Interview with Conductor Kurt Masur

SPIEGEL: Professor Masur, you're credited with being one of the people who kept the Monday demonstrations held in Leipzig in 1989 to protest the East German government from turning bloody. As the situation was threatening to escalate, loudspeakers in Leipzig broadcast your appeal, in which you asked the city's inhabitants: "We urgently request that you remain calm so as to make peaceful dialogue possible." And, as it turned out, the demonstrations did remain peaceful. What's left of the spirit of that era?

Kurt Masur: I'm reluctant to answer this question. The spirit of those days has pretty much been exhausted, and things haven't turned out well for everyone. In fact, for many people, reunification has meant more suffering than gain. And many are quite desperate.

SPIEGEL: What do you mean by desperate?

Masur: I know of people who decided to kill themselves because they'd lost everything dependable in their lives. Just look in the eyes of the young people: Just one year after reunification, most had lost their sparkle. On the one hand, there's unemployment and the feeling of being superfluous. On the other hand, many in this generation never even try to find a job. They figure out that they can live fairly well off government benefits and earning a little extra money on the side.

One of many who became dissatisfied with the "peaceful revolution" of 1989, Kurt Masur, describes how many East Germans lost hopes around the time of unification.

Kronsbein, J. & Thimm, K. (2010) Interview With Conductor Kurt Masur: 'The Spirit of 1989 Has Been Exhausted'. [Online] http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,721851,00.html#ref=nlint [17/10/2010]

Unification not Complete

"German unification is not complete", Angela Merkel admitted shortly before the 20th anniversary of the Wall's opening (SMD, 2009). Many in Germany still feels "the economic, social and psychological divisions once demarcated by the Wall" and "the country had yet to fulfil promises made when East and West reunited in 1990", claimed CNN (2009).

She has also said that Germany faced "a challenge the likes of which it has not seen since reunification," a reference to the immense costs of raising the social and economic standards in the former East to the levels equivalent to western regions (Dempsey, 2009). 

"In the new (former East German) states we also have far greater structural unemployment than is the case in the old federal republic", claimed the German chancellor, and reunification a "political and economic success for the people in all parts of Germany" even though it has "not yet been achieved in all areas"   (DPA, 2010)

Interior Minister, Thomas de Maiziere, who had been a state secretary for West Germany - and his cousin Lothar de Maiziere was East Germany’s only freely elected premier - argued, "we objectively had too little time, we were driven people". West Germans had taken a "paternalistic stance towards the East — along the lines of 'we know what’s right for our sisters and brothers in the East'", stated de Maiziere, although "in truth, we did not know" (DPA, 2010)

These reports confirm the mentality in Germany, that after 20 years since the Wall was breached and €1.3 trillion (SMD, 2009) later, the social and psychological divide is still evident. 

CNN (2009) Berlin celebrates night that changed world. [Online] 

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europe/11/09/berlin.wall.anniversary/index.html [04/08/2010]
Dempsey, J. (2009) Merkel Says Worst Still Ahead in Germany. [Online] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/11/business/global/11debt.html?_r=1 [04/08/2010]
DPA (2010) 20 years on, German reunification still not complete: Merkel. [Online] http://www.thehindu.com/news/international/article487380.ece [04/08/2010]
SMD (2009) 20 Years On Berlin Celebrates the Day the Wall Fell. [Online] http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,660134,00.html [04/08/2010]

Is Germany's Left Party a Threat to Democracy?

Siobhán Dowling

Spiegel Online

A top court in Germany has ruled that the country's domestic intelligence agency may monitor the far-left Left Party. Commentators on Thursday argue that the party may have many failings, but a desire to overthrow democracy isn't one of them.

The far-left Left Party has long strived to rid itself of its pariah status in German politics. Slowly but surely the amalgamation of former East German communists, disaffected former Social Democrats and western German Marxists has turned itself into an important fixture on the political landscape.

In the last national election it garnered 12 percent of the vote, it is the most popular party in eastern Germany, and is in coalitions with the Social Democrats in the regional governments of Berlin and Brandenburg. But at a national level, potential allies still regard it as not fit to govern.

On Wednesday the party suffered a blow to its attempt to forge a more moderate image when a top court ruled that Germany's domestic intelligence agency had the right to monitor a prominent member. The Federal Administrative Court ruled that the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) could continue to observe Bodo Ramelow, leader of the Left Party in the eastern state of Thuringia. The agency is charged with observing the activities of those deemed a threat to the constitution, including neo-Nazis and Islamists.

