It may be three decades since the Berlin wall came down but too many others have recently proliferated

"No wall that excludes people and limits freedom is so high or so wide that it can not be broken," Merkel said in the Chapel of Reconciliation on the former death strip on Bernauer Strasse.


David Gow differs: It may be three decades since the Berlin wall came down but too many others have recently proliferated.

In Social Europe he writes

Europe: tear down those walls!

‘Die Mauer in den Köpfen’ (the wall in the heads) is a phrase I first heard as a German correspondent in the 1990s, not that long after the October 1990 celebrations of reunification at the Reichstag in Berlin, on which I reported. The famous dictum of the former long-time Social Democrat leader Willy Brandt at the Schöneberg town hall a year earlier—‘es wächst zusammen was zusammen gehört’ (what belongs together grows together)—had swiftly turned to dust.

Then, as now, economic disparity had something to do with it, even though on average €100 billion a year has been transferred from west to east over the last three decades. Three million east Germans lost their jobs within barely a year. The overwhelming number of senior posts were taken over by Besserwessis. And today, as the Hans Böckler Foundation’s WSI institute recently reported, east German wages are 16.9 per cent lower than for western counterparts with the same qualifications.

Indeed, in the run-up to the decidedly low-key, typically soul-searching 30th-anniversary celebrations in Germany, there were many reflections on the emotional, cultural, sociological and psycho-political walls remaining between east and west. The chancellor, Angela Merkel, who grew up in the old German Democratic Republic, told Der Spiegel: ‘Different experiences of life in east and west are a fact. We should talk more about it and make a greater effort to understand each other.’ She blamed an initial lack of curiosity and interest on the part of west German politicians.

And, I might add, the west German media. When I returned from a week-long visit to Saxony in 1991, investigating neo-Nazi attacks on migrants and asylum-seekers, colleagues in the Bundespressekonferenz (official lobby for political correspondents) asked incredulously: ‘Why on earth go there? They’re a different, difficult lot …’ Outside the Zwinger museum complex in Dresden 15 years later, a group of tourists from Düsseldorf admitted to me that it was the first time they had set foot in the east—and insisted they still had little in common with their compatriots.

Now, I imagine, they would be shaking their heads in disbelief at the fact that, together, the Left Party (Die Linke, part-successors to the old east German Communists) and the far-right populist Alternative für Deutschland commanded over 53 per cent of the vote in the recent state election in Thuringia or that the AfD came a strong second in Brandenburg and Saxony. It scores 13 per cent in current national polls; it won 23.4 per cent in Thuringia, 27.5 per cent in Saxony and 23.5 per cent in Brandenburg.

Read the full article at Social Europe.