I Repeat: Tear Down This Wall!
An invisible wall dividing Germany remains as an obstacle to peace in Europe and the world
On October 3rd, the Germans celebrated what they call the Day of National Unity. Well now, if you were expecting something on the order of the French, American, or Swiss national holidays, I must disappoint you. If you are used to marching bands, patriotic speeches, decorated homes, streets and parks, fireworks, and BBQ parties on Quatorze Juillet, the Fourth of July, or August First, respectively, then October Third in Germany is a real letdown. It’s not that the Germans don’t know how to throw a party (they sure do!), but commemorating the 1990 reunification of their country apparently is not a good enough reason to let their hair down.
I’ve seen the Germans go wild after winning the World Soccer Cup in 2014 for the fourth time and it included a lot of flag waving and visible moments of patriotic, we-are-one-nation feelings. But getting a day off to remember a fresh start in their tormented history triggers no such emotions. And I admit, the lack of enthusiasm has me worried.
I was looking forward to spending the entire week in Germany and half-expecting to party with our German friends. Forget it. There were no parties. Thursday, October 3rd was a dreary, cold, and rainy day in Chemnitz. Few people were out, the streets eerily empty. Clearly, people for the most part were not at work. Stores and offices were closed for the holiday, the only visible reminder of what should be a special day. Not a single building, neither public or private, was decorated; no flags, no bunting, no flowers, nothing. The dominant color was gray, shades of gray, to be kind, from the near black of Karl Marx’s oversized bust on Brückenstrasse, to the near white façade of the State Museum of Archeology – with its dark gray blinds.
The city of Chemnitz is making a huge effort to spruce things up for next year when it will bask in the fleeting fame as European Capital of Culture. That is why the building behind Marx’s bust is hidden behind scaffolding, for, somehow, the city council felt it important that visitors be able to read the revolutionary’s words carved into the nine-story high wall behind him: Working Men of the World, Unite! It’s a big job, cleansing the oversized letters of the rallying cry of revolutions long played out, and decades of neglect had made it difficult to read the soot covered exhortation writ large in the four languages that have mattered most in post-war Germany: English, German, Russian, and French.
As I stood there, taking the photograph above on October 3rd, the Day of German Unity, I was wondering whether the city would be inclined to spend even a fraction of the cost of buffing Marxist ideology on something like: Germans of Germany, unite!
Not a chance. It seems, the Germans do not like their country very much and even revel in sowing division. To be sure, none of the men and women I spoke with ostensibly wanted to go back to a time when people were ordered to fly flags on certain holidays, such as May 1st, and they recall with dread the decades when a deadly wall separated family members and friends into two competing German societies. But no one seemed particularly happy with the current situation, either. It was not the first time that I felt the Germans were in an everlasting state of grudge against their own country. I admit to liking much about Germany, our big neighbor to the north, but the Germans themselves are rarely in a mood to feel good about themselves. In fact, I, the quintessential foreigner, often feel that I am fonder of Germany than the average Karl-Heinz or Wolfgang.
The implications are huge. It is tempting to dismiss German angst as a purely German problem. There is, in truth, no such a thing as a purely German problem. Whatever Germany does or fails to do reverberates throughout the world. Americans should know. Called to arms twice within less than half a century to deal with the German question, it should be self-evident that a reliable political and social framework in central Europe is fundamental to world peace. But there are those who turn a blind eye to the drifting purposelessness of today’s Germany and then there are those who see it clearly and exploit it cynically. The empty squares of Chemnitz on the day that should have people dancing in the streets are emblematic of Germany’s political discourse; the void of teleological meaning is embarrassingly palpable. The public sphere, whether physical or virtual, is lacking in imagination, color, and orientation. Instead, the citizen-observer is left to nourish his angst to a potential fever pitch in a dangerous vacuum that may well again fly in the face of those who least expect it, once the void is filled with enough rubbish.
