The approximately 160 kilometres between the German-German border of Helmstedt-Marienborn in Lower Saxony and West Berlin were always just as rough. From 1975 to 1989 I travelled along this well-known transport route at least three or four times a year. It was worth it. West Berlin during the Cold War was the most culturally dramatic and intellectually captivating city I had ever experienced. The tension between local politics and the not always well-thought-out prompting from the government in distant Bonn, together with the chilly confrontation between the Great Powers in this frontier city, provided in many respects fertile ground for political initiatives that could either sustain or break it. There were intense debates without blinders here; an avant-garde culture blossomed, including in women’s film.

Travelling this route by car, my mode of transport, was always an experience of a strong symbolic nature, something that taking a plane, where you simply drop down, can never provide. In Helmstedt, I left the West to literally travel the length of a dictatorship – enemy country – for about two hours before I reached the final outpost of freedom. It was always just as nerve-wracking – what would I do if my car broke down? There were no mobile phones.

Eleven years before the Wall fell, in 1978, I had covered the distance in order to interview an East German female photographer and good friend in East Berlin. In order to make it all a little more fun, I did something I didn’t know back then was strictly prohibited. About 20 kilometres outside Berlin, I turned off the road and started travelling through the East German countryside – I knew all the border crossings and had decided on another one I hadn’t been assigned. It was Christmastime, and the dilapidated pre-war buildings radiated chill in the cheerless communities I travelled through. Here and there hung some garland, the wind howled through the few lights on the pine trees and the red lit stars were of Soviet make.

It was depressing and I started to regret my venture. There were few people outdoors but those that saw my red Mini with Swedish licence plates did not look particularly congenial. When I arrived at the border crossing I had chosen, I was called into the office and interrogated by a few heavily armed border soldiers: Why had I deviated from the prescribed route? But Christmas was in the air – I was allowed to drive on to see the person I was interviewing, where I would also spend the night. Before I managed to say anything, she asked why I hadn’t driven the way I was supposed to: “You were lucky you weren’t kept over night.” Surveillance in the DDR was absolute.

On the night of 9 November 1989, I was once again on the way from my home in Bad Schwalbach west of Frankfurt/Main to a conference in West Berlin, and right after that was to continue on to Stockholm for another conference. I had – as usual – gotten a late start and when I arrived at the border, Helmstedt-Marienborn, it was after midnight. On the car radio, I heard that the wall had been opened in Berlin; only later did I learn that the very first person from the DDR to cross the German-German border was the anaesthetist Annemarie Reffert and her 15-year-old daughter Julianne, who lived near Magdeburg. At 9:15 pm, they were alone in crossing the border into Helmstedt, where they drove around a bit before heading home again.

Late that night, the news that the border crossing had been abolished spread like wild fire. When I arrived in Helmstedt-Marienborn about three hours later (on November 10), I couldn’t believe my eyes – cars were honking right in front of the crossing, and champagne corks were popping high into the air. People had suspected that something was going to happen since 9 October at the demonstration in Leipzig, but the fact that I was to be an eyewitness to people walking past the border towers and crossing through no man’s land without being arrested or hunted down was an historic moment that today sends chills down my spine. I stopped the car for a few minutes; my eyes devoured the scene before me. This image in the middle of the night and the distant echo of cheers have forever been etched in my memory.

As I was driving through East Germany, I listened to the car radio and learnt what had happened in Berlin. The city streets were jam-packed. Two days later, I was once again back on the Berlin-Helmstedt road heading for the ferry in Puttgarden-Rödby; this time, there were queues forty kilometres from the border at Braunschweig – nothing but chugging “Trabis.”

At that time, I was a doctoral student in politology and followed the heated debate subsequent to the fall of the Wall. Once the initial euphoria was over, the discussion about what was now going to happen gained momentum both in Germany and internationally. When Prime Minister Thatcher declared that she was against a united Germany – why should the Germans be rewarded with reunification? – she was backed by Germans, including Günter Grass. He argued that a people who were guilty of Auschwitz did not deserve a territorially large Germany and reunification. Instead, Grass argued for investing in a German cultural nation: language and culture – especially literature – which were the unifying factor, with “spill over” into Austria and German-speaking Switzerland.

