Freedom and its Discontents

THE TRAVAILS OF THE NEW GERMANY

In 1983 the president of the Federal Republic, Richard von Weizsäcker, published a collection of essays under the title German History Has Not Stopped. Even he could not have predicted the pace of progress since then. And as the process of unification has unfolded, one can see the drama of German history continue as well. The economic consequences of unity are becoming apparent; the moral and psychological consequences are harder to grasp and may prove longer lasting. It is these that this article addresses.

While the two states of postwar Germany existed, Germans could believe in the unity of their nation, of a people with a common language, a common past, even a common fate. Now unified within one state, the deep divisions among Germans are more visible. No doubt there is truth in Freud's words about "the narcissism of small differences" that divides neighborhoods and family members, and yet in 1989 there was an expectation that Germans would understand Germans. In the first flush of enthusiasm, people forgot the estrangements that had grown so strong over 40 years, as West Germans came to regard the French or the Tuscans or the Dutch as closer, and perhaps more attractive, to them than the East Germans. For their part, East Germans lived with a prescribed if gradually attenuated hostility to the Federal Republic of Germany (F.R.G.), and with a nonprescribed envy and resentment of its freedom and prosperity, witnessed nightly on their television screens.

Visitors to East Germany, including this author, sensed the estrangement. And in the Federal Republic, for all the ritualistic invocations of German solidarity, for all the many individuals who did genuinely care about their fellow Germans in the East, one sensed an enormous, unacknowledged indifference to them. Sudden commonality, sudden huge demands, did not instantly transform indifference to openhearted solicitude.

DIFFERENT KINDS OF FREEDOM