Leading politicians and pundits are among those who may be aware of the brewing storm made of widespread alienation, but prefer to gloss over it – not least because they had been lulled into comfortable complacency for more than seventy years under America’s latent willingness to safeguard against almost any German tantrum. And then there are those who see the void – and are ever so eager to fill it. They are the cynics on the political left and right who overlap remarkably on their disdain for democracy and their admiration for the politics of might over right. AfD (Alternative für Deutschland, Alternative for Germany) and BSW (Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht; an alliance of mostly former East German communists grouped around the charismatic Wagenknecht) both cater to voters who seek guidance based on a mythical longing for a time when the State knew best and showing colors was mandatory rather than a habit of the heart, as you would expect in a democracy.
Both parties are relatively new on the stage of German politics. AfD was established in 2013 and BSW in January 2024. Yet, neither can be dismissed as flukes, and wishful thinking will not make them go away. They have skillfully provided answers, however nauseating, to pressing questions such as Germany’s place in the world and maintaining peace in Europe. Often seen as a rightwing, nationalistic party, AfD has revealed its inner workings more clearly in recent years, and the picture is not pretty. The appeal of a German identity based on DNA was an attention getter in early years, but now it has become increasingly obvious that the party leadership around Alice Weidel is clueless when it comes to providing direction based on Germany’s interests. Rather, the monicker “alternative” for a movement promising a new start in German politics has been unmasked as a shorthand in a more literal sense to stand for its overall policy thrust. The Alternative for Germany is not some sort of tautological vision of Germany. Obviously now, the Alternative for Germany is Russia.
BSW on the other hand set out from the start on the premise that Russia is its guiding principle. Wagenknecht makes no bones about her affinity to all things Russian as defined by whoever rules the Kremlin at any given time. Her coalition members are recruited almost exclusively among former East German spies and the once mighty state security service (Stasi). Members are carefully vetted and therefore number only in the hundreds. Yet, her public backing is alarming, as evidenced in recent elections in three east German states. Off the bat, she garnered between 11 and 16 percent of the votes cast. Add to that AfD’s roughly 30 percent support at the polls, and you have more than 40 percent of the East German voting public abetting Russia’s interests in their own country.
In a televised debate a few days ago, Wagenknecht and AfD’s Weidel attempted to outdo one another in expressing fealty to Putin. Both women are part of his soldiery tasked with anesthetizing European public sentiment into accepting a peaceful vision of Europe along the lines of Russian hegemony, sometimes referred to as Russky Mir. There is little outrage in Germany over the obvious meddling of a foreign power under the guise of democratic discourse, the likes of which of course we would never see in Russia. Yes, there is talk of banning AfD, but not on grounds of sedition, but rather because the party’s careless use of the word Volk (etymologically related, but not exactly equal to the English word folk). And no one has demanded that BSW be relegated to the dustbin of history before Wagenknecht gets an opportunity to take the wrecking ball to the entire country (or worse). The fact alone that Wagenknecht has built a political following around her personality cult should be alarming to Germans, but it’s not.
The reasons for this awkward handling of political upstarts in Germany are hidden deep in the country’s collective psyche, damaged by two world wars on the wrong side of history and two dictatorships that shipwrecked citizen awareness and with it the potential for reflective maturity in collective action. Political reward in Germany since at least 1848 has rarely been bestowed on those who sought compromise but lavished on those who prevailed by force or demagoguery. Recall that Bismarck in the 1860’s forged the Second German Empire at the tip of a thousand bayonets – and that his first and most ardent enemies were the numerous German states that had little taste for Prussian hegemony.
There is no need here to repeat what happened next, save to point out that German unity, such as it ever was, has exhibited the fault lines we are now witnessing all along. Nor is there anything surprising or new in the meddling of foreign powers at the expense of German unity. In fact, German disunity was the consensus goal of almost all European powers for many centuries since at least the late Middle Ages. Seen this way, BSW and AfD are part of a sad legacy in German history. The French, the British, the Swedes, the Austrians, and of course the Russians have all taken turns or acted in coordinated fashion to keep the German beast small before it could do much damage as a powerful, united nation. Keeping the Germans in check always involved playing on internal divisions, pitting various factions against one another. The Thirty Years War (1618-1648), the Seven Years War (1756-1763), and the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815) were just the most obvious and devastating wars that were fought, at least in part, to keep the Germans from uniting into a formidable central European power. Thus, Germans often marched against Germans on behalf of one or more foreign power.
