>> John Haskell: Welcome to the Library of Congress. I'm John Haskell, Director of the Kluge Center. In today's program, I have, at the end of the dais up here, Hope Harrison, who is a history professor at George Washington University, and the author of After the Fall: Memory and the Making of the New Germany, 1989 to the Present, that just came out. The recipient of fellowships from Fulbright, the Nobel Institute is Oslo, the American Academy in Berlin, Harvard, and the Wilson Center, Dr. Harrison is also the author of a praise winning book about the building of the Berlin Wall, Driving the Soviets Up the Wall, which was released to wide acclaim and received a great deal of acclaim in its German translation as well. In the sensible center here, Constanze Stelzenmuller, is currently the Library of Congress Kissinger Chair on Foreign Policy and International Relations, and a senior fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institute. She served as the inaugural Robert Bosch senior fellow there forum 2014 until this year. Prior to working at Brookings, she was a senior transatlantic fellow with the German Marshall Fund, where she directed the influential Transatlantic Trends survey program. Constanze's essays and articles in both German and English, have appeared in a wide range of publications, including; Foreign Affairs-- >> Constanze Stelzenmuller: You don't have to list them all. >> John Haskell: I'm not going to list them all. I just want to try my pronunciation on Internationale Politik, is that even close? >> Constanze Stelzenmuller: Yep. >> John Haskell: The Financial Times, the International New York Times, and wait, Suddeutsche Zeitung. That wasn't so good was it? Okay, let's get to the discussion. >> Constanze Stelzenmuller: We'll practice this. >> John Haskell: She's in residence until April so I have plenty of time to do better than my one year of German in college, which clearly didn't take. What's-- Let me, I want to pose the first question to Hope; tell us, just go to the basics, what was the wall, why did it fall, and then maybe you can go into what the process was. Why did the focus shift to unification? That's a lot all in one, right? >> Hope M. Harrison: That's okay. >> John Haskell: You know. >> Hope M. Harrison: So glad to be here in this beautiful space. Thank you, John, so much. And Constanze, for letting me join you, it's an honor to be with you all. And to continue to think about the 30th anniversary of this amazing event, the peaceful, unexpected fall of the Berlin Wall, which so many people thought they would not experience in their lifetimes. So the Berlin Wall stood for 28 years, it was built by the East Germans in 1961, to stop East Germans from escaping the communist regime, to go to the west, to democracy and capitalism, to freedom in the west. The Berlin Wall was never just one wall, it was always two walls; an outer wall and an inner wall, and a whole deathly border strip in between including armed guards who were to shoot anyone trying to escape, guard dogs, towers, trip wires, anti-tank barriers, all sorts of obstacles that surrounded 96 miles of West Berlin, so that nobody from East Berlin or the surrounding east German countryside, could get into the democratic capitalist city of West Berlin, which was of course, luring these people from communism, both for the freedom; freedom of expression, free press, but also for all the goods in the stores, which they didn't have in East Germany. So, not surprisingly, the East German regime wanted to stop that mass exodus. By the summer of 1961, over 1000 East Germans were leaving every day. So, after pushing for many years for soviet approval to do this, and the soviets had resisted for a long time, knowing this would not look good, they said, you know, what kind of regime are we going to look like if we have to wall our people in. So they kept trying to find another way to prevent the East Germans from leaving, but that didn't work. So in 1961, the East Germans built the Berlin Wall and that stood for 28 years, until November 9, 1989, when it unexpectedly and peacefully fell. In the intervening 28 years, about 140 people were killed trying to escape across the wall, tens of thousands of people were arrested and put in East German prisons for trying to escape or being suspected of trying to escape. So many people were very happy when the wall fell in 1989. And if fell, not by policy, the building of the wall had been carefully thought out over many years, but the fall of the wall 30 years ago was, in fact, a mistake. It was a senior East German official who went to a live press conference, unprepared. I always point this out to my students, why it's important to be prepared when you speak in public. The East German regime had been under pressure from the soviets who, under Gorbachev, were making reforms, from neighboring Poland which had thrown off its communist regime, replaced it with solidarity, ultimately led by Lech Walesa, so many East Germans wanted these kinds of changes and this kind of freedom. And were taking to the streets in droves, calling for change, and some of them were escaping. So on the night of November 9th, 30 years ago, the senior East German official went to talk about changes to border policy. It was still going to be necessary to apply for permission to leave, as it was in all communist countries, but he didn't say that. He basically said, oh we're changing things and the border will be open. And someone said, what does this mean about the Berlin Wall? And he said, yeah, it means the wall too. And someone else said, well, when is this going to happen? And he looked confused at his notes, he looked over at his assistants, and finally he said, immediately, without delay, on live television. So, over the next several hours, more and more East Germans headed to the Berlin Wall to find out what the heck, is this real? The soldiers guarding the wall, of course had gotten no instructions because this wasn't supposed to happen. And finally, 4 1/2 hours after the press conference had ended, at 7:00 pm, at 11:30 that night, Harald Jaeger, who was in charge of one of those border crossing points, at Bornholmer Strasse, gave up and opened the border to let East Germans cross. That crossing point, at Bornholmer Strasse, 20,000 East Germans crossed there that night, including the current chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, who herself was from the east and living in East Berlin right near that border crossing. So, those are the dramatic developments that sort of set the background for us talking about the 30th anniversary of this day. >> John Haskell: So Constanze has a brilliant essay, 8000, I think it's an 8000 word essay, that is well-worth the read, called German Lessons, which is essentially the topic of what we're doing today. And you talked a little bit about, as a German, where you were at that time and what your response was, so maybe you could capture a little bit of that. >> Constanze Stelzenmuller: Sure, sure. It's funny, I was asked to do this on very short notice, by Brookings, and I have to say that