The Bellevue Palace Speech
by Marko Martin
This speech was delivered at Bellevue Palace, the residence of the German President, on November 7, 2024, celebrating the 35th anniversary of the opening of the Berlin Wall. Marko Martin’s work deserves to be known more in English. His most recent publication, Und es geschieht jetzt: jüdisches Leben nach dem 7. Oktober, discusses Jewish life after the Hamas attack last year. Translated by Russell A. Berman, whose comments are here.
Dear Mr. Federal President, ladies and gentlemen,
But above all to you, distinguished Polish guests, including protagonists of the Solidarity revolution and the co-initiator of the strike on the Gdansk shipyard:1 Without your courage there would have been no “1989” at all. Since you are apparently not invited to the all-German panel later today, I would like to say a big thank you from here, Dziękuję bardzo!
Thirty-five years of the Peaceful Revolution and—one of the memory associations—that apt sentence from Wolf Biermann on his return after expatriation at the Leipzig concert in December 1989: “Oh, there were only a few of us—and many remained.”2
In any case, millions of GDR citizens weren’t on the streets back then but were basically waiting behind the living room curtains—which, by the way, is not a value judgment, but rather just a supplementary fact-check that explains some of the mentalities that continue to have an impact.
If today—and now more importantly than ever—an East German civil society exists, it is above all thanks to the incredibly courageous demonstrators of autumn 1989, their children, and now often even grandchildren in the large and medium-sized cities of East Germany. (The continued loneliness and isolation of these emancipatory “89ers” and their heirs in the countless smaller places, sometimes even among their acquaintances and family circles, should also be spoken and written about.)
Where 1989 Was Not a Turning Point
Perhaps some people will now ask themselves whether this tone is appropriate on the 35th anniversary of a peaceful and successful revolution. Counter-question: Would it be “appropriate” to keep quiet about the fact that in the last regional elections in East German states, two illiberal parties were able to achieve landslide victories, one of them right-wing extremist and both of them openly pro-Putin, while both spread the most infamous Kremlin propaganda; and in the case of the other party, the authoritarian Wagenknecht sect, this doesn’t seem to particularly bother the two major democratic parties in their various negotiations to form regional
governments?3 Is it “appropriate” to refuse to think about the roots of all this, even though “1989” was clearly not always that emancipatory turning point that it is claimed to have been?
And no, such probing is not merely a self-referential discourse criticism but rather leads right into the present. Why is the vital support for Ukraine, facing a murderous attack, significantly less popular in the East than in the western part of the country, both according to representative surveys and the mood on the street, in offices and factories and at the evening kitchen tables?
What can be heard there, repeatedly, in addition to an abstract and often only pretextual concern for “peace”: “Putin, Putin, always only Putin—but what about us?” From this absurdly narrow perspective, even the war of aggression against Ukraine seems to be, first and foremost, just one more western excuse for not taking care of the interests of East Germans. In just the same way, many treated the debate about climate change, the refugee crisis of 2015, the old and new antisemitism, or the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s as nothing more than an imposition—especially on themselves, mind you—and as a narcissistic insult, which then was articulated as a whining: “And us, who takes care of us?”
This Is How Children Talk about Their Parents
As early as 1970, the writer Uwe Johnson, who fled East Germany in 1959, described this mentality: “This is how children talk about their parents. This is how adults talk about someone who once took the place of their father.”4 But honest recognition of such ongoing defects and “upward delegations” would offer the chance for real freedom, for the happy discovery of one’s own options for action. And—yes, that too—for the active solidarity that quite a few East Germans of all ages are already practicing, not coincidentally often with a reference to “’89.”
It is now being decided in Ukraine whether “’89” really initiated a sustainable history of freedom, as the buzzword goes, or whether it was just a kind of world-historical breathing space. And yet it seems as if all too many people in both East and West Germany lack the insight and will to recognize this fact and act accordingly. But was it really different previously, during the 1980s and with regard to Poland, where almost the entire population had actually rebelled against the dictatorship with tremendous courage?
