Chapter 4: Berlin (Germany) [An Abridged History of Europe]

AN ABRIDGED HISTORY OF EUROPE 
by William M. Brinton 

Chapter Four:
Berlin (Germany)

A Crane Stands Above a Construction. CORBIS/Owen Franklin

A Crane Stands Above a Construction. CORBIS/Owen Franklin

In 1999, Berlin became Germany's capital, replacing Bonn. By the end of World War II in 1945 most of Berlin had been reduced to rubble by Allied bombers. Today on the eve of the 21st century, Berlin has been the biggest construction zone in all Europe. For information about the 10th anniversary of the fall of the Wall, see A Concrete Curtain: The Life and Death of the Berlin Wall at www.wall.berlin.org. Once more German developers have sought a new identity. In 1938, Adolph Hitler had drawn lines on a map to show what he had in mind. It never got built, but now the developers seem to be reviving a new identity built on modern lines of ceramic and stone, not the steel and glass of the thirties. On the surface, contemporary Berlin seems to be liberating itself from history. The Nazi structures were wiped out during the war, and the Berlin Wall was demolished in 1989 leaving long, inviting stretches of unfilled lots. Whole swaths of Berlin were razed for new construction. Some of the sites planned for government buildings were razed by the government because shabby housing was not what the developers wanted. These buildings were easily vacated by the inhabitants. The governmental task of acquiring these sites plus improvements was made easier by the fact that many of the resident-inhabitants were Jewish. The German government will move into what has evolved as the new plan, the German Institute for Economic Research has revised its early estimates. Instead of some 60,000 new residents expected to make Berlin their home, it now expects its population prediction to show a reduction between now and 2015. This is only one reason why the early investors have disappeared. Another reason is that Berlin remains poor. Its absorption of East Berlin in 1990, left the East German inhabitants without any skilled workers. Those who were over 50 in 1990 have no future of any kind in the labor market. Berlin itself is virtually bankrupt.

Cranes Stand Above a Construction. CORBIS/Owen Franklin
Cranes Stand Above a Construction. CORBIS/Owen Franklin

Berlin's architect, Daniel Libeskind, considers the city's reconstruction a national scandal, but for the wrong reasons. Libeskind says they represent a vision of city life more in tune with the Nazi past. Other entrepreneurs have argued that the entire plan is doomed to financial failure, unless the Schroeder socialist government is willing to subsidize the inevitable losses. Even now in 1999, some of the office spaces are distressingly empty. Entrepreneurs have discovered that having an office or retail outlet in Berlin has no reasonable relationship to the cost of leasing one. Furthermore, the power centers are really Frankfurt with its European Central Bank and Vienna. Both are oldtime and comfortable and its business people are enormously rich despite a Russian occupation of Vienna that ended only in 1955. This was the date that Austria signed the State Treaty with the United States, Great Britain, France and the Soviet Union. The latter withdrew its 40,000 troops in late September. For a complete history of Austria see lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/attoc.html.

Aquaminile in the Form of a Lion (Germany, 1400)
Aquaminile in the Form of a Lion (Germany, 1400)
Mirror of Medieval World, p. 172

Those rebuilding Berlin must have been aware of all the Nazi horrors of World War II and the Final Solution to deal with European Jewry. Wannsee is a lake of suburban Berlin. The Schutzstaffel (SS) owned a villa on the lake. On January 20, 1942, mid-level bureaucrats from a number of Nazi agencies assembled at Wannsee at the request of Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Main Security Office. Those assembled were to and did deal with the "Jewish Question" The report filed by them was named the Wannsee Protocol. Among other things, this protocol established the method for disposing of some 11,000,000 Jews. The English text of the original German-language Wannsee Protocol was based on the official U.S. Government translation prepared for use as evidence in the Nuremberg war trials. The text may be found at www.us-israel.org/jsource/Holocaust/Wannsee-Protocol.html The minutes of the Wannsee meeting were taken by Heydrich's subordinate, Adolph Eichman. He was later captured by Israeli agents, tried in Israel for war crimes against humanity and executed.

