37 years ago this week, my month’s stay in the German Democratic Republic (we refer to the fading image in our cracked rear view mirrors as “East Germany”) came to an end. Shortly thereafter, so did East Germany.
40 Years of Sidebars: Drinking beer in East Germany in the summer of 1989
In 1989 I had the opportunity to spend more than three months in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary and the USSR. This period remains a defining experience in my life, something that continues to intrigue and haunt me all these years later.
Later that year, I was still traveling in Europe when the Berlin Wall suddenly came tumbling down. You can thank Gorbachev, not Ronnie Ray-Gun.
No one expected it, least of all the Ost Berliners who lined up at checkpoints on the fateful evening of November 9 with little more in mind than briefly passing through and seeing what life was like on the other side. Earlier the same day, border guards would have opened fire on them for trying to cross.
For them, for me, for virtually all of us, the Cold War’s spheres of influence seemed eternal at the time. We had no idea drastic change was just around the corner. There were minor fissures, hairline cracks and other warning signs, but no indication they wouldn’t be resolved within the overall context of the postwar victors’ division of power.
Here, there and everywhere, politics ultimately is about power — who has it, who doesn’t, who is in, who is out — and who ultimately decides. In East Germany, the Communist regime addressed the people like this: If you’re not with us, you’re against us.
However, it was different in Hungary, no less a Communist state than the GDR, and to be sure, capable of undemocratic threats and repression when necessary. Hungarian leader Janos Kadar artfully borrowed money from the capitalist countries in order to make consumer goods more readily available, thus altering the political power equation: If you’re not against us, you’re for us.
These days it is assumed that political power is about money and vice versa, but in fact it isn’t always about money, even for a currently comatose Mitch McConnell, and as numerous small-time, tin-horn dictators have proven. Not all...Read more