As inspiring as the Polish resistance was for the GDR civil rights activists, voices in large parts of the population were completely different. “Why,” as the by no means hushed tones went at the time, “why don’t the Polacks” just go back to work instead of going on strike and constantly demanding freedom and annoying “us”? In the state media it just sounded a little less blunt.
I have been thinking about this very early experience of denied solidarity for a while. Isn’t it being repeated today in the ice-cold demands that invaded Ukraine finally stop its resistance and hand itself over to the Russian occupiers without a fight—even though the dictatorship in East Germany finally imploded in 1989 and the context in Germany is now completely different?
And why suddenly this inflation of the concept of peace, even though the vast majority of young people and grown men in the GDR never objected to military service, just as they did not refuse to take part in military classes at school, pre-military camp training during their apprenticeship, and later the exercises in the so-called “company combat groups”? Is the regime propaganda that only saw “peace” guaranteed if it served the Kremlin’s power interests still at work here, while the NATO defense alliance is slandered as an “imperialist warmonger”?
A Perverted Understanding of Peace
However, anyone who misunderstands this attitude as “typically Eastern” in order to outsource it would be wrong. Because it was and remains a double German story, so to speak, and whatever nonsense was (and is still) told in the West has always been reflected back into the East. In 1982, Egon Bahr even described Solidarność as a “threat to world peace” in the magazine Vorwärts.5 This was insane infamy, which the poet Peter Rühmkorf, still widely revered to this day as a subversive sophisticate, seconded in this way—in the harsh diction of the Nazi father’s generation: “No one in the world can prescribe more than work and discipline to the Polish nation anyway—but who, in addition to the necessary courage, also has the guts to actually impose it?”6
But what does all this have to do with the 35th anniversary of the peaceful revolution in the GDR? Certainly more than we would like. Because that perverted concept of peace, which completely ignores the question of duration, stability, and justice, is now whizzing back and forth between East and West like a shuttle. And let’s be honest: Does our collective memory really recognize that the first stone from the Berlin Wall was knocked out at the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk? Do we recognize that the celebrated détente policy was based on increasing defense spending in West Germany’s GDP—and of course on the protective umbrella of NATO and on an American policy that clearly showed the Soviet Union the limits of its expansionist power?
I think it says a lot about the forgetfulness of history here—again in East and West—to deliberately suppress all of this and instead continue to indulge in nostalgic memories of the “good Tsar Gorbi,” under whom the Kremlin did not roll out tanks and fire at civilians. (That is, except when he did just that on “Bloody Sunday in Vilnius” on January 13, 1991, at a time when German reunification had long since been going smoothly and the unified Germans could indulge in their favorite hobby—to just occupy themselves with themselves, preferably grumbling, about whatever.)
“For our freedom and yours” has been the Polish rallying cry since the nineteenth century, and it was understood that way by civil rights activists in the GDR and, of course, especially by the people in Eastern Europe, in 1989 and later, in 2004 and 2013–14 during the democratic revolutions in Kyiv, with the European flags in the hands of the demonstrators. Yet it seems that the same contempt disguised as realpolitik that once spoke in Egon Bahr’s words still echoes today.
Gerhard Schröder, still an unrepentant and proud first-name friend of the mass murderer in the Kremlin, is already being guaranteed by the new general secretary of the chancellor’s party that there is still room for him in German Social Democracy.7 Incidentally, this welcome elicits the same horror among Eastern Europeans and traditional Social Democrats who had to hear from the then foreign minister in 2016 that the NATO maneuvers on the eastern flank to protect the democracies were “saber-rattling and war cries.”8 Saber-rattling and war cries?
Truth is Mild
Dear Mr. President and with all due respect: The Nord Stream project, which the SPD and CDU clung to for so long despite all well-founded criticism, was only “a bridge”—your term from spring 2022—insofar as it encouraged Putin in his aggression, through his calculation that the Germans, otherwise world champions in moralizing, would not let the lucrative business deal slip away, Ukraine or not. And again, the prescient warnings in Eastern Europe were arrogantly ignored. And it is again Eastern Europe that faces the threat and will have to bear the consequences—and in the near future possibly even without American support.
