Memories of WWII: Oh, how they differ - ST

Memories of WWII: Oh, how they differ
Selective amnesia rules as Europe marks the 70th year of start of war
By Jonathan Eyal, Straits Times Europe Bureau

EUROPEANS mark this week the 70th anniversary of the start of World War II, which took more than 60million lives and ushered in the worst barbarities in human history.

The main commemoration was held in Poland, the first nation to be attacked by Nazi Germany. It was a moving affair which ended on a high note when German Chancellor Angela Merkel, representing the country which started it all, spoke of a 'Europe which transformed itself from a continent of horror and violence into a continent of freedom and peace'.

Yet almost everyone who attended the commemoration still holds a different impression of that war and its implications. The battle for historic memory continues, and is unlikely to be settled for decades to come.

Russia represents the most extreme example of how the same set of historic events can be interpreted in diametrically opposed ways.

As heirs to the Soviet Union, the Russians feel proud of their World WarII achievement. Bedraggled and often barefoot, Red Army soldiers pushed all the way to Berlin, an epic march soaked at every step in Russian blood.

Unfortunately, that's only part of the story. For on the eve of the war, Josef Stalin, the Soviet leader, signed a deal with Adolf Hitler. The Soviets claimed at that time that this was merely a 'non-aggression pact' designed to prevent a European war.

In fact, under secret clauses to the deal, Stalin carved up the continent with Germany. So, as German troops marched into Poland in 1939, the Soviets took their share of Poland, and swallowed up the Baltic states and a chunk of Romania as well. The Soviets entered the war only in 1941, when they were themselves attacked by Nazi Germany.

For a brief period after the collapse of the Soviet Union, some Russians were prepared to accept that their country's conduct during the war had been less than honourable. But those days are gone.

For, just as the commemorations got under way in Poland this week, the Russian security services released a batch of documents which, they claim, justify the Soviet Union's behaviour.

Under the new Russian interpretation, the USSR signed the pact with Nazi Germany in 1939 because it knew that the Poles were, supposedly, plotting with the Nazis to invade the Soviet Union.

The Poles - who could be accused of many things, but never of being Germany's allies - are outraged.

'Absolute rubbish,' says historian Mariusz Wolos of Poland's Academy of Sciences, who points out that the Russian evidence does not stack up.

However, facts are unimportant in this game, for Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin wants to instil a new sense of pride among his people, and this means a refusal to admit that Russia was ever wrong. Under a new Russian law, anyone who challenges official history is committing a criminal offence.

Although Russia's behaviour stands out in this regard, almost every other European nation suffers from its own selective amnesia about some inconvenient historic episodes.

The Poles, for example, still find it difficult to admit that though they were the war's biggest victims, they were also sometimes complicit in the destruction of Europe's Jews. Few Polish children know that the last anti-Jewish pogrom in their country took place a year after Poland was liberated from Nazi Germany.

For decades, the French lapped up every story about their heroic resistance to Nazi occupation. It was only much later that stories about collaboration with the German occupiers began to emerge. Even Mr Francois Mitterrand, France's president during the 1980s, turned out to have been a former collaborator.

And the British have their own myths. Their failure to defend France during the war is often portrayed as a victory. And the carpet-bombing of German towns, which caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of ordinary German civilians, is frequently brushed aside as mere detail.

More interestingly, however, the Germans are moving in the opposite direction, by challenging taboos that they themselves created. For over half a century, Germans did not speak about themselves, but about the crimes they committed against others. As Chancellor Merkel put it this week, her nation 'bears eternal responsibility' for what happened.

Nevertheless, the Germans now want their own suffering to be remembered. In particular, they ask Europe to acknowledge another crime committed at the end of the war: the wholesale expulsion of millions of Germans from Eastern Europe, for no other reason than pure revenge.

One historic 'mental block', however, is shared by all Europeans: a refusal to accept any responsibility for spreading their conflict to other continents. The horrors of the war in Asia are remembered only in so far as they affected European citizens and soldiers. What happened to the Chinese or Koreans - to name but two afflicted Asian nations - is no longer Europe's affair.

The fact that Europeans have a guilty conscience about their past does not suggest that responsibility for the war should be shared in equal measures among the combatants. The ultimate culprit of the war remains Nazi Germany and its manic leadership.

But the arguments are a reminder that, regardless of globalisation and decades of collaboration, historic memories still remain a strictly national affair.

One day, a common narrative of Europe's biggest tragedy may emerge. Until that happens, the continent will not be truly united. For no country that hides its past will be able to tell the truth about its future.

jonathan.eyal@gmail.com

How Hungary let East Germans go - BBC

How Hungary let East Germans go
By Oana Lungescu
BBC European affairs correspondent, Sopron

"It was in Hungary that the first stone was removed from the Berlin Wall," said the former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl.

His successor Angela Merkel went to the Hungarian town of Sopron on Wednesday, to thank the country for opening its border 20 years ago. That decision led to the fall of the Wall three months later.

But curiously enough, it was a picnic in a field outside Sopron that would change the face of Europe.

