Berlin Wall, 20 years after the fall

BERLIN — "The Quiz of the Germans," a lighthearted entry amid a crush of serious examinations of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, pitted three West German celebrities seated behind the sloping hood of an old Volkswagen Beetle against counterparts from the East perched above the front of a clunky Trabant.

On a television production stage emblazoned with an oversize map of unified Germany, the questions about the divided days of the past were as symmetrical as the antique cars. The topics — nude beachgoers in the East and sex education in the West, the vacation destinations of the two populations or the funny dialects on either side of the border — struck a note of retrospective commonality, of shared Germanness, even at the peak of the Cold War standoff.

The impending anniversary Monday has prompted a powerful national conversation, not just about a moment two decades in the past, but about the Germany of today. It is a country that is peaceful, more united and less turbulent than few here or abroad expected or, given its troubled 20th century, many thought it deserved. Especially among the young, there is the sense that the aspiration to transcend Germany's dark history and simply become normal may finally be within reach.

Events of the day

The latest round of news accounts on the tumultuous final hours of the wall have emphasized not some sense of historical inevitability driven by economics and geopolitics, but rather the capricious human side of the event.

That is reflected in last week's cover story in the magazine Der Spiegel, titled "The Error That Led to Unity," which meticulously reconstructed, hour by hour, the events of the day that built up to the wall's unexpected opening.

Bureaucratic confusion over new travel regulations led crowds of East Berliners to gather at border checkpoints on the night of Nov. 9, 1989, prompting guards to open the gates, bringing a sudden end to the division of the city with a night of spontaneous celebration and reunion.

In recent weeks, polls have been released on the differences, and as often as not the similarities, between the former East and the former West in matters of love and real estate, table manners and car ownership. In ways typically serious and atypically jocular, Germans seem to be groping for an understanding of what happened and what, along the way, they have become.

Beneath the trivial differences lies a country more together than anyone expected. That is not to say there are not some hard feelings, and particularly among those from the East, known officially as the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Despite great strides and an estimated $2 trillion in assistance since 1989, many easterners have not quite caught up to westerners materially and saw their everyday way of life disappear along with the wall.

"The things from the GDR are no longer around, and have to be hauled out of museum cabinets, whereas in the West they don't have to remember because those things are still there," said Jana Hensel, a writer who grew up in the eastern city of Leipzig, when asked about the quiz show. "For East Germans it is still painful to have to remember the things they have lost," she said.

But the fading divisions between the sides are most apparent among those with no memories of the wall or the GDR, the generation born after 1989.

"For people from our generation, it's just a part of German history," said Sebastian Melchior, 19, a student at the Alexander von Humboldt High School in the district of Koepenick in the former East. "For us this division doesn't really exist anymore."

He added: "My parents ask if people are Wessis or Ossis," using the colloquial and slightly derogatory terms for the two groups, "but I just can't identify with that at all."

He is far from alone in his post-wall generation. A survey of more than 1,300 people published by the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag found that just 11 percent among those between 14 and 19 defined themselves as East German or West German, compared with 36 percent of Germans between 40 and 49.

Memories of Stasi

Wolfgang von Schwedler, the principal and a graduate of the Humboldt school, remembered being taken to a police station for questioning because he was the editor of a student newspaper when he attended in the 1970s. He also recalled how six fellow teachers were dismissed after reunification for having worked with the East German secret police, known as the Stasi.

But he said his students found the annual ritual of dissecting the events surrounding the country's reunification to be boring. "It's like when we would say, 'Oh no, Grandpa's telling stories about the war again,' " Schwedler said.

After a century of war, of guard towers and barbed wire, of tanks and gas chambers, boring sounds tantalizingly close to that much desired national normalcy.

The reality of Germany today makes it difficult to remember the immediate concerns in Europe after the wall fell. Leaders such as President Francois Mitterrand of France and, in particular, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain, worried aloud that a reunified Germany was likely to drift away from the NATO alliance and the structures of the European Union and might return to the path of nationalism.

"The fear was that this thing in the center of Europe, if it were allowed to become unified, was going to be a cancer once again and lead to Act III of the great European tragedy," said Robert Hunter, a senior adviser at the RAND Corporation and an ambassador to NATO under President Clinton.

Instead, Hunter said, "the German problem, which emerged with the unifying of Germany beginning in the 1860s, is one of the few problems in modern history that has been solved."

If anything, Germany is more firmly anchored in those Western institutions than ever, after pressing allies to bring its eastern neighbors and former enemies, such as Poland and the Czech Republic, into those same institutions that were built after World War II to bind West Germany with France and the rest of Western Europe.

Between opposing the Iraq war and contributing to the defense and reconstruction of Afghanistan, and trumpeting its strict recycling programs and booming solar-power industry, Germany is trying to shed the ghosts of its past and may be succeeding.

"I've never been ashamed to come from Germany," said Bjorn Viergutz, 18, who also attends the Humboldt school. "One can be proud. When you compare to 20 years ago, an immense amount has happened. The fact that there are differences between East and West is really normal. What surprises me is that they're so minor, actually."