‘I wanted to forget about East Germany’

André Wilkens is a German social entrepreneur and author. Born in East Berlin in 1963, he is a founding member of the European Council on Foreign Relations and co-founder of the Initiative Offene Gesellschaft. Since November 2018, he has served as the director of the European Cultural Foundation in Amsterdam.

Rem Koolhaas (RK) 1989 was an absolutely crucial moment in history, but ever since then, I have felt that we, certainly in the West, have totally misread what happened. As a result of this misreading, we are [experiencing the] current [problems]. Do you also think there was a massive misreading and what do you think that misreading was? What else could have been done?

André Wilkens (AW) I come from East Berlin. I was 26 when the Berlin Wall came down. [It was] my defining moment. Everything changed, and I knew from then on, [any]thing is possible… or [at least] nothing is impossible. On the morning of 9 November, if someone had said, ‘The Wall is coming down this evening’, [I would have said,] ‘What a lunatic.’ And then it came down. And strangely enough, people didn't kill each other; it just happened. A few days later you could take the S-Bahn [suburban train] from one place to another and so on. I believe this was a very important moment, and it will stay as one of the crucial moments in the history of Europe. What happened afterwards is another thing.

I would define myself as a European with an East German migration history. When the Wall came down, I only wanted to go West, I wanted to be in Europe, I wanted to forget about Germany, I wanted to forget about East Germany. But the longer I was away, the more I became Eastern again, strangely enough.

Luuk van Middelaar (LvM) How is that?

AW I think it’s age, partly. …. Sometimes I’m in between: ‘What am I doing here in Amsterdam when I should be there in Halle or Chemnitz or whatever, as an East German, making the case for Europe’?

LvM What was it like to be young in East Berlin? Could you already sense the winds of change in the 1980s, or not? And when it came, was it clear to you at that moment that something had changed? Or was it only in hindsight a few years later that you saw this as being a defining moment?

AW I didn't believe the [GDR] propaganda that the EU was terrible. But in a way, the propaganda that [promoted] the East Germans as the good guys and the West Germans as descended from the Nazis kind of stuck. Or at least [the idea] that the East Germans had nothing to do with the Holocaust, only the West Germans. They (the East Germans) have nothing to do with the bad sins of the war. We were communists. We descended from communists, who were in concentration camps, and the West Germans descended from the Nazis.

RK You’ve talked about your personal experience of 1989. Would you have felt the same as a Russian in 1991?

AW I think for the Russians it was a defeat, because even if we wanted to [move] to a liberal system – basically you saw [what happened, it was] chaos. There was a lot of chaos in the former Soviet Union. Then everyone sort of disappeared, all kinds of friends of the Soviet Union, they ran away and created their own stage. From 1991 to 1999, I travelled in the Soviet Union and there was a lot of poverty. For the Russians, it wasn't a great moment.

It had nothing to do with the years of Gorbachev, Perestroika, Glasnost, when suddenly in Europe you could read Russian magazines. I had learned Russian in school, like everyone else. Russian magazines were suddenly the coolest thing. They sold out. [Next] there were bands coming and playing in East Germany: Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan. In 1987 and 1988, all the big guys came and played really huge concerts. Depeche Mode. For me, I think, looking back, I was a political person, but the soft power of the West, and of Europe, was even stronger then. It was the freedom to travel and the freedom to go and see the Rolling Stones, the freedom to vote.

RK Did you differentiate, at the time, between Europe and America, or was it just one big, other world?

AW The Americans and the Russians are quite similar in a way. They are very emotional and over the top. And this was always a bit too much for me. The Europeans I could understand a bit more. But it wasn't anti-Americanism, it wasn't like that. I was already a European. I always looked to London, Paris… America was already too far from here. I was wondering then if I would go to London, Paris, West Berlin, Amsterdam.

LvM You’ve written about the ‘End of History’.

AW I think Fukuyama’s book and what people made of it are two different things. In a way, that for me is one of the biggest stories of 1989 or lessons of 1989, and a personal story from subjective experience. What you see now is that maybe the ‘End of History’ was the soundtrack of the 1990s because people believed the West had won. Now you only have to tell these Eastern Europeans and the whole world how to do it. We will just tell them what to do. It became kind of a missionary thing. In East Germany you could see that very well, because technically it wasn't a unification. Basically, nothing was taken from the Eastern side. East Germany just joined [West Germany]. That means if you have two companies, one company gets dissolved, and all the others join and then the prevailing company sorts out what of the mess you keep.