The Left Party is furious to have been tarred with the same brush. While the court noted that it did not believe that Ramelow himself wanted to overthrow the state, it argued that there were extreme-left groupings within the party, such as the Communist Platform or the Marxist Forum, which had anti-constitutional tendencies. The court was also concerned that the party tolerates extreme-left violence. The BfV observation does not include spying but rather allows the agency to monitor Ramelow's public statements and writings. The court also ruled that other members of the party could be similarly observed. (The Left Party is also kept under observation at the state level, but only in some states, mostly in western Germany.)

'Throwback to the Cold War'

Upon hearing the judgement Ramelow said he was "deeply disappointed," adding that this was a "victory for the snooping state." On Thursday he confirmed that he would be appealing the ruling at the Constitutional Court. Speaking to RBB radio he said that the court's decision was "scandalous" and a "throwback to the Cold War."

On Wednesday Ole Schröder, state secretary in the Interior Ministry and a member of the ruling conservative Christian Democrats (CDU), greeted the ruling saying it was a "good day for our well-fortified democracy." The decision was also welcomed by Wolfgang Bosbach, the CDU domestic policy expert. He told the MDR radio station on Thursday that he had never heard the Left Party arguing that the far-right NPD should no longer be observed, "just because the NPD has also been elected to state parliaments in democratic elections."

The view from the left of the political spectrum was somewhat different. Matthias Machning, Thuringia's economy minister and a member of the SPD, called the ruling "absurd," saying that Ramelow was a politician of integrity and a democrat. "Obviously the BfV doesn't have enough to do and is now tilting at windmills."

And Cem Özdemir, co-leader of the Green Party, also leapt to Ramelow's defense. "I find equating the Left Party with the NPD or other extremist parties to be mistaken," he told the Berliner Zeitung. He said that the Left Party was not conspiratorial and even the communists within the party were open about their opinions.

On Thursday the German press take a look at the ruling and most commentators argue that while there may certainly be extreme views within the Left Party, it does not pose a threat to democracy.

Süddeutsche Zeitung

"The NPD is an anti-constitutional party through and through. The Left Party is not. It may well criticize capitalism. But capitalism is not one of the things that the constitution is designed to protect."

"There are indeed strange small groups of Trotskyites, Maoists and other crackpots in the Left Party, but they have hardly any influence. … The BfV should be clever enough not to lump together all of the party. It should concentrate on individuals instead of generalizing. The BfV knows that the Left Party of 2010 is a completely different party to the SED/PDS of 1990."

"One can get annoyed at (Left Party leaders), one can think their policies are half-baked or absurd. But political irritation should not be an excuse to set the people from the BfV on them. Those who denounce the Left Party as anti-democrats in this way should question their own understanding of democracy."

The Financial Times Deutschland

"There are a lot of things one can hold against the Left Party: the self-righteous stance of their top people, their nostalgia for East Germany, their blind faith in the state. But that does not justify by a long shot the decision by the Federal Administrative Court to allow top politicians in the Left Party to be observed by the BfV."

"One can say a lot about Ramelow, (Gregor) Gysi or (Oskar) Lafontaine, but not that they are anti-democrats. They use legitimate methods in election campaigns, on talk shows and in parliaments to promote their controversial views -- and they should only be fought in these arenas too."

"According to the ruling, the Left Party politicians are to be listed alongside neo-Nazis and Islamists in the BfV report. This stigmatization threatens the freedom of the Left Party representatives and their party to take part in the political process unhindered."

Berliner Zeitung

"The decision to allow the observation of Thuringia's Left Party boss Bodo Ramelow is not just wrong, it's abysmal…. There is not one statement by Ramelow from the past that would justify his observation by the BfV. He is regarded, not just within his own party, as a politician with integrity who works very successfully toward changing the balance of power, and certainly not toward overthrowing those in power. And the same can be said for his party."

"There may well be more nutcases in this party than others, including revolutionary dreamers and Stone Age Marxists, but on the whole, no one cannot deny that the Left Party has, for a long time, accepted parliamentarianism, party democracy and the constitutional state. To ignore that is a remarkable failure on the part of the court. It has obviously not understood that there has always been a place within the German constitution for criticism of capitalism."

Frankfurter Allgemeine

"In most states, the party is no longer observed and it is only a matter of time before Germany's remaining states succumb to the charms (of the party). The contradiction whereby the party is seen as extreme in one state but not in the next state will ultimately be resolved by the naive belief that the party has become democratic. Bodo Ramelow's protestations of innocence are emblematic."

Dowling, S. (2010) Is Germany's Left Party a Threat to Democracy? [Online] http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,707888,00.html#ref=nlint [28/07/2010]

How the East Was Lost

Alexander Neubacher and Michael Sauga
Spiegel Online

July 1 marks the 20th anniversary of the introduction of the deutsche mark in East Germany in the runup to full reunification. But the economic benefits that West German politicians promised failed to materialize. What went wrong?