In the summer of 1989, thousands of East German "tourists" had been making their way to Hungary, looking for a way to cross into Austria. What drew them was a bold decision taken earlier that year by the reformist prime minister Miklos Nemeth to start dismantling the security system along the border.

"I thought it was obsolete in the 20th Century," Mr Nemeth told the BBC. Another reason was that Hungary, heavily in debt, simply could not afford to pay $1m to maintain it.

As he returned from holiday in his official car, Mr Nemeth was shocked to see hundreds of young people and families camping outside the West German consulate in Budapest. Others had found refuge in the imposing Holy Family Church in a leafy district of the Hungarian capital.

Among them was Robert Breitner, who was 19. He arrived with just the clothes on his back, after losing his backpack in a failed escape attempt.

"The street was full of East German cars," he recalls.

Robert Breitner in the church garden where he camped 20 years ago
"There were families who came with two or three cars and did a lot of escapes. They lost one car so they took the next one!"

Mr Breitner's story was fairly typical. Because of his family's Christian beliefs, he was not allowed to do his high-school degree in the GDR. He could not travel to the Soviet Union, let alone to West Germany, where most of his family lived.

From the age of 14, he had decided to flee. "I grew up just 300 metres behind the Berlin Wall but for me it was too dangerous to try it there," he said. He thought in Hungary "the chance to die was not as high".

East German agents

The man who opened the gate to the church was Father Imre Kozma, who led the Order of Malta charity service. The charity erected tents and distributed food - all under the watchful eye of the Stasi, the East German secret service, whose agents were posted just across the street.

They were afraid we would ... hand them over to the East German authorities

Father Kozma about the refugees
Father Kozma said the refugees feared each other and even the Hungarian volunteers. "They were afraid we would gather them in one place and hand them over to the East German authorities."

Then in August, the place was awash with rumours and leaflets about the Pan-European Picnic.

Opposition groups had decided to organise the event as a celebration of good-neighbourly relations, with beer and gammon roasted over a bonfire right on the border with Austria. But the refugees wanted more than a picnic.

Today, you can simply drive or walk into Austria with no questions asked. The Iron Curtain has become a bike trail.

But in August 1989, much of the barbed wire fence was still there. Just before 3 o'clock that afternoon, Lt-Col Arpad Bella, who was in charge of the Hungarian border post, saw a crowd of men, women, even children rushing towards him.

Before his eyes, the first wave of East German refugees pushed through a barbed wire-topped wooden gate into the West. Some cried, laughed, embraced each other. Others kept running because they could not believe they were in Austria.

Guards' dilemma

Without clear instructions from his superiors, Lt-Col Bella decided not to shoot ."It was terrible for me!" he said. "Those two hundred people were just ten metres away from freedom. So I took the decision that I thought was best for Hungary and for my own conscience."


On the other side of the border, Austrian chief inspector Johann Goeltl faced another dilemma. In their headlong rush to freedom, an East German family had left their eight-year-old son on the other side of the gate, which had now been closed.

"Please, please, let him through," they pleaded, "otherwise we'll have to go back to that terrible regime". Somehow, chief inspector Goeltl managed to sneak the boy in.

By the end of that day, more than 600 East Germans had crossed over to the West. Three weeks later, when Hungary fully opened its borders, 60,000 flooded out. Among the first to leave was Robert Breitner, who arrived in Berlin in time to see the Wall collapse.

But 20 years on, Lt-Col Bella feels he was only an actor in a complex play whose director remains unknown. Some of those who organised the Pan-European Picnic, like engineer Laszlo Nagy, also feel politicians used it to test how far they could go.

"If you are taking part in a test of which you are not informed, you feel yourself as a worm that they use in fishing," Mr Nagy said. "They threw us in deep water and they were watching whether the sharks are coming or not."

The shark of course was the Soviet Union, which still had 100,000 troops in Hungary. Under Mikhail Gorbachev, its appetite seemed to be for reforms rather than military intervention.

Laszlo Nagy was one of the organisers of the Pan-European Picnic
In March 1989, Miklos Nemeth told the Soviet leader he planned to dismantle the barbed wire along the border. Mr Gorbachev reacted calmly and said border security was Mr Nemeth's problem, not his. The Hungarian prime minister took it as a green light. But could things have gone differently?

"Absolutely, we had worked out a lot of scenarios," Mr Nemeth told me.

"For me, the most important thing in those days was how I judged the position of Gorbachev in power. If he's being toppled, kicked out of power, that would have been a different story, I can tell you."

Like Mr Gorbachev, Mr Nemeth has retired from politics. He is disappointed that crisis-ridden Hungary is no longer a leader in Central Europe.

Lt-Col Bella and chief inspector Goeltl are friends and often meet to talk about the past.

Robert Breitner went on to study politics and now works in St Petersburg, happy that East and West can do business together.

For Father Kozma, little has changed. Except that now he drives one of the Trabants left behind by the refugees he helped 20 years ago.

Viewpoint: The Nazi-Soviet Pact BBC

Viewpoint: The Nazi-Soviet Pact

In the second of a series of articles marking the outbreak of World War II 70 years ago, historian Orlando Figes analyses what the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact meant for Europeans in 1939 - and what it means today.