I cursed loudly when I was told this because-- >> John Haskell: But not this event, it was the article. >> Constanze Stelzenmuller: No, no, so the essay. Because I, for a variety of reasons, this is for me, both personally and as a German and as given what my trajectory as an expert has been, an enormous topic. And I felt, I have to say, I felt completely overwhelmed by what was not a request, but a, you have got to do this now, so an order as it were. And then, got down to writing it with immense trepidation, because it also became clear to me that the only way that I could write this credibly was by writing about myself. Because I'm not a historian, unlike Hope, who by the way has also just written a second book called, After the Berlin Wall, which has just come out in Cambridge University Press, and is awesome, which you should all buy and read. >> John Haskell: Which will be available after the event. >> Constanze Stelzenmuller: Awesome. >> John Haskell: Signed. >> Constanze Stelzenmuller: I've just finished reading it and there is actually, you and I need to talk about this, because there are some people in there that I know and that I crossed paths with, it's very funny. But the truth is that at the time, I was a 27 year old graduate student, working on the beginnings of my German doctoral thesis about American constitutional law, at Harvard. And I was sitting in, I had been out of Germany for 2 years, this was my third year. And I was writing about direct democracy in the United States, and the reason why I was doing that was because, of course, so much was happening in Europe, including in my own country, and it seemed to me that civil society was kind of coming into its own and that maybe direct democracy would be a useful vehicle and involving civil society in a sort of organized, institutionalized way, in the making of politics and policy. And that is a view which I have since comprehensively reneged on, not least because of writing this doctoral thesis, but that's just a footnote. And so on that day, I was sitting at my desk, which is one of these, you know, we had as students, like a door from Home Depot on, you know, on wooden, you know, on file cabinets, and I was wearing, I am almost certain I was wearing my double layered thermal underwear from L.L. Bean because that was the only way to survive a Massachusetts winter. I still got pneumonia a couple times. And this friend calls me and says the wall's down. And this friend is pretty conservative, I was sort of vaguely left of center and I said Angelica, what the hell? You know, you and your stupid political jokes. And she just said, turn on the TV. And I was sort of went to the TV like I'm an automaton, and it was one of these, you know, I was living with roommates and so we had a communal living room and there was this enormous chest, you know, or 1960's chest shaped TV with grainy black and white images. And I turned it on and I see all these people dancing on top of the wall, with sledgehammers and champagne bottles, and I was thunderstruck. I was completely thunderstruck. And the thing is, the thing that I, that then was worked completely floored me, I burst into tears. And I was sobbing, I'm literally sobbing my eyes out, and I, it's basically taken me the last 30 years since then, to process why I sobbed my eyes out, because really, I had no personal reason to be affected by this in any way. I was a foreign service brat, we had no family behind the Iron Curtain, as it was called, to send packages to who might have come and visited us, and I was sort of in my vaguely left of center way, sort of thought, you know, you can't keep 30 million East Germans just, you know, with a wall. And also, the people who were on the right, like my friend Angelica, wanted parts of Poland back, which I thought was a doesn't, and you know, just unconscionable. And so one tended to think that it couldn't be as bad as the revisionists made it out to be, literally I had not paid attention for most of my, you know, young adult life. I had however, started paying attention that summer, and that was because my mother had become very I'll and we had, I had been flying back and forth, and despite the fact that my mother was in intensive care units in Franklin University for a variety of reasons, she's had a brain tumor and then had complications and so on. My mother insisted on us reading the news to her every morning at 8:00 am, and it was really through the reactions of my parents, who were absolutely mesmerized, thrilled, completely captivated, by what was going on in Poland and in Hungary, and then the tens of thousands marching in East Germany, and the East German police not shooting. But nobody quite knowing where this was heading. And of course, we had all seen the brutal bloody crackdown in Tiananmen Square, so everybody was terrified that Tiananmen Square would happen all over again in East Berlin. And so, that had all built up inside me, I was perfectly, although for me it didn't seem personal, I was perfectly aware that I was seeing world history. I was also completely, I completely understood in that moment, that what was happening had just changed my adult life forever. And I mean, as I write in this essay, I had really sort of gone to America thinking, Jesus, if I can stay here, this would be so great. Because frankly, just Cold War Europe and Cold War Germany, was just, was horrible. And so, in that moment, I realized that I was going back. That was a pretty big shift. >> John Haskell: So, Hope, you've written about what [inaudible] German leaders drew from the history of the wall. Could you, you know, capture that for us, summarize that for us, I know that-- >> Hope M. Harrison: I will, but I can't resist commenting on the crazy reverse situation we're in. Because Constanze was a German in the U.S. on November 9th. I was an American on a plane headed to Berlin on November 9th. I boarded the plane November 9th, when nothing had happened, flew to Frankford where I caught the commuter plane from Frankford to West Berlin, a long planned trip. Get on the commuter flight from Frankford to Berlin, and everyone's reading newspapers, because now it's November 10th. And the headlines, huge headlines [foreign phrase], the wall is open! I too was a graduate student, as you were, I was writing my dissertation at Columbia, on the Berlin Wall. >> John Haskell: Nothing to write about [inaudible] >> Hope M. Harrison: And suddenly, the pilot gets on the intercom and says, ladies and gentlemen, in case you haven't heard, the Berlin Wall fell last night and we are flying into history. So, while Constanze was sitting at Harvard, I was in the incredible situation of being in Berlin, and West Berlin and East Berlin, for 10 days following the opening, watching them remove sections of the wall so East Germans could come through. Watching West Germans embrace them and everyone crying, me crying, you know, it was so moving to see all of this. Champagne being sold on street corners. I went to some of these demonstrations in East Berlin, to see what was going on. I saw [foreign name] speak at [foreign