Dispatch From Berlin: Walk, Don't Run When Politics Heat Up

A single East German legacy may have something to teach us.

One thing that still divides Berlin is traffic lights. You know you’re in the old East Berlin when, as you’re ready to cross a street, you are greeted by the silhouette of a funky little behatted man inside the signal box instructing either to stop (red) or walk (green). It’s called “Ampelmännchen,” which means, “little traffic light man.” The East German traffic specialist who designed it in 1961, the year the Wall went up, feared the humorless apparatchiks who were his bosses would reject the design as too “petit bourgeois,” too warmly human for an inhuman regime. But, to his surprise, they gave their green light, so to speak. Years after unification, the designer said, Ampelmännchen “represents a positive aspect of a failed social order.”

Friends from the West (“Wessis”) tell me that the little guy is the only good thing the German Democratic Republic (GDR) left them. In fact, following unification the government planned to replace the erstwhile communist traffic lights with the West’s more impersonal, generic lights. But Easterners (“Ossis”) registered their opposition en masse, petitioning their political representatives to press to keep Ampelmännchen, which had become a beloved figure in the GDR, especially among children. And they prevailed! Germany remains divided today along traffic signal lines.

I spent an entire afternoon taking in an educational tour of Wall sites on Bernauer Strasse along which the hideous thing ran for 28 years. The arbitrary division split families, lovers and friends. It took on surreal features. Versöhnungskirche (Reconciliation Church) lay smack dab in the middle of the vile “death strip.” Parishioners were locked out. So, the GDR authorities simply demolished the soaring Gothic landmark. The Wall ran through its cemetery, thus politicizing even the dead. No problem. The East German government simply had graves on the GDR side exhumed and reinterred on the western side. Those who resided in buildings adjacent to Bernauer Strasse had their windows bricked up. Many, often having to decide on the spur of the moment, jumped out of upper floor windows onto the street to escape the East. If they were lucky, the local fire department on the western side would catch them in big rescue nets. Some, including children, died in the process. A wall of martyrs today displays photos of their faces, haunting as they stare back decades after their passing. The GDR subsequently razed all buildings on their side of Bernauer Strasse, replacing them with flood lights, mine fields, signal fences, automatic machine guns, anti-vehicle barriers, guard towers and guard dogs. A bleak field designed to divide and murder.

GDR border guard Conrad Schumann, 19, is captured in an iconic photo of him leaping over barbed wire with his submachine gun as he defected to the West when the Wall was being constructed. Resettled in Bavaria and rejected by his family in the East, he committed suicide in 1998 at age 56.

The death strip today is a manicured park with educational exhibits, a museum and remnants of the Wall. It has been commercially redeveloped over the years. Little resembles the pre-1989 neighborhood.

Years ago, I knew a former East German diplomat, a young man named Dieter. He had been summarily fired along with all GDR diplomats immediately following unification. Bonn had sent a telegram to all GDR overseas missions informing all but a handful of custodial staff that they thereby were fired and would soon be receiving a one-way plane ticket back home. Dieter, who, typical of his class, stemmed from a long line of reliable communists, was bitter about the way he was treated. “I am as much German as anybody,” he told me. He felt he could serve the Federal Republic of Germany ably and faithfully. But no such luck. Dieter landed on his feet, though, snagging a professional position with a UN agency. He admitted to me that he was gay, a no-no in the GDR apparatus. I asked him how he dealt with it. “In a system of lies, it wasn’t so hard,” he said. “We all lived a life of lies.”

British travel writer Jan Morris wrote of the GDR: “Travelling from west to east through [the inner German border] was like entering a drab and disturbing dream, peopled by all the ogres of totalitarianism, a half-lit world of shabby resentments, where anything could be done to you, I used to feel, without anybody ever hearing of it, and your every step was dogged by watchful eyes and mechanisms.”

I was fortunate to have occupied a birds-eye view position at the State Department during the time when communism fell in Europe, the Wall came down, Germany reunited and the Soviet Union imploded. The dispatches from our embassies and consulates, as well as news reports, were riveting reading. The rush of history was almost too much to handle for policymakers.

A Wessi friend told me the other day, “The physical wall came down more than 30 years ago, but a psychological wall remains.” He and other Wessi friends describe how deeply divided many Ossis and Wessis remain today. The former feel put upon by Wessi carpetbaggers, referred to snidely as “Besserwessis” — Western know-it-alls — who flooded into the Eastern lands, bought up everything of value, pushed their weight around, imposed cutthroat capitalism and often bled assets dry. Three decades on, a sense of “Ostalgia” has set in, a yearning, especially among older people, for a time when “the state pretended to pay us and we pretended to work.” Wessis have dominated almost every major institution in the ex-GDR. My Wessi friend cited, as an example, academia. Of 101 institutions of higher learning in Germany, today none is headed by an Easterner.

Despite billions invested in the East by the federal government, it remains Germany’s Appalachia, with higher unemployment, youth flight and a begrudging population. A recent survey shows that 57 percent of eastern Germans feel like second-class citizens. Only 38 percent view reunification as successful, including only 20 percent of those under 40. This is the stronghold of the right-wing populist, anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party. But, reflecting the complexity of German society and politics, its co-leader, Alice Weidel, is a lesbian intellectual who opposes gay marriage and resides part-time in Switzerland with her partner.

Germany is hardly the only country that wrestles with regional tensions. One-hundred-fifty-eight years since the end of the Civil War, Americans are debating the nature of slavery, Confederate symbols such as the Dixie battle flag and monuments to Southern heroes, the role of religion in public life and other issues that often break down along sectional lines. And every now and then some rabid loudmouth politician from below the Mason-Dixon line blurts nonsense about “secession.”

It usually takes decades, even centuries, for a people to iron out tension-filled historical legacies — though, honestly, there is zero validity, in my view, of rehashing slavery. Germany will be contending with Wessi-Ossi differences for many years to come. So will the U.S. continue to confront its North-South disparities. But if they are smart, overwrought partisans will pay heed to funky little Ampelmännchen and pause when the light signals red.