The Pursuit of Cultural Unity

The fall of the Berlin Wall was a wonderful moment, but German unification began with misunderstandings on all sides. West Germans expected East Germans to be happy and grateful at the end of their 40-year nightmare. East Germans, they were convinced, would awaken from their decades-long deep freeze and act like the Germans they had been all along. East Germans, meanwhile, saw the West as the opposite of everything they disliked about their country: it was wealthier, more colorful and life was undoubtedly easier. Bureaucrats would be friendly and workplaces more efficient.

From the beginning, neither side’s expectations were met. West Germans had failed to understand that East Germans were not simply slightly ‘backward’ West Germans; forty years of separation had created two different cultures. East Germans, meanwhile, overestimated the West, in part because – unable to travel and compare societies – they had never been able to judge what aspects of East Germany could be ascribed specifically to the communist dictatorship and what aspects were reflective of wider German culture, or even universal in nature.

This psychological aspect of unification, combined with the more practical details of the process, worked to produce a long period of disappointment and resentment that continues to this day.

West Germans have complained since 1990 about the economic costs of unification they were expected to shoulder, and which have changed Germany from the astonishingly wealthy place it used to be to a country that, while still ensuring a generally high standard of living, has become a somewhat less easy place to get by. Westerners also criticize what they view as undesirable East German qualities: Ossies are lazy, complain too much and don't understand or accept democracy.

Eastern Germans, meanwhile, continue to resent what they view as condescending western German behavior. They were angered when East German businesses were dismantled to protect western competitors, and watched in frustration as their jobs vanished and less-qualified but higher-paid western Germans streamed into eastern German universities, business and government. They fell for, and therefore came to resent, some of the worst aspects of western capitalism – both scams of all sorts, and the simple temptation to spend money on unnecessary items.

Political culture combined

It is against this backdrop that Germans began to develop their post-Cold-War identity – including establishing a combined political culture. While unified Germany has developed greater self-confidence in the years since 1989 – visible, for example, both in its more prominent role in international affairs and in the increased willingness of ordinary Germans to acknowledge their own patriotism – it is significant that a large portion of the country's population does not feel part of the national consensus.

A recent study found that 64 percent of eastern Germans continue to view themselves as second-class citizens. This has led to the success first of the post-communist Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) and now of its new incarnation, the Left Party, in the eastern part of the country, as largely regional parties that capitalize on the frustrations of former East Germans. Such parties are not uncommon; after all, few countries do not harbor regional distinctions or dissatisfied groups. Nevertheless, many western German politicians (as well as some former East German dissidents) view the Left Party with distrust, arguing that its brand of populism endangers democracy. Historical experience makes it difficult for Germans to believe that even impassioned political discourse can be healthy as well as destructive.

As members of a disempowered minority, eastern Germans have faced overt prejudice as well as more indirect and camouflaged discrimination. However, while dissatisfaction among easterners remains significant, they, like minorities everywhere, have also learned to work the system and infiltrate the public sphere: Eastern Germans taught western German advertisers to change their marketing concepts when dealing with what was in effect a foreign culture, given that eastern Germans respond differently to conventional advertising tropes than westerners; eastern German women pushed Germany to move away from the 'stay-at-home-mom' paradigm that West German family policy promoted and to begin seriously helping women combine career and family, as East German policy – despite its many problems – had attempted; notwithstanding the stereotype of the lazy East German, West German businesses often preferred East German employees, whom they found reliable and hardworking.

Angela Merkel's ascent to the post of chancellor is the most obvious example of East German 'infiltration.' Not surprisingly, she brings a different sensibility to the job: As an eastern German, she is clearly more suspicious of ideology and therefore more pragmatic than her western German counterparts – a style that seems to appeal to Germans across the country.  

Dealing with diversity

East Germans were not the only new residents of united Germany. As borders opened following the fall of communism, Germany experienced an influx of foreigners: Eastern Europeans suddenly able to travel and seek work elsewhere; ethnic Germans and Russian Jews; refugees from the conflicts in Europe and Africa that broke out in the wake of communism’s collapse.