name], about this amazing moment. So, in some sense that experience of watching the immediate aftermath of the opening of the wall, was the beginning of this book I have just published, After the Berlin Wall. So, looking back, your question John, about lessons German leaders have drawn about this; these kinds of lessons have changed over the past 30 years and that's what I really write about. My book looks at how Germans have grappled with this part of their history over the past 30 years. As you may very well know, Germany has grappled with the Holocaust, really significantly, in great detail, they have come face to face with that dark past, and atoned for it in many ways, and continue to do that. So I was interested to see, what about this more recent past? What about the 40 years of communist East Germany and particularly the 298 years of the Berlin Wall, how has Germany grappled with that and how is that process been connected with how Germany has handled the Holocaust past? And those are things I talk about. So on the question of lessons German leaders have drawn, I'll give you sort of two examples. In 2009, for the 20th anniversary of the fall of the wall, which is a huge celebration in Berlin, and a picture of the celebration at the Brandenburg Gate, with fireworks going off, if the cover of my book. And for that anniversary, 10 years ago, the Germans drew very sort of positive lessons about the history of the wall, focusing on the fall of the wall, saying look, this was all peaceful, these, we have to thank the brave East German citizens who, in the fall of 1989, took to the streets demanding change, not knowing whether they were going to be faced with a Tiananmen Square type solution, because the East German regime made it clear they admired the Chinese for how they had cracked down in June of 1989. So as things heated up in East Germany in the fall of 1989, every single person who decided to go out onto the streets, 70,000 people in Leipzig, a month before the wall fell. Over 100,000 in East Berlin, 5 days before the wall fell. Every single one of those East Germans had to wonder, am I going to get beaten up? Might I be killed? Might I be imprisoned? And if any of those things happen, might they take my children away from me? That's what the East German regime did sometimes with people that were opponents to the regime, if they put you in prison, they sometimes took your kids, put them in orphanages, or put them up for adoption with reliable East German citizens. So, it was no small matter for those East Germans to decide to go out to the streets. So for the 20th anniversary in 2009, the lessons the German leaders focused on were the brave East German citizens wanting freedom and democracy, and saying this is the lesson of the wall, Germans can be democrats, Germans can be actively engaged in peacefully calling for change, for democracy and for freedom, and they are an inspiration. That remains a lesson, but the mood in Germany now, 30 years later, particularly over the past 4 years since the refugee crisis, and the sense of division Berlin Wall East and West, the rise of the far right, the rise of xenophobia, they remember that but they, for example, President Steinmeier, who gave a speech on, this year on the 30th anniversary, at the Brandenburg Gate, he remembered those people, but he also said, you know what, we Germans now are building walls. They're not literal wall, they're walls between each other, including between East and West, between rich and poor, we're not listening to each other. Only with ourselves can take down those walls. And again, thinking of the bad history of the wall, sort of the violence, and thinking of sometimes the violence in Germany against refugees. So the wall has both a very negative history, the 28 years it stood, the people that were killed, the regime who decided to build it. But also, this wonderful sort of happy ending positive side of, it came down peacefully. >> John Haskell: Constanze, what, where are we today, from your perspective, commenting on what Hope had to say. >> Constanze Stelzenmuller: Yeah, well, it's true that for my generation of Germans, and in fact, sociologists have at some point decided to call us the '89-ers, because '89 was the definitive event of our lives. For us, and this is, I'm quoting something I say in my essay, '89 was a moment of amazing grace. And I mean that in a theological sense, because it was a gift who enormity we only were slowly learning to understand and one which, at least our generation, had done absolutely nothing to deserve. It was really, you know, it was the Poles, the Hungarians, the Czechs, the Polish pope, it was Gorbachev, it was the East Germans marching, it was some West Germans who had smuggled printer's ink or written letters to prison directors, that did also happen, that was a very much part of the West German culture. But it was by no means, universal. And for many of us, like me, profoundly ignorant, and only started realizing over time, the enormity of the political shift that has just taken place. And in some ways, I mean I always felt it was like a gift that I was trying to live up to really. But the, Hope is right that this 30th anniversary has been particularly glum. And in some ways, I will say that I think that that is a good thing, because being German, I am slightly perhaps, Hope is very polite, I would be a little more critical towards how Germans interpreted the lessons of 1989 because there was, there has of course, always been will the increasing German awareness of the crimes of the [inaudible] and of World War II, there's also a sense of mounting complacency. You know, we've done the whole atonement thing, other people haven't. And in 1989, it is not unfair to say that a lot of Germans concluded, with a deep sense of personal satisfaction, even if they, like me, had done absolutely nothing to create the situation, that really, from having been behind everybody else in history for a century, we were suddenly out in front. We were now the good example for everybody and everybody would now become like us and this included our dear brothers and sisters from the Eastern German lender who are now proposing to join us, of course on our terms and under our rules because what else would it be, right? I think the single thing that the East Germans got to keep, was the ability to turn right on red. And which, as far as I'm concerned, is a good thing. But, I was a junior journalist in the early '90s, I was doing a [inaudible] internship at a daily paper in West Berlin, Tagesspiegel, and I as, you know, yelled here and was out the door when, if somebody said there was, we needed to cover a hunger strike in one of the factories being dismantled, either in East Berlin or on in Brandenburg, the land that surrounds it or further afield and I also covered some of the court cases in which the border guards and their commanding officers were tried, and I have to say that even in those early years, I had very, very mixed feelings about how we were doing this. I mean it seemed to me, very clear, that the GBR really was an [foreign