Children at Concentration Camp Fe, (ORBIS/Hulton-Deutsch Collection
Children at Concentration Camp Fe. CORBIS/Hulton-Deutsch Collection

The Jewish Question was not the only horror perpetrated in Berlin. In 1938, for example, Nazi thugs patrolled the streets of Berlin during Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass in which Jews were assaulted and their homes and/or businesses were ransacked and destroyed. This occurred on November 10, 1938. Ten months later, Germany was at war in all of Europe. No one really insists on constant reminders of a Nazi past, but real anger erupts when there has been a conscious denial of the Holocaust. Therefore, it is interesting that so much has gone into subordinating National Socialism to contemporary political action. Rebuilding Berlin is only the largest manifestation of a desire to forget the past, not to obliterate it, but to acknowledge it and move on. Consciously or not, German entrepreneurs have moved on this direction. The actual reconstruction is a visible manifestation of movement, and one way of describing progress has been the German musical, Space Dream. Its backers have invited Internet readers to download one or more of the selections of music used in this show. See www.spacedream.ch/spacedream/music/samples.html The Introduction is loud, discordant and lacks a melody or a coherent theme.

In 1933, the Nazis staged a book-burning uniformly denounced by Ralph Waldo Emerson and others. See www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/burning/burning.html.

Johann Christian Bach, Thomas Gainsborough, Oil on canvas, Civico Museo Bilbiografico Musicale, Bologna
Johann Christian Bach (1776)
Thomas Gainsborough
Carol Gerten's Fine Art (CGFA)

Frankfurt, eager to offer the works of Johann Wolfgang Goethe, has planned dozens of cultural events during 1999, the 250th anniversary of his birth, oddly enough in Weimar. Goethe was anti-Semitic as was Richard Wagner. Wagner's music has never been performed in Israel despite its almost universal appeal to those who enjoy myths. The Ring cycle, for example, offers the Nibelungen myths, but Wagner also composed Die Meistersinger, the prize song. Frankfurt annually stages Der Buchmesse, the international book fair which had some 26,000 publishers from around the world in 1998. Ever since 1947, when the book fair, once held in Leipzig, opened in Frankfurt the fair has grown from humble beginnings to its worldwide status today. In 1992, at least three publishers from various countries had reservations at the Schlosshotel Kronberg. This site was once home for the Dowager Empress of Germany, a daughter of Queen Victoria. Weimar also has plans for 1999. In that year, it will have celebrated entry into the millennium as the European City of Culture. Goethe's Faust and even a German rock opera, The Ninth of November will be performed. Other events that will also be celebrated in 1999 include the 80th anniversary of the Weimar Constitution, the 80th anniversary of Bauhaus architecture, and the 240th anniversary of Friederich von Schiller. To remind those present of the past, tours to Buchenwald will be offered. This site was one of the more notorious concentration camps during the Hitler regime. See www.germanembassy-india.org/news/april97/10gn04.htm. It is puzzling that the planners of all these celebrations have not included some writers with the courage to resist communist repression during the Soviet occupation of East Germany. One of these, Reiner Kunze, who wrote The Wonderful Years in 1984 and Life and Consequences: Being a Writer in Divided Germany. Excerpts from both books appear in Without Force or Lies: Voices from the Revolution of Central Europe in 1989-90 published by Mercury House and edited by this writer Heinrich Heine wrote an essay entitled "Schiller versus Goethe" It first appeared in The Romantic School in 1835. An excerpt appears at members.aol.com/abelard2heine.htm.

The Cardsharps, Caravaggio (Michelangelo da Merisi), Kimbell Art Museum
The Cardsharps
Caravaggio (Michelangelo da Merisi)

Germany has few major museums. One of them is Der Zeughaus — the Arsenal — completed in 1707 in Berlin. Almost two centuries later, the old Prussian weapons depot became a museum of Prussian history with a notable collection of military objects. In 1939, Hitler ordered the Wehrmacht to operate museums in three cities, Berlin, Munich, and Dresden. In later years, the Arsenal has been administered by the state, except when it was controlled by the SED, or the German Communists, until the Soviet Union withdrew its occupying forces from Berlin and all East Germany. Another museum, while smaller than the Arsenal, served as a source from which Nazi propaganda could be disseminated, at least until 1945 when Germany surrendered. The Museum-Karlshorst was first managed by the Soviet Union. Eventually, however, a new concept was negotiated by the real owners and the Soviet administration. The new museum opened its doors in 1995. In September, 1990, this museum was dissolved. Its collections and property were conveyed to the German Historical Museum The exhibition covers subjects of particular importance to the Russians. See www.dhm.de/ENGLISH/karlshorst/ Deutsches Historisches Museum (German Historical Museum) in Berlin is another museum with short histories of some of the new members of the European Union as well as some applicants. See www.dhm.de/ausstellungen/mythen/english/d30.html. The countries as to which there is a two or slightly more than two-paragraph summary include France, Belgium, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Italy, Greece, Hungary, Austria, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Poland, Denmark, and Norway. The Web site of each offers links to other sites with more information.

