There was a sense of Götterdämmerung prevailing over parades and reception festivities when the DDR celebrated its 40th anniversary on 6-8 October 1989. Bombastic speeches in the Palace of the Republic were interrupted by the largest demonstration in East Berlin since the uprising of 17 June 1953.

For angry citizens of the DDR, the eerie anniversary festivities and the hypocrisy of the regime were drops that made the cup run over. The discontent, suppressed for so long, exploded. On 9 October, 70,000 people marched through Leipzig chanting, “We’re the people!” and “Gorbi, Gorbi.”

But none of this made any impact on Erich Honecker. Unperturbed, he cranked out his standard “life is a bed of roses” speech about the splendours of DDR socialism. That is when the younger members in the Politburo became frightened. If DDR socialism and hence their own position were to be saved, Honecker had to go.

On 17 October, they seized the opportunity. Like every Tuesday, Erich Honecker opened the Politburo’s weekly meeting. But on 17 October 1989, something entirely unexpected happened. Premier Willi Stoph requested the floor and proposed adding another item to the agenda:

Honecker’s dismissal as general secretary of the state Socialist Unity Party, SED. Honecker, who had had surgery for liver cancer and had been absent for a long period, was taken totally by surprise. He made weak attempts to protest. But Stasi head Erich Mielke, his right-hand man, threatened that if Honecker did not step down voluntarily, he would reveal everything he knew and then…

Honecker gave up. When it came time to vote on his resignation, he too raised his hand. As a reward for his cooperativeness, he was allowed to announce his resignation the next day, using his poor health as the excuse. The Central Committee, which was hastily convened, elected Egon Krenz as general secretary. At 52, he was a youngster in the Politburo, and because he had been head of the state youth organisation FDJ (Freie Deutsche Jugend), it was hoped he would win over the troublemakers with a breath of future-oriented youth.

But the impatient population of the DDR did not see Krenz’s election at all as a step forward but rather as a provocation: the same old fossilised SED establishment, albeit in a new guise.

The demonstrations continued across the country. People’s rage was inflamed when the media, which now dared to act freely, revealed how the SED nomenclature had wallowed in privilege and corruption. The indignation of the population over the regime’s hypocrisy turned into resentment.

Krenz and the other members of the Politburo were perplexed. They had planned a palace revolt but not what would happen after that. Nor did they have any time to stabilise the situation; they had to come up with some kind of sweet to appease the angry masses. Someone came up with the idea of liberalising travel restrictions. The ban on travelling freely had irritated the population more than anything else in the system of oppression, so the regime hoped that a decision like that would quickly placate them.

On 6 November, the regime announced the draft of a new travel law. However, there was still talk of passports and visa requirements, thus making the population even more furious. Under the pressure of escalating protests, the government resigned.

Two days later, the Central Committee met to decide a new strategy. Because the entire Politburo had resigned, a new one had to be elected. As long as the Communist system worked according to the usual pattern, the election of new members was easy: the list proposed by the Politburo would have been anonymously approved. But these were new times, and every member had to be elected individually. It was an arduous democratic process with votes, countervotes and a lot of protests.

When the time-consuming election was finally over, Krenz took the floor. The jittery Central Committee had expected a clear sense of how this party in crisis would regain its footing and resolve matters. But Krenz immediately dispelled any illusions. He declared that the country was on the brink of ruin and put the blame for the disastrous situation on Honecker.

After this, the Party’s financial officer gave a drastic description of all the mistakes the state organisations had made and which had now led to the bankruptcy of the state. The members of the Central Committee were seized with panic. Their horror grew into fury over the idea that, in all these years, those responsible for the escalating poverty had not opened their mouths and protested. They directed their anger at Krenz: Then why hadn’t he, sitting in the party leadership, reacted earlier?

At 3:30 in the afternoon, Krenz broke off the agitated discussion. Willi Stoph had just submitted a draft for a new travel law that had to be voted on at once. Krenz read the text aloud and asked for comments. But the Central Committee members had their heads full of all that shocking information confronting them and had barely any objections. Krenz handed the text over to the Politburo’s spokesman, Günter Schabowski, who was to announce the new travel regulations at the international press conference at 6 p.m.

The gist of the new travel law, which was to take effect the following day, was that foreign travel naturally still required a visa but that this could be requested without having to provide special reasons and would quickly be granted. In addition, it would be possible to travel abroad via every border crossing between East and West Germany, even via crossings between the sectors in Berlin.

