2 November/3 November 2019 ★ FTWeekend 3
I N T E R N AT I O N A L
TO B I A S B U C K— BERLIN
Wolfgang Hübner returns from the
archives of the Neues Deutschland
newspaper clutching a rare treasure: a
thick binder containing one of the big-
gestmissesinjournalistichistory.
Mr Hübner has unearthed the edition
of Friday, November 10 1989, the day
after thefall of the Berlin Wall. It is the
most consequential moment of the dec-
ade, yet that day’s ND — the official
organ of the Socialist party of East Ger-
many, boasting a circulation of more
than 1m — contains not a word on the
event.
The following day, Saturday, the
paper’sfrontpagecarriesonlyabottom-
corner photo below the bland headline:
“Lots of traffic at the border crossing”.
Inside, a short article describes the
scene at a Berlin checkpoint, where the
paper claims to find crowds chanting
their support for Egon Krenz, the soon-
to-be-deposed prime minister of the
GermanDemocraticRepublic(GDR).
“Itwassurreal,”admittedMrHübner,
ND’s editor, who was a junior reporter
on the paper at the time and spent that
historic November night proofreading
pages filled with transcripts of party
speeches. Remarkably, no one thought
it necessary to send a reporter to cover
the dramatic scenes at the border a few
kilometresaway.
No less remarkable is what has hap-
pened to ND in the years since. Despite
brutal circulation decline, heavy finan-
cial losses and massive job cuts, the
paper survived the transition to capital-
ism and democracy. Though the Social-
ist state it served is long defunct, the ND
masthead stillproclaims its role as the
“SocialistNewspaper”ofGermany.
“At the end of the day the ND is
unsinkable,” says Mr Hübner, one of the
fewveteransfromtheGDRera.
To its rump of 25,000 readers, mostly
elderly and living in east Germany, the
paper offers a rare symbol of continuity
— daily reassurance that they are not
alone in resisting the prevailingpost-
1989 historical narrative. As Germany
prepares to celebrate the 30th anniver-
sary of the fall of the wall, the ND’s cov-
erage reflects the complex blend of
emotions — nostalgia, disillusionment
and accommodation — felt by many of
itsreaders.
“Our readers expect us to look
back [at the fall of the wall] in a
way that does justice to their own
experience and to their memories
of the GDR. They don’t wish the
GDR back in the way it was, and
they mean that. There is a wide-
spread feeling that things went
wrong,”saidMrHübner.
“But they also think that there
were some basic ideas [underpin-
ning the Socialist system] that
should be back on the agenda. Peo-
ple say: the GDR never took part in
a war. There were no homeless.Therewasnounemployment.”
There is, he admits, a strong current
ofOstalgie nostalgia for East Germany—
— running through his readership. Mr
Hübner’s view of the past, however, is
morenuanced.
“As a journalist I am very happy that
we can now run a newspaper that can
decide freely what it wants to write
about. And that we can have debates
here,” he said. “I sometimes say this
when we have events with readers: the
paper as it appears today could not have
beenpublishedintheGDR.”
The idea that the ND editor
would urge his readers to see
the upside of unification car-
ries a certain irony. From its
foundation in 1946, the
paper served as a powerful
tool in the East German
propaganda machine, under
the direct control of the cen-
tral committee of the ruling
SocialistUnityparty(SED).
“People here had critical
discussions on the corri-
dors, and there were com-
plaintsaboutshortagesandthings like that. But everyone knew
what the limits were. None of this made
it into the paper because people knew
what you could write and what not,”
said Mr Hübner. ND’s journalists were
requiredtobepartymembers.
“People were convinced that social-
ism was the right thing,” he added.
“There were only very few — and I was
not one of them — who said at the time:
this is not going in the right direction.
Thingsshouldbedifferent.”
For all its journalistic shortcomings,
ND was hugely influential and closely
read, not just in East Berlin. Much like
Pravda, its Soviet counterpart, the
paper was watched for small but poten-
tially crucial political shifts in coverage.
“Everythingthatwaswrittenwasscruti-
nised, also in West Germany and
abroad, because the paper was used as a
channel to send messages. Sometimes
wehadpiecesthatwereincomprehensi-
ble to normal readers. They were essen-
tially addressed to certain individuals,
or contained a reply to reports in the
westernmedia.”
Today, ND sees itself as a committed
voice ofsocialism in a capitalist society,as well as an advocate of eastern Ger-
many. It continues to be owned and
financially supported byDie Linke, the
far-left party that has its roots in the
SocialistpartyofEastGermany.
The paper’s readership is shrinking
steadily, reflecting the advanced age of
the subscriber base. ND loses between
1,000 and 1,500 readers *every year,
saidMrHübner.
His office at ND’s imposing headquar-
ters contains tributes to the GDR and
tongue-in-cheek mementos. Also on
display is the official portrait of Erich
Honecker, the hardline GDR leader
from 1971 to 1989, who was removed
from office just weeks before the wall
fell. The picture is hung upside down,
and — after decades of exposure to the
sun—hasfadedtonearinvisibility.
To Mr Hübner it has assumed a
strange significance, a measure of Ger-
many’s slow progress towards bridging
the gulf between east and west: “My
thesis is: when the portrait has faded so
much that you don’t recognise the face
any more, that is the moment that the
GDR will have disappeared, and Ger-
manunificationiscomplete.”German paper
that spoke for
GDR still fights
for socialism
Neues Deutschland offers readers nostalgia
and adaptation 30 years after reunification
Continuity:
Wolfgang
Hübner, ND’s
editor, was a
junior reporter
in 1989 when the
paper failed to
cover the fall of
the Berlin Wall.
Below, a front
page from six
months before
the Wall fell
Jan Zappner‘Our
readers
expect us to
look back in
a way that
does justice
to their own
experience’
Wolfgang
Hübner