Elsewhere, Grass insisted that Germany’s neighbors had every right to react negatively, “even hysterically,” to the prospect of German unification, because “if we think about Germany and the German future, we have to think about Auschwitz.”
In East Berlin, meanwhile, supporters of the SED regime, who had always constituted a significant force in the East German capital, strongly denounced the push toward unification. On December 19, 1989, 50,000 party members demonstrated for “a sovereign GDR, against reunification and a sellout” of their country. Two weeks later, on January 4, 1990, SED supporters and various pro-government groups marched to the Soviet War Memorial in Treptow Park, where they heard party leader Gregor Gysi denounce unification as a nefarious plot aimed at “ruining the chance for democratic socialism in the GDR.” SED members, of course, had a personal stake in the GDR’s survival, but in East Berlin it was not only they who opposed unification. Many reformist intellectuals (like some of their counterparts in the West) believed that socialism was morally superior to capitalism. In an interview, Stefan Heym insisted that the continued existence of a socialist state in Germany was “absolutely necessary for the socialist development in the whole world.” The GDR now faced a crisis, he said, because its citizens had become fed up with the miserable conditions brought on by an inept leadership. However, it was not socialism per se that had “fallen on its face,” but the form of Stalinism perfected by the GDR leaders. “The other, better form, in whose name so many courageous people have set down their ideas and laid down their lives, is still to come,” he claimed. Contemplating the implications of reunification, a young East Berlin intellectual protested: “Go away, go away, leave my Wall where it is. . . . My God, what will happen if the West Germans come here to renovate and beautify everything, to put geraniums in the windows? Where am I supposed to go then? . . . It is so ugly, our Alex . . . , but it is
A few years later, when the difficulties and dislocations of reunification had become painfully apparent, thousands of East Germans would find reasons to wax sentimental about the “good old GDR.” There was a wave of nostalgia for things East German, from liberal abortion policies and secure jobs to the lowly Trabant, which became the chief symbol of a lost way of life. (Many West Berliners, for their part, would become just as nostalgic for their lost “isle of the blessed,” where they had lived happily without having to worry too much about money, careers, or what was going on in the rest of the world. Even pre-1989 Kreuzberg fell under a haze of dewy-eyed commentary as the denizens of West Berlin’s most famous alternative
The orgy of nostalgia for the old East, however, was still a thing of the future in the early months of 1990, when whatever sympathy the GDR regime might have enjoyed was rapidly slipping away. Popular hostility toward the state focused on the Stasi, which Prime Minister Modrow unwisely tried to retain in a reformed and trimmed-down version. On January 12 he bowed to popular pressure and agreed to dissolve the organization, but the concession came too late. Three days later a mob stormed the Stasi headquarters in Normannenstrasse, smashing doors, trashing offices, and pitching furniture out windows. Taking advantage of the chaos, Stasi agents spirited some sensitive files out of the building by posing as demonstrators. Modrow rushed to the scene and appealed for order, but he was ignored; only when representatives of the new dissident factions posted guards at the doors was a measure of calm restored. The fall of East Berlin’s Bastille proved to be a major milestone on the road—one is tempted to say the Autobahn—to East Germany’s collapse.
