I find the CNN overview of the night’s festivities to be very good: lots of videos and a slideshow.
Well the day has finally come, the 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall.
We’ve put up a lot of Wall-related posts over the last several weeks in preparation for today, including our Fall of the Berlin Wall Resources page, as well as several individual entries in our Berlin Wall content category.
Now it’s just time to sit back and enjoy the celebrations on the telly. Those of you in Germany and Austria should tune in to Phoenix for the most coverage. Others around the world will no doubt be checking out major international networks such as CNN and the BBC.
Enjoy the coverage and see you back here soon!
Photo Credit: The lead photo accompanying this blog post is from the German Federal Archives, which has made it available under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license via Wikimedia Commons.
In Part One of my overview of Mary Fulbrook’s The People’s State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker (Amazon US, UK, CA, DE [english] and DE [deutsch]), I emphasized Professor Fulbrook’s assertion that most histories of East Germany concentrate on the “state versus society” angle, seeing the latter wholly as a repressed body governed and repressed by the former. As she makes clear in her introduction to the book, she believes the “state versus society” approach is unnecessarily and unnaturally limiting; a history that focuses only on the East German regime’s repression of dissent is, to some extent, ahistorical.
Having now read up to the book’s conclusion — and most importantly the section with the eyebrow-raising title, “The Participatory Dictatorship” — I can say that rather than getting the sense of any kind of contentment experienced by East German citizens, I instead come away with a much greater understanding of what could be considered “coping“: how most East Germans settled into the system, became a part of it and recognized their own limitations as to what they could change about it. So one of my overall reactions is that Professor Fulbrook probably did not need to worry too much that what she wrote would be considered a diminution of the repressive elements of East German society. I can say with certainty that in sections such as “The Participatory Dictatorship”, I did not feel in any way that Fulbrook plays down the repressive nature of the regime.
Rather, she simply provides a very interesting and thought-provoking description of how, in fact, the “State versus Society” model hardly existed. The State was the Society. How’s that?
The regime did a truly remarkable job integrating the society into the state by widening — to an extraordinary degree — the group of stakeholders who had something to benefit from the state. And I’m not just talking “benefits” in the form of health and education, but rather more in the form of making individuals feel that they are part of the state’s governance by providing them with responsibilities, no matter how pathetic (in retrospect) some of these responsibilities might seem. Much of this was simply manipulation, but a very clever manipulation indeed. That handful of people who truly held power at the top of the regime understood very clearly that they needed to give people a sense of (limited) power — or the appearance of power — to influence their local surroundings.
Implausibly large numbers — perhaps one in six of the population — were involved in one way or another in what might be called the micro-systems of power through which the GDR society worked. This system cannot be described in terms of an extended “state” that was “doing something” to a “society” conceived of as separate from the “state”: rather it was the very way society as a whole was structured. Life in the GDR, in just about every respect — including not only the obvious areas of the economy or the education system, but also housing and leisure — was organised in ways that were at the same time dependent on central policy decisions and on the practices of innumerable people who were active participants in the maintenance and functioning of the system on the ground.
played a significant role as a functionary in one or more of the mass organizations, political parties and regional and local representative institutions such as the Stasi, the Army and the People’s Police, and the state administrative and economic apparatus.
She goes on to describe some of the “enormous number of functions” a citizen of the GDR could potentially hold. But it’s very important to note that she does not present this as some sort of ideal circumstance, as if it was “finally” a state in which “the people” could actively participant. I found her to be describing a rather more pathetic situation, though I’m not sure she would characterize it as such. For example, the “functionaries” would — unsurprisingly — use their functions as proof of commitment to the regime when asking (begging) for items of scarcity, such as apartments or management jobs. A certain type of class system emerged in this “classless” society.
And those were simply the official employees of the Stasi. By the 1980s there were 170,000-180,000 informal collaborators, “an average ratio of one informer to every 60 or so adults.” Given the turnover of IMs over the years, she estimates that a half million GDR citizens were informal collaborators of the Stasi during the Honecker years. So this was yet another and more sinister way in which society and state overlapped during the second German dictatorship.
Fulbrook’s The People’s State (UK, CA, DE [english] and DE [deutsch]) is full of interesting data such as the numbers I’ve just showed you. I believe she makes good use of the data and, overall, I found her argument very convincing. She need not have worried too much about her arguments being misinterpreted from a political perspective: I experienced the book as a series of very thorough empirical examinations followed up by completely plausible interpretations.
It’s dense stuff, meant (I imagine) not so much for a casual audience but rather for university study. Nevertheless, Fulbrook’s writing is very approachable — it’s only the detail that I think might put off the casual reader. Professor Fulbrook is very thorough! Personally, I like that.
‘The Lives of Others’ is 137 minutes of the best entertainment imaginable. Ulrich Mühe is an East German who himself was the target of Stasi oversight. For this film, he was awarded Best Actor at the 2006 European Film Awards. Is there a more just triumph than that?
