German-German History

2009 is the year of big memorial days. One of these of course is the “twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall”. In Berlin, no special pathos is needed in order to remember the event and the subsequent developments in the city. But the commemorative machinery demands a new profile for the anniversary and fresh perspectives for remembrance. This year the city, the federal government and many institutions are attempting to do justice to the anniversary with innumerable events and to sharpen the view of history from below.

In order to broach a theme as boundless, or better said so boundary-less, as “Berlin 2009, Twenty Years after the Fall of the Wall”, perhaps it isn’t necessary to begin in Berlin. Still, things can go too far: the exhibition conceived for the memorial year by the German Historical Museum, Art and Cold War: German Positions from 1945 to 1989, which is operating under the name of the opening ceremony for the celebration, opened in January 2009 in, of all places, Los Angeles. Wouldn’t Prague or Budapest have done as well?

Countless events in Berlin

All the same, until the end of the year Berlin will also be endeavouring, concretely and on the spot, and very complexly, to treat the 1989 fall of the SED regime and the resultant changes in the city up to 2009. “We are attempting to cover the memorial year in many ways”, explains Moritz van Dülmen, Director of the Cultural Project Berlin Ltd., which is coordinating hundreds of events and exhibitions for the celebration. They are divided into “three focal themes”.

“On the one hand it is about the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, which will be celebrated on November 9, 2009 with a party, cultural events and art actions at the Brandenburg Gate. On the other hand, we are focussing on the history of the city and its figures twenty years ago, the remembrance of this and on the forms and development of commemoration.” Finally, the mega-programme will present a big thematic series on the “Transformed City”. Along the former border strip and at central places in Berlin – from the Potsdamer Platz and the Bernauer Straße Memorial Site to the new eastern urban development areas – photographs and documentation will bring to people’s attention what has changed since 1989 – and what has not.

Berlin and the federal government have made about six million euros available for projects by foundations, research and educational institutions, for documentation by contemporary witnesses, conferences and artists, and for political and historical initiatives. Wolfgang Tiefensee (SPD), transport minister and “Federal Commissioner for the Newly-Formed German States”, shares the concept of a balancing act between 1989 and 2009. The essential question, he says, is “how did people then experienced the fall of the Wall and German unity, and how do they experience unification today”.

Clear profile in a year of significant anniversaries

It is evident that in this year’s commemoration machinery the “Twentieth Fall of the Wall Anniversary” needs a clear profile. For one thing, it stands in competition with a plethora of other significant anniversaries in German commemorative culture and politics: for instance, 60 years Federal Republic, 70 years since the beginning of the Second World War, 90 years women’s suffrage, and the anniversaries of the Weimar Assembly and the Treaty of Versailles. For another, the reception of the fall of the Wall has changed since 1989 and broached new perspectives, focal points and questions. To illustrate this, Van Dülmen draws a comparison with the celebrations in 1999. The tenth anniversary “called to mind [the pictures of the fall of the Wall and its consequences] much more emotionally, subjectively and immediately”. The major questions then were whether the “inner split” between East and West had been surmounted or not, the controversy over accounting for the injustices of the GDR, and the adjustment of living conditions.

In 2009, says van Dülmen, “the time has come to present and document history more comprehensively and with greater differentiation”. The distance to the events of 1989, he observes, is now greater, the discourse of contemporary witnesses no longer shaped only by their own way of seeing things. Moreover, the interpretative authority over history between now and then is no longer ceded mainly to “Wessis” (West Germans). “All in all, today we can talk more easily, more reflectively and also with greater distance about the fall of the Wall, its history and its consequences.”

Once one has penetrated the events and exhibition programme of, for instance, the Federal Agency for Civic Education or the Robert Havemann Society’s Open Air Show “The Peaceful Revolution 1989/1990”, devoted to the chronology of change and opposition in East Berlin, the change in perspective becomes clear. The points of view today on the fall of the Wall throw light on the deficits beyond the successes. Tiefensee: “Twenty years after the fall of the Wall we have to make a close analysis of our present situation. State unity has been achieved; now social unity must follow.”

Academic controversies and the “magic of anniversaries”

Martin Sabrow, an historian and Director of the Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam, therefore expects academic controversies between those who demand a more radical coming to terms with the East German dictatorship and the unification success story, and those who sue for more attention to be paid to everyday life in the GDR and the effects of the Wende on East German society. “It will turn on the question of whom 1989 belongs to. There will be a competition over interpretative authority.” In addition he expects a search for another way of looking at this period of history, “from an oblique angle or from below”, an approach to which current research has committed itself.

The “magic of anniversaries”, says Sabrow, naturally makes for “event history”. This fits well into a time that has everywhere discovered how to make the most of history for its own purposes – whether for entertainment, for corroborating a new identity, or for both together. As an historian, he has his doubts about this approach. But he realises that the anniversary is a part of the popular “historical culture” and has to be accepted as such.

Those who would like to tear down the Wall again will have their chance in 2009 – though only in play, of course. For the “Festival of Freedom” from November 5 to 9, school children will build a two and a half metres high wall out of colourful building blocks along the former border strip, and then bring it to a sensational collapse like a row of dominoes. The last days of the GDR will be re-enacted with a touch of revolutionary nostalgia; and so, what with all this, the commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Wall will have arrived at place somewhere between irony and seriousness. And why not?