Die Puhdys, a GDR rock band, in performance in 1986
These restrictions, ludicrous even by GDR standards, were soon dropped. In 1982 the GDR’s first official rock festival, “Rock for Peace,” took place in the Palace of the Republic. The exalted venue showed how far rock had come in terms of official acceptance. Now the regime was even claiming that “young people’s dance music”—the official term for rock—was not a Western invention at all but a natural outgrowth of East German culture. As one bureaucrat put it: “The rhythm patterns and sound structures of rock music reflect a sensuousness, a sensuous relation to reality, which, irrespective of all commercial filters, has its social roots in our working-class youth.” Official acceptance, however, was very much a Pyrrhic victory for a music that was supposed to be rebellious, and the bands that played at the big state-sanctioned concerts were dismissed by the kids as Staatsrocker. Moreover, most East German rock fans still preferred to listen to foreign bands on records and Western radio—or, if possible, live. Whenever major Western groups performed near the Wall in West Berlin, as they sometimes did, hordes of young East Berliners instantly materialized on the other side of the border. During the 750th anniversary celebrations a major riot broke out in East Berlin when the Volkspolizei tried to prevent thousands of young East Germans from listening to a concert near the Reichstag put on by David Bowie, Genesis, and the Eurythmics. The rioting quickly turned political, with the kids shouting, “Die Mauer muss weg (The Wall must go).”
Some of East Berlin’s rock bands had their digs in Prenzlauer Berg, the one part of the city that produced a vibrant countercultural scene in the last years of the GDR. If the East German capital had a Greenwich Village or a Haight Ashbury, this was it. The area, bounded by Dunckerstrasse, Lychener Strasse, and Schliemannstrasse, was pitted with places dispensing LSD and hashish. The district boasted seedy Kneipen like the Oderkahn, which turned into an informal jazz club after official closing hours. Here were also the classic “scene cafés,” the Mosaik and the Wiener Café (known fondly as the “WC”), where intellectuals and artists like Robert Havemann, Grit Poppe, and Bärbel Bohley gathered to discuss ways to give the GDR a “socialism with a human face” (presumably not Honecker’s). The “EP Gallerie,” which displayed the work of young artists who could not or would not get into the official shows, became a byword for the cool and the forbidden. Yet one should not mythologize Prenzlauer Berg: along with all the bohemian artists and earnest reformers there were plenty of Stasi collaborators, and all too often they were one and the same.
Looking back in 1992 on the cultural hemorrhage from East Berlin that began in the mid-1970s, Wolf Biermann wrote: “One thinks immediately of a sinking ship. The exodus of many writers, actors, painters, and scientists after 1976 was the beginning of the end for the GDR.” On the contrary, it is more likely that the exodus of dissident artists and intellectuals helped to prolong the life of the GDR. The expulsion of dissident intellectuals, like the sale of political prisoners to Bonn, proved to be an effective way to retard the development of a strong political opposition.
For all its inadequacies—cultural, economic, and political—East Germany seemed in the mid-1980s to be a solid and permanent fixture in the international community. The regime was begrudgingly accepted by the West, even by the new conservative West German government under Helmut Kohl, which like the SPD regimes before it sought to ease tensions over Berlin through extensive negotiations with the GDR. While continually paying lip service to German reunification, Bonn helped to keep the GDR afloat with generous loans. In 1983 a consortium of West German banks, backed by Bonn, lent the GDR a billion marks on very favorable terms. Franz Josef Strauss, who had brokered the loan, later explained that the German question could no longer be solved with “blood and iron.” In that same year West Germany’s new president, Richard von Weizsäcker, declared that “the German question will remain unanswered as long as the Brandenburg Gate remains closed.” This turned out to be a prophetic pronouncement, but at the time it was made almost no one, probably not even Weizsäcker himself, believed that the Berlin Wall would come down any time soon.
President Richard von Weizsäcker and Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher protected by a police cordon during the president’s speech at Berlin’s Lustgarten, November 8, 1992
10
FROM BONN TO BERLIN
Did German reunification really occur only five years ago? Are Berlin [West] and Berlin [East], once the ideologically opposed show-windows of the West and East, really one city again?
—Berlin Mayor
Eberhard Diepgen, 1995
WHEN GERMANY WAS UNIFIED under Bismarck in 1871 the selection of Berlin as the national capital displeased many Germans, but that choice had seemed virtually inevitable given the way in which the Reich had been pulled together by the Iron Chancellor. By contrast, there was nothing inevitable about the Bonn parliament’s momentous decision in 1991, following the nation’s second unification, to move Germany’s seat of government back to Berlin. Few decisions in modern German history have been more hotly debated or more divisive. As the newly united Germans set off in the early 1990s on the journey that would put them back in Berlin by the end of the decade, many wished fervently that they could turn back.
Although Berlin emerged as the victor in its bitter battle with Bonn, in some ways it did not seem like a winner. An economic boom that followed immediately upon the fall of the Wall and reunification turned quickly into a bust. Although the city was physically whole again it was by no means spiritually whole; on the contrary, it emerged as a microcosm of the famous “Wall in the Head”—that amalgam of social, political, cultural, and psychological barriers that replaced the old concrete wall in keeping eastern and western Germans apart.
The Fall of the Wall
At a ceremony marking the tenth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder declared: “The wall fell from east to west, pushed down by brave and fearless East Germans.” This was true enough, but the initial and decisive challenge to Erich Honecker’s regime—and to the Berlin Wall that he helped build—came not from within East Germany, certainly not from East Berlin, but from the Soviet Union. Mikhail Gorbachev believed that the Soviet Union could survive as a superpower only if it undertook reforms that might make it more modern, dynamic, and efficient. This was the motivation behind his daring policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (economic restructuring). He expected that Russia’s renewal would be emulated by the governments of the other East-bloc states, some of which, most notably Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, were facing serious domestic opposition to communist rule. He was convinced that timely reforms would not only strengthen the communist governments of Eastern Europe but also tie them more tightly to Moscow. At the same time, in an abrupt departure from the “Brezhnev Doctrine,” which called for military intervention against antigovernmental insurgencies in the satellite countries, he made it clear that the Soviet Union would not use force to prop up communist regimes that had lost the support of their people. East-bloc nations were now free to map their own path to socialist progress. (This new approach was labeled by Gorbachev’s America-expert, Gennady Gerasimov, the “Sinatra Doctrine”—as in “I Did It My Way.”) Of course, Gorbachev never dreamed that his plan to strengthen communism at home and abroad through timely reforms from above would ignite a revolt from below that would ultimately bring the whole system down. Like the proverbial Sorcerer’s Apprentice, he set in motion a process he could not control.