RK It happened on Western terms. Could it have been different? And are there many of those moments where you can identify where things went wrong or where the insult began?

AW Maybe now it's different, but I would say in hindsight, [it was a case of] ‘let's do that very quickly and pragmatically because who knows what happens with the Soviet Union and with Russia’. … [Helmut] Kohl was a historian, he understood the moment. His point was to make the most of it before it’s too late. So probably he was right, but it had a price. …the tone was, basically, ‘the West is the best’. And you should be so lucky, because we pay the bill for the unification. You might not have a job, but you get paid so that you can sit somewhere.

LvM But there's also maybe another way to look at it. Europeans were post-historical, whereas the Americans, maybe in some paradox, weren’t quite. They remained more keenly aware of history and the power relations underpinning this ‘End of History’. Robert Cooper states that Europeans are indeed in post-history, but the Americans are still in history. What I find interesting is that you write about the fact that history has been written by the winners, and the winners of that history are the West, let's say. Do you think that now is the moment to look at that story again? Or how do you look back, yourself, at that history?

AW The big picture is that in the end, I think history is always written by the winners. So in that sense, there's no big difference. But maybe we expected more from Europe and the West, because you have the European story, which I always describe as a miracle, the miracle of Rome, where Europeans, who always had wars with each other, suddenly created a bureaucracy [that enabled them] to have peace and so on. So, I really think this is a huge achievement, the best thing that happened in the 20th century, and I think it's still a model that is unique, and we should be proud of it. So maybe we (I, others) had higher expectations of how Europe would deal with this moment. I was hoping that we wouldn't end up with a winner-takes-it-all approach, that we would think in terms of integration.

When I look back at the ‘End of History’, I think it’s very unfortunate that the paper – the book is probably okay – is just a headline for the media. It became such a thing… It made Europe simplistic. And I think one could have imagined more. So if I look back, one could have rerun this in a different way with more empathy and more tact.

‘More empathy and more tact’

LvM Do you have any thoughts about whether the ‘Return of History’ is not just a risk and a threat, or the end of an era with more doom and gloom, but could also bring something new, productive or creative for us here, which I guess is also important for your mission at the European Cultural Foundation.

AW I think it was a kind of illusion. There wasn't an end of history. It was maybe a label that caught on. It was a kind of a fairy tale for many, but it just wasn't an end. And in that sense, I don't believe there is a ‘Return of History’. There wasn't an end of history, it just continued. Maybe it’s like with fairy tales; you are happy to listen to a fairy tale and it makes you feel comfortable, and that dose of fairy tales lasts for some time until something happens. Ukraine and Gaza, but possibly already with Afghanistan and Iraq. The return of wars. So, you could say, ‘Okay, we lived in a fairy tale of the End of History and we didn't want to see what was happening, but now we have to, because we can't look away anymore. It's just too obvious.’ Ukraine is on our border. Afghanistan and Iraq were a bit further away and we had to send a few thousand soldiers there, but it didn't really hurt. But Ukraine, this is serious business and it hurts and it costs a lot of money and it can go really wrong. We’ve had to wake up from our fairy tale, and the question is whether we see this as our moment or whether we muddle through again. Supporting Ukraine… Actually it isn't really supporting Ukraine, it’s supporting ourselves. People should realize that this is a European war. At the moment we have it relatively easy because they are doing the work. We are trying to muddle through by paying our way out, as we have always tried, as in the euro crisis.

So, I actually see the opportunity. I think the opportunity is that now we can't really easily tuck it away. I think it's not possible anymore. We have to react. And for me that is an opportunity in which you say, ‘Okay, now you do something.’ We actually have a model which is quite unique. It kind of works.

LvM What else would you add?

AW I think the whole issue of soft power is a lesson from 1989. Actually, for most people, this is much more important than elections and the media and all the kinds of things we usually talk about. Europe actually still has a lot of soft power but takes it for granted. You have to invest in it. You have to invest in media and in infrastructure. I would see it as a ‘looking forward’ lesson from the Cold War and invest in soft power.

It's not that we want to support cultural heritage for the sake of it. It’s also a very important thing in terms of winning the battle for the hearts of the Europeans. There could be another chapter in which capitalism is failing, [taking lessons from 2008]. If capitalism is thriving, then maybe you don't have to do all this. But now it's stuttering, and with climate change and all the inequality it may fail. So then you have to think: what is actually the European model without capitalism? Is there a European model without capitalism? And what is it? I think the sole issue that brings us together is a European identity, the fact that our soft power is really important. And I want Europeans to look at it more strategically, [not as a ‘nice to have’].