Times Online: Why Germany can’t get over the Wall - by Anna Funder

Why Germany can’t get over the Wall - Times OnlineThe Berlin Wall didn’t fall; it was happily hacked to pieces. Ordinary people from East and West came, some with hammers or picks, others simply to give it it a good kicking to get their piece. Everyone wanted to be in on it: if all the “Certified Genuine Souvenir Fragments” in all the living rooms in all the world were put together now they’d make an even more monstrous edifice. When we think of November 9, 1989, the overwhelming picture is one of joyful, incredulous Berliners — East and West together — out of danger and dancing on top of the Wall.

A survey in June found the GDR to have its highest approval rating since unification: 57 per cent of people agreed with the statement that the GDR was “more good than bad”, and a majority of schoolchildren were under the illusion that it had a legitimate, democratically elected government. As Faulkner has it, so beautifully: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Nothing in contemporary Germany could be truer.