Germans' lingering link to the wall

William Collins Donahue

is chairman of the department of Germanic languages and literature at Duke University

The Berlin Wall would have turned 50 this weekend. It's long gone, but its legacy lives on in the complicated relationship modern-day Germans maintain with it.

During a recent trip to Berlin, I found many people still grappling with that relationship. To them, the wall represents not only the successful reunification of the German people in November 1989, when the wall came down, but also the brutal police state that existed during the prior 28 years.

How do you cope with the fact that some of the people who spied on you, or forced your closest friends and family into betrayal, are still at large? One former political prisoner told me she had run into her onetime jailers at a supermarket.

Germany works hard to present a successful image to the world. It is the economic powerhouse of the European Union and the undisputed savior of the euro in a summer of economic crises. But this high-tech, high-performing country is still very much a Cold War casualty, and its people are still divided.

Enter Udo Lindenberg, a pop-cultural icon of 1980s Germany. With his Dylan-knockoff singing style, occasionally indecipherable political mumblings, and signature black hat and dark glasses, he remains a cultural phenomenon.

In the '80s, Lindenberg inserted himself into Cold War politics quite personally: He fell in love with a woman from East Berlin and then wrote the pop hit "The Girl From East Berlin." The East German secret police, the Stasi, then coerced her into spying on Lindenberg.

This story of forbidden love and apparent betrayal is the basis for the hit musical Beyond the Horizon, which premiered in Berlin this year and is still packing the house. The show is a cheesy, schmaltzy Broadway wannabe - and it's great.

The musical is punctuated by huge black-and-white photos from August 1961, when families, lovers, and friends were torn apart by the new wall. In one, an old woman struggles to jump to freedom while East German police try to pull her back into her apartment. The photos never let the audience forget that, for all the fun they're having, there is something very serious in the theatrics.

At the end of the show, the actor playing Lindenberg breaks character and speaks about the absurdity of the wall. He makes a dramatic cutting gesture with his right hand, saying, "You know, the wall ran right along here." With that, he slices the theater space in two, dividing the audience into East and West.

It's a stunning realization: The very place where the musical is staged - Potsdamer Platz, one of the busiest squares in all of Europe - was a deserted no-man's-land less than a generation ago, home to empty fields, the ruins of embassies, and Berlin's red-light district. The message: While all seems fine on the surface, we have yet to get over the wall in our hearts.

You can dismiss Beyond the Horizon as a nostalgic vehicle for Lindenberg's comeback. Much like the Nazis in Mel Brooks' The Producers, the Stasi in the musical are portrayed largely as a bunch of incompetent dunces rather than as the lethal menace they really were.

But amid all the silliness is a genuine desire to confront and cope with the Cold War past, as evidenced by audiences' standing ovations. (The fact that Lindenberg himself has appeared on stage after the show, reprised some of the songs, embraced the cast, and distributed his favorite Eierlikör, or egg liqueur, to the front row hasn't hurt the mood, either.) This is not just nostalgia for the '80s. It's also hunger for the kind of unity Lindenberg pleaded for back then, and which has yet to be fully realized now.