word], in other words, a state that treated the majority of its citizens in a way that we would, we I think under most standards of human rights, we would consider illegitimate and unlawful. But at the same time, it was clear that these, that the ordinary, there were also ordinary citizens who had not been in any way implicated in the system, and who were paying a huge personal price for this transformation, in ways that one, I felt one had to empathize with and we weren't doing as a society, and particularly as a West German, as the West German half not doing enough to empathize with. And now of course, you see in 2019, we have a hard right party, the alternative for Germany, which has been campaigning with the slogan, full [inaudible] vendor, complete the revolution. On what is essentially an anti-system ticket, basically saying, and all you have to do is read their party program, it's translated not just into Russian and Hungarian, but also into English. And it basically calls the current constitutional order of the United Federal Republic, illegitimate. If that's not enough for you, I urge you to read their military policy paper that they published this summer, which is absolutely hair raising and I do military and security policy. This is a party that wants to change the nature of our constitutional order. In much the same way that say, you know, [inaudible], or Viktor Orban, or certainly Vladimir Putin, would recognize as eminently, you know, in tune with their preferences. I have to say, I'm horrified that we are even there. I'm horrified that they get 10% in the west and up to 28% in the east. And they have just held a party, a general their annual party conference, which to me, demonstrated that they are acting in a very strategic and very disciplined way, something that they weren't doing in their early years. And that, to me, is as an anniversary, as an anniversary phenomenon, deeply troubling. And I think that we Germans in particularly we westerners, have a great deal to answer for in terms of the complacency that we, I think that we, that prevented us from addressing some of the legitimate concerns of our new follow East German citizens. That's a really hard thing to have to learn, and that's a very somber lesson, and it's one that is repeated in different ways throughout the transformation, the transformed democracies of Eastern Europe. Because, let's not forget, that what we're talking about here was part of a much larger, much larger phenomenon of the toppling of communist regimes all across Eastern Europe, the dissolution of the soviet union, and this then in turn became an example for citizen movements trying to topple authoritarian governances, governments, in Latin America and Asia, and in Africa, South Korea, Chile, Argentina, South Africa of course. And it seems to me that this really calls into question in the most fundamental way, our ability to preserve the representative democracy and open societies, that have to me, is the great civilizational achievement of the post-World War II era. >> John Haskell: So you, you know Hope mentioned walls within Germany, you've put some flesh on that by talking about the AFD and its platform. You've written and spoke about, Constanze, the idea that while walls are being built politically throughout Europe, and some countries are even, you know, much further along, then AFD gets 10%, you know, in the west and quite a bit higher in the east, but still nowhere near getting power yet. The-- >> Hope M. Harrison: Well they are the third, they are the third-- >> John Haskell: Number, they're number three, yeah. >> Hope M. Harrison: -- biggest party in the-- >> Constanze Stelzenmuller: They're the leaders of the opposition in the-- >> John Haskell: I didn't mean to belittle that accomplishment so to speak, but you have this, you've written about the political divergence that you're seeing throughout Europe, at the same time as the economies are more and more integrated and so there's this, I mean there's, is that just simply an interesting irony or what kind of-- >> Constanze Stelzenmuller: No, I think what, I mean there is obviously a huge debate going on right now about why western societies appear to be succumbing to this fear of complexity, succumbing to authoritarian temptations, flirting with the anti-democratic. And there are a variety, they're, I mean every western country, including this one, is going through this moment. All of us are going through polarization, political self-segregation, and phenomena that we would more associate with Europe in the 1920's, than with the outgoing, with the beginning of the 21st century. And it's certainly an object lesson to all of those who thought that history was always going to be linear and would always be progressive. I think the biggest lesson of all this is that democracy and open societies need to be defended, they aren't self-repairing. But, the, I think that that's about as much generalization as I'm willing to do. It's, I think, really quite important to look at each political space and analyze the sort of culturally politically specific reasons why representative democracy is being contested in this way. And I would say that there are some cultures where there is clearly an economic explanation for this, and I would say that the United States is one of them, because it is, happens to be true that the entry of China into the global trade system and the WTO, literally really did a great deal to syphon off jobs from certain regions in America, and that has had political consequences, but I would add to that, that was probably helped by, shall we say the deregulating, not just of economic markets, but also of political institutions. Things like gerrymandering, money [inaudible] Citizens United, campaign finances, et cetera, exactly. Whereas I think, you know, it is notable that Germany has full employment, has had until quite recently, a roaring economy and that the living standards of the east and west in Germany have actually been converging. So the question there clearly has more to do with the politics of memory and the politics of identity than with actual economics. And so on, we could take this through other spaces in Eastern Europe where I think you have to be very careful in examining and identifying the precise reasons why this is happening. >> John Haskell: You want an opportunity [inaudible] because that's what you write about is politics of memory, Hope. >> Hope M. Harrison: Yes, and also specifically to sort of follow on about what Constanze's been telling, but the situation in Germany Berlin Wall east and west, and the question of democracy. You know, in a recent survey asking is Germans, is democracy the best form of government; 77% of West Germans said, yes, that's what they lived with for 50 years. Only 42% of the East Germans now, in 2019, agreed that democracy is the best form of government. Then when they were asked, is United Germany a democracy in terms of guaranteeing certain basic rights, such as freedom of speech, 2/3 of West Germans said yes, but only half of East Germans said yes. Feeling sort of, you