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LONDON CALLING!

The Berlin Wall Anniversary

An Examination of Nostalgia

by FELICITY USSHER

G21 Staff Writer

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LONDON, U.K. - A jubilant rock concert was staged in Berlin in the early months of 1990, to celebrate the smashed up rubble of Europe's most symbolic frontier.

It was the first retrospective of those crazy nights of pillage, apart from news broadcasts. Pink Floyd's The Wall was what it was called. And as the giant stage wall was pulled down, hundreds of thousands of people in the audience danced and wept to the glorious sound of "The Tide is Turning".

That's the sense of liberation we remember today, on the tenth anniversary of 9th November, 1989. We remember that sense of hope for the human race, as estranged countrymen and women hugged one another. Freedom at last, for East Berliners trapped behind the Iron Curtain with clapped-out cars and no ambitions permitted beyond The Party.

But despite the public embraces of folk from both sides, there was no attempt to negotiate a political half-way point for East Germany or West. And now, ten years on, we have missed our chance to learn a few things from an economy that put welfare above financial profit.

Today's anniversary tributes are unlikely to tell us much about the Soviets' pioneering welfare system, which offered creches for employees' children in factories and offices, and provided low rents in major cities and free medicine on hand for all. We probably won't hear how the wall, now available in lower case, came down so fast that much of the good of the Socialist system - strong currency and full employment - was washed out with the bad, in a series of drastic mistakes. These are the economic conditions our own political leaders are aiming for now, but sadly, advice only travelled from rich to poor in 1989.

Perhaps if we are serious about constructing a Third Way, today would be a good day to reassess the past and its representation.

The past ten years have shown that the original ending of Pink Floyd's film was more accurate than the sentimental, musical re-working of 1990. Devised in 1982 when the Cold War was at its peak, Pink Floyd's wall was meant as a metaphor for the mental barriers people build inside their heads. Its collapse brought not joy but disaster. It destroyed the main character's prejudices, which at face value might sound good. But he was left with nothing to protect him from the world, and he collapsed in a deeply depressing spiral.

Peter Schneider's renowned novel, "The Wall Jumper," published in German in 1982, shows that Berliners were well aware of the concept of the wall in their minds, or "Mauer im Kopf", and how much longer that would take to fall than the real thing.

The Berlin Wall did come down too fast. To start with, the announcement on 9th November that all citizens could cross Berlin with immediate effect was an accident. Councillor Schabowski, had picked up the wrong press release for a local meeting, but he insisted on stumbling his way through it to the increasing astonishment of his audience, and then the world.

The news was supposed to break the following day, along with details of tightly controlled exit visas. But as it was, there were none of the usual border controls between states, and nothing to calm fears of a mass exodus to the West.

A straw poll taken at the first crossing point in the wall, on the night of 9th November, found that 70 percent of Germans opposed unification. The immediate concern of East Germans was to buy consumer goods and visit lost family, and their long-term priority was free elections in the East, not a united Germany.

But as more and more people swept across the border in search of higher wages, unification reached the top of the agenda - if only as a way of stopping them. For it was now far too late for border controls.

All-Berlin elections were held just three weeks after the wall came down, giving nascent East German political parties no time to organise. Their suggestions for state welfare within a multi-party system went unheard, and West German candidate Kohl, representing the Christian Democrats, won the election on impossible promises of wealth for all.

The rush for German unity had a disastrous effect on the economy. On July 1 1990, authorities announced a 1:1 exchange rate between the West German deutchmark and the East German ostmark. Consumers reacted with delight, and rushed out to spend their savings. But the short-sighted move over-valued East German industry, and killed its markets overnight. The only advantage of East German products over their Western equivalents had been their cheap retail prices. Now that selling point had gone, businesses collapsed and workers became unemployed - many for the first time in their lives.

It was not just the speed of the unification process which destroyed livelihoods. Politicians were treating crucial political and economic decisions as having primarily symbolic value. Why else was the exchange rate set at 1:1? Why else were the Stasi secret police files opened so soon, wrecking personal lives as people discovered who their informers had been? Political symbolism was the lethal, drunken driving force of unification, and it was, no doubt, the legacy of having a ten-foot high, 24km long concrete frontier dividing the city in two.

Today could be an excellent day for starting the debate with some solid ammunition from the past.