Nearly a year ago, the collapse of the Berlin Wall marked the end of an era of socialism and communism. Our party, the East Berlin Communists, have ceased to be an influential party after the reunification of West and East Germany.
Back in 1961, Premier Khrushchev was forced to seal the border between East and West Berlin with a concrete barrier to stop the damaging ‘brain drain’ of young East Germans from betraying their communist ideals and being lured by false promises of prosperity in the West. And the Wall worked – the number of Germans leaving dwindled from 47,000 in August 1961 to fewer than 30,000 per year, though of course the West ignorantly depicted the Wall as ‘communist tyranny’. Furthermore, it led to economic prosperity and free medical care, high employment rates.
However, I acquiesce that during the final months before the Berlin Wall collapsed, the East German government failed to sustain a divided and communist ‘Fatherland’. Many Easterners were circumventing the Wall through Hungary, who had removed their border with Austria and dismantled the Iron Curtain, which Gorbachev passively signaled no objection to. Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika and glasnost triggered the collapse of the USSR – granting freedom to the Easterners only led to mass protests and a crisis that resulted in the removal of the hardline Stalinist leader, Erich Honecker. Under the pressure of the mass movement, our new Party leader, Egon Krenz, called for a press conference to introduce new travel regulations to reduce tensions in the East. However, our efforts went completely out the window when the spokesman, Schabowski, for our party announced that East Germans would “immediately” be allowed to travel directly to West Germany. Following that debacle, we recognized the scale of the crisis that seized East Berlin and resigned gracefully.
The same affluence allowed by the Berlin Wall cannot be experienced in today’s Germany – its removal has not led to the much desired “political revolution”, but rather counterrevolution in the form of unification with West Germany. The Chancellor of West Germany, Helmut Kohl, has resorted to shameless bribery to persuade the Easterners that merging is the only solution. But Kohl deceived them, telling them that unifying would mean that their lives would be like the West Germans. He did not inform that introducing a market economy would cause mass unemployment (3.3 million more people unemployed since 1989), factory closures, and the essential demolition of the industrial base of the USSR.
No side has won – East Germany now faces the economic and social ramifications of reunification, whilst the West bitterly pays higher taxes to accommodate for the financially weak Easterners.