Page 33 - BNE_magazine_12_2019 dec19

bne December 2019 30 Years of transition I 33
Ground zero and the fall of the wall in Berlin
Ben Aris in Berlin
I’d just arrived in Germany when the Berlin Wall came down. It was hard to appreciate the enormity of the change that had just happened at the time but the reunification of the two Germanys changed everything and also highlighted just how difficult it is to change not only an economic system but the ideology and values of people that had lived for generations under a powerful ideology.
The first I knew of the fall of the wall was from the news reports and the chatter in the bar in Heidelberg where I had arrived to visit a friend after spending the summer on the beach in France. The pictures on the evening news were dramatic, but life in this Black Forest university town went on although a few people left to spend the weekend in Berlin that was at the epicentre of the action.
Following the fall the German government under Helmut Kohl did all the right things. Kohl promised USSR General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev
in a series of historic meetings that Nato would not advance its troops to the Russian border (a promise that was soon broken), agreed to swap one Ost Mark, the eastern German currency, for 1DM, the western currency, in
an incredibly generous gesture, and then launched a massive €1.5 trillion
a mass internal migration from east to west. Unemployment levels in East Germany skyrocketed and despite the huge amount of money poured into
a region that housed only 17mn of the total 80mn population, the local economies stagnated. To this day
a difference in income remains with
“Following the fall the German government under Helmut Kohl did all the right things”
investment programme to bring the standard of infrastructure and life in the DDR up to that in in the FDR. A special solidarity tax was introduced to pay for it, which produced some grumbling amongst West Germans, as the state launched itself into the work with typical Teutonic efficiency.
But it didn't really work very well. Or at least while the roads, bus stops, hospitals and schools in East Germany were rapidly transformed, there was
those in what was the DDR earning less money and those areas suffer from higher unemployment than in the west.
An ill-defined divide remained after
the fall of the wall. The West Germans, known in German as Wessis (pronounced “Vezi”) as opposed to the Ossis (“Ozi”) from the East, found that they had less in common with their brethren than they at first thought and the inculcations of socialism had deep roots, even if the Ossis were not married to the ideology.
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