Here in Berlin, radio and TV are celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago so intensively there's hardly a moment for the weather report, which, unfortunately for all the planned events, turned out nasty and rainy.
From my window I just watched the fireworks' brave attempts to spite the clouds and drizzle.
It is well-nigh impossible to be nasty about that strange event in 1989 when a seemingly random remark by an East German big shot opened the gates to a mass rush by East Berliners to West Berlin and, soon after, places further westward.
There was general euphoria, bliss, the commonest word was Wahnsinn — "insane, crazy, unbelievable".
Then and now it seemed petty to entertain even the tiniest critical idea.
Without a doubt, the great event permitted happy reunions of many families and opened the way for East Germans to visit no longer only Prague, Warsaw, or Moscow but also Paris, Washington, and Munich, as well as West Berlin.
It was truly a blissful occasion. The film footage has been shown a thousand times, but the crossing, embraces, the dancing on the wall are still moving, even to tears.
But as a socialist who tries to analyse history, I find it impossible to banish certain heretical recollections and doubts.
For moments of mass euphoria, wonderful as they are for those involved, do not always explain history. And for me too many issues and questions remain unexplained or simply unasked.
Why does no one recall that it was Eastern Germany, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), which pushed for reunification during the postwar years while Konrad Adenauer, chancellor of West Germany from 1949-1963, brusquely rejected all proposals, even general elections?
Only when, and after West Germany, the Federal Republic of Germany, set up its own state, formed an army, joined NATO, and insisted on regaining huge hunks of what was now Poland, were such attempts finally abandoned.
Why is it never mentioned that the GDR, though certainly undergoing an economic crisis, was in less of a crisis than all of Germany today? Or that until its very end, it had no unemployment, no homelessness, free medical care, child care, education, and a sufficiently stable standard of living?
Why is it forgotten that many of its travel restrictions had been considerably eased in the two years before the Wall's fall, so that not only pensioners, who were always able to visit West Germany, but 1-2 million GDR citizens had been able to visit West Germany in 1987-1989?
Young people wanted desperately to travel, it is true, but their chances of being able to were already improving.
Sadly, there was often an intolerant atmosphere in the GDR, traceable to the limitations of its aged leadership, to bad traditions inherited from (or in part imposed by) the USSR. But also traceable to a kind of paranoia that was not entirely unrealistic in its fears of being swallowed by West Germany, which is what finally happened.
From the start, geographically and historically Germany's weaker third, the GDR was always under powerful, merciless attack. This created endless problems for GDR leaders, which they were never able to solve satisfactorily.
Nevertheless, most participants in the demonstrations and rebellions in the fateful autumn of 1989 wanted an improved GDR, not a dead one.
Only after West German leaders promised them not only freedom but all the consumer goods they had gazed at so enviously in TV shows were they lured by the seductive songs of the Lorelei beauties [the mythical Rhine Maidens, who, according to legend, would lure unwary river navigators to their deaths].
Many have done very well thanks to their status as federal German citizens. Certainly all consumer goods and travel possibilities are available.
The leaden speeches and dull media articles of the old GDR are gone and forgotten, although replaced by endless platitudes and deadening commercials.
For freedoms won, however, there have been freedoms lost.
In the GDR, according to one bon mot, you were wise not to criticise government or party big shots, but you could say whatever you wanted against your foreman, the manager, or the factory director.
Today, this was reversed. People are fired for rejecting unpaid overtime, for asking what a colleague earned, for simply being suspected of eating a company-owned roll or forgetting to turn in a 13 cent coupon.
Beggars, the homeless, patrons of free food outlets, people with untreated tooth gaps — all unknown in GDR days — are now taken for granted.
So are towns with closed factories and a population of pensioners, with most young people off somewhere far away hunting jobs.
The GDR had been founded with certain basic principles. Above all, as a bulwark against fascism, led for many years almost exclusively by anti-Nazis, replete with books, films, theatre, even the names of streets, schools, and youth clubs anti-fascist in nature.
This was in extreme contrast with a post-World War II West German establishment whose military brass and diplomatic corps, academia, police, and courts, up to the peak of the government were riddled with former Nazis — not a few of them earnest criminals.
In 1961, when the Wall was built, they were still to a remarkable degree in leadership.
When the Wall came down in 1989, most old Nazis were retired or dead, but the giant concerns, trusts, and banks that built up Hitler and made billions from his war — and hundreds of thousands of slave laborers — were for the most part still powerful.
When the Wall went down, these interests swarmed back to East Germany and beyond — the Czech Republic, Poland, Romania.
Their army and navy, built by war criminals, still led by militarists, was no longer blocked by the GDR and were fighting in parts of Africa, the Near East, Afghanistan.
Two wars have been waged since the Wall went down.
And, while the GDR had aided the left-wing Chilean government of Salvador Allende, the Vietnamese and Algerian struggles for national liberation, the left-wing Sandinista government in Nicaragua, and the anti-apartheid forces of the ANC and SWAPO in southern Africa, West Germany was always on the other side.
Yes, the euphoria of the common people who always suffer from the deeds of the big shots was understandable. But today in all Germany, wealthy men in towering skyscrapers coolly decide the fates of tens of thousands: fire 3000 here, 10,000 there, move this factory a thousand miles eastward, close that one.
It is as if they were playing some gigantic Monopoly game.
Nokia, Opel-GM, Siemens, pharma firms, weapons makers: to a great extent they rule the roost, more than ever with the newest German government, despite its sweet smiles about freedom.
But isn't there just a note of worry in their declamations? The latest crisis, by no means cured, is making some people think a bit more carefully.
Some of them even spite the media and their pronouncements and vote for a party that calls for re-thinking, sometimes even for socialism. Not the same as in the GDR with its many weaknesses, but a state no longer ruled by the Monopoly men in their skyscrapers.
Perhaps the ingenious domino ceremonies and slightly soggy fireworks in their insistence on "We Are the Greatest" reflect these very worries.
[Victor Grossman is a journalist and author and a long-time resident of East Berlin. This article is slightly abridged from .]