Once the achievement is in the bag, it is natural to celebrate. Victors celebrating can seem like taunting to the losers however. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.
The Wall, shown at night with searchlights and killing fields is quite the dramatic picture. The building of the Wall was perhaps one of the riskiest times of the long cold war. Getting rid of it was a major achievement of West Germany. Closer to the time, there was a stamp with a hole in the Wall well expressing hope for a united future. This was a different. This was looking back and judging those responcible as bad. Not a lot of people standing up for the DDR, but perhaps not the way to move forward together.
Todays stamp is issue A862, an 100 Pfenning stamp issued by Germany on November 9th, 1995. It was a single stamp issue put forth as honoring the victims of the Berlin Wall. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 60 cents used.
The Berlin Wall came down dramatically at the end of 1989. West Germany started negotiations to bring East Germany in under the West German government. This had been provided for as part of the 1949 West German Basic Law. Doing so required much negotiating, The four major Allied Powers had to renounce their claims to Germany. The East German government had to agree to be dissolved. Soviet/Russian military units had to be withdrawn back to Russia. West Germany also had to formally renounce claims to former German territory east of the Oder-Neisse Line that was the current border between Germany and Poland that left much German territory in the hands of the Poles and the Russians. Getting this territory back had always been at least an agenda item for German Chancellor Kohl’s CDU political party.
Pulling this all together was a major victory for German diplomacy. Doing so was massively expensive. A 2011 study put the cost at over 2 trillion Euros. The expense I think is what lead to the anger that comes across pretty boldly in todays stamp.
There were many manifestations of this anger. Promises made during reunification about not pursuing crimes from DDR times were reniged upon. Egon Krenz, the last East German leader was sentenced to jail for election irregularities and behavior of East German border guards. Eric Honnecker, the long term East German leader, elderly and stricken with cancer was hounded out of Germany and left at the Chilean Embassy in Moscow asking for asylum. His daughter was married to a Chilean and East Germany had taken many Chilean leftists when Allende fell from power. He was refused and stood trial in Germany after being forced back against his will. The trial was bogged down and eventually he was released and now with a passport he was allowed to join his wife and daughter in Chile to die.
Even the fairly new Palace of the Rebublic was torn town in former East Berlin. In the way of the modern, it took longer to tear down in the 2000s than it had taken for the East Germans to build it in the 70s. The structural steel from it was exported to the UAE and used in the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world.
Well my drink is empty so I will open the conversation in the below comment section. Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.