Berlin Wall 20

German Reunification 20 years - page 1

20 years German reunification The Wall came down in my hometown 20 years ago, but I will not be celebrating. As the 20th anniversary of the opening of the Berlin Wall approaches, and the transcripts of Margaret Thatcher’s conversations with Mikhail Gorbachev become public, my mind travels back. When I was a child and teenager in West Berlin, before the Wall was built and afterwards, the division of Germany was nothing special since we did not know any different. The world was simple then, the guys in the East were the baddies and the guys in the West were the good ones. They were democratic, honest and decent. They would not steal your land or other assets, like the East had done with my Grandmother’s two properties. Why they put up red banners everywhere vilifying a Ruling Class, evil Capitalists and so forth was not really understandable to us children. We were told this is ‘propaganda’, stuff that is written and put out there with the purpose to steer someone’s thinking and actions. The Nazis had used the same methods to manipulate people. Not every book or piece of propaganda had perished with Hitler in 1945 and since it was in our language we could access it direct. Nowadays we call these things spin, which also came over the East Berlin radio, although we hardly ever tuned in. Our aunt in East Berlin tried hard to give us presents for Christmas and birthdays which were propaganda free. These were music books or Russian fairytales in French with lovely old fashioned pictures to boost our compulsory studies of French. Spin – we learned to recognize it, read between the lines, questioned and checked what came your way. My father’s critical brain added a dimension for money matters with his phrase ‘that’s only meant to suck money from my pocket’. We had a spin-filter. The tentacles of politics in life For the record, we need to mention what my father had said about Hitler and the Nazis, who came to power when he was a 21 year old university student in Berlin.

German Reunification 20 years - page 2

I remember his words as if he were standing right next to me, although in 2009 this is 56 years ago. Yes, you can pin me down on 1953 when I was nine years old, because the bombed out part of our fourth floor apartment had been restored for habitation that year. We stood at the window of my father’s room, looking over the empty space and rubble where apartment buildings had stood before Berlin was bombed. My father had had an unusual childhood and talked to us two children as if we were adults. Surprisingly, the child, or just this child, absorbed the important bits. ‘Look at it’, my father said, ‘what destruction, everything kaputt. When Hitler came to power in 33, I was not convinced he was our salvation, our rescue from our many troubles. But everybody was so enthusiastic that the street fights would now cease; I stopped mentioning it. Look where it got us, just look at it.’ As a nine year old, I had no concept how politics grow tentacles into your life. 56 years later, it feels like I took in his words ‘to file away for further use’. I never thought of it again for decades. 1967 – End of postwar phase In 1967 the post war period was over and West Germany changed. My generation developped a scene of ‘system opponents’. I could not understand that and stayed well away from what I perceived as Eastern steered troublemakers. That was not difficult as I had experienced a considerable degree of poverty in my youth which made me focus on survival and hopefully doing better than just that. The system opponents came from two directions and sometimes merged. One direction was the death of a student during an anti-Shah demonstration. The other direction came from the Hamburg magazin Konkret which was in the hands of journalist Ulrike Meinhof and her husband. She later claimed to have seen so much corruption and collusion that she became disenchanted with the system. ‘Break what breaks you’ was the slogan and to make a real point they caused a fire in the Frankfurt department store Kaufhof. This left me all a bit baffled, because I found it weird that someone should spend his time demonstrating against the Shah who was depicted as a CIA puppet. I could not have cared less whose puppet the Shah of Iran may have or may not have been. Konkret magazine we sometimes bought. I read it with my spin-

German Reunification 20 years - page 3

filter activated: There was contents which I agreed to and some which was obviously written with a semi-communist mind which I did not take seriously. Just like with the leftovers of Nazi literature, or what came from East Berlin, I read Konkret through my spin-filter. The system came down on the ‘system opponents’ like a ton of bricks and thus the Baader-Meinhof gang was born. I read most of the newspaper reports like you watch a whodunnit TV soap. The only practical points, where these issues touched me were on Saturday shopping trips into the city of Frankfurt, where I had moved to in 1966. It annoyed me greatly, that my movements were impeded by demonstrations against a never ending string of issues in other countries. Iran, Nicaragua, Chile, Yougoslavia, Greece, Cyprus, Spain, South Africa, and Vietnam are what I remember but there were probably more. These people had obviously too much time and money. If I had had a say, I would not have licensed these demonstrations in the city. I would have moved them to the big football stadium at 6:00 am. They could have made their point there without affecting the working population. I did not take all these people and movements seriously at all. What they wrote about the ruling or colluding class in West Germany had no credibility with me. I believed in the Free World and its system. The many variations of shonkiness that we experienced in all segments of our life were not nice but I put it down to my own inexperience in business or not being strong enough as a person. Looking back at it now from my Australian vantage point, shonkiness and dishonesty were so widespread that I regard them as symptomatic. International links and preparing for reunification We often worked in Britain in those days where it was quite clear that the unions abused their power. The good idea of social responsibility was taken too far. No wonder then, that I applauded the rise of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. Some people do not see political developments as part of their life, but when you grow up in West Berlin like me, there is a different degree of awareness. After Margaret Thatcher took it all too far, just like the union movement had done before, I shook my head about the iron lady. I never gave her another thought until I read Brian Crozier’s book ‘Free Agent’ and discovered that she had been a puppet of the CIA

