Against a backdrop of economic implosion, erosion of public authority, and continuing depopulation (another 50,000 East Germans checked out in January), Prime Minister Modrow decided to move up the promised free elections to March 1990; that way, there might still be somebody around to vote. The main bloc parties—GDU, SPD, and FDP (Freie Demokratische Partei or Free Democratic Party)—entered the race with financial and logistical support from the West. The PDS, unlike the old SED, could no longer control the process from beginning to end. This meant that the end, for the first time in GDR history, was not predetermined.
The most aggressive campaigner turned out to be Helmut Kohl. Determined to achieve a victory for the East-CDU, which would amount to a victory for unification, Kohl stumped the GDR, promising “blooming landscapes” and “prosperity for all.” Later, when things did not pan out as he had promised, he was accused of deliberately hoodwinking the credulous East Germans. It is more likely, however, that he was swept up in the euphoria of the moment. Interestingly, not one of his six campaign swings through East Germany included East Berlin. The East-SPD also campaigned hard, bringing in big guns from the West like Willy Brandt, Hans-Jochen Vogel, and Oskar Lafontaine. Unlike Kohl, they spent a great deal of time in East Berlin, the old SPD Hochburg. The Socialists were hindered, however, by divisions on the unity question: Brandt passionately favored it; Lafontaine did not.
When the East Germans went to the polls on March 18 they had an amazing twenty-four parties to choose from, ranging from the PDS on the left to the Kohl-backed “Alliance for Germany” on the right. There was even a Beer Drinkers’ Union, which promised to protect eastern Germany’s beer culture against imports from the West. The results of the voting confounded the pundits, most of whom had predicted an SPD win. Instead, the Alliance for Germany came out on top, winning almost an absolute majority. Obviously, many voters bought Kohl’s promise of better times, expecting him, as one GDU partisan put it, “to help us quickly out of our mess.” Apart from the SPD, the big losers were the small reform parties that had done so much to make this election possible; the Bündnis 90, for example, garnered only 2.9 percent of the vote. Bärbel Bohley, one of that party’s candidates, complained bitterly that her countrymen had passed up the chance to create something new, opting instead for “money and bananas.”
East Berlin did not contribute significantly to the victory for Kohl. The Alliance for Germany won only 21.6 percent of the vote there, compared to 35 percent for the SPD and 30 percent for the PDS. These results reflected the strength of the Communist establishment and the old socialist movement in the eastern half of the Spree metropolis. For pro-unity East Germans in other parts of the country, the vote in East Berlin confirmed their image of the GDR capital as a pampered, parasitic town, whose fat-bottomed Bonzen put their own interest above that of ordinary people and the nation as a whole.
The March 1990 election brought the beleaguered GDR yet another new government: a “grand coalition” of the CDU and SPD under the leadership of the East-CDU chief Lothar de Maizière. A descendant of the French Huguenots who had emigrated to Berlin in the late seventeenth century, de Maizière had stayed clear of entanglements with the former Communist rulers—or so people thought at the time—and seemed to be the right man to lead the GDR safely and smoothly into oblivion. Upon taking office he promised the “rapid and responsible realization of German unity after negotiations with the FRG under Article 23” of the Grundgesetz (basic law). This article allowed for the direct integration of the five states of the GDR into the FRG. Alluding to Hitler’s incorporation of Austria into the Reich in 1938, as well as to the recorded message one hears in Germany indicating an out-of-service phone number, GDR patriots said of Article 23: “No Anschluss under this number.”
But unification was coming, and another important step toward it occurred on July 1, 1990, when the East German currency gave way to the mighty D-mark. Bärbel Bohley’s complaint that the March elections had been about money was not without validity: East Germans had become as contemptuous of their impotent ost-marks as they were of their flag; they wanted the D-mark, and they wanted it fast. Kohl realized that bringing Western currency to the GDR would signal a commitment to the East, just as importing D-marks to West Berlin in 1948 had shown a determination to save the city. Kohl also hoped that a change in currency would slow the East German exodus to the West. “If we don’t want the people to come to the D-Mark,” he said, “the D-Mark has to go the people.” On February 6 he announced his intention of exploring a “currency union” with the GDR. The main question concerned the value at which the eastern currency should be converted. At the outset of the discussions, Federal Bank president Karl Otto Pöhl warned Kohl not to use currency as a lever for national unity. True politician that he was, however, the chancellor responded that “we should not approach this historic decision with a mercenary mind.” As usual, Kohl prevailed. On July 1, 1990, the GDR got the D-mark, and the conversion rate was one to one.
A new Deutsche Bank outlet on the Alexanderplatz opened its doors at 12:00 noon, launching the alchemic process of converting Eastern lead to Western gold. To celebrate this “initial step toward unity,” the bank manager gave the first customer through the door a bottle of champagne and a one hundred D-mark savings account. Flush with their new money, East Berliners talked excitedly about how they would spend it. Some planned elaborate vacation trips. Others thought in more modest terms: “Eating decently, visiting a disco or whorehouse, that’s all possible now,” enthused one man. Inevitably, there was a run on used Mercedeses—and, just as inevitably—a rash of accidents involving drivers unused to vehicles that actually accelerated when one stepped on the gas.
Amidst all the excitement, few realized that the monetary union might bring long-term challenges as well as instant rewards. Shoddy and unsophisticated eastern products, now priced in D-marks, could no longer compete with Western imports. Even domestically produced food was affected, as eastern shoppers suddenly turned up their noses at local cherries and apples in favor of fruit flown in from Washington State. Many companies had difficulty meeting their debt obligations and payrolls in the new currency; it was one thing to retain marginally productive workers when they were paid in ostmarks, quite another to do so when the wages were in D-marks. The GDR’s Eastern European trading partners reduced imports from East Germany because the goods were now overpriced. It may indeed have been necessary to bring the D-mark east, but doing so at a parity of one to one turned out to be a crucial mistake.
While ostmarks disappeared into mine shafts, to join the Reichsmarks abandoned there in 1948, the Berlin Wall—that is, most of what was left of it after the Mauerspechte (Wall-peckers) had had their way with it—was dismantled by cranes. Eighty-one colorful sections were sold at an auction in Monte Carlo in 1990; some of them fetched as much as 40,000 marks. Most of the rest were ground up for paving material. A block was presented to former President Ronald Reagan, who just three years before had urged Gorbachev to tear the structure down. Belatedly realizing that the Wall had value as an historical artifact, not to mention as a tourist attraction, city officials earmarked a 212-meter-long section at Bernauer Strasse for preservation. To protect it from the voracious peckers, a wire fence was built around it. The decision to create a permanent memorial there “to the victims of the German division” was delayed for a time because of resistance from the Church of St. Sophia, whose cemetery lay next to the Wall. The memorial that was ultimately installed, a dazzlingly clean section of concrete bordered by two bronze slabs, bears little resemblance to the original barrier. Aware of this deficiency, the city government under Eberhard Diepgen toyed with the idea of reconstructing a section of the “border defense system” in all its former horror—a kind of Disneyland of the Cold War.