There are reasons why many Germans cannot see BSW or AfD as threats to German unity and its young democracy. Belligerent rhetoric mimicking the agenda of foreign powers appears near normal in the German context. But that is not the only reason. Much of it is related to the German brand of public discourse going back to Martin Luther and, more accurately, its reception in later years. At the Diet of Worms in 1521, Luther refused to recant his 95 Theses. Although he likely did not say it there in front of emperor Charles V, the seminal words appear later in a document issued under his supervision: “Here I stand, I can do no other, so help me God. Amen.” Millions of Germans over time have internalized not the content of Luther’s Theses (leave that to academics) but the reformer’s defiant rhetoric as virtue, quite apart from any mitigating content. The phrase played an important role in shoring up German nationalism in the 19th century and politicians use it in various paraphrased versions still today. In fact, it seems to me, that the Bundestag, the German federal parliament, is full of members who fancy to have the moral authority of Luther. Wagenknecht is but one of many, if perhaps the most spiteful and articulate, who regularly “stands there and can do no other.” Her public admiration of dictators past and present (Stalin, Ulbricht, Castro, and Putin among them) further bolster her image as a politician who has little patience for democratic compromise. Her carefully coiffed Rosa Luxemburg look fits neatly into the image of a far left intellectual who incidentally got her Ph.D. in Chemnitz, just down the street from the huge monument to the man who continues to dominate her thinking: Karl Marx.
Chemnitz, the city that was known as Karl-Marx-Stadt from 1953 to 1990, has no intention of getting rid of the “head,” as locals sometimes refer to the bronze monument honoring the man who demanded dictatorship – and got it several times over. Ironically, the city fears losing tourist income if it were to scrap its Marx, preferring instead to give in to capitalist leanings and thus attract badly needed cash to rebuild what used to be Germany’s wealthiest city. But that was a long time ago (the 1910s) and before Marx-inspired rulers triggered a crushing exodus of many of its leading industries westward, such as Audi from nearby Zwickau to Ingolstadt in Bavaria.
We leave Marx, 21 feet tall and weighing 40 tons, sitting on his plinth made of Ukrainian granite and turn the corner to the opera building just a block away. Remember, it’s still October 3rd and joy over German reunification is muted, but the sold-out performance of Jacques Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann is delightful and the mostly well-dressed audience visibly happy to escape Chemnitz gray for an evening of catchy evergreens. Afterwards, we go out to eat, Italian.
We spend two more days in Saxony before crossing the state line into Bavaria on our way home. Road signs remind travelers that Germany was once divided here.
A lonely watch tower still stands surrounded by farmland.
Attempting to cross the border illegally before 1989 was deadly. Well over 100’000 East Germans tried to escape between 1961 and 1988. More than 600 people were shot by elite border guards, or they drowned, suffered fatal accidents, or killed themselves when they failed. Shame on Wagenknecht and her harebrained followers for defending the wall.
On his second visit to Berlin on June 12, 1987, President Ronald Reagan challenged his Soviet counterpart Mikhail Gorbachev to follow up on his promise to reform the aging communist empire, saying: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” It was a bold taunt delivered directly behind the Brandenburg Gate, symbol of Germany’s own imperial past. Few, if any, at the time believed much would come of Reagan’s exhortation. Indeed, the now famous words went largely unnoticed until the wall did come down on November 9, 1989, more than two years later, and suddenly Reagan’s once seemingly unrealistic demand appeared in the new light of a great statesman’s unwavering vision.
The collapse of the wall took most people by surprise. Even high-ranking politicians later admitted that they had dismissed Reagan’s rhetoric as grandstanding for the benefit of a western audience. On my visit to Berlin in the Spring of 2006, I had the opportunity to speak privately with Dr. Richard von Weizsäcker, president of the Federal Republic of Germany at the time of the wall’s demise. He told me that even he, as head of state, had no indication of the wall’s imminent collapse and when it did occur, he was as taken aback as the rest of us.
