Don't play that song for me: anthem plan highlights German divisions

Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Bodo Ramelow, premier of the eastern state of Thuringia, thinks it might be time for a new national anthem for a reunited Germany.

The proposal is radical, but with most of the former East Germany voting in regional elections this year that will test Chancellor Angela Merkel’s fractious coalition, the eastern Germans’ feelings are uppermost in many politicians’ minds.

“Many East Germans don’t sing it,” said Ramelow, a Westerner who forged a political career in the East but faces a tough re-election fight in October. “I would like to have a truly common anthem. Something completely new that everyone can identify with and say: ‘That’s mine.’”

With Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt also electing new parliaments in September and October, three of the five states that make up the former East Germany - excluding the capital Berlin - are holding votes, or two thirds of its population.

Together, their governments control 12 of the 69 seats in the federal upper house, meaning a possible drubbing for Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) and their Social Democrat (SPD) coalition partners could greatly complicate legislation.

Many were jubilant when, deprived of Soviet backing, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) collapsed after four decades, uniting a few short months later with its western neighbor.

But the manner of that unification, the years of depopulation and job losses that followed, as well as the subsequent erasure from history of a state in which 16 million people lived at its peak, have left a bitter taste for many.

Few took Ramelow’s proposal seriously. A spokesman for Merkel, herself an easterner, said she found Germany’s present anthem “beautiful in both text and melody”. But Ramelow is not the only senior politician to fret at some East Germans’ alienation.

At a recent meeting of her party’s eastern delegates, SPD minister Katarina Barley said the almost unthinkable, reflecting that West Germany should perhaps have abandoned its cherished post-war constitution in 1990 in favor of a fresh document for a reunited Germany.

Alienation has consequences. Some analysts link it to the strength in the east of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which has a chance of seizing the mayoralty in Dresden, Germany’s 12th largest city, in coming local elections.

Decades after reunification, the region remains poorer, making nationwide problems like spiraling housing costs even more severe than in the wealthier West.

But while the SPD advocates slowing rent increases and the CDU suggests law and order measures, the Left party with its promise to end “market radicalism” and the AfD pledging to ban headscarves and tackle immigration are fighting on more existential ground.

For British academic James Hawes, the east - the part of Germany that lay beyond the borders of the Roman Empire 2,000 years ago - has always been different, its inhabitants more insecure because more exposed to invasion from the east.

“East Germany isn’t different because it was conquered by the Russians,” he said. “It was conquered by the Russians because it has always been different.”