Der Abentheuerliche Simplicissimus (Germany, 1660s), Hans Jacob Christoph Von Grimmelshausen
Der Abentheuerliche Simplicissimus (Germany, 1660s)
Hans Jacob Christoph Von Grimmelshausen
1648 War and Peace, p. 172

Germans would like it, if the world around them forgot the Holocaust and two world wars, both of which they lost, World Wars I (1914 - 1918) and II (1939 - 1945). However, the people behind reconstruction of Berlin offer no help. They have agreed to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the adoption of a Constitution for the Weimar Republic. It was proclaimed by Phillip Scheidmann on November 9, 1918 and Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated, fleeing to Holland on the next day. The Schneidemann government resigned in June, 1919 and Social Democrat Gustav Bauer succeeded to the post of Chancellor. On July 31, 1919, the Weimar Asssembly adopted a new constitution providing a strong president who, under Article 48, could govern alone in a state of emergency. The new constitution became law on August 14, 1919. This date would be 81 years from the year 2000, but one cannot quarrel with a discrepancy of one year for the celebration of an event that Hitler used in his march to power in 1933. However, Hitler became chairman of the National Socialists' Workers Party then renamed as the NSDAP. At this time, 550 marks were equal to one dollar. Two years later, $1 equalled 54,300 marks. On September 3, 1923, the government declared a state of emergency, while one month later 4 billion marks equalled one dollar. Adolph Hitler was released from prison on December 17, 1924 and Field Marshall Paul von Hindenburg was elected President of the Weimar Republic. In 1929, the National Socialists Workers' Party organized a party rally in Nuremburg at which some 150,000 participants. A year later, the Nazis increased their number of seats in the Assembly from 12 to 107 (18 percent of the vote). On July 16, 1930, Reich Chancellor Bruning invoked Article 48, dissolving the Reichstag. With 6 million umemployed Germans and wild inflation not yet under control, Hitler was named chancellor by von Hindenberg. On March 23, 1933, the elected representatives enacted Enabling Laws making Hitler a dictator. One week later, the boycott of Jewish businesses began. Two months later, Nazi students burned un-German books, and all opposition parties were banned on July 14, 1933. Pamela Potter has given an analysis of the Weimar Republic in her book, Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society From the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler's Reich, published in 1998 by the Yale University Press.

The Weimar Republic had a violent start, punctuated by bloody uprisings, assassinations, and the failings of a lax system of law and order. The Treaty of Versailles in 1919, the occupation of the Ruhr in 1923, and the concurrent hyperinflation further demoralized and angered large portions of the defeated country, splintering the German electorate into numerous political factions and lowering expectations for the survival of the Republic, even after conditions improved with currency devaluation and a period of prosperity from 1924 to 1929. The Great Depression in 1929 brought social and political conflicts to a head, creating a state of emergency and a rise in disorder and umemployment and marking the beginning of the Republic's decline.

The Lovesick Woman (1660), Jan Steen, Oil on canvas, Alte Pinakothek, Munich
The Lovesick Woman (1660)
Jan Steen
Carol Gerten's Fine Art (CGFA)

Ms. Potter also argues convincingly "that the insecurities of the Weimar Republic reached in to cultural realms as well. Reactions against Romanticism inspired wild and iconoclastic experimentation in art, music, and literature." She mentions Arnold Schoenberg in her book. Schoenberg was greeted with hostility in both Vienna and New York. The New York Times music critic in 1913 wrote afer a performance of "Pierrot Lumaire" that (Schoenberg's music) conveyed "an aura of original depravity of subtle ugliness, of basest egotism, of hatred and contempt, of cruelty and of the mystic grandiose."Had America on Line been operating in 1913, with its 15 million subscribers, these views could have been circulated throughout about 25 percent of the German population. One cannot be certain that Germany wants outsiders to recall this chain of events with a celebration, particularly because of its major Nazi theme, anti-Semistism. Rather more publicity should have been given to the Council of Europe's celebration of the 350th anniversary of the Thirty Years War (1618 to 1648). Fariid Zakaria, Managing Editor of Foreign Policy offered these thought in an article appearing in New York Times Magazine.