German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière, 56, is from Bonn, deep in the west of Germany, but his memories of the days between the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and German reunification in 1990 are those of an East German.

Lothar de Maizière, the first and last democratically elected prime minister of East Germany, had asked his cousin whether he wanted a job. Thomas de Maizière agreed, moved into an office on Klosterstrasse in East Berlin and, from then on, sat on the side of the table reserved for East Germans at the negotiations on German reunification.

Thomas de Maizière has often asked himself what went wrong at the time. "Objectively speaking, we didn't have enough time. We were under a great deal of pressure," he says. He compares it to a "sudden political birth."

The emergency delivery happened exactly 20 years ago. Today, as the federal government's commissioner for the "new German states" (as the former East Germany is known), de Maizière's job is to promote the development of eastern Germany. He is the first interior minister and the first West German in a long time to hold the position, but de Maizière downplays his role.

The minister remains reserved in interviews on the subject. And when he does say something, it doesn't sound like what his predecessors said.

He has an aversion to official phrases like "harmonization of living conditions in the east and west." Nor is he keen on the term "Aufbau Ost" ("development of the east"), which German governments have used as shorthand for efforts to promote economic development in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), as East Germany was officially known. "When people from western Germany come to Potsdam, Dresden or Stralsund," he says, referring to three relatively prosperous eastern German cities, "their first impressions prompt them to ask: 'What still needs to be developed here?'"

Overnight Change

It was 20 years ago that then-Chancellor Helmut Kohl made a lonely decision. The Berlin Wall had come down, and thousands of East German citizens were moving to the West every week. Kohl offered Hans Modrow, the interim communist leader of East Germany at the time, a monetary union for the two Germanys. Experts were annoyed by the proposal, and Karl Otto Pöhl, the then-head of West Germany's central bank, the Bundesbank, warned against it. But Kohl had his way. Money transporters began rolling eastward overnight. The West German deutsche mark was named East Germany's currency on July 1, 1990.

Politically speaking, the monetary union was a success. The people were delighted, because they no longer had to travel to the west to get deutsche marks. But the move had a devastating effect on the economy. Overnight, all pensions, wages and savings of up to 6,000 East German marks were exchanged on a one-to-one basis. This was beneficial for East German citizens but not for businesses, many of which went under when they suddenly found themselves having to compete with the highly modern West German economy.

"Although there was no reasonable political alternative to the fixed exchange rate, it was a bad move economically," says de Maizière. "Instead of one to one, the exchange rate should have been one to three or one to four, to reflect the economic reality, but this would have had the devastating political consequence of further migration."

Lagging Behind the West

Today, the eastern German economy is still in a sorry state, and there are no indications that the situation will change. An estimated €1.3 trillion ($1.6 trillion) have flowed from the former West Germany to the former East Germany over the last 20 years. But what has that money achieved? Historic neighborhoods have been restored, new autobahns built and the telephone network brought up to date, but most of the money was spent on social benefits such as welfare payments. The anticipated economic upswing failed to materialize.

Some eastern cities, like Leipzig, Dresden, Jena and Erfurt, have experienced economic development. The state of Thuringia has a relatively robust auto industry, and there are successful high-tech companies in Saxony. Research institutes and universities are doing well, thanks in part to generous government subsidies.

But the success stories are rare. Most of eastern Germany has turned into an economically depressed region that lags behind the west in all respects:

The per capita economic output in the east is only at 71 percent of the western level, with a disproportionately high share of economic output attributable to the public sector. The economic output generated by the private economy is only at 66 percent of the western level.

To close the gap, the eastern German economy would have to grow more rapidly than in western Germany, but precisely the opposite is the case. Germany's leading economic research institutes expect the economy in eastern Germany to grow by 1.1 percent this year, compared with 1.5 percent in the west.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the population of eastern Germany has declined by almost 2 million people, a trend that is continuing unabated.

The proportion of household income derived from welfare payments is 20 percent higher in the east than in the west.

Of Germany's 100 largest industrial companies and 100 largest service providers, not one has its headquarters in eastern Germany.

Politicians across the political spectrum tend to sugarcoat the meager economic results of reunification. Chancellor Angela Merkel, the leader of the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), is fond of saying that "a great deal has been achieved" in the development of the east. Former Transport Minister Wolfgang Tiefensee of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), who is also a former commissioner in charge of developing eastern Germany, says jubilantly: "We have successfully made it three-quarters of the way."