Seventy years on, the pact between Hitler and Stalin still casts a shadow over Europe. Its memory continues to divide.

For the Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians and Bessarabians, the pact began the reign of terror, mass deportations, slavery and murder which both the Nazi and the Soviet armies brought along with them when they co-ordinated their invasions of these countries in line with the pact's notorious secret protocols - by which Stalin and Hitler had agreed to divide Eastern Europe between their regimes.

For the Jews of all these lands, the pact was the licence for the Holocaust. For the European Left, the idea that the leader of the USSR could sign a pact with Hitler symbolised the moral bankruptcy of the Soviet regime.

We are not opposed to war [between Germany and the Western states] if they have a good fight and weaken each other

Josef Stalin, speaking in 1939

Pact that set the scene for war
For a long time, apologists for Stalin tried to rationalise his ideological turn-around as a pragmatic necessity to "buy time" for the Soviet Union to arm itself against the threat of Germany.

Certainly, by the summer of 1939, Stalin had good reason to be sceptical that France and Britain were serious about a military alliance with the Soviet Union. The Poles' understandable refusal to allow Soviet troops on to Polish soil was the major stumbling block. This drew the Soviet leader towards Hitler's offer of security.

But Stalin did not see this as buying time for the war with Germany that finally occurred in 1941.

He made no distinction between the liberal capitalist states and the fascist dictatorships - both were enemies.

Through the pact he thought to play them off against each other by giving Hitler a free hand to invade Poland and go to war against its Western allies without intervention by the Soviet Union.

"We are not opposed to war [between Germany and the Western states] if they have a good fight and weaken each other," Stalin said in 1939.

Still an embarrassment

Alongside the pact itself - signed by German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and his Russian counterpart, Vyacheslav Molotov - were the secret protocols. For many years afterwards, the Soviet Union denied their existence.

For many, the pact began a reign of terror, deportations and murder
It was only in 1989, after mass demonstrations to mark the 50th anniversary of the pact, that a Soviet commission finally acknowledged their existence - though the document itself was not published in Russia until 1992.

The pact remains an embarrassment for those in Putin's Russia who take pride from the Soviet achievement in the war.

Its commemoration is a constant thorn in Russia's relations with its neighbouring European states, which, not surprisingly, recall the pact from the perspective of Soviet oppression after 1945.

The European Parliament has called for 23 August to become a day of remembrance for all the victims of the totalitarian regimes - Hitler's and Stalin's. It is not a bad idea.

Perhaps it would help to ease the tensions that are still created by the memory of the pact.

Orlando Figes is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author of many books on Russian history, the latest of which is The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia (2007). His books have been translated into more than 20 languages.

Last WW1 British Veteran Dies 2009

LONDON (AFP) - - Harry Patch, the last soldier to fight in the trenches of Europe during World War I, died Saturday at the age of 111, drawing poignant tributes led by Queen Elizabeth II.

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Patch fought at the notorious Battle of Passchendaele in 1917 -- where an estimated half a million troops perished.

He is listed by the dersdesders.free.fr website, regarded as an authoritative chronicle of veterans of the conflict, as the last World War I veteran to have served in the trenches.

"I was saddened to hear of the death this morning of Harry Patch," said Queen Elizabeth II.

"We will never forget the bravery and enormous sacrifice of his generation, which will continue to serve as an example to us all."

Nicknamed "The Last Tommy" by Britain's media, Patch was also Britain's oldest man following the death of fellow veteran Henry Allingham, at the time the oldest man in the world, one week ago.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown added: "The noblest of all the generations has left us, but they will never be forgotten.

"We say today with still greater force, we will remember them."

Brown said the sacrifices of the World War I generation would be commemorated in a special national service, likely to be held at Westminster Abbey in London.

"It's right that we as a nation have a national memorial service to remember the sacrifice and all the work that was done by those people who served our country during World War One and to remember what we owe to that generation -- our freedom, our liberties, the fact that we are a democracy," he said.

Claude Choules, 108, who lives in Perth, Australia and served with the Royal Navy, now becomes the last surviving veteran of the 1914-18 conflict from the British side.

Patch did not speak about his wartime experiences until he was aged 100 and was strongly opposed to violent conflict, calling war "organised murder".

"It was not worth it, it was not worth one let alone all the millions," he said of those who died.

"It's important that we remember the war dead on both sides of the line -- the Germans suffered the same as we did."

Last year, he travelled to Belgium to remember his fallen comrades and unveil a memorial.

Patch was conscripted into the British army at the age of 18 and served as a machine gunner with the 7th Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry.

He was 19 when he fought in the 1917 Battle of Passchendaele, also known as the Third Battle of Ypres.

That battle was one of the bloodiest in the conflict. One of the opposing German soldiers was an Austrian named Adolf Hitler.

After four months in the trenches, Patch was wounded by shrapnel and sent home to Britain, his war over.

General Richard Dannatt, the head of the British army, said: "We give thanks for his life -- as well as those of his comrades -- for upholding the same values and freedom that we continue to cherish and fight for today".

Following the war, Patch worked as a plumber until his retirement in 1961. During World War II, he worked as a fireman.

