Wall Anniversary

From the DW:

"Berlin holds ceremony to mark building of Wall in 1961"

German students are often unable to differentiate between democracy and dictatorship, according to the director of the Berlin Wall Foundation. His remarks coincided with the remembrance of the wall's 1961 construction.  Berlin Mayor Michael Müller led a wreath-laying ceremony Saturday at the Bernauer Street memorial, where the last remains of the Berlin Wall still stand 55 years after first being erected by communist East Germany. Alex Klausmeier, who heads the Berlin Wall Memorial Foundation, spoke at the ceremony of the importance of the site in promoting critical historical insight after he had lamented knowledge gaps among present-day German students. He told the "Berliner Zeitung" (BZ) newspaper Saturday that his foundation's seminars with pupils showed repeatedly that their awareness of East Germany's negation of democracy was often "further away" than their knowledge of ancient Pompeii, the Roman city buried in volcanic ash in AD 79. The seminars therefore had to include fundamental teachings on democracy - freedom of expression and division of powers between the legislative, judiciary and executive, said Klausmeier. He is a professor of cultural history who has published a series of books on how the Wall is remembered. On August 13, 1961, as the Cold War deepened, former Soviet-run East Germany (GDR) began erecting the 155-kilometer-long wall, turning US, British and French sectors of West Berlin effectively into an island separated from the then West Germany and connected only via tightly patrolled transit corridors. At least 138 people died trying to escape over the Wall and its East German fortifications until the fall of the East German regime in November 1989. A similar ceremony also took place Saturday at Marienborn - on a key route between Berlin and Hannover - where the GDR regime once ran its largest transit facility along the more than 1,100 kilometers of fortified fence (683 miles) dividing East and West Germany. Reiner Haseloff, the premier of Saxony-Anhalt state, said Saturday he hoped more visitors would come to Marienborn with an "alert eye" for the past and present-day. Marienborn lies close to Helmstadt, once a key reception center in Lower Saxony state in former West Germany. From his foundation's office overlooking the Bernauer Street site, Klausmeier told the BZ that it was gratifying that one million tourists, many of them young, visited the Berlin Wall memorial each year to learn about the fate of its former victims. Asked by the BZ why youth should bother long-term, Klausmeier replied that the foundation not only had the task of documenting the "concrete historical events" involving the Wall and its fall, but also to remind youth about democracy.  "What we experience time and again in our seminars with male and female pupils is that there is hardly any or no knowledge and even awareness of what the difference is between a democracy and a dictatorship," he said. "Many have heard the term Stasi [former East German secret police] from time to time, but they have little to no knowledge about the political persecution by the SED [the-then ruling communist party], the absence of division of powers or the lack of freedom of expression in the GDR,"  Currently, another memorial site overseen by the foundation, the Marienfelde Refugee Center in what was the south of former West Berlin, was housing 700 refugees from Syria, he said. Between 1949 and 1990, 1.3 million East Germans fled through Marienfelde and received residency permits for West Germany.

^ It seems history does like to repeat itself - especially in Germany. If you asked the young people of West Germany in the 1950s or 1960s what Auschwitz or the Holocaust was most would have no idea because it wasn't talked about (probably due to the fact that former Nazis lived in the open and still had high-profile positions in West German society.) It was only after those young people themselves started filling those same positions and started asking questions  (although it still took Germany several more decades to actually really start trying to punish the Nazis rather than looking the other way and paying their government pensions.) The same basic concept is being done with regards to East Germans and the Communists that committed crimes back then. After the Wall fell and Germany became reunited there were a handful of trials of the former Communist elite, but like the trials of the Nazis the criminals received a mere slap on the wrist for what they had done. Then, as is often the case within German society, no one wanted to talk about it anymore - hoping it would all just go away. The parallels between the Germans handling of the Nazis and the Germans handling of the Communists is almost identical and of course the results are also the same. The young people in Germany today don't know what really happened in East Germany by the Communist dictatorship and it probably won't be until those young people come into their own and start asking questions (the way the young people in West Germany did in the 1970s) that things will even begin to change. Hopefully it won't take decades for Germany to then start going after the Communists the way they did the Nazis. You would think that the Germans would have learned from their mistakes in how they handled their Nazi past and not make the same one when dealing with their Communist past - but in the 26 years since Germany reunited they are following the same misguided "logic" of putting their head in the sand. ^

http://www.dw.com/en/berlin-holds-ceremony-to-mark-building-of-wall-in-1961/a-19472947