Freedom and its Discontents

Fritz Stern

From Foreign Affairs, September/October 1993

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Summary:  After 40 years of division, the two former halves of Germany are discovering the psychological stresses of unity. The collapse of the German Democratic Republic released East Germans from public control and authoritarian intimidation. But with freedom, they are having to learn to make choices and to live with risk and uncertainty. West Germans are resentful at the cost of reunification and arrogant about the sad state of their Eastlander brethren. Both halves of Germany will have to deal with their separate and joint pasts. They should expect moral and psychological unity to take longer than the material recuperation of the east.

THE TRAVAILS OF THE NEW GERMANY

In 1983 the president of the Federal Republic, Richard von Weizsäcker, published a collection of essays under the title German History Has Not Stopped. Even he could not have predicted the pace of progress since then. And as the process of unification has unfolded, one can see the drama of German history continue as well. The economic consequences of unity are becoming apparent; the moral and psychological consequences are harder to grasp and may prove longer lasting. It is these that this article addresses.

While the two states of postwar Germany existed, Germans could believe in the unity of their nation, of a people with a common language, a common past, even a common fate. Now unified within one state, the deep divisions among Germans are more visible. No doubt there is truth in Freud's words about "the narcissism of small differences" that divides neighborhoods and family members, and yet in 1989 there was an expectation that Germans would understand Germans. In the first flush of enthusiasm, people forgot the estrangements that had grown so strong over 40 years, as West Germans came to regard the French or the Tuscans or the Dutch as closer, and perhaps more attractive, to them than the East Germans. For their part, East Germans lived with a prescribed if gradually attenuated hostility to the Federal Republic of Germany (F.R.G.), and with a nonprescribed envy and resentment of its freedom and prosperity, witnessed nightly on their television screens.

Visitors to East Germany, including this author, sensed the estrangement. And in the Federal Republic, for all the ritualistic invocations of German solidarity, for all the many individuals who did genuinely care about their fellow Germans in the East, one sensed an enormous, unacknowledged indifference to them. Sudden commonality, sudden huge demands, did not instantly transform indifference to openhearted solicitude.

DIFFERENT KINDS OF FREEDOM

Both Germanies gained greater, if sharply different, kinds of freedom after unification--and with that freedom came new uncertainties and discontents. In the East it was the freedom from the knock at the door, freedom to travel, release from a regimented, intimidating, false existence, freedom to examine one's life. But almost immediately 17 million East Germans discovered that freedom also meant freedom to face an uncertain future, freedom to lose a job, to lose support nets, however inadequate they may have been.

For 40 years, most East Germans had accommodated to life in a world of public lies and private doubts. Totalitarian regimes mobilize people into passive participation in politics. After 12 years of Nazi rule and 40 years of communist rule in the German Democratic Republic (G.D.R.), they may have survived psychologically by practicing denial, by wishing not to see.

After 1989 avoiding reality became impossible, given the economic dislocations of transforming a dysfunctional, decaying command economy into a market economy-as if there was but one type of market economy. The closing of state-run enterprises led to mounting unemployment. Moreover, economic affairs were only part of ...

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