Opinion Wall in the head

When East German soldier Conrad Schumann leaped over the barbed wire fence on the third day of the construction of the Berlin Wall (August 15, 1961), nobody knew how long the wall would last. After reunification in October 1990, Germany removed almost every trace of the 155-km-long structure. The multitudes gathering at the Brandenburg Gate on Sunday, to commemorate a quarter century of the fall, will make do with the release of illuminated balloons along the line that once divided the city. With its “Death Strip” and watch towers and double-lined barbed wire fencing, the Berlin Wall came to embody the spirit of the Iron Curtain. No single event captured the collapse of the East Bloc as much as November 9, 1989.

Twenty-five years on, the city that made Stendhal wonder what could have possessed people to found it “in the middle of all this sand”, remains Schicksal Stadt Deutschlands (the city of German destiny). Angela Merkel, who recently announced that economic migration from former East Germany has ended, illustrates the distance travelled: she is reunified Germany’s first chancellor from the former GDR and its most representative politician. But the divisions prove resilient. Not just the socio-economic divide. There remains a wall in the head (Mauer im Kopf). It’s a battle over memory. Former East Germans would like former West Germans to remember their very different experience of history for 45 years.

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Günter Grass’s fears of a unified Germany failing again proved alarmist. But what wasn’t anticipated was that far from obliterating the GDR, the federal republic would shift to a new centre, where an East Berliner could lead Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Kohl’s party and still keep the “Engine of Europe” a welfare state. As Europe battles its way out of the financial crisis and countenances a new “cold war” from Finland to Ukraine, Germany’s quiet and stable capital once again occupies the spot on the map where east and west converge or fall apart.