Peaceful Revolution 'should have received the Nobel Prize'

Barack Obama was today awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. However, over on evangelisch.de, Henrik Schmitz writes that it should have been the GDR's peaceful revolution
whose turning point was 20 years ago today that should have received the prize.

Wouldn't it have been a great symbol if on 9 October, the day that makred the turning point in Germany, if the acadmey had awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to the people who actually managed to start a revolution to promote, and eventaully to accomplish, greater freedom, justice and peace - that is the people who were instrumental to ensure that the revolution in the GDR in 1989 was a peaceful revolution.

Der Spiegel is reporting in English about the peaceful revolution in Leipzig:

In the summer of 1989, East German politicians praised the Chinese decision to use violence against democracy activists camping in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. In September and early October, East German police had cracked down forcefully on protesters in Dresden, Berlin and Plauen. Protesters marching in Leipzig on Oct. 2 were beaten by police. "People had seen pictures from Beijing," Jens Schoene, a historian and author of "The Peaceful Revolution: Berlin 1989/90 -- The Path to German Unity," says. "It wasn't at all clear it would be peaceful. On Monday, Oct. 9, Fuehrer, Wonneberger and the others at the Nicolaikirche decided to go ahead with the scheduled protests. All of East Germany, it seemed, was holding its breath. "We were so worried they would come in and shoot everybody," said Dorothee Kern, then a graduate student in the nearby city of Halle. "We had goosebumps the whole day and the day before. Dissidents prepared for the worst. Couples with kids made sure one parent stayed home, in case there was a police crackdown. Rumors flew around the city: Hospitals had been stocked with extra blood and beds; stadiums were readied to hold masses of arrested demonstrators. On his way home from work at the opera house in the middle of town that day, Leipziger Hans Georg Kluge remembers seeing the city filling with soldiers and police. "Everyone had to reckon with the state suppressing any demonstration," he says. "Violently, if necessary."

And there is also a film on the "miricle of Leipzig"

The 'peaceful' revolution

Speaking of a 'peaceful' revolution may give the idea of a soft, calm transition from an old regime to institutions based on the rule of law. Yet as this article from The New York Times in 1989 makes clear the autumn uprising in the GDR was a movement in which protesters and demonstrators had to be ready to take on the overt and covert violence of the state:

East Berlin ended its 40th anniversary celebrations tonight with clashes between demonstrators demanding change and police troops. Callers to Western news reporters told of other demonstrations, in Leipzig, Potsdam, Halle and other East German cities, but initial details were sketchy. The clashes in East Berlin began under a display of fireworks that lit up the night sky, underscoring the contrast between the state-ordered festivities and the crisis shaped by the flight of more than 45,000 citizens this summer. With the flight curtailed by the closing of the Czechoslovak border earlier this week, the focus of popular frustration seemed to shift to the streets. Large demonstrations and outbursts of violence were reported earlier this week in Leipzig and Dresden. In East Berlin, what began as a clutch of about 100 demonstrators mingling with crowd of holiday-makers at a fair set up on the vast Alexander Square turned into a march of thousands through the center of the city, first toward the Palace of the Republic, where President Mikhail S. Gorbachev of the Soviet Union and other visiting Communist chiefs were attending a gala reception, and then through the dark, cobbled streets of the working-class Prenzlauerberg district. Thousands of police officers, plainclothes security forces and volunteer militia ringed the marchers, estimated at about 5,000, and drove them down the side streets of Prenzlauerberg, where the police periodically charged seized individual protesters.

The scene is immortalised at the beginning of the film Goodbye Lenin where Alex's mother, Christiane, who is on her way to the festivities to mark 40 years of the GDR suffers a near fatal heart attack as she sees her son being grabbed by police and taken away in a police lorry.

The Turning Point

A prayer service for peace in an historic Lutheran church in the East German city of Leipzig 20 years ago triggered the chain of events that exactly a month later led to the opening of the Berlin Wall, writes Anli Serfontein for Ecumenical News International. As people gathered after work on the afternoon of 9 October 1989 in the Nikolaikirche (St Nicholas' Church) and three other inner-city churches in Leipzig to pray for peace and democracy, the signs of potential violence were uppermost in most people's minds. Two days earlier, as Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was in East Berlin for the 40th anniversary celebrations of the East German state, pro-democracy demonstrations there had been put down with force. Before the prayer service took place, however, ominous warnings had appeared in Leipzig's communist-run media suggesting that armed force would be used to suppress demonstrators. Rumours circulated of hospitals building up blood reserves and being put on alert to deal with bullet wounds. Read more here >>

Meanwhile the German Protestant magazine Chrismon has an article on 9 October 1989 as a "day of decision"

Photo: (c) LTM/Andreas Schmidt

60 years of the GDR

Today marks the 60th anniversary of the German Democratic Republic, which was founded just a few days after the People's Republic of China. Yet while the PRC is a power that is getting ever more important, the GDR ceased to exost in 1990. I first visted the GDR in 1979, the year of its 30th anniversary. Part of an official delegation from the British Youth Council we were shown the forward looking optimistic side of the GDR. Five years later I was a student in East Berlin with friends who were active in peace and human rights groups. In 1989 I was banned from the GDR - even after the opening of the Berlin Wall - and in 2009 I had the great privilege to take part in a symposium with Heino Falcke, one of the precursors of the peaceful revolution. Christoph Dieckmann, a journalist coming from east Germany, once said, "The GDR is a time, not a place".

