No other single event symbolised so graphically the collapse of the Soviet Communist system as the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Less than a year later, the seemingly impossible happened when the Stalinist Soviet satellite state of East Germany became part of a united, capitalist Germany.
SIMON BURNETT is a free-lance reporter who closely followed the decline and fall of communist East Germany in the 1980s and its fortunes since becoming unified with capitalist West Germany in 1990. His reports have appeared in newspapers in many parts of Eastern Europe and Asia.
German unification arrived with a huge fanfare. The political, social, and economic expectations reached giddy proportions. Nothing was done to dampen hopes. When they were not met, the disappointment was massive. The Eastern economy failed to survive exposure to capitalism. As firms folded, unemployment rose. New companies from the West using modern production techniques could not soak up the available labor. In their despair, many Easterners turned to the “post communists”, the successors to the party that ruled East Germany with an iron fist for forty years.
“(Ghost Strasse) is a great read . . . The author seems totally fair and balanced, and he confirms much of what I have observed in the former East Germany.”—- Graeme Mount, Professor of History, Laurentian University, Ontario, Canada.
Gradually, minds began playing tricks. As the uncertainties of existence in the new Germany increased, the dark old days began to look better. The fact that East Germany was a sordid little dictatorship that shot people for trying to flee it and imprisoned those who disagreed with it, is being forgotten. The Stalinist restrictions have come to represent security. Stalinist brutality has simply faded from memory.
Former Stasi secret police officers, specialists in disinformation, are whitewashing history in an attempt to make East Germany seem benign and paternal. Western German apathy is playing into the hands of this disinformation campaign.
A more complex set of circumstances lies behind the emergence of xenophobic violence and a related neo-Nazi political revival. Eastern neo-Nazi violence is far more virulent than that in the West. Voting for neo-Nazi parties is a disturbing Eastern trend that is helping muddy the region’s image.
The result is that two extremist forces, the post communists and the neo Nazis, are strongly associated with Eastern Germany. Not only can neither deliver solutions for the problems of a region where the economy has failed to get off the ground, but they actually act as a disincentive to investors. Outsiders do not want to be associated with a place blighted by extremism.
Ghost Strasse looks at why unification has been such a buffeting process, and why Easterners have had such trouble adjusting to a world they once wanted eagerly to be part of. Because the origins of the problems lie as much in the past as in the present, the book also delves into the forty years of the East German dictatorship and discusses how the region has become trapped between that past and the present.
