With today's knowledge, we would have built the wall five meters higher.
I know many people don't understand this whole wave of Ostalgie. Especially in the West, people shake their heads and ask themselves what is missing. But the fact is that anyone who was twenty or thirty years old when the border was opened experienced their entire childhood and youth in a completely different system. A system that was not perfect. But a system in which you got up in the morning and knew: The work is there. The rent is affordable. The children are taken care of. And if you get sick, it doesn't cost anything. This basic feeling of security – that's missing. And that's not phantom pain. This is real.
Mixed feelings – and that's allowed
Freedom of travel, freedom of expression, free elections – this is a gain that no one disputes. People have taken to the streets for this, with the risk of shooting. That was courageous, that was right, that was historic. But the same people who stood on the street back then sit in their apartments today and ask themselves: Was it worth it?
Not because they want the Wall back. But because what came after that was not what they took to the streets for.
They took to the streets for change. For reforms. For a better GDR. Not for the sell-out of their country. Not for the humiliation of having to have their own degrees re-graduated. Not for the experience that the company where you have worked for twenty years is closed overnight and your Western colleague explains to you how to work properly. Not for the feeling of being a second-class citizen – for 35 years.
The Narrative
What bothers me the most is how over the years an entire generation has been trained to parrot a certain image. The GDR was grey, bankrupt, a dictatorship, the Stasi, the Wall – that's it. There is nothing more to say. Anyone who tells otherwise is a nostalgic, a die-hard, a Putin sympathizer.
But anyone who lived there knows: There was also the neighbor who rang the bell at half past seven and asked if you needed milk. The company doctor who knew you by your first name. The kindergarten teacher who looked after the same children for twenty years. The summer at Lake Balaton, paid for by the FDGB, for an amount that is not even enough for a parking ticket today. The school meals, where no child remained hungry. The brigade, who were not only work colleagues but family.
This is not whitewashing. That is remembering. And remembering is not a disease. It is a fundamental right.
The sentence that more and more people are saying quietly to themselves
"With today's knowledge, we would have built the wall five meters higher."
The sentence sounds provocative. It hurts. It is also supposed to hurt. But it doesn't come out of nowhere. It comes from people who have experienced how everything has been taken away from them – work, security, dignity, the feeling of belonging – and who have been told afterwards: Be happy. Be grateful. You now have bananas.
They don't want a wall back. They don't want Honecker back. They don't want the Stasi and no travel restrictions. What they want is respect. For their life's work. For their history. For the fact that not everything was wrong just because it came from the GDR.
The other way
I am firmly convinced that many did not want a total sell-out of their country. A large part of them wanted two German states to continue to exist side by side – a reformed, democratic East and a West that does what it wants. Two countries that meet at eye level. Not an accession in which one side makes all the rules and the other side is allowed to join in.
Would that have worked? Maybe. Maybe not. But they could have tried. You could have asked the people. They were not asked. And that's exactly the point.
Why I'm writing this
Not to provoke. Well, a little bit. But above all, because I believe that these feelings have to be said. Loudly. Not only at the kitchen table, not only among like-minded people, not only after the third beer. But here. Publicly. With the knowledge that someone will come along again and write "Shit communists". Let me tell him: Firstly, we were not communists, we have already explained that here. And secondly: If you don't have any arguments, you just write swear words. We have already explained that.
If you read along regularly on this page, you know the facts by now. The Treuhand, the Soli, the sell-out, the newspaper publishers, the pioneer houses, the polyclinics, DKK Scharfenstein, Bischofferode – everything researched, everything proven, all with sources. If you want to read it, scroll through my contributions. Everything is there. Black on white. With links.
I don't want a wall back. But I wish we had been asked. And I wish that people would stop telling us to be grateful. Because anyone who deals with the facts knows: Someone else should be grateful.
And yes – there are quite a few who bitterly regret it. Those with the knowledge of today say: We would have built the wall five meters higher. Not because they want the GDR back. But because they never wanted what came instead.
If you can understand that, you were probably there. And if you can't understand it, it probably wasn't. Both perspectives are fine. But only one of them has the right to judge it.
0.000 SRY