Berlin Wall Archive

One more Berlin Wall post for tonight

Before I lay me down to sleep…

I find the CNN overview of the night’s festivities to be very good: lots of videos and a slideshow.

Sehenswert, as the Germans would say. (“Worth a look”.)

Today is the 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall

Today is the 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall

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!

Bill Dawson


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.

The “Participatory Dictatorship” – Fulbrook’s “The People’s State” (2)

The “Participatory Dictatorship” – Fulbrook’s “The People’s State” (2)

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.

I also mentioned that in pursuing her newer, wider and, as she believes, more correct approach to East Germany’s history, Fulbrook appears to be at least somewhat worried that her own politics can be used against her, that she might be seen by some as downplaying the repressive elements of the dictatorship.  As I noted, she therefore goes out of her way on several occasions to remind the readers that the regime was, in fact, a repressive dictatorship.  (By the way, she makes this clear enough in another of her books concerning East Germany, Anatomy of a Dictatorship.)

Given her stance — and her own worries about how her stance might be received — I was really wondering just how far she would go in describing what we might call a “contented people” (not her phrase) in the later parts of the book where her arguments would be spelled out in greater detail.  Let’s be specific here: I was asking myself, “Am I maybe going to come away thinking that East Germany wasn’t such a bad place?”

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.

To that end, vast numbers of people were given some sort of “functionary” role.  (The notion of “functionary” is very prominent in Chapter 11.)  Fulbrook:

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.

Among them were 300,000-400,000 “key functionaries”, but then also another two million adults who

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.

[T]o try to call them all representatives of the “state”, rather than members of “society”, would be to make an artificial distinction that does not adequately depict the situation on the ground.[236-237]

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.

She refers to the functionaries described above as a “benign” form of participation.  That group was large enough as is, but we’ve not yet touched upon the “malign exercises of power” that could be undertaken by everyday members of society who, sadly, jumped at the opportunity.  We’re speaking here of the informal collaborators (inoffizielle Mitarbeiter, or “IMs”) who worked with the Stasi, the notorious East German secret police.  Fulbrook:

By way of comparison, the Gestapo employed 7,000 officials for a total population of 66,000,000 in Nazi Germany; the Stasi employed over 91,000 full-time staff in a GDR population of about 16,400,000 in 1989. [241]

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.

Happy Reading!

Bill Dawson

P.S. For a dramatic interpretation of the methods of the Stasi — the East German secret police — check out the Oscar-winning film “The Lives of Others” (also available at Amazon UK, CA and DE).  For a foreign-language film, “The Lives of Others” has an extraordinary 270+ reviews at Amazon.com, almost wholly positive.  Here’s part of one:

‘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?


Photo Credit

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.

“Someday the Wall will fall” – Letter from an East German Penpal (Hausarchiv)

“Someday the Wall will fall” – Letter from an East German Penpal (Hausarchiv)

Amateur history nerd that I am, I’m quite pleased to have married into a family which has retained all sorts of books, newspapers and magazines dating from about 1920 onwards. The “In the Hausarchiv” series gives an occasional look at the things I’ve come across in our own “house archive”.

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.

The first thing that caught my eye was the postage stamp.  It commemorates the 50th anniversary of what has commonly been referred to as “Kristallnacht“, or “The November Pogrom”.  On this East German stamp it is called the “Fascist Pogrom Night”.  This is factually true, but I had to laugh a bit because it’s a very, very East German (communist) way of putting it.  The regime in East Germany went to great lengths to define itself as anti-fascist.  The Berlin Wall itself was officially named the “Anti-Fascist Protection Wall.”

Note from a GDR PenpalBut now let’s get to the good stuff, the words written by this young man.  If you look at the bigger version of the note (click on it), the top of the right-side reads as follows:

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.

I hunted through other letters from this particular young man and found one which stirred me even more.  It contains this fantastic passage:

On 18 and 19 June [1988], 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.

Then we went with the S-Bahn [regional train] and suddenly there were giant white skyscrapers.  Jan nudged me and said that that was West Berlin.  I said loudly, “You’re crazy, that’s not West Berlin.  They would never let us get so close!”  A woman across from me smiled and said, “Just wait, young man.  In a second you’ll see the Wall — it really is West Berlin.”

