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ShareMumbai: They decried the GDR or simply stayed out of its way. It's these 'children of the wall' who are scripting German history in a remarkably tight world faced with shared global challenges: terrorism, global warming and recession. The generation of the 'Wendekinder', as they are called, these East Germans were 15-25when the wall came down in 1989. Twenty years down the line, they are of an age to enter the German socio-political stage, and in more ways than one.
What makes the 'Wendekinder' unique is their dual experience of having spent their formative political years in the communist East and then being integrated into a capitalist world, left solely on their own to make sense of extremes of the political spectrum. In that sense they have been called the 'unadvised generation'. If they thought life in the East was oppressive, "they didn't know how strange the story was about to become", says one from the generation. They were going to be a 'generation divided'.
When they breached the wall to enter the West, the immediate difference was that the "East Germans wore clothes that had gone out of fashion ten years earlier in the West" and the streets were lined with colourful cars of different make. Soon they were introduced to the American good life and other western concerns that the East kept out for as long as it could: Feminism, Vietnam war, abstract expressionism in art, consumerism, education reforms. That fast-forward by a decadeled to an identity crisis.
Today they are stakeholders of a unified Europe, whose level of engagement with the present system has been defined by their experiences. Having taken down the wall of barbed wire and concrete, they "now face the invisible walls of the 21st century", as Angela Merkel puts it, "the walls in our minds, walls of short-sighted self-interest, walls between the present and the future".
