25 years after the East Germans broke through the Berlin wall and gained freedom, Germany is trying to re-build it.
From The Telegraph.
Germany’s far-Left party has returned to power in a state government for the first time since the Berlin Wall fell 25 years ago, stoking heated debate about its communist roots.
The Left Party, widely seen as the successor to the Socialist Unity Party (SED) that once ruled East Germany, will head the government of Thuringia after the state parliament narrowly voted to approve a new coalition.
The new state prime minister, Bodo Ramelow, used his first speech in parliament to apologize to victims of the former communist regime, and said he wanted to “reconcile rather than divide”.
Thousands of people braved sub-zero temperatures on the streets of the state capital, Erfurt, on Thursday night to protest against the expected result of the vote.
Angela Merkel predicted the decision would be “bad news” for Thuringia, while the German President, Joachim Gauck, broke with the traditional neutrality of his role to speak out against it.
But the state parliament voted to approve Mr Ramelow’s three-way coalition after the Social Democrats, Mrs Merkel’s partner in the federal government, rejected an alliance with her Christian Democrats in the state.
The coalition, which is completed by the Green Party, will have a majority of just one seat in the state parliament.
Although Mr Ramelow grew up in West Germany, many of the Left Party’s leadership were senior figures in the East German communist party and some have been accused of links with the Stasi secret police.
Thuringia was part of East Germany until reunification, and many have expressed dismay at the former communists’ return to power.
“Old SED [Socialist Unity Party] comrades and Stasi informers run the state now,” said Rainer Wagner, chairman of the Union of Victims’ Associations of Communist Tyranny.
“Many who were in prison in the GDR [East Germany] are very upset,” the director of the Stasi memorial in Berlin, Hubertus Knabe, told Nord-West Zeitung newspaper. “They feel that the lessons of history have been forgotten.”
But hey, communism only killed about 100,000,000 people. Let’s give it another chance. Congratulations, comrades. You’ve learned nothing from your own history.
I don’t think it’s quite as simple as you’ve stated. I spent a week in Thuringia the year after the wall came down. It was cleaner, safer and all-around more orderly than any American state I’ve been to. But the locals harbored enormous resentment after reunification, because the new government decided to kick out all their teachers and former government workers and give the jobs to unemployed ones from the former West German states. I haven’t been back there since, but it’s possible continued mistreatment like that from Berlin made it happen.
I still dream of the wurst in Erfurt, and every beer in each small town seemed to be the best I had EVER tasted.
Mikey,
I spent 3 tours in Germany starting out as a Cold war Soldier in 1976. I was also stationed there in 1989 in Ansbach when the wall came down. Reunification, after about 30 years as two separate countries, was not going to be easy. As for getting rid of the old bureaucracy, for better or worse, the Germans wanted to start out with a clean slate instead of trying to “re-educate” communist workers to the idea of free market capitalism. Speaking of which, many former East Germans resented not having the government automatically provide them with jobs and the thought of actually having the freedom to run their own lives after decades of regimented lives was very traumatic. That alone, created resentment. My concern is that the oppressive system of Communism has no place in a democracy. You would think that anyone who lived through those years would know better. The current generation has no historical perspective and thus, no clue.
German food, beer, Volksmarching, the castles, the country itself, were the reasons why Germany was a favorite duty station for American GIs.
SFC MAC