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.

Until next time,

Bill Dawson

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.

Fall of the Berlin Wall – 20th Anniversary – links for 03 Nov 2009

Fall of the Berlin Wall – 20th Anniversary – links for 03 Nov 2009

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.

If you missed them, consider reviewing other recent entries containing links regarding the anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall. And don’t forget our special page dedicated wholly to Fall of the Berlin Wall Resources.

And now to today’s links:

  • 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!

Until next time,

Bill Dawson

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!


Photo Credit

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.

3 Links to Get You Up to Speed on the Berlin Wall

3 Links to Get You Up to Speed on the Berlin Wall

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.

That’s what I’m here for, to help you learn a bit o’ history. Here are three links to help you understand what this upcoming anniversary is all about:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

And now for a little bonus. Do you want to “feel” the Berlin Wall, in an emotional sorta way? I find the video below to be absolutely goose-bumpy! It features video clips concerning the Wall, accompanied by the song “Wind of Change” from the German band The Scorpions. The song is relevant: it was written with the revolutions of 1989 in mind. Put on your headphones, turn up the volume, kick back and immerse yourself in the Berlin Wall experience:

No excuses! Now you know about that infamous Wall and you’re prepared to talk about it in the coming week!

Until next time,

Bill Dawson

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.

 

Photo Credit

The photo of the Berlin Wall that accompanies this blog post is from Flickr user “vivaopictures”, who has graciously made it available to all of us via the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license. The suggested attribution is as follows:

Fall of the Berlin Wall – 20th Anniversary – links for 29 Oct 2009

We skipped a day yesterday, but here we are with links for 29 October 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 on 09 November 2009.

If you missed them, consider reviewing other recent entries containing links regarding the anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall. And don’t forget our special page dedicated wholly to Fall of the Berlin Wall Resources.

And now to today’s links:

  • The first is a bit humorous, though it’s not meant to be.  At Russia Today we learn that Vladimir Putin may have “significantly contributed to reuniting the German state, but this stage of Putin’s biography is still classified and no specific facts can be obtained.”  Riiiiggghhht.  Russia Today is run by the “Autonomous [tee hee] Nonprofit Organization ‘TV-Novosti'”. [“tee hee” mine.]  The journalist for the documentary that is mentioned in the article works for NTV, which is controlled by Gazprom, the state gas industry.
  • At the New York Times appears a Reuters article about the “Stasi files”: massive amounts of paperwork kept by the East German Ministry of State Security, detailing extraordinary amounts of information about the citizens on whom they were spying.  Authorities in the re-unified Germany had originally thought they could honor all requests by private citizens to view their files within ten years.
    But thousands of people, mainly from former East Germany, are still applying every month. In the first half of 2009, applications were up nearly 11 percent on 2008.

    “We have had more applications this year because of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Wall,” said Martin Boettger, who heads a regional branch of the Stasi archives in Chemnitz, formerly Karl-Marx-Stadt.

    “Many films and books are being made, events are being held, so it is in the public consciousness,” said Boettger, whose own file contains 3,000 pages, detailing even the most trivial facts of his life and branding him a “religious fanatic.” (my emphasis)

    It really makes you wonder: what on earth could this particular citizen – Mr. Boettger – have done that could have been interesting enough to fill up 3,000 pages?

Today’s video is a report from Reuters about where pieces of the Wall have ended up:

Until next time,

Bill Dawson

P.S. We’re now just 11 days away from the 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall. I’m going to be cutting back on these daily links — they won’t be daily anymore, because I almost feel like I’ve been spamming my own blog! :) So they’ll be a bit less frequent, and with some other bigger blog posts interspersed.

Fall of the Berlin Wall – 20th Anniversary – links for 27 Oct 2009

Here are links for 27 October 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 on 09 November 2009.

If you missed them, consider reviewing other recent entries containing links regarding the anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall. And don’t forget our special page dedicated wholly to Fall of the Berlin Wall Resources.

