make the right decision in these circumstances is extraordinarily hard and the older I get the more I wonder whether I would have had the courage to do the right thing. I think about this when watching the young demonstrators in Hong Kong — listening to a young woman who was flouting the ban on marching in masks and declaring that she will defy the clampdown “even if there is no hope”.
So the marches of 1989 send echoes down the years. History does not exactly repeat “the old conceits, the quick replies the same retreats”, as Elvis Costello puts it — but it often rhymes. Hong Kong protesters today may yet reap a terrible whirlwind from Beijing.
Their cause of greater independence might fail — as East Germany’s marchers could have if Mikhail Gorbachev, on his visit to East Berlin three decades ago this week, had given Erich Honecker, the East German leader, the go-ahead to quell the protests. Or they might prevent a slide into deeper autocracy.
The risk of these movements is that they test the odds-on success and failure that only seem reliable in hindsight. It is fashionable to draw a gloomy balance of where we are in Europe, and often justifiably so. The retreat of Trumpian America from the international order (now impulsively pulling out troops from north-eastern Syria, against the advice of what remains of his national security apparatus), the bad blood that Brexit has caused in the European family, the rise of a far-Right in Germany and nationalist-populists from Moscow to Budapest and Rome — in so many ways post-wall life looks like a dream of better days that went thoroughly haywire.
A “Europe whole and free”, to cite the Nato motto that helped lure so many countries out of the sphere of communism’s influence, is no longer as united in purpose and the values of liberal democracy as advocates of it like myself would have wished. Mass migration, wars in the Middle East and flows of refugees from northern Africa have strained an ideal of integration which rested, far too complacently, on the notion that the new Europe would remain untouched in its political DNA by upheavals beyond its borders.
So we find ourselves today contending with events in Russia or Ukraine, whose disruptions echo into the heart of the US presidential race. The aftershocks of the financial crash and its offspring in the eurozone crisis after 2009 have left a traumatised EU, uncertain of how to fend off threats, slow to address its internal challenges — and thus particularly reactive to what it regards as the unnecessary provocation of Brexit.
We can argue the ins and outs of the alternative backstop complexities — the latest cunning plan from the inventive Boris factory that looks more likely to crash than fly, or forge a plan for a multi-party referendum to make it “go away” — until the subsidised cows come home.
It would be productive if we admitted, three decades after Europe stood the test of the dissolution of the Iron Curtain, to shared anxieties and the uphill task of dealing with the shared strains of our democracies in 2019, rather than playing them off against each other.
So recalling 1989 tells us what flag to wave. It is not a failsafe guide to what kind of integration thrives or flounders, nor does it give us the right to preach the moral purity of our own preferences for what happens next in Brussels.
The Europe we inhabit has struggled to live up to its aspiration. But the gambles taken on the streets of eastern Europe then, and Hong Kong now, were about a belief that open societies were better than those which defined themselves by enmities. They were also driven by a faith that unpredictable democracies outweigh the paralysis of closed societies. It was worth the risks the foot soldiers of change took 30 years ago. For all the setbacks since, it still is.
⬤ Anne McElvoy is senior editor of The Economist and author of The Saddled Cow: East Germany’s Life And Legacy
In so many ways, post-wall life looks like a dream of better days that went thoroughly haywire