The 40th anniversary is largely remembered for the civic rights protests that marked the event (and which sets the stage for the opening of Goodbye, Lenin) and the phrase Mikhail Gorbacehv is supposed to have uttered to the leaders of the GDR, "Life punishes thosewho arrive too late".

This is an extract from Time magazine about the 1989 anniversary:

The timing of Mikhail Gorbachev's visit to East Germany could not have been more awkward. On the 40th anniversary of the country's founding as a separate socialist state, the government in East Berlin found itself utterly humiliated. Like storm-besieged dikes, the borders of the country had sprung one leak after another, and thousands of refugees were pouring out. The routine anniversary visit threatened to turn into another diplomatic nightmare for the Soviet President, fraught with the kind of tensions and prodemocracy demonstrations that marred his trip to China last spring. It was Gorbachev's message of change, after all, that had largely inspired the freedom flight.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,958775,00.html

Labyrinth of change

The Marienkirche in Frankfurt an der Oder has inaugurated a "Labyrinth of Change" to mark the 20th anniversary of the peaceful revolution. Helmut Kohl promised people in the GDR a blossoming countryside landscapes - but this rarely emerged. Instead this vision represents dashed hopes. The action artist Richard Gigantikow aka Reinhard Zabka - together with international artists - has symbolised this ebb and flow of emotions in a walk-in art installation as a labyrinth of change in the nave of St. Mary's. Just as then nobody knew what the next day would bring, so surprises are awaiting visitors walking through the interactive labyrinth ... Reflect, remember and wonder in and through the labyrinth of change ... .

An anniversary in Berlin, or Brasilia on the Spree

Today marks an anniversary in Berlin, no - not the 19th anniversary of German unity, but the inauguration of East Berlin's Fernsehturm (television tower) 20 years earlier in 1969 in time for the 20th anniversary of the GDR on 7 October 1969. Since then - and even more since unification- it has become as much a trademark of Berlin as the Brandenburg Gate. The Fernsehturm was part of an attempt by the GDR's rules, "secure" behind the Berlin Wall, to create a new "socialist" capital for the GDR and demonstrate the superiority of socialism over capitalism. However, as the Mitteldeutsche Zeitung reports, Horst Oehlrich one of the building engineers who made the tower possible was missing from the official reception given by state- and party leader Walter Ulbricht for the engineers, architects and construction workers on 3 October 1969. «I refused to serve in the army because of my Christian convictions», Oehlrich told the Mitteldeutsche Zeitung. «That was certainly the reason why I could not be present for the the reception with Ulbricht.»

The television tower was just one part of a much wider programme of building a new capital for the GDR which in some respects mirrors the attempts of Brazil to build itself a new capital at Brasilia. Like Brasilia the socialist capital of the GDR was a political statement as much as an architectural ensemble, but while the Brasilian capital was hewn out of the jungle, the socialist GDR capital - on a much smaller scale - was hewn out of the rubble and remains of the centre of Berlin. There is it seems increasing interest in the motifs of modernism in GDR architecture, a couple of books have coined the term Ostmoderne, for example, while a recent book sets out motifs of Brasilia's architect "Oskar Niemeyer -a legend of modernism" - to be found in East Berlin. On the other hand there are also apparently motifs from East Berlin architecture that Niemeyer placed in Brasilia.

For the German speakers among you here is a book on the theme:
Symbolsuche. Die Ost-Berliner Zentrumsplanung zwischen Repräsentation und Agitation
(The search for symbols: Planning and the East Berlin centre between representation and agitation)

The planning of East Berlin's city centre is is like no other construction project of the GDR shows the close links between politics, ideology, economics and architecture. The plans for the "socialist transformation" of the area between Alexanderplatz and Kupfergraben, especially the history of the monumental tower that the SED wanted to erect on "Marx-Engels-Platz as a demonstrazion of their power and prestige demonstrate in an exemplary fashion the possibilities and chasms of political iconography. It was precisely the historic centre of Berlin, which was for more than forty years, the political centre of the GDR, that became the setting for an explosive debate about style in which both 'conservative modernity' as well as the planned city of Brasilia were the inspiration for a socialist symbolic architecture. Selected examples show the the evolution of DDR-representation architecture as an expression of personal and intra-party power struggles that raged particularly between Hermann Henselmann and Gerhard Kosel, between the local level and the state.

For English speakers, there is an article in English by Peter Müller on "Counter-Architecture and Building Race: Cold War Architecture and the Two Berlins".

PS: The picture shows the Marienkirche in front of the Fernsehturm. Originally the Marienkirche was to be removed from this showcase of socialist planning but it remained, a symbol of the place of the church in the GDR.

How a BBC journalist remembers 1989

Brian Hanrahan, who covered the 1989 events in eastern Europe for the BBC, has posted to the BBC News site an article of recollections from that time:

It was a baffling year - neither predictable nor inevitable. For those of us in the thick of it, there was a constant struggle to make sense of what we were seeing. Even those with the power to shape events were taken aback. The outcome was not what they had bargained for.

It was a year in which power was transferred away from repressive communist leaders who tolerated no questions or debate about their policies to mass movements which swept away governments and rewrote the map of Europe. Only China resisted the momentum of change by brutally suppressing demonstrations ... But at the beginning there was little to indicate that we were witnessing the collapse of communism, and the end of the Cold War. I have looked back through my notebooks and can find not a mention of the round table talks in Poland which began in February and would eventually lead to Eastern Europe's first non-communist government. Few thought it worth remarking on.

Hat tip to Anli Serfontein