know, they're supposed to be careful with what they say in terms of being critical of the system or maybe having positive things to say about the East German system. When asked is the legal system independent of politics, 56% of West Germans say yes, and only 39% of the East Germans. On the question of how united people feel, when asked do you feel more German or do you feel more Eastern or Western German? Among East Germans, 47% feel East German and only 44% feel German. So, there is this identity issuer happening with sort of different views of what's going on, different views of democracy, different views of the future, different views of the past. And on the question, because I know we're going to get to also the question of German relations with the U.S., when asked you know, what poses a danger to democracy in Germany, people mentioned right winning extremism of course, they mention left winning extremism, they mention migrants, but they also mention the U.S. You know, seeing the U.S. now as a danger to democracy. So there are not only are there these divisions within Germany, but as we all know, from reading the newspapers, there are also important divisions between the U.S. and Germany, certainly at the level of the leaders, but also, you know, average citizens. You know, looking at polls on how average citizens in the U.S. and Germany see those relations. Germans are much more optimistic, I think 2/3 of Germans see the relations as very good. I mean, sorry, of Americans see the relations as very good. Whereas a much smaller number of Germans >> Constanze Stelzenmuller: Not so much. >> John Haskell: Yeah, that's really interesting data. You want to comment on that? >> Constanze Stelzenmuller: Yeah, I would like to add something to that, I mean all of that is true. But I have to say, having run a survey myself for 2 years, I'm always, I think sort of you know, you have to be, you sort of, you can use surveys as a starting point, and then you sort of have to look at other stuff that's happening at the same time. And it seems to me that one of the most important things that is happening right now, and wasn't happening before, and that echoes what happened in West Germany, or began to happen in the late '70s really, when younger Germans started interrogating their families about what they, where they had been during the Third Reich, and what they had done. And I think that the conversation among the East Germans about who had done what under communist rule, is really only just starting. I think that that was repressed for a very long time. And speaking of repression, it's important to keep in mind that in, that many of these, you're talking about a situation where everybody did something to somebody, very often. The people who were in the resistance or who were marching in the streets, were a minority of the citizenry. At the height of the demonstration you had what, 70,000 in Leipzig? The total population of East Germany was 30 million. And if you look at the work, the outcome of the work of the so-called [foreign name] that the agency created affair Germany was unified, to look through the files that the [inaudible] had kept meticulously on its citizens and to, and the, there are some truly horrific, tragic stories coming out of that, of neighbors, family members, and even married couples, spying and reporting on each other. And it is incredibly difficult to have this kind of discussion with your parents, it is a little easier to have them about your grandparents. And I think that is what is happening now. You're seeing now, that's what I found in writing my essay, there is a whole new burgeoning of literature about, not just what happened in 1989, but the familial context of families who had been part of the system in one way or another. Where the grandfather and the father had been in either the Stasse or in the military and the kids and the grandkids came out of this in 1989 and were suddenly confronted with an entirely new system, but at home faced family members, older members, you know, people whom they loved and were close to, who were not just, you know, who were not just shall we say, ambivalent about this, but deeply, deeply, hostile to these events. And who, in some ways, had been, had not just lost their social status but had been emasculated by this. And I will, there is a, on Twitter there is a, in German Twitter there is a new hash tag called [foreign term], baseball bat years, and it was created by a guy whom I've just talked to and whom I have been reading, a journalist who writes for [inaudible] online, and he's, and this is a motif that has been, that more and more people are coming out and writing about now, about being 10 year olds in 1989, in rural or suburban communities that are essentially lawless zones, where young neo Nazi thugs, roam and are the forces of order and the instrument that they use to impose order is baseball bats. And I in fact, experienced this myself. I write this in the essay, there was one, I had to cover a trial of young neo Nazis, in Frankford [inaudible] which is on the Polish border, it's a 1 hour train trip from Berlin, and I go there and I was already pretty negatively impressed by how these young guys were sort of sitting there in front of the judge, you know, insolently indifferent to what the judge and the jury were saying, and then I, you know, go out after the court session is over to file my report, and I find myself in the middle of a battle, of a battle, between the supporters of the neo Nazis, and anti [inaudible], all of them with baseball bats, some of them who had brought [inaudible] with busses, who were basically beating each other around the head in the bushes and the trees around the courthouse, and I literally sort of, you know, jumped to safety somewhere and then ran off to the train station, and this was, I think, far more virulent and far more prevalent than people saw. And I suspect that we could tell similar stories about other parts of Europe that underwent these [inaudible] processes. In other words, the communist, the [inaudible] state had disappeared, the enforcement state had disappeared, and the new state was either not strong enough or basically in denial about what was happening to move in and do something about this. And I think that this has a, plays a tremendous role in some of the resentment that we're seeing here. And one final point is if you read these autobiographical reports that are now being published, there is a not insignificant element of generational and familial continuity between support of the Nazis before 1945 and being members of the GDR functional elites after 1945, and that of course, is in direct [inaudible] to the founding myth of the GDR, which was that all the Nazis had stayed on the other side of the wall. >> John Haskell: Normally we're proud of baseball as a cultural export, but not in this particular case. >> Constanze Stelzenmuller: In this case I would say not so much. >> John Haskell: So let's, let's switch gears for the last few minutes before we take a few questions, to the question of U.S. /German relations and how