West Germans had become accustomed to the Turkish guest workers in their midst since the 1950s, but even second and third generation immigrants were still viewed as foreigners, as German citizenship continued to be defined by blood. East Germans, meanwhile, cut off from the world, had had little opportunity to encounter other cultures, except at arm’s length in the form of contract workers from other communist countries.

Thus foreigners portrayed as living off Germany’s generous social welfare system easily became scapegoats in this period of great change. Soon after the fall of the Wall, both western and eastern Germany exploded in xenophobic violence – against Turks in Mölln and Solingen, Romanian Gypsies and Vietnamese workers in Rostock and Hoyerswerda. Rather than taking the initiative against such violence, German officialdom dithered, and in 1993 the government even capitulated to it by tightening Germany’s generous asylum laws.

But by 2000, it had become clear that Germany could no longer resist the mobility and diversity that characterizes modern societies, and the Social Democratic-Green coalition government undertook revolutionary legal changes, permitting a limited form of citizenship by birth rather than blood and easing the naturalization process. Together with a 2005 law providing for legal immigration, these changes officially turned Germany into a ‘country of immigration.’ Second and third generation Turks and other ‘people with immigration backgrounds,’ in the awkward new official terminology, are gradually attaining visible positions in government and elsewhere in society. Though violence against those who look different remains a serious problem (nearly 3,000 hate crimes motivated by xenophobia were external pagerecordedcall_made in 2008), and the violence is proportionally greater in eastern Germany, the country today is far more diverse than it was in 1989 – adding new layers of complexity and nuance to the question of what it means to be German.

Handling history

The tensions of unification also influenced the German dialogue with the past. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, some western Germans seized upon the transition from communism as a way to make up for West Germany’s failure to properly reckon with Nazism after World War II. A moral line, they felt, had to be drawn; decommunization must succeed where denazification had failed.

Yet communism in East Germany, for all its evils, was not Nazism; its gray areas were more pronounced, its rights and wrongs less clearly delineated. Still, some East German dissidents encouraged a more absolutist approach. Having suffered for their own courageous decision to practice open opposition to the regime, they were often unforgiving of those less brave or more conformist than they. This, of course, alienated the teachers, police officers and members of other public professions who in many cases were demoted or fired for their roles in the old system. Even where this was justified, the perception that the ‘old guard’ was being purged by outsiders left lasting resentment. Thus dealing with history in the East came to be seen as an imposed rather than an organic process; a true reckoning from within may take another generation.

Meanwhile, how Germans dealt with the Nazi period also underwent changes, though not always in expected ways. Neonazism experienced a disturbing increase, particularly among young people in the East, but that can be attributed at least in part to the economic and social dislocations that continue to bedevil the region. Despite (or perhaps in defiance of) East Germany's steadfast refusal to take any responsibility for Nazism,external pagesurveyscall_made since the fall of the Wall have consistently external pagefoundcall_made lower levels of anti-Semitism in eastern than in western Germany (though the anti-Israel sentiment that has risen in both parts of the country in recent years has been interpreted by some commentators as a modern form of anti-Semitism.)

But Germans have also begun to explore their own experiences during WW II more extensively and publicly than in the past. The Allied firebombing of Dresden became one high-profile focal point for historical and popular portrayals of German suffering; the postwar expulsions of ethnic Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia was another.

While these events were never taboo as some have claimed and were always passed on within the family and even in some public fora, they have indeed become a more accepted part of the public conversation in recent years. While this trend has been viewed with concern – and has not emerged without debate – it may also be a healthy development that permits more nuanced analysis of events 60 years in the past.

Despite these changes, however, no visitor can miss the country's continued grappling with its Nazi past. After all, the central Holocaust memorial in Berlin, though first suggested in 1987, was debated and completed largely following the fall of the Berlin Wall. There is little chance that memory of the Nazi period will fade anytime in Germany's near future, though its meaning and impact will inevitably change for succeeding generations. Indeed, the country's ongoing struggle with, and ambivalence toward, its history offers evidence of the past’s continued hold on the unified state in the 21st century.