The lead photo accompanying this blog post is from the German Federal Archives which has kindly made it available via Wikimedia Commons under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license. The photo shows participants of the Bundeskongress of the German League of Democratic Women (DFD), one of the many organizations that would have been in a position to provide “functionary” roles as described by Professor Fulbrook.
Last time I featured a letter from an East German penpal of my wife. I’m going to do the same again in this post, though this letter comes from a different young man in East Germany.
A week ago we had a very nice yet sad farewell party. Two couples whom I know well have finally received their permit to emigrate to West Germany, after three years of waiting.
Such a farewell was definitely sad, but we’re all agreed that someday the walls will fall and we’ll all see each other again. I’m so looking forward to that.
I confess that those words stirred me emotionally. The letter is undated and the postmark is unclear, but from the content (he speaks of the “new year”) I assume it was written in January of 1989. Fortunately he only had another 10 months to wait before being able to go to the West and visit his friends.
On 18 and 19 June , Fisher-Z, Marillion, Heinz-Rudolf Kunze, Big Country and the absolutely awesome BRYAN ADAMS played in East Berlin. And so I went with my friends to Berlin for the very first time. I was absolutely overwhelmed and I’m still processing it all now. It started even before we reached Berlin. There I was driving comfortably in the car and all of a sudden there was a deafening roar above us: a Pan Am jet landed at the airport next to the Autobahn. I’ve seen it a thousand times on television, but when you actually experience it it’s really something.
And then I saw it, the Wall and watchtowers, and shivers ran down my spine [mir lief es eiskalt den Rücken runter]. Dani, I’m sure you’ve heard much about the Wall just like I have, but when you’re standing right in front of it — you just can’t imagine what a feeling it is, you can hardly believe it’s real: freedom so close, yet so far. [so nah die Freiheit und doch so weit].
I’ve never seen such a concert live; it was a beautiful high point of my life.
P.S. Don’t forget to check out my Berlin Wall resources page!
P.P.S. The concert is mentioned in an interesting English-language article at the website of the German magazine Der Spiegel.
Here are links for 03 November 2009 concerning that very important moment in German History (and world history), the fall of the Berlin Wall. The 20th anniversary of that momentous event is coming up in just six days, on 09 November 2009.
Deutsche Welle shows us “What’s Left of the Berlin Wall”. Though it’s a fairly simple slide show featuring 16 photos, it has quickly become one of my favorites because of the excellent descriptions (in English) of each photo. Very, very interesting, particularly the parts about cemeteries being affected by the border fortifications.
“I have never had such a gifted pupil since,” says German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s former teacher, according to an interesting article at the Independent which gives not only a brief biographical sketch of Chancellor Merkel, but also a glimpse at the town in which she grew up in East Germany.
Unfortunately, today’s video is not “embed-able” in my page, so you’ll have to head on over to the BBC to watch it. It’s part of native German Franz Strasser’s trip through the areas of his former country, East Germany. In this episode, Strasser talks with German students who belong to the first generation that grew up during reunification. Interesting!
I hope you enjoyed today’s links. Keep coming back for more!
P.S. Chancellor Merkel is right at the top of the list of the world’s most powerful women. She’s very modest in public and comes across as a bit of an intellectual (which she is); words like “dynamic”, which we often like to ascribe to leaders, don’t necessarily apply to her. But this makes her no less of an extraordinary woman, one who has a very interesting biography, as that Independent article suggests.
There are English-language biographies of this “Power-Frau“, such as the one I’ve highlighted here. Check it out!
The lead photo accompanying this blog post shows German Chancellor Angela Merkel and comes from Wikimedia Commons, where it was graciously made available by Jacques Grießmayer under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 license.
So you vaguely recall hearing something about an upcoming anniversary in Germany, but you’re embarrassed to admit that you don’t really know what all the hoopla is about. Sure, you know Berlin is the capital of Germany, and you’ve come across the notion of some kind of “Wall” being there, but that’s about the extent of your knowledge.
The BBC maintains a series of pages dedicated to helping British students study for their GCSEs (General Certificate for Secondary Education). For their history coverage they include a set of pages on the Berlin Wall. This is a very short (a few paragraphs) summary of why the Wall was built. If you wish to go further in understanding the historical context, view the other pages in their “Back to International relations 1945 – 1991″ series.
The website of the German Mission to the United States features a page titled Looking Back at the Fall of the Berlin Wall”, which is a nice, succinct, single-page summary of the Berlin Wall. A short timeline covering 1945-1990 is also provided, as are several suggested links to other pages.
Last but not least, there is always Wikipedia and their comprehensive entry concerning the Berlin Wall. This makes for longer reading than the links above, but provides a great deal of historical context.
No excuses! Now you know about that infamous Wall and you’re prepared to talk about it in the coming week!
P.S. You can always read a book, too, if you find yourself more interested! Here is one wholly dedicated to the topic of the Berlin Wall. The book came out this year specifically because of the 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, which is celebrated on 09 November.
It’s Jeffrey Engel’s The Fall of the Berlin Wall: The Revolutionary Legacy of 1989. That link is for Amazon.com, but the book is also available via Amazon UK, Canada and Germany.