The world was ill prepared for the sudden change in the geopolitical landscape, and with the Germans in the middle of it, things were not off to a smooth start. The initial enthusiasm soon gave way to the somber everyday tasks of soldering together what had been forcibly kept apart for more than four decades. Two very distinct societies had evolved after the war; one based on freedom and made prosperous by generous American aid, the other footed on oppression and made destitute by Soviet plunder. Remember that Putin had been stationed in East Germany – and he wasn’t there for UNICEF or the International Red Cross, but in the employ of the KGB. His job was to ensure loyalty to Moscow’s brutal regime, sending thousands to political imprisonment or worse in Bautzen (men) or Stollberg (women).
Today, the scars remain. Angela Merkel, who was German chancellor from 2005 to 2021, had been raised in eastern Germany, and it is fair to say that the awareness of the wall as a dominant image played a decisive role in the forming of her public identity. When challenged by new political forces, she resorted to the wall as a symbol, calling for a Brandmauer or firewall to keep the growing threat of AfD at bay, at one point even illegally calling for the reversal of a democratic election – and getting away with it. Merkel did little to unite Germans further, instead waffling between accommodating Gazprom interests and playing into the hands of nostalgic but influential GDR remnants who, like her, were raised on intoxicating Russian chants of “drushba” (friendship), the premier code word for Russian informal imperialism.
Enter Wagenknecht and her ilk. She has found a discursive environment of new walls, this time built on distrust, malice, and outright hatred. Her insidious alliance thrives on a collective mental landscape of us versus them in classical Marxist struggle fantasies of pitching one group against another while showing no mercy for ideological deviance. The undertone of her public utterances is always “I am right and therefore you must be wrong.” It’s a variant of “here I stand and can do no other.” And if you are looking for the demonization of the opposition that was sadly also part of the Reformation 500 years ago, on all sides, Wagenknecht is skilled at that, too. She has elevated the blame game to an ugly art form, skillfully charming truth seekers only to predictably depict NATO and the west as demons that must be destroyed, lest evil once again ruin what would otherwise be a socialist Eden, made in Germany (and nourished by Russia).
The governing parties (Social Democrats, Free Democrats, and the Greens) as well as the opposing Christian Democrats appear in a state of intellectual holiday. In part, no doubt, this is due to their own affinity for walls and a comfy black and white worldview. Why should they go up against a paradigm that is not only familiar but is part and parcel of their own thinking arsenal? Germany’s latent form of cohabitation is civil war, after all, and why should they disarm prematurely and unilaterally at that?
Given that background, the calls for more Brandmauer and even outlawing AfD (but not BSW) are not surprising. Constructive dialogue, the willingness to compromise, and reconciliation once feelings are hurt are largely absent in today’s discursive culture. Evil resides on the other side of the wall and the courageous voices calling for it to be torn down are not being heard. In fact, people calling for dialogue are summarily dismissed as agents of the opposition and traitors whose only aim must be the undermining of Brandmauer resolve.
We need to acknowledge the conspicuous fact that many western democracies are currently under similar strains of disorientation characterized by a loathing rhetoric and the lack of trust in public institutions. But Germany assumes a special role as a bellwether State due to its history, geopolitical and geographic position. Germany is the canary in the mine of the international relations edifice.
It doesn’t help that America is currently self-absorbed, not just due to the upcoming elections, but going back further to the mid nineties when the U.S. intelligence community failed to grasp the wider ramifications of the collapse of the Soviet empire. In a self-congratulatory mood, much was made of the “end of history” which led to a blindfolded approach to regrouping Russian imperial ambitions that soon became unmissable. We are all paying the price for it now, through higher taxes in a very real way, reflecting the cost of dealing with the consequences of someone upending the postwar order in Eastern Europe after 2014.
To the Germans we must say: We repeat, tear down this wall! Resist the urge to place blame on those on the other side of the walls in your head and heart! Try honest and open dialogue, listen to each other, find common ground, and be kind. Forgive as you expect to be forgiven. Reject ideological band-aids, question old clichés, and for goodness’ sake: Throw a party! Invite your neighbors! Tear down that fence in your own yard that serves no purpose. Talk together, laugh together. See the sparkle in your neighbor’s eyes, make compliments, and offer your help in case of need. Raise your Black-Red-Golden flag and learn to love your country in a healthy, responsible manner.
It's all about developing those all-important habits of the heart. They are the glue of any democratic country. It’s not about being right or blaming others. It’s about finding the right way together and assuming responsibility.
I repeat: Tear down this wall!