In 1648, after three decades of bloody warfare and three years of negotiation, two such (treaties) documents were signed in northwest Germany. Together they constituted the Peace of Westphalia, probably the most important treaty of the millennium. It ushered in the modern state system that governs our world — the very system that is now, 350 years later, being undermined by transnational forces like the euro, the Internet, and Amnesty International. The Peace of Westphalia brought an end to the Thirty Years War, the deadliest conflict in history until then, in which perhaps 10 million people died. The war began when Protestant German princes revolted against Ferdinand II, their nominal sovereign and head of the Holy Roman Empire, a confederation of mostly German-speaking principalities. Ferdinand, the Habsdburg emperor, championed the Counter-Reformation, which sought to restore Catholic power in Europe. Protestant Sweden allied with the German princes against him; so did Catholic France. Voilà, Europe had a full scale war. While France's move showed that canny diplomacy knows no God, it was religion that made the Thirty Years' War so important. Compromise was impossible. Either the Pope was Christ's vicar on earth or he wasn't. Protestants were heretics or heroes. You couldn't split the difference. At war's end, the big losers were the Habsburgs of Austria who reigned over the Holy Roman Empire; much of the treaty was devoted to parceling out their land to the winners, the unholy alliance of Sweden and France.

Aquimanile in the Form of a Cock, Germany, 13th Century
Aquaminile in the Form of a Cock (Germany, 1200s)
Mirror of Medieval World, p. 114

Sombre as it was, the Thirty Years War ended on a note of optimism. This exhibition in both Osnabruck and Munster described the destructive nature of war. This one surpassed by far anything that the people had experienced since the beginning of civilization in Germany. Even more important was the Peace of Westphalia, by establishing a multilateral diplomatic insrrument to settle this calamitous conflict, formed the basis of new power relations geared to a peaceful balance of power. On January 30, 1999 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was honored with a performance of his dramatic poem Faust, under the title of World Citizen Goethe — Open World of Goethe at the Frankfurt Schauspiel Theater. This was followed by some 170 concerts and readings and exhibition. The final celebration was Goethe's 250th birthday on August 28, 1999 was at the Alte Oper, an opera house. Goethe was born in Weimar in 1749 and died in 1832.

Germany began to hear from Adolph Hitler and Joseph Goebbels. Hitler's book, Mein Kampf, was published in 1925. See www.crusader.net/texts/mk/. Unfortunately, few people outside Germany either read or believed its contents. Goebbels was a Berlin District Commissioner in 1932. In a district memorandum, he announced he would lead the way in culture by establisheng the Kampfbund fur Deutsche Kultur. This Fighting League for German Culture had assumed the task of leading the struggle in the Greater Berlin District for the preservation of German culture in all areas of art. Goebbels interpreted preservation in the broadest possible areas of culture, including literature, radio, film, the entertainment arts, architecture, and music. Goebbels encouraged composers to do music that had a Germanness (Deutchstum) component. Nazi youth groups were thoroughly indoctrinated into music that pleased Goebbels. History does not record the date on which Hitler and Goebbels first met, but Goebbels became Hitler's minister of propaganda in early 1934. Goebbels, together with Alfred Rosenberg, worked on separating out the component of Germanness from music composed by foreigners. Their failure to do more rested on confusing criteria, but they did publish a handbook of Jewish composers. In Frankfurt, an intellectual institute was closed by the Nazis in 1934 after only a few years of research.

Bauhaus
Bauhaus School, Berlin
(Photos and art...)

During the postwar period (1919 to 1939), a number of talented artists painted under various labels, such as Cubism and Expressionism. The experimenters included Vasily Kandinsky (1866 - 1944), Marc Chagall (1889 - 1985), Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973), and Salvador Dali (1904 - 1989). Amadeo Modigliani (1884 - 1920), and Paul Klee (1879 - 1940). In literature, writers described a sense of devastation and sought new ways of dealing with it. T.S. Eliot's Wasteland, was one of them. Others included James Joyce's Ulysses, Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, Berthold Brecht's Threepenny Opera and Erich F. Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front.