that's changed. I guess we all get the sense, although the NATO Summit may have complicated it a little bit, and we can go there too if you want, but we all get the sense that there's more tensions now in the last few years between the U.S. and Germany than there had been. Why is that? Either of you want to kick it off. Is that an easy answer or? >> Hope M. Harrison: Well, I mean there's no question part of it is Trump, many, many Germans, I mean Germans really loved Obama. I think it was the country, I think it was the country outside of the U.S. where people most, where he was most popular. So, it's been a huge change in that regard. But there has been, there's been increasing skepticism by many Germans for a long time, about the U.S. which pains me, but I've watched it happen. You know, in some ways starting with George W. Bush and the Iraq War, Germans who, you know, since World War II have become most of them, very anti-military and anti-war and you know, you add that with sort of the people in the east who were always trained to sort of be against the U.S. and against NATO, with a general German opposition to use of military force, and that, you know, the war against Iraq in 2003 was an important beginning. Obama, the National Security Agency, ultimately finding out that it had been listening in on Angela Merkel's cell phone. Okay, they loved Obama, but they sure did not like that. And then with Trump attacking Merkel and attacking the Germans so much that, you know, to me it's been very dismaying because older generations of West Germans of course felt the incredible importance of the German/U.S. alliance because of the U.S. after World War II, the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift, saving West Berlin when Stalin blockaded it. Then the U.S. role in German unification; after the wall fell, Europeans were pretty worried. Thatcher, [inaudible], Gorbachev, the Poles, were quite worried, remembering what had happened the last time Germany was united, you know, with the Nazis in World War II and the Holocaust. So, it was really only George Bush Senior, who supported the process, actively supported, and wasn't afraid of that process. So, that was of course a very positive moment, but people, older generations remember what the U.S. has done, including in unification, many of them you know, remember, fondly in some cases, the U.S. forces, all the U.S. troops and getting to know them, American music, all these different things. And that has also been sort of the basis of you know, for a lot of Americans getting to know Germany because, you know, they were stationed there and there're many fewer of those now. There are 35 thousand active duty U.S. soldiers in Germany and actually a recent survey shows that a majority of Germans would actually like to see them go. So, you know, I think there have been, there's been a tendency growing, a critical tendency in Germany, of the U.S. which has only become exacerbated under Trump, and Constanze and I both are parts of transatlantic networks that, you know, do all we possibly can to keep fostering U.S. /German relations and sort of weathering this storm. >> John Haskell: So I'll give you the last word so that we can have time for a few questions [inaudible] for that. >> Constanze Stelzenmuller: Yeah, I mean everything that Hope says is correct, I didn't think I'd see the day when I'd be trolled by an American ambassador to Germany in Twitter, that has happened to me and it's not pleasant. And yes, you know, my dad was a 16 year old POW, and was just you know, thrilled by the experience, the Americans sent him to translator school in Leipzig in 1947. My dad ended up, you've heard this story, as the set translator on the Howard Hawks' movie, I Was a Male War Bride, which was filmed in [inaudible], the region where my mother's from, in [inaudible]. So if you ever see that movie, it's Cary Grant and Ann Sheridan in front of the camera, Howard Hawks and my dad behind it. Unfortunately, my dad's first girlfriend, who married [inaudible] in Oregon, took the signed picture with her to Oregon, it's somewhere out there. Anyway, I would really like to get that picture back frankly. But, but you know, yeah, when I was a kid in [inaudible], the then capital of the federal republic, there was an American club where friends of my parents were members and there was really nothing greater for us kids, as far as we were concerned, than being invited to the [foreign name], on a Saturday afternoon, hitting the swimming pool, and then getting a hamburger and an ice cream sundae. As far as we were concerned, I mean you know, that made you know, sort of helps vassals of America for us forever. The other thing frankly that seduced me at an impressionable age, was in the [foreign name], the American settlement around the embassy, which I mean, you have to, if any of you, if you've never been there, you have to imagine German city, you know, nice [inaudible] city among the vineyards, and then you go off to the left on the [inaudible] in the direction of the south, and you were suddenly in a, you have American roads, American sidewalks, and you have this little green clearing with a white clapboard, New England church and a sort of little sort of colonnade of shops and a movie theatre. And in the movie theatre, you paid with either a douche mark or a quarter, and my mother had a friend, an American who was married to a German, who explained to her that the birthright of modern woman, was Saturday afternoon off, and the way that you did this was packing your kids off to the movies. And my mother, who was very sort of serious about culture, had serious misgivings because she felt that American movies were not culture. But the prospect of getting rid of us for several hours, won over and so I was shipped off together with the friend's four kids, and my little brother, and I saw every single movie ever made about the Korean War, all the Disney movies, I was carried screaming out of Fantastic Voyage. But you get, this is the kind of thing, I'm saying this only half-jokingly, that had an immense influence on generations of German [inaudible] growing up, and one of the saddest things in my view, is the Americans closing down all of the [foreign name] in German cities, because those were really important for building these bridges. I mean, you were right, the German, right now German/American political relations are at an all-time low, and I've been writing about this for the last 25 years as a journalist or as a think tanker, I have never seen anything like this. And I will say also to you, and I've written this, that Trump has a point in some of his critiques of Germany. Our defense expenditures, our trade surpluses, I'd say guilty as charged. Those things are problems not just for America but also for European neighbors starting with the Poles, and others. But the problem is that this administration seems to have a hostility to the European Union and a nation that Germany is some of its puppet master in ways that I find deeply disturbing. And they go well beyond what I would say is an ordinary and reasonable