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[...] A new type of refugee, hitherto unknown on such a vast scale, had stepped onto the stage of history: the prosperous refugee. Because these were not the wretched of the earth, these people arriving with a child on one arm and a plastic bag on the other. Most of them left behind a job, a three-room apartment, a TV set, and a car. Now they were standing in line to move from what was supposedly the tenth-wealthiest economy in the world to the third-wealthiest. Were they economic refugees? Of course they were, but that doesn't fully describe the phenomenon. The more intangible things they hoped to gain by giving up so much and crossing the border struck West Germans as strangely romantic: freedom, dignity, the right to live your life as you pleased. Such declarations reminded Western leftists of right-wing propaganda, and rightists of campaign slogans that had been worn to death. What were these people talking about? Did they know no more about the West than the commercials on TV? And did they really take them seriously?
This revealed a cultural gap as wide as the Wall was high: people who lack basic freedoms don't have to think very hard to name them, while people who enjoy them usually find it hard to perceive their concrete value--from which it follows that when people claim they don't know what high-sounding notions like "human rights" really mean, you can be pretty certain they already have those rights.
[...] Among the many grotesque miscalculations of East Germany's rulers, none was greater than the decision to protect the "Socialist Fatherland" by constructing an edifice that was bound to evoke a yearning for freedom in men and women everywhere. In building the Wall, they instantly generated worldwide sympathy for the Germans--not exactly everyone's darlings--and the German Question. Had they erected a structure less charged with symbolism, neither the Germans not their "problem" would have touched the hearts of makind in quite the same way.
he goes on to say that the Wall was doomed to start with--instead of a north-south line, they should have done an east-west line separating the Prussian North from the rest
[...] By going through the Brandenburg Gate, which until recently marked the end of the Western world, you arrive at Berlin Center and Pariser Platz, and just beyond that is Unter den Linden. In Berlin, what people were calling the "wild," "crazy," "incredible," was in truth the most normal thing in the world: the ability to walk from one end of the street to the other. Having grown accustomed to an insane situation, we experienced normalization as crazy. [...]
Instead of disbanding, instead of surrendering their ill-gotten gains and shutting their mouths, the Socialist Unity Party simply mounted the next-biggest pony with any life in it. This new horse is called democratic socialism, and has the advantage of never having run a race.
I don't agree with this view but thought it was notable--he describes a convention of the Socialist Unity Party right after the Wall came down, where the party line was "we were deceived by the people on top" (Honecker, Mielke, Hager)
[...] The Germans now coming in from the East aren't used to anything non-German. Foreigners make up 12 percent of West Berlin's population, while in the whole of East Germany they consituted barely 1 percent.
The Poles are pushed to such degrading convolutions as a result of the German immigration regulations [...] the Pole who presents his father's or his grandfather's National Socialist German Worker's Party card acquires all the privileges of a German citizen, while a compatriot whose father or grandfather died in the Warsaw Uprising against the Nazi barbarians has no case for asylum.
It is scandalous that even today the authorities allow themselves to be guided by the Nazis' passion for Germanity. Such an immigration policy is simply another form of Aryanism--how else can one understand the ranking of petitioners according to their degree of "Germanness"? [...]
based on the People's Register, established by the Nazis in 1939 primarily for conscripting Poles into the German army
[...] The couple owned a lake house in Berlin-Friedrichshagen, as well as a sailboat and even a surfboard; they owed their prosperity to a private glassworks. The two had waited years to be allowed to emigrate, and had finally arrived in West Berlin just before November 9. [...] it was all for nothing--the years of waiting, the arguments for and against, the crucial decision to leave and the pain of abandoning their house. Only one thing was certain: the man--now working as a window-washer in the West--would never even begin to approach his former standard of living. [...]
[...] And in Upper Silesia? Are revanchist elements still active there? At this, the pastor shakes his head and prefers not to commit himself. "In a new Europe," he says cautiously, letting his gaze rise to met the distant future, "we will have to do away with the existing borders through economic and cultural exchange, and not draw new ones."
well said
West German leftists spared themselves the shock that French intellectuals felt on reading Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago; instead, they put their energies into an angry critique of French shortsightedness. They themselves, however, never really abandoned the discretion they had long practiced in describing Stalin's camps as a "mistake." When the word "crime" was finally uttered, they avoided the debate and sought refuge in equivocations: "Yes, but on the other hand ..." Ther referred to "the by no means insignificant crimes of Stalinism," or "the model Cuban revolution, despite its persecution of homosexuals," or "the by no means easy fate of dissidents." They managed to dodge every challenge to their worldview by pointing out that the Soviet Union was under siege, and by quoting Brecht: "The escape from capitalist barbarism may entail some barbarism of its own."
I've already admitted the validity of such an argument: the failure of an experiment doesn't necessarily disprove its premises. You don't have to doubt Mozart because Igor Oistrakh plays him badly. But when every virtuoso makes the same piece sound bad, you have every right to suspect the composer. The flat assertion that present-day socialism in no way detracts from the theory ultimately amounts to intellectual shirking. It may be reassuring, but it only avoids the problem of deciding which components of the theory will sink with the wreck of socialism and which might still be salvaged.
[...] what if the catastrophic economic failure of socialism today were due not only to a lack of democracy but also the suppression of private ownership? That would certainly challenge a central piece of the doctrine. Doesn't it look as though events have proven our worst enemies correct? Doesn't it seem these days that history itself has judged the duel between socialism and capitalism, and declared capitalism the winner? And isn't this winner now commanding from the mount: Thou shalt have no other social system besides me!?
i don't really agree with his negativity but he makes some good points, worth thinking about