Columna The New York Times, 14.09.2016 Alison Smale
Fifty-five summers ago, the Communists who ruled East Germany decided to wall in their citizens to stanch the flood of Germans moving west.
The Berlin Wall has now been down for almost 27 years, nearly as long as it was up. For some Germans, the experience of a cruelly divided country has shaped their response as European democracies struggle with Islamic terrorism and a flood of refugees from wars and misery in the Middle East and beyond.
Germany’s exceptional status in Europe has become more pronounced, both through its continuing economic strength and its acceptance of more than one million asylum seekers, many of them Muslim. The policy has baffled and angered critics at home and abroad who fear democracy is imperiled by precisely the kind of culture clash that welcoming Germans say they hope to avoid.
In Germany, history is often invoked as a guide to behavior. The Nazi and Communist pasts are all around. At my subway station, a large sign lists concentration camps, “names we should not be allowed to forget.” Every day, I cross the cobblestone and metal lines on streets that mark where the wall once ran.
Many analysts have depicted the embrace of refugees as part of Germany’s dissection of its Nazi past, when millions were murdered and millions of others driven out, usually rejected by countries where they sought shelter.
Angela Merkel, the leader of Germany for almost 11 years now, was a citizen of East Germany. When the wall went up on Aug. 13, 1961, a Sunday, 7-year-old Angela Kasner watched her mother and others crying as her father, a Lutheran pastor, led church services 50 miles north of Berlin, in the town of Templin.
As chancellor, Ms. Merkel has guided her country through the global financial crisis, the struggle to preserve the euro, a sudden abandonment of nuclear power and, since last year, the refugee crisis.
Occasionally, she makes clear that she draws on the long wait for the fall of the wall as a guide to her brand of politics.
When challenged at the Munich Security Conference in February 2015 over her pursuit of diplomacy over war in Russia’s conflict with Ukraine, she was unequivocal. “This conflict cannot be won militarily,” she said, and arming Ukraine “will not solve it.”
That bitter truth, she added, came from experience. “I was brought up in East Germany,” she said. “I was 7 years old. I saw the wall being built. But did anyone consider the idea of using force to stop it?” she asked. “No.”
A few months after that conference, she faced a different crisis. By late August, the government had calculated that 800,000 people would seek asylum in 2015. On Aug. 25, the federal migration office said that Syrians would be allowed in without formalities. On Aug. 26, Ms. Merkel paid her first visit to a refugee center, in Heidenau in the former East Germany. A woman who was protesting yelled a crude message to get lost — said by German media reports to have rattled the chancellor, who sets store by politeness.
A day later, looking grim, she was in Vienna, at a European summit meeting on refugees. News arrived that the putrefying corpses of scores of would-be asylum seekers had been found in a truck along the Vienna-Budapest highway. Then the body of Alan Kurdi, 3, a Syrian Kurd fleeing with his family, washed up on a Turkish beach.
Hungary stopped westward trains to Austria. Thousands of refugees were trapped in a Budapest station. Hundreds decided to walk west. The Austrians and Germans pledged to let them in. Crowds at Vienna and Munich train stations greeted them. A Syrian refugee in Berlin took a selfie with Ms. Merkel.
By year’s end, she was not only scrambling for an awkward agreement with Turkey to halt the flow, but suffering unusual criticism for placing Germany’s, and Europe’s, way of life at risk. The assaults against hundreds of women on New Year’s Eve in Cologne and other German cities fueled those accusations.
Yet Ms. Merkel is sticking to the motto she coined, “Wir schaffen das” (roughly “We can make it”), even doubling down on it after Germany suffered two terrorist attacks in July. As she emphasized in September 2015, “If we now start to have to apologize for showing a friendly face in an emergency situation, then that is not my country.”
Christian charity is what Ms. Merkel was taught growing up in Templin. Just once in the past year did she explicitly draw on her East German experience to explain her refugee policy.
It was mid-October, the height of the crisis. Embattled within her own conservative bloc, Ms. Merkel invited about 150 students from high schools across Germany to meet with her and took 90 minutes to discuss life in East Germany.
She might have been a teacher, she said then, but in the East that would have meant indoctrinating pupils. She opted for physics, “because you cannot twist the facts as much as in other areas.”
A student asked whether society was more friendly in East Germany. “Friendships which consisted of swapping paper tissues for borrowing a drill were not friendships,” Ms. Merkel replied crisply. They were communities of necessity, “and that is why those bonds broke” after Communism fell.
She underlined how important it was for anyone who is persecuted to have someone elsewhere looking out for them — as prisoners in East Germany were not forgotten by West Germany.
“Many, many people are not in the happy situation that we are in Germany,” she said, and supporting the oppressed can mean “that dictatorships don’t allow themselves just anything.”
In imparting her experiences to students who did not know Communism, she touched on a concern of many older Germans: How to keep alive a memory of the Nazi and Communist pasts without being old-fashioned or maudlin?
That question hovered over the 55th anniversary of the building of the wall, in August. Berlin’s mayor, Michael Müller, was visiting the center that documents the wall’s history. Across the street is a stretch of the wall, complete with death strip and watchtower, and poignant memorials to those shot trying to flee.
The street is Bernauer Strasse, where houses on the east side once formed the wall, and those who fled jumped down to the street itself, which was West Berlin.
Even a 77-year-old woman, Frieda Schulze, made this plunge in 1961. A tour guide, Silke Edler, showed a cluster of sixth to 10th graders how Ms. Schulze was caught by a blanket held by firefighters. She was determined not to be separated from her daughter in West Berlin, Ms. Edler said.
Roughly a million people visit this powerful place each year. In today’s hip Berlin, a mecca for the world’s young, those days seem inconceivable.
Mayor Müller and the director of the memorial site, Axel Klausmeier, noted that Bernauer Strasse was not just a show of humanity at its worst. It teaches that dictatorship can be vanquished peacefully, that democracy is precious and, the mayor said, that “it is right and important to take in new arrivals.”
Roland Jahn, once an East German dissident who now oversees the files of the Communist secret police, laid one of the 25 wreaths to honor the dead. It is always a “bittersweet” day, he said, when the Communists showed they could survive only by building a wall and issuing orders to shoot, but one that also means repression can be overcome.
“It is always important to note that it was not an act of nature,” Mr. Jahn said. “It was done by people.”