Grass had a supporter in his Social Democratic colleague from Austria, Günter Nenning, a renowned journalist and author. In his book Grenzenlos Deutsch, which was published a year before the Wall fell, Nenning, who also distances himself from ideas of a nation-state, pleads for a spiritual German realm. Arguing that spirit is the opposite of state, he writes amongst other things: “As a nation-state, Germany stumbled into the global arena far too late and has brought nothing but misery. However, as a spiritual realm it has been worthy of high honour for a thousand years (…) For Germans, the nation-state is a national disaster. Every attempt ends in catastrophe. The GDR and the DDR are headed toward each other like two bikers that don’t know how to bike.”

The then Social Democratic candidate for Chancellor, Oskar Lafontaine, was also against a rash and ill-considered unification. He saw the whole thing as the risky economic venture it was to become and was supported by the then president of Deutsche Bank, Karl-Otto Pöhl, who also warned against a rapid currency union. That was also my main argument against unification when I was asked by Pia Brandelius on TV1’s special broadcast from Berlin on the Day of Germany Unity, 3 October 1990. Today, with the benefit of hindsight and twenty years of experience, we see the German economy once again being completely drained of its resources, with high unemployment and a weak wage trend in the labour market. With all the state subsidies, reunification has cost more than 1.2 trillion (1,200,000,000,000) euros to date. Today, 140,000 Germans a year see no future in the country; they emigrate. My own comment is: it is a miracle the country still functions.

A strikingly large number of young West Germans were against reunification. In an article in the leftist-oriented Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik (no. 11 1990), “Offener Brief an die alten Männer,” two 27-year-old West Germans asked whether reunification was not “the realisation of the sentimental dream of old men.” What Genscher, Kohl, Willy Brandt, Egon Bahr etc. tried to do was nothing more than “use the past as the future … For us, the only thing that exists is the experience that a divided Germany entailed. In its sentimental form, the nation-state – we’ve learnt – is not just superfluous but also has … ridiculous qualities.” Today, we would say “uncool”. The Schröder government’s decision to rechristen the Deutsche Bibliothek in Berlin the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek was also “uncool;” the Berliners who plead for a Deutsches Nationaltheater in Berlin are also “uncool.”

So there were many sceptical and disparaging voices. Today, one of them is the author Ingo Schulze. In a recent interview, he argued that people should have listened to the sceptics – because what we have experienced is not just that the old DDR was lost, which was a blessing, but also that the GDR has lost many of its most attractive characteristics. Since unification, the debate has become increasingly subdued; the entire country has in some way been watered down and lost substance; in the same way, Berlin today is a conventional capital just like any other.

One could argue that the first border crossings on 9 November 1989 started the movement of East Germans primarily to West Germany – an emigration that is still under way – and to Europe. Many have survived the journey, but there are many who have not yet arrived in a reunited Germany. They are waiting. There are numerous reasons for this delay. One is that the DDR is not letting go. To maintain its grasp on people, many Old Guard Communists resort to lies and distortions. Knowledge about the DDR as a dictatorship and an Unrechtsstaat is being replaced by the myth of the DDR as a social paradise.

The historian Hubertus Knabe, the leading expert on the reprocessing of the DDR’s past, shows how dangerous this falsification of history is. In his book Die Täter sind unter uns, which is a ruthless reckoning with the German justice system, he shows how tens of thousands of former party functionaries and Stasi collaborators exploit the democracy they live in. In the former DDR, there are at least 50,000 former Stasi collaborators employed in the public sector – almost 2,000 of them were incorporated into the police and border security. Another theme is the failure to prosecute the murderers who shot 1,245 people to death at the German-German border and disabled even more, who are handicapped because of their gunshot injuries. Yet few of the border soldiers have been brought to trial.

In his book, Knabe shows how the old Stasi regime burnished its image with lies and distortions. “While perpetrators, accomplices and supportive observers meet with more and more sympathy, victims and critics are on the defensive. The old cadre has reorganised. It is our responsibility to see that their view of history does not prevail.”

Anything else would be an insult to the East German victims, to German taxpayers who have paid and continue to pay to refurbish the DDR, and an insult to the memory of that glorious day, 9 November 1989.