There were other questions asked first at the international press conference. Just before the end, an Italian reporter asked about the new travel law. Schabowski, who had not taken part in the Central Committee meeting, then dug out the text from a pile of manuscripts on his table and read it out loud. In response to the question of when the new procedure would enter into force, he answered hesitantly, “From what I understand, immediately.” (Nach meiner Erkenntnis gleich, sofort.)

That was the signal. When TV stations in the East and West informed viewers of this during their evening broadcasts on 9 November, dumbfounded East Germans only picked up the part about the new freedom to travel beginning at once and that they could even leave via the Wall in Berlin. Hundreds of thousands of people swarmed to the border crossings. The border guards, who had been drilled to shoot anyone who approached the wall and had not received any new instructions, were taken by surprise and were at a loss to respond. However, under pressure from the swelling masses of people, they had no other choice than to give in and open the gates. Thousands of East Berliners poured into West Berlin. The Wall had fallen.

The next day, Willy Brandt expressed his joy in his much-publicized comment, “What belongs together is growing together.” (Es wächst zusammen, was zusammen gehört.)

However, it was a short honeymoon after the fall of the Wall. The orgiastic joy of embracing one another after the long divorce soon turned into frustration and aggression: in the East because the hope of immediately sharing in the glittering prosperity of the West turned out to be an illusion, in the West because the job of cleaning up the East German scrap pile required sacrifice. The more details about the DDR system that emerged, the less desire West Germans had to share their wealth with compatriots who had characterised them as cold-hearted Fascists, imperialists and warmongers for all those years. In both the East and the West, many were soon wishing that the Wall had never fallen.

For the second time in less than fifty years, Germany was faced with a dilemma that always arises when a dictatorship is superseded by a democracy: what will happen to the people who supported the regime? Who can be made responsible in a system where propaganda permeates everything and the freedom of individuals is drastically curtailed? Does the population share in the responsibility for the crimes committed?

These questions, which had been debated in West Germany ever since the collapse of the Third Reich, now suddenly had to be addressed once again. Can parallels be drawn between 1945 and 1989?

After the end of the war, the victors sat in judgement on the Germans, required them to distance themselves from their past and told them what democracy was. In the final phase of the war, Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed that Germany would be punished, de-Nazified and democratised after the end of the war. But when the Allies began to translate these goals into practice in their own zones, it was immediately apparent how different their ideas were, both about who would be punished and what a democracy is.

In the Soviet zone of occupation, the population was never held accountable for the crimes committed under the Nazi regime. Because the people are always victims of the egotistical interests of the powers-that-be in the Communist world view, the “little” Nazis were immediately helped to redevelop their country – naturally, under the condition that they adjust to the Communists’ notion of what a democracy was. In the Eastern zone, the “big” Nazis were punished, and the old elite was replaced by a new one. But other than that, the structures of the Nazi era were left undisturbed.

The regime used them to establish a new dictatorship and polished the anti-Fascist myth of the DDR as the country of Hitler’s opponents. In the Western zone, the occupation proceeded quite differently. The Western Allies, with the US in the lead, were convinced that the entire German population had to be made responsible for the evil doings of the Nazi era. Even though there was never any explicit accusation of collective guilt, it served as the foundation of their policy of occupation. An enormous apparatus to check people was set up, with tests on their views, questionnaires that went on for pages, exclusions from working in public sector jobs… The fact that these methods were scarcely suited to convincing the German population of the excellence of Western democracy was clear when people sighed, God give us a fifth Reich. The fourth is just like the third.

However, after the Cold War broke out in 1947, de-Nazification came to an abrupt end. In the struggle for power now under way, it was no longer anti-Fascism that mattered but anti-Communism. In the West, it was thus the “little” Nazis who were punished whereas the “big” Nazis – now dedicated democrats – were soon back at their old jobs because the Western Allies no longer wanted to do without the specialist knowledge and experience of the old elite.

After the Wall fell, Western Germans adopted a similar position to that of the victorious Western Allies in 1945: they sat in judgement of the East Germans, required them to distance themselves from their past and told them what democracy was. And they levelled two charges against their East German compatriots: not just that they had adjusted to the Communist dictatorship without any resistance but also that they had never faced their Nazi past. Because they had grown up with the anti-Fascist myth and always considered the question of guilt as purely a West German capitalist problem, many East Germans felt insulted and aggressively dismissed the accusations.

