Map of Germany/ shots from story

Music

02:52:17

A decade after the fall of the wall, it's still a west side story.

Campbell:   After the unification, West Germany kept its political systems, its institutions, its sense of leadership. East Germans now think more of what they lost.

Map of India/ shots from story

Music

03:17.09

Byrne:  From India, Eleanor Hall goes on tour with the Lucknow brass band.

Brass band

Hall:  If the music sounds a little strangled, it's not surprising. Every one of these band members is a convicted murderer. And they're all still serving time in gaol.

Music

Byrne

Byrne:  First to Berlin - still a city with a split personality despite some momentous demolition work a decade ago. It will remain one of those rare occasions when political history offers a dramatic triumphant visual for the lumbering decline of Eastern Bloc Communism - the decommissioning of the Berlin Wall.

03:57:20

But, as Eric Campbell reports, despite the official celebrations, not everyone's partying.

Party in warehouse

Music

04:24:00

Campbell:  In a disused warehouse in East Berlin, two thousand young Germans are celebrating the old days.

The event is called ‘Ostalgie', meaning ‘Nostalgia for the East.' On display, some of the icons that made East Germany the country that it was.

The drab communist dictators who kept them in dependable poverty.

The pride of local manufacturing, the Trabant, arguably the worst car ever built. And behind it the wall that split Berlin in two, between the western enclave controlled by West Germany, and the eastern capital of East Germany.

05:02:24

This is one part irony and two parts nostalgia. East Germany, the so called German Democratic Republic, wasn't much of country. But it was their country. And now it's gone.

Elizabeth and Kathrin were just 8 and 10 years old when the two Germanys reunited.  While they revel in post-communist freedom, they genuinely regret their old country's death.

Applause/cheering

Elizabeth:  Because in the GDR, there was a special feeling,

05:50:24

Elizabeth

all together, it was like a big family. And now everybody is doing the best for himself and I think they want to have this feeling again.

06:00:22

Campbell:  So they are nostalgic for the...

Elizabeth:  Yes, yes, yes, I think so.

Kathrin

Kathrin:  Short after the year, after '89, they all said that everything in GDR was bad, and now after ten years the good things come back.

06:17:04

Warehouse party. Statue of Lenin

Music

06:27:13

Campbell:  Even today, Germans classify themselves by the side they came from.

These are the Ossis, meaning Easties. They're all the product of the communist system.

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Campbell:  They still tend to be poorer than their western neighbours, the Wessis. And they're convinced the Wessis treat them as second class citizens.

Elizabeth

Elizabeth:  They think that the people from the west are very arrogant, with their noses in the air, and they are unfriendly and they think that we are a little bit silly, or something like that.

07:01:20

Warehouse party

Music

07:13:15

Campbell:  With each year of unity, Ossis are getting a rosier view of a grey past.

Map Germany

Music

07:27:19

Archival footage East Germany

Campbell:  For all its communal spirit, East Germany was a prison. Set up by the Soviet Union from the territory it captured in the Second World War, it became the front line of the communist empire.

07:40:02

An Iron Curtain stopped Germans fleeing to the west. And in 1961, a wall was built around West Berlin to close that escape route too. Even then people risked their lives to try to cross it.

Unlike young Ossis, many older Germans remember why.

Sebastian climbs stairs

Sebastian Pflugbeil was a dissident who challenged the communist regime. A secret police force called the Stasi persecuted him and anyone who dared resist.

08:29:19

Sebastian:  Without doubt, not so many people have been killed but the methods used

Sebastian

to keep the people frightened and to wield power were in my view even more refined than what the Gestapo did.  The Stasi learned from the Gestapo, and from the KGB too.

08:55:22

Wall coming down

Campbell:  Then one night ten years ago, the world changed forever. On November 9^th 1989, a discredited communist regime finally bowed to popular pressure and lifted restrictions on travel.

09:06:22

Within hours, hundreds of thousands flooded into West Berlin.

FX:  Traffic

Campbell:  So this is where you first crossed?

Campbell with Jana

Jana:  Yes, that was the first border point where I went over this morning.

09:45:05

Campbell:  Jana Simon was 17 years old when she had her first glimpse of the west.

As the daughter of prominent dissidents, the opening of the wall seemed almost too good to be true.  But like almost everyone who crossed in those first hours, Jana went straight home to the east.

Campbell:  What was it like that day?

Jana:  Actually we had to wait like for a couple of hours here with my two friends. And so, yeah, so we just stood here and were just really excited like how it will be, and then we actually crossed the border. And on the other end it looked exactly the same, so I was quite disappointed.

10:09:10

Campbell:   Rather than fleeing oppression, they were celebrating freedom to travel. For all its faults, they had begun to think of East Germany as their nation. Few expected that it was about to disappear.

Crowd at border

Within months, the opening of the wall had created a momentum that saw the East German government collapse.

10:42:24

East Germany reunited with West Germany, and the wall came down.

Cheering

Campbell beside remains of wall

Super:
ERIC CAMPBELL

Campbell:  Today, all that remains of the wall are a few decorated strips kept as reminders. Berlin is once more united and for the first time since the horror of Adolph Hitler, it's the capital of a united Germany. But many here believe there is still a wall - in people's minds. And for them, Berlin and Germany remain divided.