For our freedom and yours: It is the tormented civilian population in Ukraine as well as the soldiers of the Ukrainian army who, through their resistance, are trying to protect our freedom, which has existed throughout all of Germany since 1989; Ukraine is fighting for it, even now, at this very minute and with unimaginable sacrifices. And no, those military and Eastern European scholars and the politicians in Germany, who are often so criminally isolated in their own parties, who think day after day about how the invaded country can be supported more effectively—these committed men and women do not deserve to be denounced as “caliber experts,” suggesting that they are “exuberantly” trigger-happy troublemakers.
Let’s call it what it is: These are all more than verbal slip-ups that are then dutifully retracted. On the contrary, dangerous thought patterns become visible here, at the highest level of the state, when claims are made that then immediately disseminate into the public, creating further confusion. Especially in times of acute crises, mental clarity is vital.
Allow me to conclude with this reflection: if right now, 35 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, people are often and rightly talking about this or that “deficit in the East”—how about a debate about this problem of deficits in knowledge, action, and honesty in the West, which also need to be acknowledged and overcome? And not merely as a purely rhetorical exercise of penance, but as a necessary farewell to all-German lies and repressions, in the East and in the West, because these are—very specifically and horribly—costing human lives elsewhere.
In Wolf Biermann’s 1989 Leipzig concert, mentioned above, the writer Jürgen Fuchs also spoke.9 He had returned to the East for the first time, after being imprisoned by the Stasi, which had stripped him of his citizenship. He quoted the words of a Russian dissident, which are still relevant today: “The truth is mild; it is radical, but also capable of forgiveness. However, justice and forgiveness are not possible before and outside of the truth.”
Ladies and gentlemen, although some of you might have hoped or expected a slightly different speech—thank you for listening to me.
The reference is presumably to Bogdan Borusewicz, born in 1949, a leader of the underground opposition in Communist Poland, an organizer of the strike at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk in 1980, and after 1991 a member of the Polish parliament.
Wolf Biermann, born in 1936, an East German singer, poet, and dissident, was expatriated in 1976 and only returned after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
In the state elections in September 2024 in Saxony, Thuringia, and Brandenburg—all formerly part of East Germany—one party of the far right, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), and one of the far left, the Sarah Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW, named after its leader), both scored very well. Both oppose support for Ukraine, express pro-Russian or pro-Putin positions, and, in different ways, are hostile to immigration. In the subsequent negotiations for state-level coalitions, the “major democratic parties,” SPD and CDU, have each been willing to collaborate with the BSW, but they maintain a “firewall” against the AfD.
Uwe Johnson (1934–1984) was a leading novelist from East Germany who moved to the West. The sentence comes from his 1970 essay “Attempt to Explain a Mentality,” published as the afterword to an interview volume edited by Barbara Grunert.
Egon Bahr (1922–2015) was a leading Social Democratic politician in Germany and an architect of the “Ostpolitik.” In 1982 Solidarność had been prohibited in Poland by the military government. See: Thomas Urban, “Legenden um die Ostpolitik,” Cicero, May 12, 2022, https://www.cicero.de/aussenpolitik/deutschland-polen-ukraine-krieg-ostpolitik-willy-brandt-reagan.
Peter Rühmkorf (1929–2008) was a prolific West German author who worked in diverse genres. See Peter Rühmkorf, “Nebelbänke,” in Verantwortlich für Polen?, ed. Heinrich Böll and Freimut Duve (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1982), p. 162.
Gerhard Schröder, born 1944, was chancellor of Germany from 1999 to 2005, after which he controversially took on leading corporate roles in Russian energy companies, where he grew close to Vladimir Putin. Nonetheless in 2024 the general secretary of the Social Democratic Party declared Schröder to still be a valued party member.
In 2016, then foreign minister Steinmeier used these terms to describe NATO maneuvers. Here Martin is directly criticizing his host, the Federal President.
Jürgen Fuchs (1950–1999) was an East German author and dissident. He was expatriated in 1977 and could not return until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.