Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin. Alexandra Richie

The Wall fell in 1989, but it was obvious to anyone who had lived in East Germany that many young people clearly believed in at least some of the fabrications which they had been taught for so long. These ranged from the mundane – in which minor events were hailed as great milestones on the road to the inevitable creation of the ‘peasants’ and workers’ state’ – to the ludicrous – that the entire population of the GDR was made up of ‘Communist resistance fighters’ who had helped the Red Army to liberate Germany, that all Nazis had fled to the Federal Republic in 1945, and that individuals like Hitler had played a relatively unimportant role in the creation of the Third Reich.⁶⁰

      When the Wall fell there was an immediate sense that this poisonous heritage should be exposed. It was a time of great hope and optimism in Germany and in Berlin. Old history textbooks were thrown out, hard-line East German teachers were barred from schools, official museum displays were changed and the history of both Soviet and East German crimes against its citizens was investigated – in November 1990, for example, a library dedicated to the victims of Stalinism was opened on the Hausvogteiplatz with the support of prominent ex-GDR activists, including Bärbel Bohley, Lew Kopelew and Jürgen Fuchs. But the mood did not last. East Berlin was the very core of the old GDR. It was the centre of government, of the Stasi and of the party. Every seventh East Berliner had been employed by the state and around 100,000 people were members of the SED elite, ranging from high-ranking security personnel to top party functionaries. It was they who had profited from the old regime with their subsidized flats, their access to western goods and their exercise of power. Suddenly a number of eastern Germans began to reject the new western orientation and to hanker after lost days of prestige and influence in the cosy world of the SED or the Stasi. Self-examination has never been a strong feature of old, corrupt and criminal elites. Only two years after the collapse of the state some began to call for a return to the ‘values of the old GDR’ and the defunct state was presented as a wonderful place which had cared for its people and given them fulfilling lives. A growing number of ex-GDR citizens began to exhibit those destructive traits which have plagued Berlin in the past: self-pity, sentimentality and a tendency to gloss over the worst aspects of their history.

      The group which has led this movement was none other than the heir to the SED – the East German Communist Party – known as the Party of Democratic Socialism or PDS and headed by the East German lawyer Gregor Gysi. The PDS gained the support of much of the old GDR elite, in particular those who were unable to launch themselves in new western careers, but it also played on the alienation and bitterness felt by many ordinary citizens struggling to find a way in the capitalist world, exploiting this misery for its own political gain. It has been highly successful. Rather than hearing about the SED’s crimes and abuses of power a visitor to eastern Germany in the late 1990s might well be told about the wonderful Shangri-La that was East Berlin. Those westerners who question this version are told that they ‘could not know’ because they ‘had not lived in the GDR’. Those who did live in the GDR tend not to be so easily swayed, but it is troubling to meet so many people who now long for their ‘good old days’. This has also had political repercussions. In the 1994 elections an amazing one third of eastern Berliners voted for the PDS.⁶¹

      This so-called ‘Ostalgia’ – nostalgia for the east – has become the new scourge of Berlin, turning the city into a battleground over the history of the GDR. It has already had an effect on post-Wall planning and reconstruction: bitter arguments have erupted over what to do with that symbol of the old regime, the Palast der Republik on Unter den Linden.

      It is a plain rectangular structure with square, copper-coloured glass windows and white walls and lies in the midst of the few remaining old buildings in the heart of Berlin. It is a perfect symbol of the GDR, epitomizing the lack of creativity, the dearth of compassion and the insensitivity to the past which characterized the bankrupt regime; indeed it stands on the site of the former palace which was blown up for ideological reasons by Walter Ulbricht in 1950. The Palast also represented the powerlessness of East German citizens: it was built as a ‘people’s palace’ open to all ordinary citizens in order to show them that they were participants in the running of ‘their’ state. In reality, however, ordinary people had no access to power at all – indeed they rarely saw their leaders except on carefully staged ceremonial occasions, and political activity was forbidden unless specifically sanctioned by the SED. When the Wall fell it was understood that the Palast would be demolished and that some sort of building recapturing the proportions and facade of the old palace would go up on this historic spot; supporters of this idea had a life-sized mock-up of the old building painted on to vast canvas sheets and erected them at the site in 1993. But then Ostalgia struck. Suddenly the Palast der Republik was called a ‘monument’ to the people of the GDR; some easterners began to reminisce about how much they had enjoyed visits to concerts or speech days or exhibitions in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1995 the decision to remove this building was reversed.

      The question of what to do with the Palast der Republik is an aesthetic problem rather than a political one; East Berlin is filled with eyesores built by the former regime but nobody is suggesting that these should all be ripped down. The palace is controversial not so much because it is an ugly ex-GDR government building – there are plenty of those – but rather because of where it is; if it had been built far from the site of the historic palace few would question its right to stay. The debate is troubling only in that it demonstrates a lingering nostalgia for a regime which does not deserve the loyalty of its people. But Ostalgia is having an effect on other aspects of history.

      In 1989 it seemed that the destruction of the huge 63-foot-high statue of Lenin in the former East Berlin district of Lichtenberg was a foregone conclusion. The enormous red granite sculpture by the Soviet artist Nikolai Tompsky was typical of those which had sprouted all over the Warsaw Pact countries after 1945 – enormous, oppressive, heroic, and detested symbols of Soviet oppression. These statues were amongst the first things to be vandalized or torn down in the aftermath of the revolutions in central Europe – except in East Berlin. Indeed, Berlin’s Lenin became a rallying point for those keen to salvage the reputation of the ex-GDR. For this noisy minority Lenin no longer represented tyranny but was the ‘symbol of history’ which ‘reflected GDR traditions’ and whose removal would be an ‘affront to the Ossis’. One group calling itself the Initiative politische Denkmäler advocated the preservation of all monuments, while members of the Green Party and the PDS introduced a resolution in the municipal parliament calling for the destruction of the old Victory Column in the Tiergarten if Lenin was taken down. This glib comparison between the monument honouring Bismarck’s unification of Germany and a statue of a man responsible for the murder of millions of people was simply staggering. East Berlin earned the dubious distinction of being the only non-CIS capital which actually wanted to preserve the symbol of its enslavement. In the end a suitable compromise was reached. The statue was taken apart piece by piece and laid to rest in a Berlin gravel pit, but it was not destroyed.

      The controversy over Lenin was a mere taste of what was to come. The next statue to be championed was the enormous Ernst Thälmann in Prenzlauer Berg, complete with flag and clenched fist and a heater in the nose to prevent snow from piling up in winter. This time the arguments for its preservation came directly from the misleading pages of official GDR history textbooks.

      Ernst Thälmann was one of the great heroes of the GDR. Every school child learned that he was chairman of the German Communist Party between 1925 and 1933; every museum of modern history recounted how he was arrested and killed by the Nazis, and how he was the very model of an ‘anti-Fascist resistance fighter’. There is no doubt that Thälmann suffered terribly under the Nazis and for that he deserves universal sympathy. But East Germans had not been taught the other side of his story.

      Ernst Thälmann was also the man responsible for the forced Stalinization of the German Communist Party in the 1920s. It was he who brought the KPD under Moscow’s direct control, it was he who supervised the eviction of all its opponents, and it was he who on Stalin’s direct orders broke all links with the Social Democrats – who were labelled ‘Social Fascists’ – in 1928. Thälmann then did something which alone might have provoked the removal of his statue. Rather than join with the moderate left, whom he still saw as the ‘greatest threat to the revolution’, he actually allied himself with the