Berlin

BY the time I arrived in West Berlin, in 1962, the wall was a year old. The half-city was a hysterical, intellectually exciting place; the wall, whose construction began 50 years ago today, made it more so. From the East and West radio and TV stations you heard competing, mutually exclusive versions of every event. Worldviews counted more than facts. And there were spies everywhere. For fun, a journalist told me, he’d count the intelligence services operating in West Berlin; he stopped at 30.

I could sense the pain and anger unleashed by the wall. Families, lovers and friends were separated. The freedom of movement and the imagination of Berliners, even the air they breathed, were cut off. The city’s streets, subways and express trains were suddenly blocked. Only the sewer water could circulate freely.

Yet it is astounding how quickly that anger changed into habit, almost acceptance. While the wall meant the end of freedom of movement for the Germans in the East, the West Germans realized they didn’t miss much. Their anger was reduced to annoyance about the harassments during border crossings.

The wall faded in our political imagination, too. In West Berlin, and in West Germany, a split developed over the “German question.” While the Christian Democrats and the conservative Springer publications continued to call for national unity, they spoke to a thinning audience, while the left and the Social Democrats concluded that such incantations would achieve nothing politically.

In this fallow land of East-West confrontation, Willy Brandt, the West German chancellor in the early 1970s, and his adviser Egon Bahr planted the shoots of their policy of détente, the partial normalization of relations. But it came with a high price. In order not to endanger talks with the Communists, they accepted the loss of contact with dissidents in East Germany, Poland and the Soviet Union.

Key phrases like “overcoming the German division” and even “reunification” became taboo. The most important German theme — the split and how to heal it — became an ideological plaything.

In 1980 I went on a half-year lecture tour through Latin America. When I returned, I looked at the wall with a foreign eye. It’s the most absurd and over-analyzed structure in the world, I thought, but we knew nothing about it or what it did to the people in its shadow.

As I began to research it, though, I was met with skepticism from friends. Wasn’t this the territory of the right, which a leftist like me was not to enter? The left held that the split was the price Germans had to pay for the crimes of the Third Reich. Nobody asked why the East Germans should pay this price alone. And why should the Czechs and Poles — who paid the price as well — be so generously included? Then again, it took little brilliance to recognize the longstanding “wall in the mind,” which I described in my book “The Wall Jumper.” I saw it everywhere, even among intellectuals.

I recall a meeting with my friend the East German author Heiner Müller in June 1989 in the Paris Bar, in West Berlin. I explained how much the East German government’s commentary about the Tiananmen Square massacre upset me. The East German news media was constantly going on about the “bandits” who had killed allegedly unarmed Chinese soldiers. If anyone had the authority, I said, to raise his voice against what was obviously a preparation for a similar “solution” for the East German pro-democracy movement, it was he. To my amazement, Mr. Müller, who was always ready with a joke, replied: “I believe that you don’t realize how many Taiwanese” — that is, anti-Beijing interlopers — “were present in Tiananmen.” I tossed my glass of red wine on his shirt.

But the fall of the wall, 28 years after its construction, did not mean the end of the “wall in the mind.” Indeed, the East German rulers opened it for the same reason they built it: to stop their citizens from leaving! It didn’t work either time.

But why should they believe otherwise? For decades Germans, particularly in the West, had imagined the two countries as permanently estranged. While the people of Central and Eastern Europe were storming the bastions of the dictators, the West Germans and their allies were still rubbing their eyes in amazement. Even among the Christian Democrats, Helmut Kohl, the chancellor at the time, admitted last year, hardly anyone had believed that the wall could fall or that reunification was possible.

It will take a generation before the “wall in the mind” is overcome, but the process is under way. It is not merely about Westerners bringing Easterners into the fold; there is also what I call the “Easternization” of the West going on.

Consider the career of Angela Merkel, a scientist from the East who became our first female chancellor. She did so not just by mastering the Western political structure, but in part by surreptitiously replanting left-wing, “Eastern” values — like social justice — in the garden of her party, the conservative Christian Democrats, and elevating their importance among the country as a whole.

It is fitting that Mrs. Merkel should be doing her political gardening in Berlin. Before the wall fell, it was nearly the only place where one could still feel the division between East and West. In the 20 years since, it has become the best place to watch that division disappear.