Although Kohl was well received in Berlin when he helped to open the Brandenburg Gate, the Spree city was not in the front rank of the rush to German unity. Ordinary Berliners on both sides of the now-derelict Wall were certainly excited over the prospect of unity, but the city’s opinion-makers were often blasé or even hostile toward the project. It became fashionable among the leftist intelligentsia of West Berlin to condemn the easterners’ longing for unification as a lamentable submission to the lure of Western materialism. Aware that the lowly banana was a symbol in the East of capitalist plenitude, West Berlin students brought bundles of the fruit to the Wall and threw them at easterners coming across to shop. Not having had to live under “real, existing socialism” themselves, the Western leftists were unhesitant to advise easterners to be content with their “purer” social system. Other Western intellectuals, taking a rather less condescending tack, rejected unification on the grounds that Germany, given its criminal past, did not deserve to be a single nation. A united Germany, it was claimed, would inevitably pose a danger to its neighbors. As Günter Grass put it in a New York Times piece on January 7, 1990:
Our neighbors watch with anxiety, even with alarm, as Germans recklessly talk themselves into the will to unity. . . . There can be no demand for a new version of a unified nation that in the course of barely 75 years, though under several managements, filled the history books, ours and theirs, with suffering, rubble, defeat, millions of refugees, millions of dead, and the burden of crimes that can never be undone.
Elsewhere, Grass insisted that Germany’s neighbors had every right to react negatively, “even hysterically,” to the prospect of German unification, because “if we think about Germany and the German future, we have to think about Auschwitz.”
In East Berlin, meanwhile, supporters of the SED regime, who had always constituted a significant force in the East German capital, strongly denounced the push toward unification. On December 19, 1989, 50,000 party members demonstrated for “a sovereign GDR, against reunification and a sellout” of their country. Two weeks later, on January 4, 1990, SED supporters and various pro-government groups marched to the Soviet War Memorial in Treptow Park, where they heard party leader Gregor Gysi denounce unification as a nefarious plot aimed at “ruining the chance for democratic socialism in the GDR.” SED members, of course, had a personal stake in the GDR’s survival, but in East Berlin it was not only they who opposed unification. Many reformist intellectuals (like some of their counterparts in the West) believed that socialism was morally superior to capitalism. In an interview, Stefan Heym insisted that the continued existence of a socialist state in Germany was “absolutely necessary for the socialist development in the whole world.” The GDR now faced a crisis, he said, because its citizens had become fed up with the miserable conditions brought on by an inept leadership. However, it was not socialism per se that had “fallen on its face,” but the form of Stalinism perfected by the GDR leaders. “The other, better form, in whose name so many courageous people have set down their ideas and laid down their lives, is still to come,” he claimed. Contemplating the implications of reunification, a young East Berlin intellectual protested: “Go away, go away, leave my Wall where it is. . . . My God, what will happen if the West Germans come here to renovate and beautify everything, to put geraniums in the windows? Where am I supposed to go then? . . . It is so ugly, our Alex . . . , but it is our Berlin. . . . It would be so beautiful, an East Germany independent and democratic.” Right after the Wall was breached, Robert Darn ton, an American historian on sabbatical in Berlin, spoke with East Berlin intellectuals who were deeply worried about the new order of things. One of them advised: “Don’t tear down the Wall. We need it as an intellectual barrier. It should be permeable, but it should stay up. One of the great mistakes in Berlin history was to tear down the customs wall in which the Brandenburg Gate was embedded in 1867. After that the tragedies of the modern age began.”
A few years later, when the difficulties and dislocations of reunification had become painfully apparent, thousands of East Germans would find reasons to wax sentimental about the “good old GDR.” There was a wave of nostalgia for things East German, from liberal abortion policies and secure jobs to the lowly Trabant, which became the chief symbol of a lost way of life. (Many West Berliners, for their part, would become just as nostalgic for their lost “isle of the blessed,” where they had lived happily without having to worry too much about money, careers, or what was going on in the rest of the world. Even pre-1989 Kreuzberg fell under a haze of dewy-eyed commentary as the denizens of West Berlin’s most famous alternative Szene recalled how wonderful life had been before the fall of the Wall.)
The orgy of nostalgia for the old East, however, was still a thing of the future in the early months of 1990, when whatever sympathy the GDR regime might have enjoyed was rapidly slipping away. Popular hostility toward the state focused on the Stasi, which Prime Minister Modrow unwisely tried to retain in a reformed and trimmed-down version. On January 12 he bowed to popular pressure and agreed to dissolve the organization, but the concession came too late. Three days later a mob stormed the Stasi headquarters in Normannenstrasse, smashing doors, trashing offices, and pitching furniture out windows. Taking advantage of the chaos, Stasi agents spirited some sensitive files out of the building by posing as demonstrators. Modrow rushed to the scene and appealed for order, but he was ignored; only when representatives of the new dissident factions posted guards at the doors was a measure of calm restored. The fall of East Berlin’s Bastille proved to be a major milestone on the road—one is tempted to say the Autobahn—to East Germany’s collapse.
Desperate for credibility with the citizenry, the SED now changed its name to Partei des demokratischen Sozialismus (Party of Democratic Socialism—PDS). The party’s young and media-savvy leader, Gregor Gysi, offered a new face as well. But altered initials and a fresher look did not really add up to a new and more credible party. In its efforts to halt unification, moreover, the PDS could no longer count on help from Moscow, because by the beginning of 1990 the Soviets had reluctantly come to the conclusion that German unity was inevitable. Their primary goal now was to exert some influence on the unification process and, if possible, to profit from it. At the very least, they hoped to keep a united Germany out of NATO. If they could do this, the Atlantic alliance’s eastern border would actually be shifted farther away from Moscow. The Soviets’ new line on German unity was confirmed by Gorbachev on February 10, 1990, during a visit by Chancellor Kohl to Moscow. “Between the Soviet Union, the FRG, and the GDR, there are no differences of opinion about reunification and the people’s right to strive for it,” Gorbachev announced. Of course this was not quite correct, at least with respect to the GDR, but since when did the GDR have the right to define its own destiny?