East Germany Opens the Berlin Wall

Smiles have finally returned to East Germany. In the past, every time I have taken American visitors into East Berlin and East Germany, they noticed the lack of smiles and outward happiness. No one smiles in East Berlin, they would say. People without hope for the future had little to smile about, I would reply.

But now that the inhuman wall dividing the German people, Erich Honecker’s monstrous wall of shame, has begun to open up, happy faces and hopes for a better life are beginning to replace the despair about their drab prison-like existence.

For me, too, the events of the past weeks and months have really been the lifting of a great burden. It is almost as if the second half of a constant and repetitive nightmare has finally been lifted from my spirit. The end of Hitler’s terror constituted the lifting of the first half of this terrible burden.

Perhaps I thought that by emigrating to America I could escape my share of the responsibility for rebuilding Germany. Leaving Germany in 1949 also meant that I escaped much of the pain and cost of Germany’s post-war division. I had been fortunate to survive Nazi totalitarianism and history’s deadliest war; and after spending a few years in post-war West Berlin, I left for the promise of a better life in the United States. Had I abandoned Germany for selfish reasons? Wasn’t the wall dividing Berlin and Germany a direct result of our recent past?

By now my good fortune in America stood in stark contrast to the deprivation of my friends and relatives who had to remain in East Berlin. Repeated visits to East Germany and East Berlin over the intervening years made me realize how precious our freedom to travel really is. Leaving friends and relatives confined behind the wall, I agonized about their plight and my inability to help them. The longer the confinement of my relatives and the millions of others behind the Iron Curtain, the more I had to hide my guilt.

As long as millions of Germans were unable to share in the elementary freedoms and the economic revival of the western half of Germany, I could not put the legacy of Nazism and the war behind me. When the wall was finally breached, I began to realize that my well-being in America had in part been bought as the result of much suppressed guilt.

Now that the wall between the two Germanys appears to be coming down, all of us hope that even the long-suffering people of East Germany can begin to share in the basic freedoms we usually take for granted.

When the momentous and really unexpected news of the removal of all significant travel restrictions of East Germans was announced on Nov. 9, I could finally begin to unburden myself of the heretofore unrecognized feelings of guilt. My tears of joy became tears of relief for the people of the country of my birth and for myself. With every step toward freedom in East Germany, I too can become free of my burdensome legacy.

ROLF SCHULZE, San Diego