#Alternate history communist germany free#

This vision wasnвЂ™t the product of a pat ideology rather, it unfolded spontaneously in the multitude of East BerlinвЂ™s unclaimed spaces, or freiraum.ДЄ quarter of a century later, the legacy of BerlinвЂ™s zero hour reverberates, especially in the cityвЂ™s raw urban vibe that lures world-famous artists and filmmakers, publishing houses and galleries, adventure-seeking young Americans, and millions of tourists a year. That year offered a fleeting glimpse of what another kind of Germany-indeed, postвЂ“Cold War democracy-could look like: a nation imbued with the spirit of community solidarity, bottom-up decision-making, and a sharing economy. The future was up in the air, open for a fresh start and original designs. It is hard to fathom now, but just after the Wall came down, the unification of the two Germanies was by no means assured. The вЂњwonderful year of anarchy,вЂќ as the German publisher Christoph Links labeled it, between the fall of the Wall and unification is a little-known chapter in the history of Berlin and Germany as a whole. The WallвЂ™s breach ushered in an exhilarating period of people power, improvisation, and revelry, which I both chronicled and took part in. I was twenty-something myself, a novice journalist living between Budapest and Berlin during the year of tumult.

In late 19 I watched East BerlinвЂ™s transformation through the lens of the 47 Schreiner Street squatters. One couldnвЂ™t have known it at the time, but this ethos would infuse Berlin for years to come and does even today, earning GermanyвЂ™s capital a reputation as one of EuropeвЂ™s hippest metropolises. The Iron CurtainвЂ™s breach and CommunismвЂ™s demise unleashed a groundswell of utopian energy and DIY zeal, most powerfully focused in the occupied spaces of East BerlinвЂ™s inner city districts, such as Friedrichshain. They came from East and West Germany, as well as from across Europe and beyond, to initiate BerlinвЂ™s rebirth as a cosmopolitan center after decades of reclusion.

#Alternate history communist germany free#

Throughout 1990, DJs, artists and wannabe artists, middle-class students, activist filmmakers, clubbers, musicians, and other free spirits would occupy hundreds of apartment buildings, vacant shops, shuttered warehouses, and long-forgotten subterranean vaults. They appropriated the five-story building, 47 Schreiner Street, and, in so doing, sparked a chain reaction across the city. The вЂwonderful year of anarchy,вЂ™В between the fall of the Wall and unification is a little-known chapter in the history of Berlin and Germany as a whole. For them the two projects-the squat and the GDRвЂ™s thoroughgoing democratization-were deeply intertwined. Their intention that day was expressly political: to occupy an empty apartment building in which they would live by libertine principles while they fought to turn the newly no-longer-communist German Democratic Republic (GDR) into a state more, not less, liberal than its neighbor, West Germany.

Although, as a rule, anarchists eschew leaders, one might have mistaken Silvio Meier, a small-framed guy whose magnetic personality eclipsed his slight physique, for the groupвЂ™s frontman. The group of friends-and fellow conspirators under the Communist regime-considered themselves anarchists. On a chilly December morning in 1989, just weeks after the Berlin WallвЂ™s breach, eight scruffy-looking, twenty-something Germans gathered in East BerlinвЂ™s old working-class district of Friedrichshain. This is the first time it has been reproduced online in its entirety. EditorвЂ™s Note: This essay originally appeared in the November/December 2014 issue of Boston Review.