And now to today’s links:

  • One of the things I have noticed during the past few weeks of scouring the web for Fall of the Berlin Wall articles is that not much of the content is emanating from the U.S. national media, with the exception of the Wall Street Journal.  I have frequently, however, come across articles from the States that have a local angle.  I’ve ignored a lot of it, probably unjustly.  Today I will remedy that with something from the Jefferson City (Missouri) News Tribune, which announces Westminster College’s plans for 09 November.  Westminster has a special connection to the Iron Curtain that was symbolized by the Berlin Wall: it was there that Winston Churchill gave the famous “Iron Curtain” speech.
  • Staying with the local theme, we have the Pocono Record informing us that East Stroudsburg University is marking the 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall by showing two films, one of which is “The Lives of Others”, the film we highlighted in yesterday’s links.
  • The BBC has an absolutely fantastic story to tell, that of Miklos Nemeth, who was Hungary’s prime minister in 1988.  As Prime Minister, Nemeth used his power over the country’s budget to almost single-handedly dismantle Hungary’s border with Austria, leading to an opening of the dike (so to speak) and the trickling out of several East Germans into Austria via Hungary.  The BBC story highlights the risks that Nemeth faced.

Today’s video is a bit of a mystery.  It’s a very well done production using the metaphor of the birth of a baby on November 9, 1989, to describe the birth of a new Europe.  It looks very much like it could have been produced as an official advertisement for 20th Anniversary celebrations, but the person who posted the video did not provide any information at all concerning its origin.  But that doesn’t make it any less enjoyable!

Until tomorrow’s links,

Bill Dawson
P.S. Speaking of Churchill, he’s featured in this collection of famous great speeches. Now I know it’s time for you to start thinking about holiday gifts for your history buff friends, and this DVD looks like a great choice! It includes speeches by Churchill (the famous wartime speeches), Roosevelt, John F and Robert F Kennedy, all the way up into more recent times with speeches from President Clinton and others.
 

Fall of the Berlin Wall – 20th Anniversary – links for 26 Oct 2009

Here are links for 26 October 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 on 09 November 2009.

If you missed them, consider reviewing other recent entries containing links regarding the anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall. And don’t forget our special page dedicated wholly to Fall of the Berlin Wall Resources.

And now to today’s links:

Today’s video is from Sony Pictures Classics’ account at YouTube and features the trailer for the film “The Lives of Others” (Das Leben der Anderen), a German film concerning the Stasi and how it spied on East German citizens, particularly (as in the film) prominent authors or other artists who were seen as politically unreliable or even subversive.

More links tomorrow.

Until then,

Bill Dawson

The Lives of Others (DVD)P.S. “The Lives of Others”, the film whose trailer is shown above, is now available on DVD at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca and — in the original German — at Amazon.de.
 

Fall of the Berlin Wall – 20th Anniversary – links for 23 Oct 2009

Here are links for 23 October 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 on 09 November 2009.

If you missed them, consider reviewing other recent entries containing links regarding the anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall. And don’t forget our special page dedicated wholly to Fall of the Berlin Wall Resources.

And now to today’s links:

  • Today, the 23rd of October 2009, is itself an anniversary of some significance.  In 1989, the 23rd of October fell on a Monday, which means the special and now famous Monday prayer service was taking place at the Nikolaikirche (St. Nicholas’s Church) in Leipzig.  As had already become tradition, a peaceful protest followed the prayer services. The Wall Street Journal Online reminds us that over 300,000 took part in those Leipzig demonstrations on 23 October 1989.
  • At Guardian.co.uk, Will Buckley remembers the DDR-Oberliga, the top football (soccer) league in communist East Germany.  His tagline: “When the Berlin Wall came down 20 years ago this month, it took with it one of the world’s weirder football leagues.”  He describes the four types of teams in the league, starting with the first:

    The Dynamos: Connected to the secret police. Every club with the Dynamo prefix (eg Berlin, Dresden) was directly answerable to the head of the Stasi, Erich Mielke, who had little difficulty jumping the “fit and proper person” hurdle.

    It’s a fine article to remind us how utterly bizarre dictatorships sometimes are.

Today’s video is a bit humorous.  It’s a segment from Intrepid Berkeley Explorer’s “Septemberfest” series.  Watch those tourists hammer away at The Wall!

That’s it for this week.  Come back next week for more links concerning the Fall of the Berlin Wall