sort of political debate to be had. That's where, that's what I'm most worried about. Not the security [inaudible] although I will say as a security expert, that is enough to give anybody nightmares. The weaponization of economic interdependence, which I think is ultimately deeply harmful to America. But it's the culture war framing that really freaks me out. It's this nation that we are, or that America is in some sort of civilizational end of days, you know, contest, with the forces of darkness and that the forces of darkness are non-Christian, have different skin color, that's where it gets a little edgy for my taste. And I honestly and with that this sort of you know, the contempt for you know, the nation of a rules based international order, the contempt for representative democracy and open societies, that is unfortunately picked up upon by right winning movements, not just in my country, but elsewhere. That's what makes me think this is a very dangerous moment and one where civil societies can't reach out to each other enough to help us all get through this. But ultimately, I think all of us, what we share, is I think a sense of concern about our own political spaces. But I think what unites us, is a profound, a profound commitment to values that ought to be able to see us, help us, you know, work our way through this and I think, you know, if we don't do it together, you know the famous saying, if we are not hanged together, we will definitely hang separately. That is, I think, I worry that that is a place we might end up and I would find that very sad, because I still believe that we have much good to find in each other. >> John Haskell: Let's see if we can, we have a couple questions in the next few minutes. Just signal, there's a gentleman back there, Mike. [ Ambient Noise ] >> I was curious about your reaction to, when President Reagan gave his speech and said, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall, emphasizing that the Russians were as much responsible for it and responsible for Eastern Germany. What kind of reaction was there to that? And how big a role did that play in the wall being torn down? >> John Haskell: Interesting question. >> Hope M. Harrison: Well, that speech was in June of 1987, so that was 2 1/2 years before the wall fell, the West Germans who were hosting Ronald Reagan for that speech in West Berlin right at the wall, right at the Brandenburg Gate, West Germans under Helmut Kohl were in fact, really worried about that, felt that that was too aggressive, because at that point in 1987, no one remotely thought the wall was going to come down. The reason Reagan said that was Gorbachev had just started some major reforms, he's come to power in '85, this was now '87, and Reagan was saying, if you are really serious about all these reforms you're making to communism, then tear down the wall. That's sort of where it came from. The West Germans felt that this was sort of rocking the boat too much, they're at the front line of the Cold War. In fact, a few months after that, Helmut Kohl hosted the East German leader, Erich Honecker, in the capital of Bohne, for full, you know, I mean they were toasting each other with champagne, both flags were flying, they're reviewing the troops together, I mean there was no sense that East Germany or communism, you know, in East Germany, were going away anytime soon. So, you know, in terms of actual impact on the fall of the wall, I would argue Reagan's speech had very, very little impact, it was 2 1/2 years before, I mean when you ask Germans, you know what sort of led to it and if you ask historians, they will focus on Gorbechev's reforms, Poland's reforms, and you know, what was going on in East Germany with what they now call the Peaceful Revolution, of all the people taking to the streets. Yes, having a U.S. leader who sort of kept saying, you know, we don't accept communism and this isn't good, the people who most responded to that were the people who were imprisoned in East Germany and elsewhere, and you know, were strong opponents to the regime and really wanted external pressure on the regime. Many of those people were really grateful sort of saying, oh thank God, here I am languishing in prison, but at least somebody out there realizes, you know, what's really going on. Yeah, so-- >> Constanze Stelzenmuller: Well, but you know, I would say of course, and I didn't think this at the time, as a 27 year old, but of course Reagan was right. And I think that both Reagan's and Pope John Paul the second, and I'm a Lutheran, I'm not a Catholic, but both, so I'm not saying this because I'm a Catholic, I'm saying that both John Paul the second and Reagan, with their firm commitment to ending communism as a system of governance that was inimical to human, to a descent way of life, to a descent society and a just domestic order, were entirely in the right in retrospect, I think they have to be given their proper place in the pantheon of people whom we, at least I as a German, feel grateful for. >> John Haskell: So we've got time for, what I'm going to do is, there's three people have signaled me, and we don't have time for more than that, so we'll have all three of them, there's two folks over here, Andrew, which is [inaudible] and Anna, and then the gentleman right in front of me here. So why don't you each ask a quick question and then these two will brilliantly bring them together. Do you have the mic [inaudible]? Go ahead. >> Yeah, thanks for your talk and just a really quick question; you spoke about your personal like biographies, where you were when the wall came down, and spoke maybe in the level of comparative politics, looking at Germany, United States, maybe the bilateral relationship, but wondered if you could take the level of analysis up even more and look at the long term ideological and geopolitical consequences of the fall of the Berlin Wall. So if we think in the history of the 20th century, you know, fascism, communism, liberalism, the war of the German succession, capitalism and communism, where is-- >> John Haskell: You're going to have to do this in 30 seconds. >> Where is the fall of the Berlin Wall in a much broader kind of timeline? >> John Haskell: And hand that up, you can hand it off to-- oh, I thought you did, I'm sorry. Then the gentleman over here, we'll just piggyback those two, and then we'll let these guys sort out [inaudible] excellent question. >> Is it possible to talk about what the Berlin Wall meant to Berliners, the people of Berlin, East Berlin, West Berlin, and what Berliners are doing today, and the role of Berlin in Germany, the political power and what it means to the world? >> John Haskell: Alright, you each got 2 minutes to bring together-- >> Hope M. Harrison: Okay, what the wall meant to Berliners; for many of them it was devastating, it divided families, it divided friends, some people had been going to school on the other side, they couldn't do that anymore, they had been working on the other side, they couldn't do that anymore, you know, I mean a massive, massive change. so heartbreaking for many. So the fall