In 1923, a new phenomnon arose in Russia, Joseph Stalin. He is mentioned here only because his career involved both Central Asia and Europe. When Lenin died in 1923, Stalin took his place, not by election, but by his colleagues on the USSR Politburo. They recognized his criminal talents. Stalin presided over and generally, issued commands to the Red Army generals who were charged with execution of all commands. In the ten years 1929-1938, almost all of the Soviet Union's peasant workers were consolidated into some 250,000 state-owned collective farms. In the process, some 15 million men, women, and children died because they resisted collectivisation. Stalin used the KGB as his enforcer and established a system of gulags, or prisons as concentration camps. Stalin was the largest employer in all Europe. Finally, with the works of Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitzen and international criticism, a large percentage of those in the gulags were released. Events occurring before Stalin's death in 1953 initiated the purges of 1934 to be followed by the Show Trials of 1938.

Epitaph for the Luneburg Pastor Scherzius, (1626)
Epitaph for the Luneburg Pastor Scherzius (1626)
1648 War and Peace, p. 313

To the west of Moscow, Adolph Hitler was on the march from 1933 to 1939 and the outbreak of World War II on September 1, 1939. Even before this, Germany sent arms to Spain. There were groups that opposed Franco, and Americans from the Lincoln Brigade were amomgst them In that country, Francisco Franco had displaced the monarchy by a coup. The Spanish Civil War began in 1934, and it ended in 1939 with Franco prevailing with help from both Germany and Italy. In Europe itself, this war began on September 1, 1939. Hitler's armies attacked Russia on June 22, 1941. On December 7,1941, Japanese aircraft bombed Pearl Harbor, destroying critical Navy ships and aircraft on the ground. On the next day, the United States declared war on Japan and Germany. All these wars were to end on May 9, 1945 in Germany and August 14, 1945 in Japan. See ac.acusd.edu/History/WW2Timeline/1918-38.html for text of history beginning with the Treaty of Versailles. Additional text is available on related areas of history. See, for example www.history.com/worldwar2/riseofhitler/, Another site has analyzed Hitler's book, published in 1925. Its title is Mein Kampf and it appears in two volumes. www.crusader.net/texts/mk/ and two more sites, one of them with Great History Videos. They are available at www.Reel.com. See www.historyplace.com/bookshop/usa.htm. Together, they represent an estimated 1,000 pages of additional text Another source of related information is the Cold War, a documentary filmed by CNN and shown in January 1999 on public television stations. Then, at www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/timeline/statistics.htm, the statistics of World War II appear.

Bismark Balances with Turkey On
Bismark Balances with Turkey On
CORBIS/Bettman

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics claim that Russia lost 20.6 million of its citizens, 10.6 percent of its population, while Germany lost 6.85 million of its citizens, 9.5 percent of its population. Readers may want to familiarize themselves with the monstrous story of the Holocaust by retrieving the Wannsee Conference of January 22, 1942. There, the Nazi hierarchy paved the way to what they called the Final Solution. There is a great deal of attention being paid in the last months of the 20th century to how the Nazis enlisted willing executioners to assist in the ensuing genocide of Jews. A book entitled Hitler's Willing Executioners makes the point that eliminationist anti-Semitism was widespread during the 1930s and even long before that. More recently, Ron Rosenbaum wrote a book entitled Explaining Hitler. It was published in 1998 by Random House now owned by a German publisher, Bertelsman A.G. Most text writers agree that Hitler belonged to that psychotic class of people destined to launch ultimate evil in the world, but according to Rosenbaum, no one has really explained Hitler, even Daniel Goldhagen who wrote Hitlers' Willing Executioners a year earlier. Another historian, Lucy Dawidowicz, wrote The War Against the Jews in 1975. She made the powerful argument that Hitler saw "a mass murder as his mission, his highest priority as far back as November, 1918 in an army hospital at Pasewalk, where in the throes of a still mysterious episode of gas blindness, a nervous breakdown, hysterical blindness, a hallucinatory episode in which he heard voices, he resolved to avenge the stab in the back he believed caused the German defeat in World War I by exterminating the Jews he held responsible, all of them." Rosenbaum's editors may have made a mistake by showing Hitler as a baby on its cover. Other writers have gone ballistic at seeing it on Rosenbaum's book. "It says," the critics argue, "that Hitler was never an innocent child, even at the age of two."

