When the Berlin Wall fell on November 9th, 1989, with the images of East and West Berliners shaking hands and using hammers to tear it down, an East Berlin intellectual and writer spoke out. Christoph Hein had long been a critic of the authoritarian regime in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), and he expressed a desire to see his homeland change and grow – rather than vanish entirely.
In the New York Times, excerpts from Hein’s diary revealed a man who saw the Mauerfall, what the Germans call the wall’s fall, as an opportunity.
“This is our chance,” he wrote, “Our first and last. If we fail, we will be devoured by McDonald’s.”
Now, 25 years on from the night that changed the face of Europe and enshrined David Hasselhoff’s position in history books, nostalgia for the GDR is at an all-time high, with the cut-throat brutality of its regime forgotten in favour of kitsch fabric patterns.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Berlin.
For the millions of tourists passing through the city since the Mauerfall, Checkpoint Charlie remains a must see. The infamous border crossing, one of the main crossing points during the GDR’s existence and the spot where US and Soviet forces faced off in 1961, is now called ‘Snackpoint Charlie’ – in honour of the large McDonald’s branch which opened right beside it in 2010.
Checkpoint Charlie had actually been dismantled four months before the wall fell, but now remains hugely popular with tourists – posing with young Berlin men dressed in Cold War army uniforms, who’ll stamp your passport for a fixed price.
On its website, Berlin’s governing council describes the Checkpoint as “having huge historical and emotional resonance, even accounting for the fact that there is remarkably little left to recall the atmosphere of pre-1989 days.” Cashing in on its chequered past means big business to the city.
Ostalgie
Germans have coined their own word for this particular branch of cultural celebration: Ostalgie. The word is a pun on the German for nostalgia (Nostalgie) and the word for East (Ost). It’s not a particularly recent phenomenon, having surfaced as quickly as the rubble was cleared away following that fateful night in November, 1989.
The buzzword is kitsch; think fabrics with Orla Kiely-esque designs in a Communist-era palette, or even recipes for brewing Vita, the GDR’s answer to Coca Cola, at home. A tour of Berlin in a Trabi, a reconditioned East German car renowned for its discomfort. Tourists can even purchase concrete chips daubed in neon paint, 'authenticated' pieces of the Wall, for a few Euro in every tourist shop in the city.
Those are tame in comparison to the reproductions of surveillance devices used by the secret police, the Stasi, for sale online. You can even t-shirts complete with the emblem of the East German internal security service that crushed so many lives for nearly 50 years, can be bought on Amazon.de - with Germans joking that since they found a way into your home anyway, they might as well come in through the letterbox.
“It’s a slap in the face for the victims, as if someone would go round in an SS t-shirt,” says Stefan Weinert, director of the documentary Die Familie. Weinert’s film reveals the crushing impact on the capital’s psyche of deaths of nearly 1,000 East Berliners who died trying to cross the wall – as well as how it affected individual families.
While Ostalgie is on the rise, and the commercial revenue of remembering the GDR divide is thriving, Germany is facing a memory crisis.
Recently, a poll in the country asked German to name the date that the wall had been erected. Fewer than one third of those questioned could correctly identify August 13th, 1961.
“The memory of the GDR is being peddled and reduced to a footnote in our education,” Berlin’s Tagesspiegel newspaper said. “And we are losing our past as a result.”
Who needs a past when you can just buy the t-shirt.
On this evening's The Right Hook, George speaks to Barb Dignan about her time as a youth living in East Germany.
You can listen back to George's reaction to the 25th anniversary of the demolition of Checkpoint Charlie in The Right Hook's podcasts here.
