What happened after the fall of the Berlin Wall?

Over the following years, in the competitive climate of the Cold War, it was troubling to East German leaders that the equivalent of a town’s worth of people were electing to move each year from the communist state to capitalist West Germany in search of jobs and higher living standards. So the GDR decided to erect a physical barrier between East and West Berlin to stem the flow of this tide. The Wall was constructed rapidly and without public warning, and the first barrier was largely completed in just a few days beginning on 13 August 1961.

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During the 1980s, the communist Eastern Bloc countries faced increasing economic challenges, and the socialist dictatorships in Poland and Hungary lost their stranglehold on power, a situation that raised questions about the future of the GDR. The East German Politburo was keen to avoid similar upheavals; one member commented: “Just because one of your neighbours changes the wallpaper in his house, does that mean you have to follow suit?” Yet many East Germans were hopeful of reform, buoyed by what they had seen in neighbouring countries. Peaceful protests later known as the Montagsdemonstrationen (Monday demonstrations), beginning in Leipzig on 4 September 1989 and spreading to other East German cities, called for democratic reform and freedom to travel. The huge demonstration in Leipzig on 9 October, which was not suppressed with violence, is often cited as marking a turning point for the GDR.

The critical moment came at a press conference on 9 November 1989, when Communist Party spokesman Günter Schabowski announced that travel restrictions to West Germany were to be eased. Asked when the new travel arrangements would come into effect, Schabowski responded: “immediately”. Schabowski later admitted that he had “only read the damn press release once, and diagonally at that!” – but after that declaration, there was no going back.

As news of Schabowski’s pronouncement spread, thousands of East Germans flocked to the six border crossing points in the Wall. Faced by overwhelming numbers of East Berliners demanding to be let through to the West, late that night border guards opened the gates. Politically and psychologically, if not yet physically, the Wall had fallen.

Strange new world

The opening of gates in the Wall was met with euphoria across both Germanies. East Berliners were greeted with glasses of champagne as they crossed the border, many of them for the first time in their lives. Strangers embraced in excitement, overwhelmed by the enormity of what they were witnessing. The party atmosphere reigned all night in downtown Berlin.

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Within six weeks of the Wall’s fall, some 2.5 million East Germans had visited the West. They were understandably amazed by the broad range of items piled on shelves in supermarkets there after the more limited choice in the GDR, and were excited to sink their teeth into a bona fide Big Mac – a potent symbol of capitalism – for the first time, and to taste ‘real’ chocolate.

After 40 years living in societies with different values, East and West Germans said that 'their clocks tick differently'

Once the initial excitement had subsided, East Germans faced a serious decision about their future. In the first free elections in the GDR for 40 years, they voted in favour of a speedy reunification with West Germany, which promised huge benefits: free elections, freedom of speech, freedom of travel. But stitching the two Germanies back together would involve overcoming tremendous logistical challenges. Each of the two countries had its own flag, national anthem, armed forces, legal code, educational system, approach to health care and method of taxation.

What followed was essentially a takeover of the East by West Germany. Perhaps the biggest challenges for East Germans were economic. Food prices and rent were no longer subsidised by the state, and employment was no longer guaranteed but individually determined and, therefore, markedly more competitive. As the cost of living skyrocketed in East Germany, so too did unemployment, which rose from 0% to 16% three years after reunification. So, although the end of the GDR brought new freedoms, the downsides of the transformation came to be uppermost in the minds of many who struggled to put bread on the table.

Each day in the reunited Germany revealed new areas of ignorance for East Germans feeling their way in unfamiliar
territory – ignorance that they were keen, but understandably ill-equipped, to hide. Confronted with new street names, new money and new shops, to name but a few changes, many felt overwhelmed. No one took East Germans by the hand and guided them as they attempted to get to grips with the new system. Many felt shame that they didn’t know all the answers automatically: that they didn’t know how to pronounce the food they wanted to order in McDonald’s, that they didn’t know how the supermarket trolleys worked in the West, that they didn’t know what to wear to blend in with West Germans.

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Articulating the sense of uncertainty felt by many East Germans, one woman noted in her diary in December 1989: “Everywhere is becoming like a foreign land. I have long wished to travel to foreign parts, but I have always wanted to be able to come home again.” The range of choices available to East Germans after unification was certainly advantageous, but the transition period – as they learned to navigate and fit in with the new modus operandi – was profoundly unsettling.

After 40 years living in societies with very different values, it is hardly surprising that in 1990 both East and West Germans said that “their clocks tick differently”. A similar sentiment was reflected in a joke popular that year: an East German says to a West German, “Wir sind ein Volk” (We are one people); the West German replies, “Wir auch” (Us too). Because they shared the same language and the same long-term history, it was widely expected – as Willy Brandt, former chancellor of West Germany, said on 10 November 1989 – that the two countries would “grow together” seamlessly. Yet this ‘growing together’ has taken much longer than anticipated, perhaps because after such a long time divided, each group of people found the others quite foreign.

East Germans felt hurt and disappointed that West Germans did not seem to acknowledge the hugely disorientating upheaval

The concrete wall had been the physical barrier, but in many ways the result of that division was brought into sharper relief when it was gone, and East and West Germans stood side by side. When the states were divided, West Germans supported Eastern friends and relatives, sending some 25 million parcels across the border each year. Yet these friendships commonly dwindled to nothing once the Iron Curtain had been drawn back.

To West Germans – indeed, to any outsider schooled in the virtues of democracy – it might seem counter-intuitive to think that the new opportunities presented to East Germans by reunification could be anything other than positive. They now had far greater choice: about what they said, what they did, where they went and what they ate. Nonetheless, not all East Germans embraced the changes with open arms. Many in the West felt that East Germans were both ungracious and ungrateful after 1990, given that the West German taxpayer footed the bill for the effective incorporation of East within West – to the tune of 140 billion Deutsche Marks per year during the 1990s – and many in the former Federal Republic dubbed their new compatriots Jammerossis – ‘moaning Easterners’.

To some West Germans it seemed to defy logic that former GDR citizens might experience nostalgia for their former life in a world barricaded with barbed wire. It seemed to suggest that East Germans had been infected or brainwashed by the propaganda to which they had so long been exposed. East Germans, for their part, felt hurt and disappointed that West Germans did not seem to acknowledge the hugely disorientating upheaval to their lives caused by the fall of the Wall. Their nostalgia was not for the machinations of the GDR’s political system but, rather, for a familiar culture in which they felt comfortable and at home. West Germans – who seemed overly confident, quick to criticise the GDR or to extol to the East the superiority of Western ways – earned a reputation as Besserwessis’(‘know-it-all Westerners’).

Voicing the resentment of many others, an East German bishop wrote a letter to the former West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt, saying: “It is constantly suggested that we are not capable of anything, and that everything we have done was wrong. We are the only ones who have to learn something, because, it is said, all of our experiences belong on the trash pile of history... But we can no longer take this permanent know-all manner and our degrading treatment as disenfranchised failures.”

Such feelings exacerbated the cultural disconnect between Germans from either side of the border, and the notion of
a persistent ‘Mauer im Kopf’ (‘Wall in the head’) became an accepted phenomenon.

Hester Vaizey is a historian and author of books including Born in the GDR: Living in the Shadow of the Wall (Oxford University Press, 2014)

This article was taken from issue 19 of BBC World Histories magazine, published in November 2019