37 Years After the Wall: Three German Artists on a Divided Past and a Shared Future

On November 9, 1989, ten-year-old Lea Streisand in East Berlin received a gift that every East German citizen got from the West German state: 100 Deutsche Marks. Her mother spent it on winter boots, and the girl was so let down she felt like crying. Later, a friend of her parents let her buy so many sweets at the supermarket that they lasted until Christmas. Streisand, now an author, remembers the night as simply incredible. The disappointment, she says, came afterward.

Thirty-seven years on, Deutsche Welle asked three artists with different ties to the division to look back. The question is a live one. Surveys show that only a minority of Germans feel a strong sense of community between former East and West, and many still perceive significant differences. When the Wall fell, both sides celebrated, yet many people on each side remain deeply skeptical of the other.

Streisand, born in 1979, has returned to her East German childhood repeatedly in books and essays. Her 2019 novel "Hufeland, at the corner of Bötzow" tells the story of reunification through a child's eyes. What troubled her most was the year that followed: an entire system swept away and a new one built in its place, as if to say, "There you go. You're welcome." It was, she says, simply too fast for people.

That speed sits uneasily with how the Wall came down. East Germans brought it about themselves through a civil rights movement and numerous demonstrations, and for many the aim was to reform the state, not dissolve it at once. Anke Feuchtenberger, born in 1963 in East Berlin, was among them. She and fellow artists made posters and flyers hoping to win more freedom without abolishing socialism immediately. She soon felt the movement's creative, revolutionary spirit being smothered by consumerism, while nationalist tendencies that had already been noticeable came to the fore. That, she says, frightened her.

Feuchtenberger grew up in East Berlin and in Western Pomerania, where she lives again and feels very much at home. She teaches at the University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg, so she moves between both sides of the old divide. She is often called Germany's most influential comic artist. Her nearly 500-page graphic novel "Comrade Cuckoo" (2023) was the first graphic novel nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in fiction. It follows a childhood in the invented GDR village of Pritschitanow in the 1960s through to the post-reunification years, mixing autobiography with fantasy. She was surprised by the interest from the West. At readings, audiences often raise the fact that the main character, Kerstin, rarely sees her parents because both work full-time. In the GDR, Feuchtenberger explains, work was both a right and a civic duty. She allows that Western curiosity may stem from full-time work for both parents having long been less common there.

Simon Menner, born in 1978 in Emmendingen in Baden-Württemberg, experienced the Wall's fall as a child in a "rather abstract" way; Berlin was far away. He now lives in the city. His work examines surveillance, and in the Stasi files, now open as part of the National Archives, he found a huge collection of photographs that fascinated and horrified him. They became the 2012 book "Top Secret," with images that are eerie, curious or absurd. He also spent a year trying to see the photo archive of West Germany's Federal Intelligence Service, without success.

Looking back, Menner finds the project problematic because it looked only at the East. He says West German intelligence services in the 1960s were hardly models of virtue and thinks it is "actually high time" to examine them critically. Films and documentaries of the period painted the East as bleak, he notes, but the West of the 1980s was also bleak and staid. An honest look at the whole German past, in his view, is a precondition for real reconciliation. Streisand sees a role for literature, which lets readers enter the mind of someone with a different life.

On the future, the two East German women are more hopeful than the Western-born Menner. He says he often no longer notices whether he is in East or West Berlin, but warns that politicians must listen more closely to older and younger people, citing the recent election successes of the far-right AfD. Otherwise, he says, things will get difficult soon. Feuchtenberger argues that fixating on the German-German divide does not help, and that borders have dissolved for her through travel; near the Polish border, she notes, animals cross freely. Streisand expects her children's generation to have no interest in the East-West question, since young people worry about jobs that can support a family and whether they might have to go to war.