Women and Children Liberated at From Lambach Concentration Camp. CORBIS
Women and Children Liberated at From Lambach Concentration Camp. CORBIS

In early 1999, Dark Continent appeared in bookstores throughout the United States. One of its major themes was that Hitler's Germany might have prevailed at the end of World War II. This would have produced the unnerving sight of Nazis policing the streets of London. Had that occurred we would probably be speaking German if we lived in Great Britain. While there were a very few British leaders willing to discuss a German ally on the European continent before 1939, the collision of values was far too great for the British voter to accept. Britain was ruined by the staggeringly high cost of fighting Hitler and the Nazis. However, it is doubtful it might have avoided this cost by joining Germany. Such an alliance would have raised troubling questions in London. In fact British leaders were reluctant to buy off Nazi demands in Europe in exchange of bits of Africa and the British Empire. The ideological gulf between the two powers was evident here. Nazi planners in Berlin harshly criticized the British for their lax racial policies. Britain would have had to abandon its liberal imperialist policy in exchange for hardline racial policies.

The Reichstag, Berlin
The Reichstag, Berlin
(Photos...)

Anschluss with Austria occurred in 1938, and Nazi troops marched into Czechoslovakia less than a year later. War broke out in September1939 and early on, Nazi troops marched into France and occupied Paris in May, 1940. To many observers, the momemtum of Germany seemed unstoppable. British and French troops were almost trapped until a way out presented itself at Dunkirk. Abandonning their weapons, soldiers travelled across the English Channel in boats of all sizes. It was a route. So, had the Germans planned for an invasion of Great Britain, predicting a German victory was more than reasonable. German aircraft bombed London unmercifully, and it was even thought that London might surrender. Fortunately, none of these possibilities occurred. Then Hitler decided to launch Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia. He had concluded that Nazi troops could not succeed in a cross-Channel invasion, at least until Germany had defeated the rest of Europe. So Nazi troops moved east to Moscow beginning on June 22, 1941. By this date, the land mass controlled by Germany was staggeringly large. It stretched from the Arctic Ocean — Germans has invaded Norway earlier — to the fringes of the Sahara, from the Atlantic and the Spanish Pyrenees to Ukraine with its Polish and Russian borders. Hitler knew that Germany had to have oil, so he ordered built synthetic gas plants around Germany itself. The process used the hydrogen from coal to manufacture gasoline. Hitler also knew that Stalingrad was quite close to the oil of the Caspian Sea Basin. Recently, international oil companies will test drilled wells in Kabaschan in the deep water of the northern portion of the Caspian Sea. Authorities believe that this area of Central Asia will become the biggest oil field in history. It is ironic that Nazi troops literally ran out of gasoline for tanks, trucks, and aircraft just 200 miles from what is now considered as one of the great finds of oil outside the Middle East. Today, there has been no solid agreement on which pipeline route will carry the oil produced. Betting has been that a route through Georgia to Turkey's Mediterranean coast will be the choice.

After World War II ended, Germany had been divided into the German Democratic Republic governed by Soviet stooges. The border with the Federal Republic of Germany ran through Berlin. It is here that Checkpoint Charlie was one of the entries through the Wall. The Wall was begun on August 13, 1961 and in its final form divided Germany over a border of some 600 miles. The Wall was built to prevent East Germans from escaping to West Germany, not to prevent entry into East Germany. Other European countries were also ruled by Soviet communists. These included Hungary and Czechoslovakia. To end an uprising in Hungary, Russian troops were sent to Budapest in 1956. In 1968, Russian troops also suppressed the Prague Spring of Anton Dubcek. He at least had democracy in mind, but Moscow ended any hopes Czechoslovakia migh have had. Poland was also ruled from Moscow via Warsaw. In December 13, 1981, General Jaruzelski issued an edict that imposed martial law on that country. He said it was essential to avoid Soviet invasion as in Hungary and Czechslovakia. Polish labor nions were banned, but Solidarity emerged under the leadership of Lech Walensa and Adam Michnik. This man now Executive Manager of Gazeta Wyborska, a prominent liberal newspaper today, wrote that "The principal reason for the December 13 coup was the introduction of martial law. It was not the radicalism of Solidarity but the weakness of the base of the PUWP." Solidarity proved that the workers of Gdansk took socialism seriously. They criticized the perks of Party bosses and showed no signs of interest in capitalism or the markets; it was precisely because the Party was no longer a convincing guide to socialism that the assault it faced was so devastating.

