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By Root 1437 0

did not so much overthrow the East German Communist regime as orchestrate its spontaneous collapse. Simultaneously, and perhaps more significantly, it strove as it did so to cultivate an embryonic new way for East Germany in which deliberative assemblies, local media, populist broadsides, a resuscitated civil society and an active intelligentsia trying (if not always succeeding) to cooperate with industrial workers, would establish a democratic society with a distinctive leftist German flavor. Reunification would have to wait until East Germany could offer a more equal partnership and insist on its own distinctive democratic institutions.

There is no reason to glamorize Neues Forum. It had serious flaws, among them a typically intellectual underappreciation of the yearning of East Germans for the material goods of the West that were being advertised as the benefits of instant reunification. It also suffered from a romanticized view of the working class that never fully shared important aspects of its program, and a deadly naïveté about the power of what was the German version of McWorld: extremely well-oiled West German political parties, powerful German and international media corporations, eager bankers and managers to whom the East was the equivalent of what centuries ago would have been a newfound lost continent, and opinion makers and mind menders capable of packaging the ambitions of all the others in the seductive wrappings of market democracy.

What followed was the king of all no contests. The Wall came down on November 9, 1989: only four months later, on March 18, 1990, a coalition of conservative West German political parties led by Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s Christian Democrats rolled to a victory so complete that the Social Democrats—projected as winners just a few months earlier but as things turned out far too cautious about reunification—were soundly thrashed, securing only 22 percent of the vote.1 More significantly, the remnants of Neues Forum had formed a coalition under the banner “Alliance 90” with other indigenous democratic and Green groups including Democracy Now and the Initiative for Peace and Human Rights organized by former dissident Marxist Robert Havemann. But Alliance 90 had stubbornly refused to constitute itself as a conventional political party, and it captured less than 5 percent of the vote.

In retrospect, it is clear the outcome was never in doubt: Alliance 90 was selling a difficult and demanding Third Way, an alternative to capitalist consumerism and Communist dictatorship that would preserve an East German democratic identity. Kohl’s Christian Democrats were giving away beer, bananas, and bratwurst at political rallies promising instant reunification and instant gratification. As Neues Forum leader Jens Reich put it, “The West German hippopotamus trampled the tender shoots of East German democracy.” Another disillusioned voter said: “All my life I dreamed of the day when the wall would come down, but the minute they opened it, I knew the revolution was over.”2 In Berlin’s daily newspaper, the Tageszeitung, the editor lamented, “The Germans are succeeding in turning a great historical opportunity into an experience of hopelessness, fear and deprivation.”3 Who, he wondered, would pay for the fiasco?

More or less everyone. For what followed was a victory neither for the vanquished Neues Forum democrats nor for the lumbering hippopotamus of western German market capitalism. Reunification was embarked upon so precipitously that before anyone could blink, the West had swallowed up the East whole. Five years later, Germany still suffers from chronic economic indigestion. At the same time, a series of deep cleansings and wholesale scourings aimed at purifying ex—German Democratic Republic universities, courts, and the civil service of all Communist taint were carried out with a punitive thoroughness that made the de-Nazification program after World War II look like a sponge bath. Had cooperators with Hitler’s regime been rooted out with the same efficiency as cooperators with and fellow travelers