November 9th is a complicated day in German history. In addition to marking the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it was also the day in 1938 when Nazi-led mobs attacked synagogues, Jewish businesses and Jews on the streets of Germany. In 1918, it was the day the Weimar Republic was founded and in 1848, it was the day the last of the German revolutionaries of the 1848 revolutions was executed, marking an end to Germans’ first attempts at creating a constitutional government. That’s German history for you, the highs are stratospheric, the lows hellish.

While there is plenty of coverage of the day, including some of my own, I’d like to share one story, told to me by a neighbor.

She and her husband have lived on my street for 42 years, when the neighborhood, Prenzlauer Berg, was in such disrepair that balconies often collapsed without warning. Many buildings were still heated by coal and bathrooms were often shared between several apartments.

In the fall of 1989 one of their two daughters fled to the West via Hungary, like so many East Germans did that autumn, precipitating the regime’s collapse. The second daughter had remained and was barely out of school, just 19 or 20. It was early November and suddenly, perhaps like any teenager, she wanted an apartment of her own.

She went with her mother to the nearby office that doled out apartments to see if one was available but none were even though there were dozens of empty apartments nearby because so many people had left the country in the past few weeks. They leave the office and the daughter turns to her mother and said, “Mother, this is the last straw, I’m going to the West, too. I just can’t be here.”

The mother looked at me while telling this story and said, “I had just lost one daughter a few weeks before and didn’t know if I would ever see her again. And then my other daughter says she wants to go to the West too. Because she couldn’t get an apartment. It was the worst day of my life.”

The mother walked back into the housing office. One of the women working there was an acquaintance and sees that the mother is near tears and pulls her aside to ask what’s wrong. The mother explains and the housing woman says, “I can take care of this.”

She goes into a back office and returns a few minutes later with a key, saying, “This one will work.” The mother goes outside and gives the key to her daughter, who’s overjoyed about the apartment and stops talking about going West. It was November 7, 1989.

Two days later, it’s all irrelevant, the mother tells me, the Wall is gone and the fear that families could be separated, never to reunite again, is gone. And she says that day, November 9, 1989, was one of the happiest days of her life, not just because they could travel freely, but because her newly shattered family was made whole once again.

A store in Berlin that only sells products made in what was East Germany. (Photo: Brett Neely, 2009)

It’s anniversary time in Germany. Twenty years ago, the Socialist Unity Party lost its hold on power as thousands of East Germans took to the streets in peaceful protests. It was a hopeful time, and certainly the most peaceful revolution German history. But it wasn’t all sunshine and light after thousands of companies were closed and millions thrown out of work afterward.

My most recent story for Marketplace is about the companies that survived what Germans call Die Wende, the turning point. I had much, much more for the piece but when you’re working with three minutes, a lot gets left on the cutting room floor.

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Modded Trabant in Eisenhuettenstadt, Germany, Fall 2007

It was small, cramped and ugly, made partially out of plastic, powered by what was essentially a very dirty lawnmower engine and was the epitome of the East German consumer economy – the legendary Trabant.

The waiting time to get one was sometimes over a decade. They weren’t especially reliable but mechanically simple enough to fix yourself. And they last forever, around 40,000 of them are still on the road nearly 20 years after production stopped.

For years, there have been rumors in Germany that someone would come up with a new Trabant, not unlike the new Mini. And now my friend Kristen has confirmed that it’s happening: A German company says it’s making an electro-Trabi with a solar cell on the roof to help charge the battery (I guess that will atone for the old Trabi’s horrible emissions).

I’m guessing they hope this will work a lot like the  Mini reinvention did. There’s certainly a built-in audience worldwide that came to love the ugly little ducklings. There was a movie, Go Trabi Go, there are Trabi clubs across the country and you can even get a guided tour of Berlin in one.

I’m going to try and track down the story and see if I can get a ride in one. I’ll be curious to see if they can sell the idea of merging eco-chic with East German retro-ugly.

And now for something completely awesome, the Knight Rider intro, as re-imagined for a Trabi:

August is known as the Sommerloch in the German news business, the summer hole. Like in the US, it’s when the crazies (think of those who say health care reform will lead to toilet paper rationing) can get their 15 minutes without breaking a sweat. Here, Vera Lengsfeld, a Berlin candidate from a marginal district who belongs to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats has put up a poster that has both her and the chancellor displaying a little decolletage with the slogan “We have more to offer.”

(Lengsfeld, incidentally has a fascinating personal history. She was a Communist Party member in East Germany who was expelled for protesting the stationing of Soviet nuclear missiles. She was later arrested by the Stasi, the East German secret police and sent into exile. Upon returning to Germany after the Wall fell, she found out her husband had been spying on her for the Stasi, which led to their divorce. She was active in environmental politics and was a member of the Green Party before moving to the much more conservative CDU.)

The only two reasons this story is zinging around the German press are 1) great pictures and 2) despite the fact that the election is only seven weeks ago, the conclusion seems so foregone (another Merkel-led CDU coalition) that most pundits here seem to have given up. The Social Democrat’s, the CDU’s rivals and current coalition partners, seem out of steam and out of ideas. The polling data says that even if the German public doesn’t believe the CDU’s promises to cut taxes after the election, they’d rather vote for another round of Merkel than the SDP’s hapless candidate Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who has all the charisma of a dead fish.

It’s weird to watch as an outsider because there are many legitimate questions to raise about how Merkel has governed (or punted, as in the case of rescuing the banks) but instead, the election seems destined to be fought with empty slogans and saucy posters.