U.S. embassy and consulate websites or www.state.gov.
We’ve gone social!
Follow us on our facebook pages and join the conversation.
04 September 2009
A New Germany Rises from Wall’s Fall
This article is excerpted from The Berlin Wall: 20 Years Later, published by the Bureau of International Information Programs. View the entire book (PDF, 2.5 MB).
By: Roy Ginsberg
Twenty years after its fall, the Berlin Wall still evokes a variety of painful images. Berliners and the world remember those killed trying to escape and families and friends kept apart after 1961 when the communists erected the Wall to preserve their failing system. After all, no one ever tried to escape from freedom in West Berlin to tyranny in East Berlin.
The Wall was another manifestation of the wartime Allies’ failure to agree on what to do with a defeated Germany. Twice brutalized by German armed forces in the 20th century, the Soviets wanted a neutral, weakened, and dependent neighbor. Conversely, the Americans and their allies wanted a democratic and free Germany as a bulwark against the spread of communism and to prevent the return of fascism.
Since the wartime Allies retained occupation rights in Berlin after 1949, both the western Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the Soviet satellite German Democratic Republic remained independent but not fully sovereign. Not until 1989–1990 when the Wall came down, the wartime Allies relinquished their residual occupation rights, and the two German states were united, was World War II finally concluded.
The Wall represented an artificially divided Germany and a dangerously bifurcated world. It was in that world that I visited East Berlin as a student in 1974. What I most remember as a citizen of a free country was the sense of foreboding I felt when entering and the sense of freedom I felt when leaving — and the sadness of knowing that others left behind could not follow.
Fifteen years later, I rushed into my classroom to share my joy at the news that the Wall was being torn down. My students were intrigued but not exhilarated. Their experience differed from that of my generation. Children and grandchildren of those who fought to defeat fascism, my generation was more directly connected to these wartime heroes and to the postwar leadership of the United States and its allies. From the Marshall Plan, Truman Doctrine, and Berlin Airlift of the late 1940s to the containment of communism in the 1950s and 1960s, the West stood down communism. Diplomat and Russia scholar George F. Kennan predicted communism would atrophy from within, which it did, while containment limited Soviet expansionism to Eastern Europe.
Postwar West Germans must be congratulated for constructing a democratic polity and a beacon of hope for the East. West Germany had two advantages over the Weimar Republic, its doomed democratic predecessor. It had the economic security to prosper and democratize as part of what became the European Union (EU). It had physical security through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO); thus the FRG would no longer threaten or be threatened by other European powers.
Today’s united Germany, a recipient of security from the EU and NATO, promotes democracy and stability in a world far more dangerous to many civilian populations than the world of 1989. If Germany can assume leadership through the EU, NATO, and the United Nations to further enhance stability and security in a world in need of both, it can give back to those who helped it to be secure and free.
[Roy H. Ginsberg is a professor of government at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, and author of Demystifying the European Union: The Enduring Logic of
Regional Integration.]