In 1987, Michael Gorbachev wrote a book entitled Perestroika. In English, it meant restructuring and openness. Gorbachev was a dedicated Communist, but he saw some of the failings of socialism. This book had a wide readership, and its theory appealed to many that saw the gulf opening up between an increasingly harsh reality and official ideology. The environment around people in Poland, Hungary, Rumania, Czechoslovakia and East Germany was mute testimony to the indifference with which its degradation was ignored by the ruling leaders. In all four of these countries, living standards were falling and goods were scarce — in Berlin, for example, buildings a few blocks from the Wall were shabbily maintained and needed repairs, while buildings close to the Wall were kept from reaching this shabby level, so tourists could not see the crumbling decay in most of East Germany — and inadequacies were commonplace. However, the mere fact of economic slowdown was not a real threat to regimes that had perfected reliable ways of defending themselves, What it did, though, was to undermine their claim to rule. Furthermore, actual rulers were an elite of arthritic geriatrics bitterly resisting change. Gustav Husak of Czechoslovakia was 76, Ceausescu of Rumania was 67, and Erich Honecker of East Germany was in his 80s. This combination of tottering leaders, economic decay and environmental degradation led to mass defections in the various countries. The nuclear meltdown in 1986 at Chernobyl was even more of an incentive to leave for other homes.

For several years, East Germans had been allowed to take their summer vacation trips to Hungary. In a tense drama in 1989, a huge crowd of vacationing East Germans waited outside the German Democratic Republic in Budapast waiting for approval for their trip to West Germany via Austria. At last the floodgates had opened, and Germans arriving in West Germany were granted citizenship. On Christmas Day of 1989, Rumania's Ceausescu was captured by the army in Bucharest and summarily shot together with his sinister wife, Elena. On November 19, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell and the Berlin Symphony played Beethoven's Ode to Joy. A year later, elections were held in East Germany on the question of reunification and under what terms. Hungary also held elections, while Czechoslovakia planned for elections later in 1990. The actual reunification occurred on October 3, 1990. Chancellor Helmut Kohl of the Federal Republic of Germany paid a price. The Ostmark was exchanged at parity with the Deutschmark. When the euro was issued to banks, they paid a price in exchanging Deutschmanks for euros in 1999. Unemployment still threatens the economic stability of all Germany. In the former East Germany, unemployment was 9.5 percent, while it was 11.5 percent in early 1999. In November, 1998 Germany held elections. In the elections Kohl was defeated, and Gerhard Schroeder won. He governs with a coalition of his party, the Social Democrats and the Greens, at least until the next election. It occurred on February 7, 1999, where the coalition was defeated in Hesse. Schroeder lost his slim majority in the Bundesrat over an unlikely issue, immigration.

Immigration is far from being an issue likely to turn elections around. Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, a Social Democrat, who must face elections in December, 1999. Just two months earlier in October, Schroeder's bitter enemy, Oskar LaFontaine, expects to see his new book unveiled at the International Bookfair in Frankfurt. It opens on the first Tuesday of October, but political speculation may well outrun facts. He has promised to tell all in his 350-page Memoirs. This book is expected to be an outright rejection of the centrist political course Schroeder has taken ever since the elections in February. It was in these elections that Schroeder defeated Christian Democrat Helmut Kohl as Germany's new chancellor. Schroeder had to negotiate with his coalition government over the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia and barely managed to save Germany's role there.

According to one newspaper, LaFontaine's Memoirs will come in for harsh criticism of the joint political manifesto Schroeder drafted together with Britain's Prime Minister, Tony Clair. This joint manifesto believes in enterpreneurship and economic competitiveness. The Social Democrats view this with mistgiving as an attempt to reorganize the entire Social Democrat Party.



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All contents © 1999 William M. Brinton