Berlin 25: ‘East Germans risked everything for reform’

Fritz Stern has been an essential voice in German life for decades, though he fled the country as a 12-year-old boy. The historian, essayist and author was born in 1926 in Breslau, then in Germany, to a prominent doctor and researcher father, Rudolf Stern, and an educational reformer mother, Käthe Brieger Stern.

Stern's grandparents converted from Judaism to Christianity at the end of the 19th century but they left the increasingly oppressive Nazi Germany a month before Kristallnacht in 1938, settling in New York. Stern attended Columbia University, where he later worked as a professor from 1953 to 1997.

Still a prolific historian and commentator aged 88, Stern was lauded for his 2006 book Five Germanys I Have Known, which analysed from a distance his shape-shifting homeland – from the Weimar Republic and fascism to division, unification and beyond.

The book is regularly cited by Germans as one of the best written about their country and, in her 2009 speech to the US congress, Chancellor Angela Merkel expressed her "great joy and deep gratitude" that Stern was in the audience.

With its rigorous analysis and personal insights, Five Germanys I Have Known is particularly insightful given his year in Bonn in 1993 as special adviser to Richard Holbrooke, then US ambassador to Germany.

After a lifetime examining how Germany shifted from radical illiberalism to Nazism, Stern is wary of applying retroactive interpretations to historical events.

In a 1987, for instance, he attracted acclaim and controversy for a Bundestag speech marking the 1953 workers' revolt in East Germany. Put down by Soviet tanks with about 100 dead, the uprising was not, Stern insisted, a protest for German unification – a common West German view – but a demand by East German workers for reform.

Today he is wary of attempts to shoehorn the events of 1989 into the frame of unification, which came later. His concern is mirrored with this year’s push in Germany to see things the other way around: the fall of the Berlin Wall and unification a year later as the consequence of earlier events.

Demand for a reformed East Germany

Two key events, Stern argues, are the march in Leipzig on October 9th, 1989, when about 90,000 people demanded a reformed East Germany; and the demonstration by 500,000 people on East Berlin’s Alexanderplatz on November 4th, which echoed the demand.

“These events were a passionate demand for a responsible, legitimate, democratic regime of openness,” he says.

“People have to remember what actually happened at the time and not twist things into a convenient narrative based on what came later, which is more easily palatable.”

This debate is once again live thanks to ex-chancellor Helmut Kohl. In remarks from 2001, published by Der Spiegel last month, he said it was wrong to suggest the "holy spirit somehow came over the squares of Leipzig and changed the world" in 1989.

Instead, he told a ghost-writer, the Iron Curtain fell because the Soviet bloc was bankrupt, leaving reform the only option for leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

Stern is unimpressed by Kohl’s logic, that the Berlin Wall was felled by economics and not by people power. “I think that is more an indictment of Mr Kohl than a useful remark about 1989,” he says. “The people went on to the streets not because of economics but because they were disgusted with a Stasi kind of life.”

Gorbachev was, in Stern’s view, “one of the most extraordinary men of the 20th century, a superb realist, a man of an open mind and a sense of history and perhaps one who surpasses Dr Kohl”.

If anything, Kohl's remarks in Der Spiegel underline Stern's concern in the early 1990s that West Germans had not treated East Germans with enough generosity and understanding.

“The East Germans paid more for the second World War than West Germany, they also went out on the street in 1989, risking everything for reform,” he says.

“I don’t think Kohl fully recognised the significance of how members of the East German population risked a great deal to demand a respectable, decent and honourable civic life.”

Despite his criticisms of Kohl, Stern believes the ex-chancellor acted correctly in seizing the moment for unification offered in November 1989. But the historian still wishes the process had proceeded more slowly to allow East Germans a greater chance to contribute. These shortcomings aside, Stern is impressed by how smoothly the process has unfolded.

A quarter of a century on, he says Germany's next challenge is how to meet its partners' expectations to be an active player in European and world affairs. It has in Merkel a canny political leader well up to the task, he believes: firm and non-demonstrative in dealings with Russia on Ukraine, yet restrained enough to navigate the tortuous German debate on its engagement with world crises.

Stern’s main concern today is that the frequency with which Berlin comes down in favour of inaction may not always be an honourable abstention but an evasion of its new European responsibilities.

Culture of military restraint

In this he echoes foreign minister

Frank Walter Steinmeier

, who told Munich’s security conference in February that Germany’s culture of military restraint should not be “misunderstood as a principle of keeping out”.

“We have always wanted is a peaceful Germany, but it has turned into a pacifist Germany,” says Stern. “There is a difference between the two and I’m afraid that an ‘ohne mich’ (‘without me’) mentality may be growing.”

As for the tensions facing Germany during the euro crisis, Stern suggests these were motivated less by prejudices of the past than by anger at Berlin’s current austerity policies.

Striking a new balance with France and Italy is Germany's new challenge, relieving social misery around the continent without driving inflation, he says.

“Germany can move by example and by suggestion, but has to be very careful,” he says, citing ongoing problems and imbalances as a result of the stalled Franco-German motor.

For Stern, Merkel’s firm political stance and lack of political arrogance means that, despite the talk, the EU is not dominated by a hegemonic Germany – which would be the sixth iteration of the country in his lifetime.

“I think we are still dealing with the fifth Germany, a change in that will come only if something drastic happened to the EU,” he says.

Twenty-five years after a wall fell and a new Germany emerged, Stern remains cautiously optimistic that Berlin will, with its European neighbours, continue to “muddle through”.

“This is not a German trait, nor is it something Germans condone or like,” he says. “But if we can muddle through and don’t stumble into another economic crisis – which I think is possible – we will perhaps sort things out.”

Taking stock of Germany after 1989, the 88-year-old historian says it's important to remember what went right: a united Germany achieved without bloodshed that, after centuries of strife, now lives at peace with its neighbours. The native of Breslau, now Wroclaw in Poland, singles out thriving German-Polish relations as a huge achievement of the last years, "something to be cherished".

And, despite dire warnings of some political leaders in 1989, he sees in Berlin a level of political responsibility unthinkable in previous Germanys.

“No nation is immune to reckless policies,” he says. “But I cannot think of a single instance in Germany in the last 10-15 years.”