Election May Help Tear Down Berlin’s Mental Wall

Gone but not forgotten, the wall that rose here 40 years ago to give concrete form to the ideological division of Europe exists today only as millions of souvenir nuggets and a few museum artifacts.

But getting rid of the bricks and mortar has proved the easy part. Nearly a dozen years after the hated Cold War barrier was breached, the mental wall between easterners and westerners still stands.

A quirk of political fate, however, has coincided with this 40th anniversary summer and may accelerate the painfully slow process of putting Germany back together.

A banking and corruption scandal has brought down the Berlin city government, which paired the two mainstream western political parties in a ruling alliance that imposed its capitalist will on its ideologically conquered brethren for a decade.

With the conservative Christian Democrats blamed for the fiasco, the left-of-center Social Democrats have been openly pondering a once-unthinkable partnership with the reformed Communists, whose predecessors built the wall.

“This is a huge chance for genuine integration,” said Dieter Klein, chief strategist for the Party of Democratic Socialism, or PDS, the successor of the East German Communists. “It would document a return to normality, and it would relieve the historical burden of our past.”

Elections to seat a new leadership for this city-state of 3.5 million aren’t until Oct. 21. But the anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s construction by East Germany’s Communist leaders Aug. 13, 1961, confronted the PDS with an immediate problem on the stump. With a few encouraging words from Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s Social Democrats, however, the issue has been turned to the former Communists’ advantage.

Aware that the wall anniversary would inspire critical reflection on their Communist predecessors, PDS members conducted an agonized internal review of the party’s responsibility for the enduring divide and offered a carefully worded mea culpa.

Although the declaration fell short of a formal apology, it denounced the killings of dozens of people who were shot trying to escape East Germany, and expressed regret for the “injustice” imposed on millions whose lives were forever altered.

The declaration drew sharp rebuke from the Christian Democrats, who remain opposed to any introduction of the former Communists into the political mainstream. It also provoked cries of foul from die-hard leftists, who accused the PDS of selling its soul to curry favor with the Social Democrats.

Schroeder’s party was, in fact, swayed by the declaration and deemed it “a good sign” that the former Communists have arrived at democracy. “The right words have been found,” said Franz Muentefering, general secretary of the Social Democrats.

The PDS is the strongest party in the eastern half of Berlin, with support estimated at 40%. It also polled a respectable 18% citywide in the last election, in 1999, compared with 40% for the Christian Democrats, 22% for the Social Democrats and 10% for the environmentalist Greens.

Polls for the upcoming election give the PDS as much as 23%. The Social Democrats are ahead of the conservatives for the first time in a decade, with 32% to the Christian Democrats’ 30%.

The Greens and the pro-business Liberal Democrats could together win as much of the vote as the former Communists, which means Schroeder’s party could align with both western political forces and avoid bestowing legitimacy on the PDS.

But the fact that politicians of the left and center are even talking about cooperating with the PDS has spurred the first real optimism in either eastern or western society that their distinctions might someday fade from notice.

The driving force behind that hope is the former Communists’ declared mayoral candidate, Gregor Gysi, a witty and spirited lawyer who directed the East German party’s reinvention of itself over the past decade. Gysi is even popular among westerners and is seen as one of the few PDS members who could reconcile the party’s enduring affection for social spending with the Social Democrats’ recognition that Berlin is already woefully overextended.

Gysi calmed the conservative furor over the party’s less-than-fully apologetic declaration with his observation that the crime of building a wall between people is “inexcusable.” He has also won hearts and minds with his upfront break with the party’s past in his campaign slogan: “I build bridges, not walls.”

But for Gysi to become mayor, the PDS would have to outpoll the Social Democrats in October, and that appears unlikely. The acting mayor, Social Democrat Klaus Wowereit, has little of the usual power of an incumbent because he has been in office only a few weeks. But the party is reaping political benefits from Schroeder’s relative success on the national level. Polling agencies predict that the party will win the biggest share of the vote--and with it the right to fill the post of mayor and choose its coalition partners.

A third mayoral candidate, Christian Democrat Frank Steffel, offers a younger alternative to the party’s ousted stalwart, Eberhard Diepgen, but is given little chance of prevailing. The conservative party is still reeling from the banking debacle and a nationwide finance scandal bequeathed by former Chancellor Helmut Kohl, and Steffel has angered Berlin’s sizable gay community--which includes Wowereit--by accusing the acting mayor of having a “deformed personality.”

Berlin, like the rest of the former East Germany, has overcome the prosperity divide that became apparent once the wall came down and the galling inefficiencies of a state-run economy were exposed. Since reunifying in 1990, Germany has invested a staggering $700 billion in the east, rebuilding roads, modernizing transport and sprucing up homes and apartments to bring living standards on a par with the west.

No one disputes the physical reconciliation, but neither do many confuse it with genuine social integration.

“This city is still divided, and we will always see some things differently because we are from the east or from the west,” said Sieglinde Schaub, a retired teacher now representing the PDS in Berlin’s legislature. “But if the PDS were to have a role in government, this would help dismantle the wrong impressions many have about us. Naturally, the PDS bears some responsibility for the wall, as it was the governing party when it was built. But we also played a role in its collapse, and some tend to forget that.”

Sharing power with a mainstream western party would “break a taboo” and end the political isolation of the former Communists, Schaub said.

Although most leftists and moderates regard the possible inclusion of the ex-Communists in government here as an opportunity to enhance unity, some warn that it also has the potential to dramatically set back that cause.

“This could be a chance for improvement, but it could also prove a huge mistake,” said historian Joern Schuettrumpf, whose Rosa Luxemburg Foundation think tank has close ties to the PDS. “East and west are still very divided socially, and a coalition could spotlight those differences instead of resolve them.”