11:04:06

Radio/Jana's apartment

Radio

11:26:18

Campbell:  Jana still lives in the centre of East Berlin, but works for a West Berlin newspaper. Her life has all the trappings of the western middle class. But even now she feels a stigma for being and Ossi.

Jana:  They treat me sometimes different because they think, okay, she's different. She has a different background and that's why we don't really know her.

11:49:11

I have some friends in West Berlin and I think that's quite seldom. All my other friends from the east, they don't have any friends in the west.

Campbell and Jana

Campbell:  I would have thought that after ten years those sort of differences would disappear. I mean you're all Germans, you're all Berliners.

12:07:20

Jana:  I don't think so, because I mean 40 years is quite a long time, and if you live in such different systems, I think it takes quite a while. I think probably another 20 years.

Café in West Berlin

Campbell:   After so long apart, Berliners have shows surprisingly little desire to live together. It's Friday night at a trendy café in the centre of West Berlin.

12:26:01

The clientele are almost exclusively Wessis.

Christiane Krautscheid is typical, in that she has almost nothing to do with Ossis.

Christiane

Campbell:  And how many "Ossis" do you know as friends?

12:53:05

Christiane:  I have to confess, in my circle of friends, none. Although I work in East Berlin, and in my office people from the East and West are working together,  I don't have any contacts in my private circle of friends.

Campbell:  How long have you been living in Berlin?

Christiane:  Eleven years.

Campbell:  Eleven years, and you don't know any "Ossis"?

Christiane:  Well indeed, I don't think this is my fault - I fight against it, but it just doesn't happen because we have different interests. In fact there are many things that annoy me, I have to say.

Sebastian at supermarket

Campbell:  And there is much that annoys Ossis about the west. Today, Sebastian Pflugbeil is unemployed. There is little interest in the new Germany for what people like him have to say. He now lives in poverty in his old East Berlin apartment.  He insists his country wasn't liberated, it was taken over.

13:33:24

Sebastian

Sebastian:  Overnight the rules of the West became the rules of the East.  There was no time for transition.  There was little thought about making a transition in a way that wouldn't hurt people.  As it was, it was a transition where robber-knights and speculators made obscene profits.  It totally ignored the need to protect the East German people and their identity.

14:59:15

Brass band/ reunification street parade

Brass band

14:37:19

Campbell:  Many do celebrate the death of East Germany. Thousands still come out to celebrations like this, marking the ninth anniversary of reunification.

The fall of the Berlin Wall opened the east to freedom and the fruits of capitalism. It's brought benefits the east had been craving for years, and benefits they could never have imagined.

This is essentially a celebration for the west.

Campbell to camera

After reunification, West Germany kept its political systems, its institutions, its sense of leadership. East Germans now think more of what they lost. And the greatest irony of all is that while East Germany didn't survive, the communists who ruled it have.

15:28:18

Campbell:  A few kilometres east of the parade, the new look communists hold a rally of their own.  This is what became of the hated East German Communist Party after its leadership fled. It renamed itself the PDS, the party of democratic socialism. It is now the fastest growing party in Germany.

Petra

Petra:  Yes, we have communists, we have socialists we have people claiming to be social democrats - we have Christians in our party.

16:14:13

Campbell:  Last month it captured 40% of East Berlin's vote in city elections. Its main support comes from older Germans buffeted by the transition to capitalism. But chill economic winds are attracting a new generation.

Petra at rally

Thirty-six year old Petra Pau heads the Berlin branch. Her party may have descended from dictatorship, but she insists it will give people a voice.

16:40:02

Petra:  Ten years on, people ask "How can we have more say in our lives? How can we get more democratic rights?"

Campbell:  Critics say you are the old communists with a new name.

Petra:   Not in life or concepts... We have changed not only the dogmas but also the simplistic views of the world.  At the same time, I am not going to condemn everything that went before.

Berlin skyline

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17:24:00

Campbell:  West Germany has pumped billions of dollars into the east. The city skyline is a forest of cranes as Berlin resumes its mantle as the German capital.  The new Federal Parliament, the Reichstag, should be an affirmation of the city's new prosperity. But the east's economy continues to lag badly behind the west. Unemployment is close to 20% -- double the western rate. And the pain has worsened since the ruling Social Democrats began an austerity drive. Young Ossis now see the PDS as the Left alternative.

Train/ tilt up to Jana on balcony

Jana Simon thinks it's the worst.

18:11:21

Jana:  It frightens me a bit. But I have some friends and they work for PDS and we have lots of arguments, and we - I mean I can't understand it, because I just can't forget how I felt in East Germany, and how my parents felt. I mean, we were under secret surveillance. So - and I won't forget that. I mean it's, I can't forget that. So I would never work for them.

Archival footage Berlin

Music

18:4914

Campbell:   The shadow of totalitarianism still falls across Berlin. Only the youngest children have no experience of dictatorship. From 1933, when it became the centre of Nazism, through to 1989, when it was the frontline of communism, order, obedience and terror replaced freedom.  The wall's fall gave hope for a better future and for a partnership with the west. The city now embodies the challenge of a new Europe.