After the Wall

"This is a memoir, published in 2002, by a young East German woman recounting her experiences after the Berlin Wall fell. Jana Hensel is a journalist who works for Die Zeit , which is a weekly based in Hamburg, but grew up in Leipzig. I think she was about 13 when the wall fell. It’s an interesting age because she had a childhood in the East, but an adolescence in reunified Germany. And what the book does very nicely is explain all of the difficulties and the challenges and the torments that some East Germans went through when they found that they had to reinvent their identity in a reunified country—and do so in the knowledge of just how little West Germans understood about what it was they were going through. A minister once said to me that, on the night of reunification in October 1990, he was in Frankfurt and went to a party, and everyone celebrated. The next day, they all went back to work and they carried on as they always had done. For West Germans, nothing really changed very much. For East Germans, everything changed. It wasn’t only going through deindustrialization and mass unemployment, although that meant that the 1990s were a very difficult period for a lot of East Germans. It was not only that many East Germans had to shed every marker of identity they had acquired and find new ones in an unfamiliar land. It was the fact that West Germans seemed to have very little interest in understanding those changes. I think there was a lot of resentment bred in Easterners during this time. A couple of years ago, for the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Wall, I tried to explore some of these issues. I travelled around the East, talking to a lot of people. What you realize is that there are buried resentments and traumas. Some of it, fascinatingly, seemed to be transmitted down through the generations. I’d speak to people whose parents had really suffered in the 1990s. A lot of them worked for industrial concerns that were completely uneconomic, had been wound up and they’d lost their jobs. They’d been through extraordinary difficulties and just had to do what they could to survive. Famously, you had mass emigration from the East to the West, and that created huge demographic problems in the East that have only grown more acute over time. For a lot of people who stayed, it was simply a question of trying to keep their heads above water. What you found is that often kids who may have no memory of the GDR, or maybe only the faintest memory, had developed a sort of Eastern identity, despite having not grown up in the separate country. In many cases that had been transmitted to them by what they had seen their parents go through. It was sometimes grounded in resentment or grievance about experiences that belonged to an earlier generation. I spoke to Jana Hensel at the time. She told me she had recently been shocked to find teenagers in her hometown of Leipzig peppering her with questions over whether special workplace quotas ought to be created for East Germans. “She was 35 when the Wall came down” One sociologist who worked on the GDR told me that in the previous two to three years the lectures he was giving, which used to be very sparsely attended, had become some of the most popular in his university. There was an extraordinary revival of interest in what had happened, both inside the GDR, but also in the Eastern states, in the period immediately after reunification. This memoir provides a way to understand these sorts of questions. If you’d asked most East Germans in 1990 if people were still going to be talking about East-West differences three decades hence they would have thought that was absurd. But during the commemorations for the 30th anniversary, you did seem to have this very belated recognition in large parts of West Germany, especially its media, that they had got the east a little bit wrong by just assuming that if they poured vast amounts of subsidies into the east, and opened their doors to its workers and students, that all of a sudden the world would open up to the East, and that the West didn’t need to do much more than that. I think that there was a belated recognition that that was wrong, that the history of the East for many people growing up in the GDR had been erased, that their identity had been ignored, and that this had created all sorts of resentments that people in the West, until quite recently, had been oblivious to. The debate has improved compared to where it was maybe 10 years ago. But, when we look at things like the growth of the AfD, the far right party that does much better in the East than in the West; or even the protests that we’re seeing against COVID measures and potential compulsory vaccination: you find these protests all over the country, but you certainly find them in greater numbers and greater strength in the East. The AfD has been trying to foster some sort of identity of resentment against the West in some Eastern states. All of this goes back to a lot of the stuff that’s discussed in Jana Hensel’s book. Merkel didn’t talk very much about her Eastern background when she was in charge. I think that was a very deliberate decision. She didn’t want to set herself aside, she wanted to be a chancellor for all Germans. But she made a bit of an exception in the last couple of years, perhaps because she realised she was in a unique position to tackle some of these grievances and resentments. She started to talk about it in very interesting ways, including in an interview with Jana Hensel in Die Zeit , to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Wall. But her Eastern background very clearly marked her. She was 35 when the Wall came down. At the end of the day, you can’t really understand Merkel without understanding that she grew up on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall. And some of the stuff in this book gives you a certain context. It might help you understand some of the ways that Merkel came to rule as somebody who had spent her formative years in the GDR. No, I don’t think so. In 2017, the last election that she won—which was held with the refugee crisis very fresh in everybody’s minds because that had been particularly contentious in large parts of the East—she actually suffered, if anything. She had a very rough time when she was campaigning in the East in 2017 because of the very fresh memories of the refugee crisis. She was heckled by organized crowds. She was visibly upset, and I don’t think really understood what was going on in a lot of these places. I don’t think her GDR background particularly helped her and in some cases, particularly in that election, it may have actually hindered her. Travelling in the region you could occasionally detect a whiff of resentment—that some people thought this East German chancellor had in a sense betrayed her own people."

"This is an English translation of a memoir that came out in Germany. The title in German is much more evocative; it is called Children of the Zone, a reference to the fact that East Germany started life as the Soviet zone of occupation in divided Germany. The book was a bestseller in Germany but also a very controversial one. The author was a teenager and living in East Germany at the time the wall came down. She was old enough to know her world was ending but not old enough to know why. Neither she nor her family had been particularly political before the wall came down. This is a story about how she tries to come to terms with seeing her world collapse. All her expectations change and the values that she grew up with are thrown into question. It’s a controversial book because she decided to use the pronoun ‘we’ throughout the book, even though she is talking about herself. Her critics say that she shouldn’t speak for an entire generation. Other people had different experiences. There was another book that came out from another young woman who was a child of dissidents. She jokes that until she was an adult, she thought that the word ‘cockroaches’ meant the Stasi agents who spied on her parents. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I find Hensel’s book to be a very interesting account of the time. There is a powerful moment towards the end where, many years later, she is talking about the Nazi era with some friends who grew up in West Germany. In East Germany state rhetoric declared that West Germany was the heir to fascism and East Germany was not. She realises when she is having this conversation that actually all Germans are heirs to the legacy of Nazism whether they like it or not. It is part of their shared past and they are all linked to it. It is also interesting to read about her relationship with her parents. She is jealous of her West German friends’ easy relations with their parents, because they share similar values. She, in contrast, feels alienated from hers. So, I found this book interesting because of all the internal mental discussions that she has with herself."