Patch married Ada Billington in 1919 and the couple were married for 58 years until her death. They had two sons, both of whom Patch outlived.

He married his second wife Jean in 1980 but she died in 1984.

Patch's care home, Fletcher House in Wells, southwest England, said he had died early Saturday. His friend Jim Ross added he was "surrounded by his many friends" when he passed away.

The funeral in Wells will focus on prayers for peace and reconciliation, the Ministry of Defence said.

Patch's biographer Richard Van Emden told BBC television that "he was just a lovely man, he had a sparkle and a twinkle about him.

"He was the last of that generation and the poignancy of that is almost overwhelming."

The dersdesders.free.fr website says there are now just three Great War veterans left alive -- Choules plus Frank Buckles, 108, of the United States and Canadian John Babcock, 109, who also lives in the US.

Neither Buckles nor Babcock saw active combat, it adds.

Imperial Angkor

NAT GEO July 2009 did a fantastic article about the fall of the Angkor Dynasty and here's just an abstract.

Imperial Angkor

Its vast water system awas a marvel of engineering - and a cautionary tale of technoloical overreach. At its height in the 13th century, the capital of the Khmer Empire was the most extensive urban coplex in the world. USing imaging radar and other tools, reseachers have learnt that Greater Angkor covered almost 400 square miles, roughly the area of the 5 boroughs of NY City, with as many as 750,000 inhabitants. Most were rice farmers and laborers who worked the giant jigsaw of fields. In the city center, perhaps 40,000 people - elites and farmers alike - lived within the walls of Angkor Thom, a 3.5 square mile enclosure with temples and a royal palace. Though the rainy season usually brought ample water, the ability to store water in great reservoirs called barays and conrol its flow gave Angkor an edge in times of drought or flood. BUt this engineered landscape required constant maintenance. When the water system faltered, so did Angkor's power

Angkor's Complex Plumbing

In Southeast Asia, months of monsoon rains are followed by months of near drought. To ensure a steady water supply, stabilize rice production, and control flooding, Khmer engineers built a newtork of canals, moats, ponds and reservoirs. Massive earthworks slowed the wet-season deluge flowing from the Kulen hills, directing it into canals that fed the barays and temple moats. Spreading across the gently sloping land, the water drained finally into Tonle Sap, the largest freshwater lake in Southeast Asia

Sacred Source

The Kulen Hills sheltered the headwaters of the Siem Reap River and were quarried for rock to build Angkor's temples. The hills were logge for timber and firewood o clear land for farming: Deforesation may have caused floods that choked some of ANgkor's canals with sand and silt.


Kulen Hills

Walter Cronkite Dies at 92

By Gary Strauss and Peter Johnson, USA TODAY

From Baby Boomers to the Greatest Generation, journalist Walter Cronkite will be remembered as a voice of calm and reason whenever the nation was shocked by disaster and instability.

The deep-baritone Cronkite died Friday at his New York home at 92. CBS vice president Linda Mason says Cronkite died at 7:42 p.m. after a long illness with his family by his side. They had previously said he was ill with cerebrovascular disease.


In the anchor seat at CBS News With Walter Cronkite from 1962 to 1981, "Uncle Walter," as he was affectionately known by his millions of viewers, came into the USA's living room each weeknight, offering a measured presentation of the news of the day.

That coverage included many of the signature events of modern times: the Cuban missile crisis; the assassinations of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.; the Vietnam War; the Apollo moon landing; and Watergate.

Throughout, Cronkite's comforting, authoritative style earned him iconic status as the "most trusted man in America."

"I had a pretty good seat at the parade," Cronkite once said, reflecting on the 20th century. "I was lucky enough to have been born at the right time to see most of this remarkable century."

Portly and mustachioed, Cronkite would be considered an anachronism in TV news today, a 24/7 environment marked mostly by style over substance. But journalism was in the University of Texas dropout's blood as a cub reporter for the Kansas City Times, later as a radio announcer and then for 11 years at United Press, the wire service where he eventually became a World War II correspondent covering North Africa and Europe and the post-war Nuremberg trials.

He began working for CBS' nascent TV news division in 1950, eventually anchoring the first nationally televised Democratic and Republican national conventions, and later hosting the You Are There documentary series.

"He was the personification of an era," says media critic Andrew Tyndall of tyndallreport.com. "At a time when the entire nation could only get information from a few sources, he's indelibly linked to telling us about iconic events."

Cronkite was on air for a staggering 27 of the 30 hours it took NASA to land men on the moon during the Apollo IX mission in 1969, dubbed "Walter to Walter" coverage by his peers. When astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon's surfaced, Cronkite was almost speechless for the first time in his storied career.

Cronkite earned viewers' respect for his just-the-facts style, rarely displaying much emotion on air. But there was a memorable moment in 1963, when he briefly lost his composure while announcing on live TV that President Kennedy has been shot and killed in Dallas "I choked up, I really had a little trouble...my eyes got a little wet," he said in a 2003 interview. "Fortunately, I grabbed hold before I was actually (crying)."

Cronkite's influence was such that after he ended a 1968 broadcast following a trip to South Vietnam during the Tet Offensive telling viewers that the war could not be won, President Lyndon Johnson reportedly told his aides, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America."