"We are firmly convinced that the creative forces of the people that have now been unleashed will lead to a new Wirtschaftswunder," then-Chancellor Helmut Kohl proclaimed on June 5, 1990, referring to the "economic miracle" of postwar West Germany. But anyone who travels through eastern Germany today, 20 years later, will encounter failed mega-projects, depopulated downtown areas and many people who haven't had a regular job in two decades.

Neubacher, A. & Sauga, M. (2010) Germany's Disappointing Reunification: How the East Was Lost. [Online] http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,703802,00.html#ref=nlint [16/07/2010]

Preventing the GDR Collapse

The Promise: How a Newspaper Tried to Prevent East Germany from Collapsing. [online] http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,655522,00.html

Winds from the East

Mayr, W., Neef, C. and Jan Puhl, J. (2009) Winds of Change from the East: How Poland and Hungary Led the Way in 1989. [online] http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,657805,00.html

"No Unification Without American Leadership"

Steingart, G. and Frohn, A. (2009) James Baker on the Fall of the Wall: 'Without American Leadership There Would Have Been No Unification'. [online] http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,650801,00.html

JFK Surprised by 'Strong American Outrage to the Wall'

John F. Kennedy was relieved by the construction of the Berlin Wall, according to a US diplomat William R. Smyser, who was station in Berlin at the time . Smyser claims the U.S. president was not concerned about the German reunification, but "Khrushchev's effort to force the Americans out or to shoot down an American plane flying there" and due to "the strategic importance of Berlin during the Cold War" he could not risk going to war (Smyser in Schmitz, 2009).

Smyser also notes that the U.S. Secretary of State at the time, Dean Rusk, and diplomats "wanted to say the construction of the wall represents a victory for the West because it showed that the Communists had to imprison their own people. But they only said it once or twice and when everybody scoffed, they retracted it" (Smyser in Schmitz, 2009).

Markham (1987) claims that Kennedy's view was that the Wall was ''not a very nice solution, but... a hell of a lot better than a war'' and "in the taut run-up to the rending of Berlin, John F. Kennedy speculated to his adviser Walt W. Rostow that Nikita S. Khrushchev would have to do something ''to stop the flow of refugees - perhaps a wall.''

According to Markham, president Ronald Reagan said that had he been President in 1961 he would have "knocked down that wire then" and that the president didn't think "there'd be a wall today [in 1986] because I don't think they wanted to start a war over that". 

Construction of the Wall did impact politics of the West Berlin mayor Willy Brandt's "rethinking of the German question and the decision to embark on what was to become his Ostpolitik -the diplomatic opening to East Germany and Eastern Europe" and even though there are disputes between the US and the USSR, "they have not led to Soviet and American tanks facing each other across the divide" (Markham, 1987). 

Markham, J.J. (1987) A Lot Better than a War. [online] http://www.nytimes.com/1987/02/08/books/a-lot-better-than-a-war.html
Schmitz, G.P. (2009) The Day Berlin Was Divided: Kennedy Surprised by 'Such Strong American Outrage to the Wall'. [online] http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,658349,00.html

The World from Berlin 'Nov. 9, 1989 Could So Easily Have Ended in Bloodshed'

"Calling it the fall of the Wall is misleading." (Die Welt, in Crossland, 2009)

Crossland, D. (2009) The World from Berlin: 'Nov. 9, 1989 Could So Easily Have Ended in Bloodshed'. [online] http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,660184,00.html#ref=nlint

Abandoned Ferris Wheel Turns Again

Schaer, C. (2009) As the Wheel Turns: Berlin's Cold War Carnival Ride Resuscitated for Art. [online] http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,660197,00.html#ref=nlint

"Open the barrier!"

"Open the barrier!" (Jäger, 1989)

Schnibben, C. (2009) The Guard Who Opened the Berlin Wall: 'I Gave my People the Order -- Raise the Barrier'. [online] http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,660128,00.html#ref=nlint

Dmitry Medvedev interview

"The Berlin Wall was a symbol of the division of the continent, and the fall of the Wall united us again. Some of our hopes from back then have been fulfilled, others have not." (Medvedev, 2009)

Spiegel (2009) SPIEGEL Interview with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev:
'Oil and Gas Is Our Drug'. [online] http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,660114,00.html#ref=nlint

Fall of Munich Wall

"Thousands of German students protesting against changes to the country's higher education system, as well as tuition fees of around €1,500 per year, took to the streets on Tuesday. They staged sit-ins and rallies at around 20 locations around the country, including Berlin, Munich and Cologne... In Munich demonstrators built an "educational blockade" out of cardboard boxes, and then, despite the serious nature of their cause, appeared to have a pretty good time smashing it down."

http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,661874,00.html#ref=nlint

Spiegel Interview with Lech Walesa

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,659752,00.html#ref=nlint