Forty years ago this week this, the Communist authorities in what then was East Germany, acting at the behest of their masters in Moscow, started to build the Berlin Wall. For the next 27 years, it was the most visible symbol of the division of Europe between Marxist totalitarianism and Western democracy. It was a wall that the Reds had to build. Not only was theirs a totalitarian system, it was from the very beginning a bankrupt one.
Despite its puffed-up claims, not only did it fail to provide better education, better medicare or better welfare than what was available in the West. Its rigid and deathly policy of state economic control meant that no one had the freedom to make a living for himself or his family or prosper through his own hard work. No wonder people wanted out.
The Communists called it an “anti-fascist barrier”, but the reality was that it was a prison wall, built to keep people in, by brute force if necessary. Over 200 people were shot dead by East German border guards during those 27 years as they tried to escape to freedom. Hundreds more were killed in attempts to cross the wider border between the two Germanys.
Of course, all that is well-known history. Except that there are those in Germany who appear to have forgotten this history and the terror and the cruelty inflicted by the Communists. That accusation is being leveled at Germany’s Social Democrat Chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder. Yesterday, the 40th anniversary of the Wall being started, he laid a wreath at a monument to its victims. That is hailed a good gesture.
But what is not hailed as good action is the go-ahead signal he has just given Social Democrats in Berlin to join a coalition with the political successors to those responsible for the wall and its victims — the PDS. If that is what the SDP would need to have a majority on the city council after local elections in October, he has it all laid it out to enter a partnership.
The argument that that is what politics - defined as the art of the possible - demands is not going down well with many Germans. To lament the victims of East German communism on the one hand, and to happily do deals with their successors on the other, they say, is hypocrisy, and opportunistic hypocrisy at that. The PDS is regularly referred to as a “reformed” communist party — except that there is no evidence that it is reformed. All it has done is change its name. It has not changed its belief in Marxist Leninism nor in state control of the economy.
However, it does its best to convince everyone that it is different. It prefers to display its friendly side at present; its leader in Berlin is a greater believer in being media-friendly, to the extent that he rarely talks about politics. It is a very shrewd policy. Many in the local media have lapped it up, as have a fair percentage of the inhabitants of what was East Berlin, disillusioned at the lack of progress in integrating them into the Germany economic miracle. Not that it exists any more.
Many Germans are convinced that if the Social Democrats allow the former Communists into Berlin’s city government, rather than return to the days of a grand coalition with the Christian Democrats, it will be an insult to the victims of East German communism and their families.
