False Analogy

I am an admirer of Washington Post columnist  Anne Applebaum.  Her columns on terrorism are first-rate and her history of the Soviet Union Gulag prison system is the standard.  But I think Anne missed the mark in her column this week where she recalled the collapse of the DDR and compared this to events in Iraq.  The transformation from totalitarianism to democracy, she says, cannot happen over night: it may take many decades.  Just look at east Germany 15 years after the Turning Point (Die Wende).  The people are still demoralized and are embracing extremist politics:

    

"The lesson of the East German transition after 15
years should, in other words, be phrased as a warning: Even if it is
possible to get every political and economic element right, even if it
is possible to avoid violence entirely, the psychological transition to
liberal democracy from a regime ruled by fear is one that takes at
least one generation, if not two. Few people are able to walk from a
closed society into an open one without self-doubt and discomfort. Few
people find it easy to readjust their thinking overnight, even if they
want to. Few people are able to look at themselves in the mirror, tell
themselves that the first few decades of their lives were all a bad
mistake, and go out and start living new lives according to new rules.
It was no accident, a wise teacher once told me, that God made the
Israelites wander in the desert for 40 years before bringing them to
the promised land: That was how long it would take them to unlearn the
mental habits of Egyptian slavery.

In a week in which U.S. and Iraqi soldiers are
fighting one of the bloodiest and most difficult battles of the whole
Iraqi conflict, it doesn’t sound terribly comforting to write that
"these things take a long time." But they do, and for Americans
accustomed to fast results, it can’t be repeated often enough: East
Germany is proof that it is possible to do everything right and still
leave millions of people feeling cheated by liberation many years
later. I don’t know whether Iraq will ever be a "success," but even if
it is, we may not know for several decades. If it was a grave
misjudgment to ignore that fact before the Iraqi war began, it would be
no less catastrophic to do so now."

This ignores the fact that there were aspects of the reunification – going back to the first days – that were badly botched – as even Helmut Schmidt acknowledged recently.

But I think this attitude is also blind to the forces that drove tens of thousands of East Germans into the streets that fall.  Why were they risking arrest?  Why didn’t they flee across the Czech border when that opened up?

There haven’t been many works of fiction that deal with Die Wende, but one of the best is by the east German writer Otto Emersleben – now living in the States  – NovemberMaerchen: Keine bleibende Stadt.

The novel deals with events in a small east German city  leading up to the collapse of the DDR.  The protagonist  Irmelin is a middle-aged woman married to a Stasi informer who undergoes a sexual and political reawakening, just as her small city is shaken by the tumultuous political events in Germany.  She becomes the leader of the local demonstrations, even as she is betrayed by her husband.  But her activism is not motivated by a desire for a West German consumer capitalism; rather she envisions a different world.  In one scene she describes to her friend the "fairy tale" of the society she dreams of:

Wiess ich doch. Ich meine das Maerchen vom Land, in dem es sich leben laesst.
Kein Deutschland Deutschland ueber alles…
Sondern ein sozialistisches Land, in dem der Wille der Mehrheit geschieht, ohne dass die Minderheit unterdrueckt wird. ..

So there were dreams of a utopian Third Way that animated the people in this small city.  In the final chapter of the novel the dreams are dashed; managers from the West move in to take over the local enterprises.  The residents are resigned to a future where they are once again the objects – not the subjects – of history.

I don”t know how representative this novel is of the emotions and ideas of people in the DDR of the time, but it is a "good read" and I recommend it.  Unfortunately, it is not available via Amazon.