It was Cronkite's lifelong fascination with flight — and his unabashed enthusiasm for the U.S. space program— that may be his enduring legacy: his power as a broadcaster was such that he helped stir the public's support for space exploration. "In that age of TV," 60 Minutescreator Don Hewitt said, "Walter Cronkite was as well known as John Glenn."

He was on NASA's list to be the first journalist in space, a project scrubbed after the Challenger explosion.

"I can't imagine any red-blooded person not wanting to get into space," Cronkite told USA TODAY in 1998 before he co-anchored CNN's coverage of John Glenn's return to space at age 77. "Shaking off that idea lacks a certain imagination, a spirit of adventure. I can't think of anything better out there."

Cronkite retired in 1981, replaced by Dan Rather. Cronkite was supposed to have a continuing relationship with the network, but it didn't work out that way, and in ensuing years he smarted at the way CBS rarely invited him back on its air.

"CBS did not live up to the arrangement we had," Cronkite said. "I thought I was only stepping down from the Evening News, but I'd continue to do special events coverage and in-depth reporting. They chose not to use me. I was very unhappy the way it worked out. I kept saying, 'Maybe I could do this,' but it never quite worked out."

Yet in the next breath, Cronkite acknowledged that CBS didn't boot him out on the street, either. He maintained a large office and acknowledged that the network paid him "a magnificent amount of money" over the years, reportedly $1 million a year to do virtually nothing, which made him rich and enabled him to write, travel and found his own TV production company.

Cronkite was married for nearly sixty-five years to Betsy Maxwell, who died in March 2005. In recent years Cronkite wrote a syndicated column, contributed to The Huffington Post blog, received NASA's Ambassador of Exploration award and was the subject of a PBS documentary in 2006 and a 90th birthday party on CBS in 2007.

How did he become "the most trusted man in America?" It was a Roper survey for U.S. News & World Report, Cronkite once said, and he won "because they didn't poll my wife."

And about all this Uncle Walter stuff? "I like to think it started when I got my third chin," he said. Actually, TV was still new in the kinder, gentler '50s and '60s. Tuning into Cronkite and letting him into your home involved a certain intimacy, especially if you were sitting there in your shorts or PJs. So he became Uncle Walter, the most trusted man in America. "I felt it was a characterization of some appreciation," he said. "I couldn't object to it at all."

The man who just once gave his opinion on CBS Evening News was, in fact, very opinionated and in August 2003 began writing a syndicated column for King Features called And That's the Way I See It — a play on his CBS News signoff.

In his later years Cronkite decried the large salaries of TV news broadcasters, which he said created a journalism elite. "When you're making six- and seven-figure incomes, it's hard to understand the concerns of most Americans, no matter how good a reporter you are, Cronkite said. That included himself. "I don't do personal shopping. I don't have to stand in line. They're not, I'm not, living the frustrations of the average man."

He kept homes in Manhattan— he feuded with developer Donald Trump who successfully built a high rise next to Cronkite's apartment complex — and Edgartown, Mass., where he kept a 48-foot ketch, Wyntje, equipped with a bathtub.

But if you sat down in person with Cronkite in recent years, the anchor faded away. He was an old newspaperman at heart, who hung out in police precincts, bars and strip joints in his day, told his share of dirty jokes and still talked fondly of his 11 years at the old "UP."

Unlike today's broadcasters, who work local TV eyeing the network big leagues, Cronkite joined CBS News in 1950 because the money was better, he had a family to support and CBS' legendary Edward R. Murrow wanted him.

But he didn't stay an ordinary Joe, especially after fame and fortune attached themselves to him. Presidents and generals had chiefs of staff, and so did Walter Cronkite. Marlene Adler guarded him and his schedule for years. In recent years he had a knee replaced and wore two hearing aids.

When President Bill Clinton admitted that he had had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky— and then went on his annual summer vacation to Martha's Vineyard with wife Hillary and daughter Chelsea— it was Cronkite who brokered a peace between the couple and took them for an afternoon sail aboard the Wyntje.

Historian Don Carleton, who spent four years as a researcher and historical adviser helping Cronkite with his 1996 memoir A Reporter's Life, says he visited with Cronkite several times a year in New York. He last saw Cronkite at his apartment in March. "He always like to talk about what was going on now. He paid very much attention to the news until the last few months," Carleton said.

When Carleton arrived in New York Tuesday, "I tried to see him (and) was told he was not doing well." He said Cronkite had been in frail condition for about a year.

Carleton is executive director of the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at University of Texas-Austin, home of personal papers and documents donated by Cronkite and CBS. (Cronkite had attended UT and worked on the college paper.) A major exhibit of Walter Cronkite's artifacts is planned for May 2010.

To honor him, CBS News is airing That's The Way It Was: Remembering Walter Cronkite on Sunday at 7 p.m. ET.

Contributing: Sharon Jayson

It's 20 years since reunification but is Germany still divided?

It's 20 years since reunification but is Germany still divided?

The fall of the Berlin Wall was a seismic event in European history. But as Germany prepares to mark the 20th anniversary of its reunification, many are asking: Is there really much to celebrate?

