By John Fund
Sunday, November 10, 2019
The Berlin Wall stood for 28 years until in 1989 a wave
of citizen protest forced the East German Communist government to open its
gates. We’ve now gone longer without the Berlin Wall than it existed.
As we marked the anniversary, on November 9, of its
demise, I couldn’t help but recall with wonder how astonishingly quickly the
ugly scar of the wall along with its guards, dogs, and mines were all swept
away in a wave of euphoria.
I visited the Berlin Wall and crossed into East Germany
several times during the 1980s while I worked at the Wall Street Journal.
I will never forget the brave dissidents I met on the Eastern side who never
accepted the wall, or the bureaucrats who ran the state machinery that
sustained it.
While it now appears easy to simply divide the East
German population into oppressors and the people they oppressed, I learned that
the truth was a bit more complicated even for someone like me who grew up with
anti-Communism in his bloodstream.
Here are some snapshots of people I met before the fall
of the wall whom I will never forget.
One: Christa Luft, was the last person to serve as
minister of economics in the East German government. Appointed just after the
wall fell, she faced the daunting challenge of holding together a collapsing
centrally planned economy. When I interviewed her just before Christmas 1989, I
asked her how long East Germany could have preserved Communism if the wall
hadn’t collapsed. With remarkable candor she said: “We had at most six months
to a year.” The economy, she explained, was so inefficient at the end that if a
machine tool broke down in Leipzig there would likely be no spare part
available. A factory manager desperate to produce his quota of goods would
often pay to have the needed part stolen for him from a factory in another
city.
Excited to hear such a realistic explanation of the
collectivist system, I then asked how the American CIA had possibly calculated
that East Germany had a higher GDP than Ireland did, and indeed that West
German per capita GDP was only 32 percent higher than East Germany’s. A clearly
exhausted Christa Luft started to offer a rationalization and then gave up. “We
lied,” she suddenly burst out. “But it wasn’t entirely our fault. You in the
West believed our lies, and even gave us loans and other money based on our
lies.” The wildly inaccurate economic statistics of the regime became so much a
part of the system that even the ruling Communist Politburo members were not
given the most accurate numbers.
Two: Peter Janz, who was the energetic first secretary of
the East German Embassy in Washington during the 1980s and the point man for
arranging interviews and journalist visas for me. He was always polite and he
never engaged in attempts to peddle the more preposterous of Communist spin.
After the wall came down, he naturally wasn’t kept on by
the German Foreign Ministry. I visited him a couple of years later after he’d
settled down as owner of a video-rental store in Berlin. I asked him when he
first realized that he was working for a regime that didn’t serve its people and
was built on untruths.
He explained that as the son of Communist Party insiders,
he had gone to high school in Moscow and been trained for a career as a top
government official. But a school vacation trip he and four fellow East German
classmates earned to the Baltic States changed his perspective.
He explained that he and his friends had been taught that
Estonia, Latviam and Lithuania had all been liberated by Stalin from Nazi rule
during World War II. They were now proud, loyal republics of the Soviet Union.
But when he and his friends spoke Russian on the streets, they were met with
hostile glares and suspicion by the local population. When they switched to
German, they were approached by curious passersby and greeted warmly. “I
suddenly realized my world was upside down. Nazis had indeed brutalized the
Baltic States, but the Soviets had been at least as bad and stayed far longer,”
he told me.
What did he do with this new knowledge, I asked him. He
explained patiently that his options were limited: “I could become a dissident
and give up hope of university or a career. I could leave my entire family and
try to start over elsewhere. Or I could stay on my career path and try not to
become too morally compromised and perhaps even do some good around the
margins.” To those who would criticize his choice, he had a tart response:
“People who’ve never grown up in a dictatorship should ask themselves how
easily they would rebel against it and risk its full wrath,” he said. “Many of
us have no idea how we would react until we are confronted directly with such
choices.”
Three: Monica Stern, who was one of four teenage girls
whom a German friend of mine and I encountered in 1984 while touring an East
Berlin museum. Their teacher had brought them from a rural area to see their
nation’s capital and had given them the afternoon off. My friend and I knew
Berlin far better than they did, so we volunteered to be their tour guides.
By dusk it was time for my friend and I to return to the
glittering lights of West Berlin. The girls came along to bid us farewell. They
had never seen the Berlin Wall, but they sensed it was close. They stopped on a
street corner and said, “We really shouldn’t go any farther. We are not
Berliners. If we are stopped, the guards will ask us why we are so close to the
border.”
As we stood in the growing darkness, a feeling of sadness
came over me. I wasn’t rich, but I could go anywhere in the world from that
street corner for a few hundred dollars. They could not go another 100 yards.
Their world ended at the wall. They were trapped in a human zoo.
To keep the conversation going, I asked them what they
wanted to be when they grew up. One said a beautician, one said a nurse, and
one said a teacher. But the oldest and wisest, whose name was Monika, looked up
at me and said very slowly: “It doesn’t matter what we become when we grow up.
They will always treat us like children.”
That sentence really defined Communism in its waning
years. People were rarely taken away to a political prison. Instead, there was
an insufferable and widespread paternalism. It weighed down people’s spirits
and prevented them from becoming what was the best within them.
We parted almost tearfully, exchanging addresses so we
could swap postcards at Christmas. She wrote that her application for
university studies had been rejected because of her views.
Five years later, in 1989, Monika turned 19 and the
Berlin Wall came down. I watched in New York as East Germans crossed over, and
I wondered if Monika and her friends were among them.
At about ten o’clock the next morning, the telephone
rang. AT&T, already trying to introduce a consumer culture to the 84
percent of East Germans without a telephone, had set up phone kiosks near the
wall. They gave prospective customers the chance to make a call anywhere in the
world for free. Monika called me. Her first words were, “John, this is Monika.
I am over the wall.”
We talked for a few minutes, and I reminded her of our
talk on a street corner in East Berlin. “Well, does this mean you country has
grown up, and you are no longer to be treated as children?” I asked. She
responded with a laugh. “I think my entire country has graduated from
kindergarten to high school overnight.”
Today, Monika is happily married and a successful
veterinarian. But after more than a generation during which civics, Cold War
history, and Communism were barely taught in American public schools, today’s
young people know very little about this era.
A new poll by the Victims of Communism Memorial
Foundation finds that Communism is viewed favorably by more than one in three
Millennials (36 percent). Only 57 percent of Generation Z and 62 percent of
Millennials believe that China is a Communist country and not a democratic
country. And finally, only 57 percent of Millennials (compared with 94 percent
of the World War II ‘Silent Generation’), believe that the Declaration of
Independence guarantees freedom and equality better than the Communist
Manifesto does.
Luckily, many Millennials either don’t understand what
collectivism is, or they want “an imaginary, pure, democratic, cuddly
socialism,” in the words of Daniel Hannan, a British member of the European
Parliament. “Even where history has given us laboratory-condition experiments —
East and West Germany, and Hong Kong and mainland China — they refuse to infer
anything from them, airily dismission each actual instance of socialism as ‘not
real socialism.’”
West Berlin’s fight for freedom is now part of history,
but here’s hoping that the human-rights story of 2019 — the fight of another
isolated “island of freedom” called Hong Kong to protect its institutions from
an authoritarian takeover — similarly captures the attention of the world and
prompts young people to better comprehend the difference between free and
controlled societies.
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