The two sides on both sides of the border celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, and the subsequent opening of the German Democratic Republic to the West. But 37 years later, suspicion of the other side remains high among many: opinion polls show that only a minority of respondents feel a strong sense of community between East and West Germans, while many still see significant differences.
Three German creators who approached the history of the division of Germany in different ways describe their point of view on this matter.
Writer Lea Streisand, born in 1979, closely experienced the fall of the Wall as a child in East Berlin. She repeatedly addressed her biography as a girl from the East in her books and texts and treated it literaryally. For example, in her novel "Hovland Ecke Butzow", in which she narrates the period of transition from the perspective of a child.
"November 9, 1989 was simply a wonderful day," she says in an interview with DW. Although the 10-year-old girl at the time felt sad because her mother had bought her practical winter shoes in West Berlin for the sum of 100 German marks that all East Germans received as a welcome gift, a friend of her parents later allowed her to buy large quantities of candy from the supermarket, so much so that it lasted until Christmas.
“But the bitterness came later with what happened over the next year. Suddenly, with incredible speed, an entire system was simply removed and a new one put in place, with the slogan 'Here it is, here you go,'” Streisand recalls. “I think it was too fast for people.”
It was the people of the German Democratic Republic who brought about the transformation themselves through a civil rights movement and numerous demonstrations. But for many, the goal was not to dissolve the state directly, but rather to reform it. Anke Feuschenberger, born in 1963 in East Berlin and who grew up there and in Vopommern, where she lives again today and feels “completely at home,” was one of them. She teaches in Hamburg at the Faculty of Applied Sciences, so she lives in both parts of the country. Feuschenberger is often described as Germany's most influential cartoonist. It is also successful internationally.
“We were then trying as artists, through banners and leaflets, to bring about a change in direction and gain more freedom without immediately abolishing socialism,” she says. The fall of the Wall at that time aroused conflicting feelings in her: “I quickly realized that the creative and revolutionary side of our movement had been very quickly flattened by consumption and that nationalist tendencies that had already been felt before had come to the fore,” recalls Feuschenberger. “This terrified me.”
As for the photographic artist Simon Miner, born in 1978 in Emmendingen in the state of Baden-Württemberg, he experienced the fall of the wall as a child “in a somewhat abstract way,” he says. Berlin was a long way away and he lives there today. The picture presented by films and documentaries of East Germany during the transition period was very bleak: “Although the West in the 1980s was also very bleak and conservative.”
This disparity in the depiction of the two parts of Germany in general is a topic that greatly concerns him, because he unwittingly contributed to it in a small way. Miner's work addresses, among other things, the topic of surveillance and how it works. In the freely accessible archives of the Ministry of State Security (today part of the Federal Archives) was found a huge collection of photographs that simultaneously amazed and horrified him and which he wanted to at least partially make known to a wider audience. His picture book Top Secret features a selection of images that provide a unique look into the workings of the Stasi. Sometimes the images are scary and other times strange and even ridiculous.
Simon Miner also wanted to take a look at the photo archive of the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) on the West Side. “I tried for a year to get permission to access it, to no avail.” He then sees his own project as problematic, because it is inappropriate to always focus only on East Germany's past. Miner says that the West German intelligence services also "did not have glory" in the 1960s and that "it is actually time" to shed critical light on this part of history as well. He believes that dealing honestly with the past of unified Germany is the basic condition for achieving true integration.
Lea Streisand believes that literature is what can help in mutual understanding. “Literature conveys experiences that others do not have,” she says. “One can immerse oneself into the world of thoughts of someone who has lived experiences different from one's own and understand what happened.”
There is still interest in these stories. In 2023, Anke Feuschenberger published the nearly 500-page graphic novel "Comrade Kukuk", which was the first graphic novel to be nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in the fiction category.
The story extends from a childhood in the fictional East German village of Prechitanov in the 1960s in the German Democratic Republic to the period after the fall of the Wall. In it, Feuschenberger treats autobiographical memories of her upbringing and interweaves them with fictional elements. The artist says that she was surprised "that my stories received great interest in the West, a long time after the fall of the wall." The aspect that the main character, Kirsten, rarely sees her parents, because they both work full-time, is often brought up in reading sessions. In the German Democratic Republic, the right to work was guaranteed to everyone and at the same time it was a civil duty. Is Western interest in this issue due to the fact that full-time work for both parents has not been a matter of course in the West for a long time? That's a possibility, says Feuschenberger.
When looking at the shared future, the two East German women seem more optimistic than the West German. “In Berlin I often don't even notice whether I'm in the West or the East,” says Simon Miner. He adds, referring to the recent electoral successes of the Alternative for Germany party: “But regarding social and political issues, politicians must listen better to the elderly and the young, otherwise things will become difficult in the near future.”
“It is very important to look beyond our limited horizon, because people everywhere in the world face problems. Always looking at this German-German gap that has arisen between the two groups is of no use,” says Anke Feuchtenberger. “The whole border thing kind of faded away for me personally, in a way,” she says. She attributes this at least in part to the many trips abroad that took her to many places in the world. She also notes that where she lives near the Polish border, the animals do not care about these borders at all: “They come from the east and the west and do whatever they want.” That's why I gave Comrade Kukoc's novel the tentative title "A German Animal in a German Forest", "because I found this absurdity of an animal with a nationality very funny."
“This question of East and West will not interest our children at all,” Lea Streisand believes. “Young people don't care about the origin of their parents. If I get a job that enables me to support my family, do I have to go to war? There are completely other things that are more important at the moment.”