By Tony Paterson

Sat 27 Jun 2009

Most visitors to Germany's reunited capital wouldn't recognise it as such, but there is still a bit of original Berlin Wall left standing in the city's Bernauerstrasse – a street once famous for daring escapes from the former Communist East to the West. The section stands on a piece of litter-strewn wasteland and is little more than 50 yards long. The concrete pipe that used to run along the top of it – to thwart any attempt at climbing into capitalism – has turned black and is falling off. The Wall's once comparatively smooth, graffiti-smeared surface has been picked to the bone: souvenir hunters have hacked away at it so completely that there is not much left beyond the rusting steel-reinforcement rods that somehow hold it together still.


So much for conserving it as a chilling memorial to the Cold War: 20 years after its historic fall on 9 November 1989 and the collapse of nearly all of the Eastern Bloc's Communist regimes, Berlin has for the most part dumped what is left of its infamous Wall into history's dustbin. The only section that has been kept for posterity is a 1,000-yard stretch called the East Side Gallery, which is covered with murals painted by artists from throughout Europe in early 1990. But this part of the Wall has fallen into such serious decay that most of it has had to be completely rebuilt for this year's 20th anniversary of its demise. The artists have been recalled and paid 3,000 euros a head to repaint their pictures.

A few sections of Wall were bought at the time by wealthy Americans and millions of hacked-out bits have been turned into post-Communist paperweights that now sit on desks across the globe. The rest has been ground up and used as underlay for the new autobahns that stretch across the unemployment-plagued former Communist East – nowadays more optimistically referred to as the "New Federal States".

In an attempt to recreate the eerie and menacing atmosphere once exuded by the Wall's watchtowers, floodlights and Kalashnikov-toting guards, a private entrepreneur has built an ersatz, Disneyland-style mock-up of the original in the Bernauerstrasse. It's now a favourite tourist attraction. But just a few yards away in what used to be Communist East Berlin, in the city's once-blighted district of Prenzlauer Berg, the full impact of the monumental changes that have taken place since the Wall fell will come as a shock to anyone who saw the place during the city's division.

The haunting German film The Lives of Others, which tells the story of how an East Berlin writer and his girlfriend are kept under round-the-clock surveillance by the infamous Stasi secret police, provides an inkling of what Prenzlauer Berg was like 20 years ago. The district, which used to sit close against the Wall, was not massively damaged by Allied bombing during the Second World War, but it still looked as if the war had ended yesterday. The borough, which incidentally used to be twinned with London's Hackney during the latter's socialist heyday, contains street after street of late-19th-century apartment blocks. Two decades ago, the facades of all of them were either falling off or pockmarked with the holes of millions of bullets sprayed on them by the invading Red Army (the tactic was designed to deter snipers) as they took the city in May 1945. The district stank of a soft brown coal called lignite, which was used to heat people's homes, and two-stroke-engine car exhaust fumes. It was home to academics, dissidents and intellectuals but also to Communism's failures and rejects, those without enough friends in the ruling Socialist Unity Party to warrant a decent apartment.

Prenzlauer Berg is no longer twinned with Hackney. Perhaps that is just as well: in the interim it has transformed itself into the Berlin equivalent of Islington – a yuppie enclave in a city which has been affectionately dubbed "poor but sexy" by Klaus Wowereit, its gay Social Democrat mayor. There is not much poor about Prenzlauer Berg, however: once the city's punk borough, it has come of age and is now home to a baby-boomer population of trendy, young, middle-class and educated Germans. Its streets, which once had the odd Trabant or Russian Lada parked in them, are now full of Audis and BMWs. Children cavort in the well-organised playgrounds that have been set up on what seems like every inch of green space. They, like their parents, are dressed in designer clothes, while babies are wheeled about in pristine prams costing 1,000 euros apiece.

East Berlin's most radically altered district could be considered a glowing (if slightly irritating) advertisement for the new Germany of Angela Merkel, its first woman Chancellor, who happens to live just outside its borders. It is an area in which the promise – made back in 1990 by Helmut Kohl, Germany's unification Chancellor – that East Germany would "blossom" seems to have come true at last. Yet it is also a stark reminder that the fall of the Berlin Wall has resulted not so much in Germany's reunification as the West's wholesale annexation of the former Communist East.

Gentrification has hit Prenzlauer Berg at a speed unmatched even by the most tarted-up quarters of other European capitals. Ninety per cent of the district's apartments have been vacated by their original East German inhabitants since the Wall's fall. They have been replaced by a generation of young Germans who have arrived as rich invaders from the West. The standing joke in Prenzlauer Berg is that the borough is populated exclusively by Swabians from wealthy south-western Germany. Like most jokes, it contains an element of truth.

