In the courtyard of the Willy Brandt House in Lübeck stands a section of the Berlin Wall. It is one of more than 45,000 wall segments that brutally sealed off West Berlin from the eastern part of the city and the surrounding area along a 184 km stretch. With the construction of the wall on August 13, 1961, the GDR government definitively cemented the division of the city, Germany, and Europe since the end of the Second World War; the monstrous structure immediately became a tragic symbol of the Cold War.
Democracy is alive
After the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, it was dismantled in a very short time. More than 250 wall segments have since been transported to locations all over the world, where – as in the courtyard of the Willy Brandt House in Lübeck – they serve as reminders of the Cold War confrontation and its happy, because non-violent, end.
But the pieces of the Berlin Wall are not only a reminder of a historical era that ended more than 30 years ago, in which Willy Brandt, as the first Social Democratic Chancellor and later Nobel Peace Prize laureate, played a significant role. However, this is not the point here, nor is it about the political course he set in motion in the late 1960s and early 1970s regarding the relationship between West Germany and East Germany, despite strong resistance, thus ultimately enabling what he called the reunification of Germany after the fall of the Wall.
courage
Instead, the focus should be on the courage of all those people in East Germany who resisted the authorities towards the end of the 1980s. For the pieces of the Wall also serve as a reminder of this: the courage and unwavering determination with which tens of thousands participated in the Monday demonstrations in the autumn of 1989 in Leipzig, Dresden, and elsewhere in East Germany, contributing significantly to the unexpected implosion of East Germany – both in the East and the West. At each of these demonstrations, the fear of a violent reaction from the state, of a "Chinese solution," as it was called in reference to the massacre with which the Beijing leadership had brutally suppressed civil society demands for democratic reforms in early June 1989, was ever-present.
But even apart from this threat, it took courage to stand up for political self-determination in East Germany. The system responded to even the slightest act of defiance with inhumane harassment or intimidation; demands for democratic freedoms were punished, sometimes with professional bans, sometimes with imprisonment. And yet, many people in East Germany defied the state's arbitrary power and demanded their political rights – above all, free and secret elections, freedom of expression, freedom to choose one's place of residence and profession, and freedom of religion.
The difference to certain demonstrators today could not be greater; the pieces of the wall also serve as a reminder of this.
Political self-determination should not be confused with personal self-realization.
Democratic freedoms and human rights are a common good; they do not function according to the principle of self-service, but rather through careful consideration and with the entire society in mind, however difficult that may sometimes be to bear individually. Otherwise, we risk losing them.