Robin Oomkes hears personal stories from two former East Berlin residents who left for the West…

On the 9th November 2014, the route of the former Wall through central Berlin was lined with transparent balloons filled with helium gas to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Fall of the Wall.

The project, called “Border of Light”, was a fantastic display, especially at the end when the balloons were released into the misty air.

The atmosphere in the streets was great; my personal highlight was standing in the crowd at the Brandenburg Gate, where Daniel Barenboim conducted Beethoven’s 9th symphony, and singing along to “Alle Menschen werden Brüder” with a stranger from Norway.

The celebrations around the 25th anniversary of reunification on the 3rd of October were much more demure—and for good reason. From a Western perspective, German reunification is often seen as a heartwarming reminder that those pesky Communists were banished and the Cold War is over. But things are not quite so straightforward for everyone.

Differences in social circumstances and the political cultures between East and West Germany persist, and although both the country’s president, Mr. Gauck, and prime minister, Mrs. Merkel, are former East Germans, not everyone from the former GDR is convinced that merging East into West Germany was such a good idea.

A few days after the Maurfall celebrations, I chatted with two people who voluntarily left the GDR in the 80s, before the Wall came down, yet still reminded me of this: Solvey Drees (50), who lives in Mitte, and Wolfgang Zinn (57), who lives in the United States.

Their stories have some striking overlaps: both got in trouble with the Stasi, received criminal ID cards, and were eventually bought free by the West German government; both of their stories also involve rock bands.

But where Solvey came back to the East after 1989 and until recently ran a coffee shop in Mitte, Wolfgang works in Denver, Colorado as a sound engineer and an agent for a motorhome rental business—and has no intention of ever living in the city again.

Solvey Drees

“There was a point at which the GDR could no longer deny that their antifascist state actually harboured Neo-nazi skinheads. This was the Zionskirche raid by skinheads on October 17th, 1987. Unfort…