Party like it’s 1989

The Goethe-Institut celebrates the fall of the Berlin Wall and the people who made it happen

OSSIE MEETS WESSIE:
Norbert Enker’s Wall photos (above and below)

Mechtild Manus was a young mother-to-be living about 100 kilometres east of Cologne, West Germany, when she heard the border between East and West Berlin was crumbling. She called a friend of hers living in the former German capital and, “My friend told me, ‘Next spring, you’ll be walking through the Brandenburg Gate with your stroller.’ I could not imagine that,” she says. “But the next spring, I went through the Brandenburg Gate!”

Twenty years after the Wall—more than anything a symbol of the repressive totalitarianism of communist-era Eastern Europe—came crashing down, Manus is the executive director of the Goethe-Institut Montreal, and preparing a slew of events to commemorate that momentous event. On Monday, Nov. 9, the anniversary of the border being declared open by the East Germans, the Institute will host a noon-hour celebration at the World Trade Centre, by the concrete slab of the Wall in the building’s atrium. “First, we want to celebrate the fall of the Wall,” she says. “But we also will celebrate those who contributed to its fall.”

Two of them will be in Montreal this week. The first is Stefan Wolle, an East German historian and dissident who wrote a wildly popular book on the fearsome Stasi, the communist secret police. The other is East German techno DJ WolleXDP, whose underground parties during the late communist era, says Manus, “played a role in bringing together techno musicians in the East and West.” Wolle will present a lecture on “The Relationship Between East and West Germans Today” at 7 p.m. at 418 Sherbrooke E., and WolleXDP, along with German DJs Substance & Vainqueur, will host a night of German techno at la Sala Rossa (4848 St-Laurent, 9 p.m., $10). “Techno musicians in the East and West were the first to unite,” says Manus. “They created a new movement. In the course of techno parties, they became a mass culture, a national movement of young people in Germany.” A film series, a photo exhibit by German photographer Norbert Enker and other events will complement the goings-on.

Manus credits the bravery of people like Stefan Wolle and WolleXDP (who, despite their similar names, are of no relation) with bringing the Wall down, along with some important help. “What made the fall possible was, first of all, the opposition movement. There was also the Solidarnosc [Solidarity] movement in Poland, the Hungarians who first opened the border with Austria and of course Gorbachev. But all this change in East Germany was possible thanks to a few single courageous people.”

Of course, reunification was difficult, and significant problems remain in East Germany: high unemployment and the presence of far-right parties being just two. Cleavages still exist between the two Germanys, but as the decades have rolled by, so have the baffling differences between the supposedly shallow and immaterial Wessies and yokel-like Ossies. Internal migration has helped: Manus says that although 2.5 million Easterners moved West, 1.3 million Westerners moved in the opposite direction. “I think of what our former chancellor Willy Brandt said: ‘Now grows together what belongs together.’ And after 20 years, we are growing together.”

For more details on the events, see goethe.de/montreal.