German Reunification 20 years - page 4

sponsored Crozier group to the point of becoming part of the colluding class. I despised Margaret Thatcher until I read the transcripts of her 1989 conversations with Mikhail Gorbachev which happened two months prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Thatcher warned, ‘they’ll buy up everything and will be just as bad as before WWII’. The lady was half right. They (the Germans) have certainly gone back to their badness which seeks to domineer and profiteer through taking advantage of people. On the ‘buying up’ she was not right. In fact she was naive to believe they would go to the trouble of buying up when they could just use their power to collude and steal. The new government of the re-united free Germany seized property without paying compensation, exactly like the communists had done. Honesty and decency are foreign concepts to the German colluding class I discovered, Yes, Konkret and Baader Meinhof had had a point in the early seventies. I also learnt something about democracy. What purpose democracy, when it washes up people like the ex-Chancellor Helmut Kohl and his document shredding helpers? The whole charade about the surprise opening of the Berlin Wall has also been exposed now. It was all prepared and scripted. They lied through their teeth and led the public by the nose. And for this piece of theatre, the then Chancellor wanted a Nobel Peace Prize! Did he really believe his deception would not be discovered? Did he really want this enormous sum of money for the big deception and thievery of East German land? Our land was wangled by Kohl & Co. to the French in an action called ‘Chancellor Matter’, because F. Mitterrand was Kohl’s friend (that’s spin), and for the kickbacks which Kohl & Co. got in their Geneva bank accounts. We did not get anything for our assetts which have since been merged into that murky oil company TOTAL SA. As it turns out now, even the friendship between Kohl and Mitterrand was a propaganda lie. The Thatcher/Gorbachev transcripts reveal that Mitterrand was full of fear that his domineering, colluding, and deceiving German counterpart could preside over a united Germany. Mitterrand and Thatcher were alarmed, the records say, that Germany should be unified under someone like Kohl. On the other hand, Mitterrand was as much a master of deception

German Reunification 20 years - page 5

and dishonesty as Helmut Kohl, which Brian Crozier describes in his book. Mitterrand gave a speech in the German Bundestag in 1983 which the Crozier group had dictated; the original speech by Mitterrand and government advisors went in the bin! What a friendship! What a tragedy that the never quite forgotten dream of German reunification came true at a time when dishonesty ruled in Paris and Bonn, steered by the Crozier mercenaries groups. Or is it maybe democracy herself which is the cancer? Democracy requires campaign donations so all partcipants lose their sense of honesty and decency (if they have ever had one). Whether communists or democratically elected rulers steal the land from you – same difference. To me, democracy is as much a charade as their piece of theatre which they engineered for the ‘surprise’ opening of the Berlin Wall on the 9th November 1989. My brother in Berlin will not be celebrating German reunification, either. He would still be alive were it not for the Kohl/Mitterrand collusion which allocated our land, including his share, to that non-compensating French oil company, buddies of Kohl, Mitterrand, and Crozier. These were poisonous, ultimately fatal, tentacles of politics in our life. If the land had not been ‘stolen’ from us, my brother would have been able to buy himself a small apartment. But our rights had been nullified in 1994. In 2008 he received an eviction notice from the landlord of his small rented apartment. Being unemployed after about 35 years as a labourer, he had nowhere to go and committed suicide. How typical for the ugly Germans ruling the system: Here is someone weaker than me; let’s fleece him and when he’s done, he can do away with himself. No justice has been done to this day. And for my late brother justice would be too late, even if honesty and decency were to creep into German rulers’ minds for which I am not holding my breath. I despise Germany for her dishonesty and ruthlessness. They treat their own people like dirt while sucking up to crooks like Helmut Kohl, that No 1 cyclist: Kick to below, bend to above. The Wall came down in my hometown 20 years ago. Dishonesty and thievery won the day and keep ruling. Please think of that when you see and read Berlin’s propaganda in November 2009. Ally Hauptmann-Gurski – Adelaide, 13th September 2009 [email protected]