The first building to confront visitors as they emerge from the district's Senefelder Platz metro station is a mammoth, yellow-painted, organic food supermarket. It is the biggest of its kind in Europe and run by a chain called LPG – an ironic dig at the former East because the initials were once Communist-party jargon for a state collective farm. LPG does a roaring trade with its environmentally minded customers, who live in the immaculate turn-of-the-century apartment blocks – now restored to their former Imperial German glory – that surround the district's fashionable Kollwitzplatz square. During the recent European elections, the Greens won between 48 and 60 per cent of the vote in Prenzlauer Berg constituencies. Oysters and Prosecco are standard fare at the quarter's Saturday market, which is flanked by a wide selection of French resturants and Italian-run cafés selling expensive Latte Macchiato to drink on the premises or "To Go". The nearby Kastanienallee avenue boasts more organic foods stores and an array of funky shops selling retro furniture and clothes.

One of the main concerns exercising the minds of the quarter's Green politicians nowadays is whether to retain its quaint Communist-era street lamps. Most of the new residents agree they are a wonderful piece of retro chic, but unfortunately they also waste a lot of energy.

Annette Friedrichs and her husband Theo, both in their early thirties, came to Prenzlauer Berg from Hamburg and Munich in the mid-1990s. They both enrolled at Berlin University. "It was the place to be, the rents were dirt cheap and the parties were wild," Annette recalled as she bounced her baby son on her knee in Kollwitzplatz square last week. However, she admitted that since her arrival more than a decade ago, the rent for her 100sqm apartment has quadrupled. Theo, who now works as a meteorologist in Berlin, insisted that neither of them would ever dream of leaving. "There is a good sense of community. With so many children about, everyone is the next man's babysitter," he said. For the other factor that makes Prenzlauer Berg special is that it has the highest birth-rate in Germany. At times, when strolling along its admittedly wide pavements, it is not unknown for pedestrians to run into a pushchair traffic jam.

Prenzlauer Berg owes its near-instant gentrification to developments in the property market immediately after the fall of the Wall. Many of the original, pre-war owners bought back properties which had been confiscated under Communism or expropriated by the Nazis before the Second World War. Most apartment blocks were then sold to property developers who gentrified the buildings with the help of state-funded grants. Many East Berliners have thus found themselves forced out by the Western invaders – and for all its prosperity, the effect is unsettling: walking around the district or sitting in one of its numerous cafés, means being surrounded by what seems like a cloned generation of white-middle-class Teutons. There is hardly a non-European face or anyone over 40 to be seen. "We are stuck with a monoculture," admits Dr Michael Nelken, a 57-year-old Berlin city councillor who lives in Prenzlauer Berg. "We are trying to attract people from other sections of society, but it is not easy. This is what gentrification does."

Baerbel Bohley is a longstanding Prenzlauer Berg resident. A painter, she was also one of the East Germans who led the protest movement against the Communist regime back in 1989. Her flat in Fehrbelliner Strasse was once a meeting place for dissidents, and she was arrested and imprisoned twice for her activities. Now 64, she is planning to leave Prenzlauer Berg for good. Having just returned from several years in Bosnia, she is shocked by the changes in her old neighbourhood. "It's too much for me nowadays," she says.

Even in a slight breeze, 60-year-old Steffi Schultz has to clamp shut all the windows in her Seventies-built tower-block home in the town of Eisenhüttenstadt, close to Germany's border with Poland. Opposite her kitchen window, a giant articulated hammer-drill controlled by faceless men in masks, goggles and helmets, bites its way into yet another of the 7,000 Communist-era flats that were completed in the year the Wall fell. They are all now being demolished, and despite the water jets that play constantly on the smashed living rooms, bedrooms and bathrooms from the bulldozers, the dust is everywhere.

Eisenhüttenstadt is the opposite of Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg, but its predicament is shared by hundreds of similar towns and communities in the former Communist East. The town is literally dying on its feet. Before the fall of the Wall, Eisenhüttenstadt was home to a population of close on 60,000. Today, the number has fallen to nearly half that figure and is still falling year by year. An unemployment rate of around 20 per cent has meant that the town's young people have simply upped sticks and gone west in search of work.

Steffi Schultz now survives on a state pension. Under Communism she had a job in a waste-recycling factory which she says she enjoyed, but she was made redundant not long after unification. Fields of flattened weed-choked rubble have taken the place of the Communist-era flats that surrounded her tower block a few years ago. A few concrete table-tennis tables stand in a deserted playground – but the children that used to play on them have long since disappeared. Like many of the other remaining residents in her street, Steffi Schulz is not convinced that Germany's reunification has amounted to much. "In the old days there was a real community round here," she said. "But if it goes on like this there will be nothing but pensioners left in the east," she added.

Eisenhüttenstadt's fall from grace could hardly have been steeper. It was dubbed "East Germany's First Socialist City" in 1950, when it was built from nothing by Communist "Heroes of Labour" to house the workforce and families of a giant steelworks. "Stalin City" was the name bestowed on the town in honour of the Soviet leader. Some 13,000 people worked at the steelworks during its peak years, when it supplied much of the Eastern Bloc. Today, a mere 2,700 are still employed by the works, which is now owned by the ArcelorMittal group. However, the economic crisis means that most of those have been on short-time since last year. The management is due to decide later this summer whether the steelwork's main oven should be shut down – a decision which could seal the foundry's fate for good.

