A Journey Along Old Borders Finds Barriers to a United Home

THEY CROSSED INTO A NEW WORLD with trepidation, slack-jawed at the sight of the welcome that waited. Cameras flashed, champagne flowed, flowers and deutschmarks flew at them. Hands reached out to pat the sad little East German jalopies as they chuffed through Checkpoint Charlie, silent gestures of congratulation from West German brothers too moved by a miracle of history to trust their voices.

Like the rush of new love or the pain of childbirth, euphoria must be a feeling too intense to remember. Today, it is rare that anyone reflects on those wondrous weeks in the autumn of 1989 that toppled the Berlin Wall and Communist tyrants across the region; a time when Europeans danced in joyous unison over the end of the Cold War.

Europe is no longer riven by the barbed wire, mines and concrete that were the fabric of the hated Iron Curtain. But neither has the “one Europe, whole and free” envisioned during those first heady days emerged from the ashes of dictatorship.

Ten years later, a journey along the old borders, from bustling Poland to the battered Balkans, turns up few traces of the old walls and fences. But there also is a multitude of new lines between haves and have-nots, winners and losers.

It is a continent of NATO members and wannabes.

It is a territory realigning itself along old political and economic contours, reuniting East and West Germans and restoring broken bonds of empire between Austrians and Hungarians--but separating Czechs and Slovaks. Deadly nationalism has once again been loosed upon the Balkans, pitting Serbs against Albanians, Bosnian Muslims and Croats.

The intoxication of a decade ago has given way to the sobriety of unrealized expectations, and distorted memories. Some have forgotten that when East German workers dared strike in 1953, they were knocked to their knees by Soviet goon squads. When Hungarians struggled to restore their democracy in 1956, Moscow hanged reform leader Imre Nagy. In 1968, Czechoslovakia’s “socialism with a human face” was kicked in the teeth by an armored invasion.

The uprisings of 1989 dramatically settled those scores, but they also gave way to nostalgia for guaranteed employment and dull equality.

Even in Germany, the transfer of $700 billion into the eastern side has left many Ossis demoralized and Wessis resentful.

“There were tremendous illusions created at the beginning,” says Berlin historian Wolf Jobst Siedler. “It’s not a matter of years, but of decades.”

“The mental map of unity isn’t there yet,” says Hans Stimmann, the urban planner responsible for relinking Berlin’s transportation and communications. “In physical terms the city is already reunified, but in the minds of the people, there is still east and west.”

Similar walls of wealth, politics and history persist elsewhere, not just along the path of the vanished Iron Curtain but at frontiers that were hidden behind it.

From the Baltic to the Black Sea, the thrill is gone. In the more vibrant north, many are guilty of failing to stop and smell the new roses. In the suffering south, the roses haven’t yet started to bloom.