The Berlin Wall has fallen, but not the ideas that built it

If you thought the blows of the sledgehammers that helped knock down the Berlin Wall 20 years ago were powerful, you should have seen the pats on the back European Union leaders gave themselves standing near the site. You’d have thought they were the ones who brought democracy back to a divided Germany, a wonderful institution for most East Germans who’d suffered the oppression of Communism and the brutality of the Stasi secret police force, so perfectly punctured in the movie The Lives of Others, which depicted a world only those who’d lived on the other side of the wall could understand. Behind the celebrations though were some reminders that all is not right with the democratic world in Europe and Germany.
Just as there are still pathetic handfuls of robots who gravitate to the grave of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, executed six weeks after the Berlin Wall fell, by a firing squad that shot him as soon as he appeared, there are those who pine for the days of having a single light bulb in their dim, dingy Soviet-era cement coffin apartments and who wish they didn’t have to make decisions, and rely on the state to plan their lives from cradle-to-grave, the antithesis of freedom. And while most East Europeans believe that life is better now than under Communism, a large number of people, especially in Hungary, have a positive view of life under the old regime, according to a four-nation survey released in Warsaw. Of all places, you’d think Hungary would be the last to want memories of Communism because the images of brave Hungarians battling Russian tanks in Budapest is one of the enduring moments of people who resisted slavery to the death, and the House of Terror in Budapest, a monument to the utter depravity and cruelty humans can bring out of themselves and impose on others is shuddering in a way the worst horror movie is not. Go to the basement of the House of Terror on Budapest’s most prestigious street, Andrassy Boulevard, and see how long you can stand without your knees wobbling at the sight of a hangman’s noose, concrete prison cells with walls no higher than your waist so you could not stand upright in them – or another in which you can only stand, your arms pinned to your side in a space just deep enough for a human to fit. That’s before the torture. And this is what people miss? Only those who weren’t in the cells and like a planned live of servitude, standing in bread lines and waiting for the dread of police to stop them and ask for their papers.

House of horrors
The House of Terror lists the faces of victims and of their victimizers, and many East Germans imprisoned during their own reign of terror have to walk the streets of their cities, especially in liberated Berlin, and see their prison guards and torturers now enjoying the fruits of the freedom those beasts didn’t want or deserve. There’s no eerier feeling outside of whistling through a graveyard at midnight or walking a dark road in Transylvania in a thunderstorm waiting for a vampire to appear than hearing the echoes of death reverberating still in the House of Terror. Across the former Soviet Republics, there is still a sad nostalgia in a handful of people who didn’t want freedom because it required some effort. Czechs were the most optimistic of the survey’s respondents, with 68 percent saying the present is better, according to the poll by Warsaw’s Institute of Public Affairs. The institute surveyed 4,000 people in Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and the Czech Republic and was taken only days before the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Hungarians were most critical of their current circumstances: 50 percent said their lives today were worse than before Communism’s collapse in 1989 and you can bet none of them stood in front of the tanks, but probably embraced them and loved the collaborators of their country. Only 26 percent of Hungarians said they were happier in the last 20 years than then they lived behind the Iron Curtain and under the yoke of tyranny and only about a dozen Poles surveyed in a focus group said the fall of Communism brought positive changes like freedom, greater opportunities and a free market economy, said analyst Grzegorz Makowski, and they complained that freedom brought about a weakening sense of community, fewer family values and a move away from church towards consumerism, so they got the lives they deserved. Among Polish and Slovak respondents, 59 and 53 percent, respectively, said they fared better now than during life in the former Soviet bloc, barely more than half, so you know the terror still lingers in the hearts and minds of men and women across Europe in places where Communism has left an indelible mark that even bringing down a wall can’t erase. “Democracy has support among citizens but ... it’s a cold, critical relation to the present,” said Malgorzata Falkowska, a researcher at the Institute of Public Affairs. The poll found that, overall, Czechs most positively viewed democracy and the changes in 1989. Some 44 percent of Poles and Czechs thought their country’s efforts to build a democracy had been a success. The Czechs, you must remember, also stood in front of Soviet tanks in 1968, but too many obviously don’t remember.

Don’t throw away the keys
What’s saddest, perhaps, is that these people actually crave the prisons in which they lived. “My grandmother says the Communists were great, while my grandfather says we’re stupid to open the archives, because people don’t have jobs, which is more important than ... history,” Jiri Reichl, the spokesman for the Prague-based Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regime told Christian Science Monitor correspondent Michael J. Jordan, who was reporting on this insane idea of people missing oppression, an idea so antithetical to Americans and many Europeans, especially Greeks, who fought tyranny to the death with their bare teeth. Ten years ago, the last great celebration of the Fall of the Wall, CNN reported that there was a similar tide of support for the life that crushed the human spirit.
“Life in the GDR (East Germany) was not so terrible, because it was a safe life. There was hardly any crime, and I did not have to worry about my future,” one former East German told CNN, and a poll then showed that while most former East Germans welcomed the greater political freedom and supported reunification, more than 40 percent said they were happier under the Communist regime and majority said they were unhappy with the economic changes, just like lifers in prison who don’t know what to do when they get out and prefer confinement and three squares a day to making decisions about their lives. The former East Germany may have been seen from the West as a brutal, Stalinist regime run by dictators, but it offered its citizens guaranteed employment for life; generous social programs; cheap public transit; and low-cost housing,” CNN reported. All at the cost of giving up your life. How does that stand next to the resistance of Greeks who spray painted on their walls during World War II what they thought about Nazis and Fascists and oppressors: “Better one hour of freedom than 40 years of slavery.”  People forget that the Berlin Wall, which stood for almost four decades, didn’t last long after the then-US President Ronald Reagan came to Berlin and stood outside the Brandenburg Gate and gave a memorable, chilling speech in which he told then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “Tear down this wall.” Both did, convinced that the time of Communism had passed – or so they thought. Reagan later said,  “As I looked out a moment ago from the Reichstag, that embodiment of German unity, I noticed words crudely spray-painted upon the wall, perhaps by a young Berliner, ‘This wall will fall. Beliefs become reality.’ Yes, across Europe, this wall will fall. For it cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom.”
It turns out the words were reportedly actually spray painted by an American named William Ozkaptan, who did his handiwork three years before. Gorbachev, at a summit of Nobel Peace laureates held in Berlin, said even without the Wall, “There is still some fear of Russia in the European Union,” warning that security in Europe depended in part on cooperation with Russia.
People think the Berlin Wall was a concrete structure built by the German Democratic Republic (GDR) (East Germany) and that guard towers placed along large concrete walls, which circumscribed a wide area known as the death strip was designed to stop the outflow of people fleeing Communism, more than 3.5 million of them before it was put up. It didn’t deter an estimated 5,000 people from trying to get over or around it, and 100 to 200 died trying. But it’s still there, the invisible barrier in the mind of too many people who wouldn’t have left even if there were no wall, and some who’d like to put it back up. This one’s made of fear.