Vast swathes of the former East Germany have turned into a Teutonic Mezzogiorno – the term used to describe Italy's impoverished south – and it has suffered from chronic unemployment almost since the day the Berlin Wall fell. Hundreds of factories and state-run collective farms were simply shut down after German reunification in 1990. The unemployed either went west or were given low-paid token employment under state-funded job-creation schemes which managed to hide a real jobless figure of around 60 per cent. One of the chief reasons cited for the economic failure that still blights much of Germany's east was Helmut Kohl's decision to bow to massive popular pressure and give the east Germans the Deutschmark at a one-to-one conversion rate. The move made east-German exports 400 per cent more expensive, destroying the region's economic base at a stroke. The dilemma was exacerbated by the government's Treuhand agency, which was given the job of privatising all of east Germany's state-owned industry. The upshot was a mass sell-off of east-German business to the west, which in many cases simply meant mass closures. West Germany's powerful trade unions, which took over in the east after the Wall fell, compounded the problem by insisting that their fellow workers in the east obtain equal pay.

Of course, east Germany is not without its success stories. In the south of the country, Leipzig and Dresden have emerged like phoenixes since the fall of the Wall. They have become thriving regional centres in their own right. The same can be said of many of the towns and former Hanseatic cities on east-Germany's Baltic coast. Many have been carefully restored after the years of neglect they suffered under Communism and now benefit from an expanding tourist trade. For the east too, the economic crisis has been less severe than in the west of Germany because its industry is not so dependent on exports. But a drive through the east-German countryside on back roads soon reveals the scale of the problem: in village after village, where the streets are cobbled or sometimes made of sand as they were before the Great War, there is often no one to be seen. Their inhabitants have either gone west, or are jobless, poor and glued to the television. Nearly two million have fled the region in search of jobs since the fall of the Wall and current projections show that at least the same amount again will leave over the next 20 years. It comes as little surprise that voters in the east opt increasingly for Germany's far-right, neo-Nazi, National Democratic Party or the successor to the former Communists' Socialist Unity Party, Die Linke or left party. The neo-Nazis have seats in two eastern states and recently gained a host of new seats on eastern borough councils.

Many east Germans appear to derive some comfort from the fact that their Chancellor, Angela Merkel, is an "Ossi", or an easterner. However, in the view of several leading experts on the east, the country's main political parties have largely failed the region. "The politicians appear to be as clueless as they were on the day the Wall fell," says Klaus-Peter Schmidt, an economic analyst. "It is as if they have learnt nothing from the errors that were made after reunification," he adds. Even Wolfgang Tiefensee, the government minister responsible for eastern Germany admits that although the gap between east and west is slowly closing, it is still much too wide.

The wall may have almost completely disappeared from Berlin, but it is in better shape than ever in Mödlareuth. The village is nicknamed "Little Berlin" and for most of the Cold War it was split in two by the heavily fortified border that ran between the two Germanys. From 1952 onwards, its 50 inhabitants could only make contact by waving at each other over a wooden fence and (subsequently) the walls, watchtowers, barbed wire and armed border guards that separated them. If the Westerners wanted to visit their Eastern neighbours on the other side of the street, they had to apply months in advance and make a detour of some 30 miles to get there.

Mödlareuth has retained all of its border fortifications and serves as a permanent reminder of what the Cold War was about. It also serves as a sort of Iron Curtain theme park, one of Germany's few museums dedicated to explaining the history of the country's division. Its chief guide is a former East German border guard.

When the Berlin Wall fell, Ingolf Hermann was an officer in a crack East German army unit that used to patrol up and down the Iron Curtain. His men had orders to shoot would-be escapers on sight and were expected to uphold the regimental maxim "Nobody shall pass", a perverse adaptation of the famous left-wing Spanish Civil War slogan "No Pasaran". He realised that something was wrong with his Kremlin-controlled world while on a Communist-sponsored trip to Moscow in the months preceding the fall of the Wall. The shock came when he asked for a beer in his hotel. "When the woman behind the bar asked me to pay in US dollars, I was stunned – this is not what I expected from the country we were supposed to think of a our model big brother," he says.

Unlike most east Germans, Ingolf did not rush to visit the west after the Wall fell. He waited a week or so because he was worried that he might be arrested by the west Germans. He then visited covertly, in his relatives' car, making sure he left his uniform at home. In the years that followed German reunification, he tried his hand at business, but had little success. Then he was given his job as chief guide at the Mödlareuth museum, because the west German official in charge thought an easterner should be involved. Now, Ingolf Hermann's working life is spent explaining the intricate history of the division he helped to sustain, to tourists and groups of schoolchildren. He does it with a degree of impartiality that perhaps only a former border guard from a system conquered by westerners is capable of. His other task is sorting out the piles of Communist-era uniforms, garages full of discarded East German military vehicles, and documents and guns that have been bequeathed to the museum for posterity. In more than one sense he is chief refuse-disposal officer for what was once acclaimed as the "First Worker and Peasant State on German soil".

Like many east Germans, who consider themselves to have been more than adequately punished for their country's 20th-century history, Ingolf is ambivalent about the Berlin Wall and Germany's division. "I often ask myself what would have happened if the West had agreed to accept Stalin's demands to keep Germany demilitarised. There would have been no Iron Curtain and we might have ended up like Austria," he says.