Had the West Germans tired of carrying the burden of guilt from the Hitler era on their own, thus demanding that the East Germans finally shoulder their responsibility? Or was it the need to compensate for the humiliation they had themselves been subject to after the end of the war that gave them so little sympathy for their East German compatriots? However counterproductive accusations of collective guilt are, they really should have learnt something from their own experiences, and this time too, the effect was not the intended one but rather the opposite: the accusations did not encourage critical self-examination but instead provoked defiance. Like many West Germans after the war, many East Germans felt unjustly accused and reacted with excuses, lies and sullen silence.

The opposition in East Germany also experienced the same disappointment after the Wall fell as did West Germans who were critical of society after the war ended: people who had been faithful to the regime became turncoats and were soon at the top of society again, while their own dreams of a new, better Germany were dashed. East German rebels had not been fighting for capitalism but for a human socialism that was open to the world. Yet now, when they had finally brought about the fall of the regime, they were passed over on both sides: their fellow East Germans were throwing their arms around the West Germans and selling their souls for D-mark and prosperity, while their West German compatriots were ignoring their demands and carrying out reunification on their own terms.

It has been twenty years since the Wall fell, but emotionally it is still there. Many East Germans are embittered by the West Germans’ arrogance and feel insulted that their state is being condemned. You West Germans have no idea about what our life was like in the DDR and you are not a whit interested in us, they complain. After the war, you were supported by a wealthy Great Power so you could rebuild your lives and be successful. But you never gave us a chance. You barged into our world, made decisions about everything and destroyed what was good and secure. In the DDR, nobody was unemployed and nobody had to worry about the future. But since reunification there is no longer any solidarity, just selfishness and competition.

“Millions of East Germans need therapy,” says the East German psychotherapist Hans-Joachim Maaz, who was himself active in the protest movement. “They’re suffering,” he diagnoses, “from a mix of depressive resignation over their dreams of happiness and well-being collapsing, impotent anger over a state that once took care of them now leaving them in the lurch, and an insecurity complex because they’re economically dependent on West Germans and feel like poor, unwelcome relatives. And when the future seems hopeless, they choose the simplest solution: they escape to the past and glorify the former DDR.

“We’ve never came to terms with our past,” Maaz notes. “We didn’t have ‘the ’68 revolution’. And we would need a new revolt, with the younger generation coming to terms with their parents’ generation, which supported the DDR.”

However, there is no generational conflict in sight. Rather, the opposite: even young East Germans, who never experienced the DDR, are today glorifying the East German state. “Homesick for a Dictatorship” was the title of an article in Der Spiegel (29 Jun 2009) about the new “ostalgia” now spreading across eastern Germany. It is not just old Stalinists and inveterate Stasi ideologues mourning the Communist state. Today 57% of eastern Germans think the DDR had more advantages than disadvantages. Naturally, there were a few problems, they admit, but people who adjusted could live well in the East German state. Many claim they were happier under the Communist regime than in today’s reunited Germany.

Anxiety about existence and a lack of self-confidence are the foundation of growing right-wing radicalism and xenophobia in the new federal republics – Gregor Gysi, party leader of the heir to the SED, Die Linke, thinks so too. “The success of the neo-Nazis is due to eastern Germans feeling like they’re second class,” he says. “So they try to find something from the third class so they can feel first class. The right-wing extremists offer this false sense of self-confidence for free by saying, ‘Just by your birth, you’re worth more than billions of others. That’s because you’re German!’”

Many reunited Germans do not want to see how high this “mental wall” is today. A recently published book gives a disillusioned insight into this East-West drama – Immer wieder Dezember. Der Westen, die Stasi, der Onkel und ich by Susanne Schädlich, the daughter of Hans Joachim Schädlich, a writer critical of the regime. She describes how the Stasi system broke down her family. When her father published a book in the West and signed a protest against the deportation of the ballad singer Wolf Biermann in 1976, the family was forced to leave the DDR.

They were given permission to move to West Germany. The daughter, then age 11, saw this encounter with the Western world as traumatic: perplexity, a sense of being an outsider, homesickness and the threatening feeling that they were still being followed. The father became depressed, the parents went their separate ways, the daughter ran from her problems to the US. After the Wall falls, she learns that her beloved uncle, Karlheinz Schädlich, worked for the Stasi and spied on them and their friends even in the West. She cannot get over her shock at his betrayal. She returns from the US in 1999 and settles in East Berlin but refuses to forgive him. Nor can he forgive himself. In 2007, he takes his life.

Susanne Schädlich’s autobiographical account is a lesson in German post-war history and a gripping document of the human tragedies that resulted from the partition of Germany. It shows how deep this German-German conflict is and destroys any illusion that this will be resolved in the foreseeable future.