of the wall, was you know, this wonderful thing, this moment of relief as you know, as amazing grace. They are remembering families have been brought together, they remember people who were killed at the wall, there is now a national Berlin Wall Memorial where you can go look at what it looked like, they have some pieces of it, they have a display outside in the former death strip, it's a seven block long site that tells the history the wall, so yeah, a profound, as people say gash through their lives and through the city. If you didn't live there, you know, you weren't as affected, West Berliners for a lot of West Berliners, some of it was in their backyard, they're having a barbeque and, you know, the wall happens to be there. It just, a lot of West Berliners and West Germans got used to it. You know, more as background and many of them went and painted on the wall, on the external side of the wall which you certainly couldn't do on the eastern side. The big, big question, well I mean, partly Constanze has said this, and German leaders always say this, you know, that the fall of the wall showed that freedom, you can't stifle forever the desire for freedom. And you know, I mean that lesson that sort of everybody drew in 1989, which things have backtracked since then, but it's certainly in that epic context of the Cold War between communism and democracy, communism and capitalism, at the time it sure seemed like, you know, democracy and capitalism had won out these, you know, more hardline repressive regimes had lost. And you know, as these regimes toppled and then the Soviet Union itself toppled 2 years later, it sure seemed in the grand scheme of things, which is partly why Frances Fukuyama wrote back then, you know, about the end of history. It sure seemed like, okay, they agree, those people behind the Iron Curtain, they want democracy and all that comes with it, or and capitalism, or some combination. But you know, what we've learned, is that it's not so easy, particularly we all see even in this country, the problems with capitalism, the haves and have nots, you know, that communism didn't have that, there were, there weren't these big, big gaps, which is something that the people in east feel very much. And also, democracy and sort of civic activism, you know, one of the lessons the German leaders say about 1989, you know, it shows the importance of civil activism. Well the only problem with that is, that's also what the AFD, that's what the far right party is doing you know, they're getting out on the streets, they're being civically active. So you know, just because you're being really active and wanting to make your voice heard, it's not always for democracy. So, the legacy has become much more complicated 30 years later, than people thought for a while after 1989. >> John Haskell: Quick last word. >> Constanze Stelzenmuller: Yep-- >> John Haskell: And then the fun stuff, we have a reception, books, and one other thing to say. >> Constanze Stelzenmuller: Drinks. >> John Haskell: Exactly. >> Constanze Stelzenmuller: Alcohol. There is a cottage industry right now, suggesting that liberal democracy and a rules based international order are essentially relics of the 20th century. And that the sort of modern age of economic interdependence and great power of competition is at least as suited to or maybe even more suited to, shall we say authoritarian constitutional operating systems. I think that that is a defeatist narrative, and one that essentially sort of, you know, puts up its hands when faced with the complexities of the modern age, and I think that my personal inclination is, and my urge to others, is to fiercely resist that. But what I do think that we have underestimated is just how hard freedom is. And it becomes particularly hard, when you're worried about where your next meal is going to come from and whether you have a shadow of a chance at living a descent life in a society that appears to be fragmenting around you. And I think the lesson from that for us, is that you know, you, I think really the lesson of the 20th century for all of us is, particularly for western societies but I suspect for others as well, is that it matters how we construct our systems of governance. I personally believe that representative democracy is not a flaw, but a competitive advantage of western societies, but it doesn't repair itself, it doesn't create itself. And it is the product of a very carefully calibrated and designed architecture of constitutional legislation of laws and of institutions. And if you let people destroy these institutions, and if people, if you let people destroy the social contract, then it should not come as surprise to anybody if people think that freedom under those circumstances is too hard. So I think the challenge for all of us is to look at what we have and say, is this good enough to weather what is clearly a climate change, not just in international relations, but also in domestic politics. We are clearly looking at a sort of, I think climate change is actually really good metaphor for this. Because of the, because climate change if a product of, I mean we all live in an ecosystem, and we are finding it increasingly hard to regulate and control that ecosystem. And I think what we need to look at is how to protect it, and how to make it stronger against these forces that are buffeting us. That's where we are, and I think all of us can think of things in our own systems that we think could use some repairing. And break this down into things that can be done locally or in a state level or international level, and be a part of that. It's not that hard. And if anything, it seems to me, I thought after 1989, that we were moving into something of a political consumer culture. In other words, we were leaving the hard work of democracy to self-appointed political elites, and we were ordering stuff from Amazon. And as far as I'm concerned, this is a moment when it's kind of good to rediscover the virtues of citizenship again. And as far as I'm, you know, I think that's a good thing. >> John Haskell: So let me tell you that I can't command enough to you the recent writings of Hope and Constanze, and right now I'm going to tell you how to get your hands on them. Hope's new book, After the Fall, will be available back behind the reception area and she'll, I think she'll be nice enough to sign a copy for you too. >> Hope M. Harrison: Of course. >> John Haskell: And-- >> Constanze Stelzenmuller: But you have to pay for it. >> John Haskell: Yeah, you have to pay for it. Constanze's essay that I described before, German Lessons, if you google Stelzenmuller and German lessons, you'll find it. And if you're like me, you might miss a metro stop as you're reading it and end up at Eastern Market on the way to work tomorrow, if you work up here. That happened to me. Because it's really riveting and we thank you both so much for your-- >> Constanze Stelzenmuller: Thank you, thank you for hosting us. [ Applause ] >> Hope M. Harrison: Such a pleasure. >> Constanze Stelzenmuller: Thank you for doing this. >> John Haskell: Very nice.