‘I realise that my first twelve years [in reunited Germany] weren’t typical,’ she reflects. ‘I was thrown into the polarized political system in the new Germany. You can’t experience it in a more extreme way.’ Unlike most SED supporters who lost power and experienced a decline in status with the Wende, the events of 1989 offered Petra an unprecedented opportunity to pursue a career in politics. While some East Germans were all too keen to put every aspect of life in the GDR behind them, Petra focused on trying to incorporate what she felt were positive elements of the GDR’s policies in reunited Germany.20 During this time, the PDS continued to win seats in the Bundestag because those East Germans who still strongly identified themselves with the GDR felt that the PDS best represented East German interests, in contrast to other parties which seemed to distance themselves from the values and policies that came out of the GDR.21
Like many others, Petra felt irritated by the Western assumption that in the GDR East Germans had been constantly under pressure from the state and could not express their views. Whenever Petra explained that her own experience was not like this, people responded by saying that she was defending the East—a charge that she vigorously denies. However, one of her motivations for being a PDS MP was that she felt it important not to write off the heritage of the GDR entirely. It was essential, she believed, to include this heritage as part of the new unified Germany while, in her view, the government in reunited Germany sought to establish its authority in part by distancing itself from it. Whilst acknowledging that the Left made a lot of mistakes in former East Germany, Petra feels there should be greater recognition of the things that were good in the GDR, as well as the things that were bad.
Since Petra was fundamentally happy in the GDR, having enough to eat and working in a field that she had chosen, in the months after the Wende she felt embarrassed that so many Easterners flocked to buy things in the West. It seemed to give credence to the insulting remarks about East Germans made by West Germans, who said things like ‘Look at them! They’re shopping again! Don’t they have anything better to do?’22 To Petra, seeing so many East Germans with West German plastic bags was degrading, and implied that their lives before had been deficient.23 Bananas, for example, which had scarcely been available in the GDR, came to be a symbol of the gains made by East Germans after unification. West Germans observed how pleased their Eastern counterparts were to have easy access to bananas which had only tended to be available at Christmas in the GDR, and some of them mocked this. ‘How do we know that East Germans have descended from apes?’ began one joke. ‘The banana shelves are always empty after they’ve been there.’24 Petra wanted to distance herself from the East Germans who rushed to gain access to Western goods. ‘I’d never wanted for food in the GDR,’ she explains, ‘nor longed for oranges or bananas. I ate them from time to time, but the fact that they were not available all the time was no big deal.’ As one of her contemporaries so aptly put it, ‘the Wall had fallen and the path to Aldi [a budget West German supermarket] was open’.25 Similarly disillusioned with the behaviour of her compatriots, another East German penned a diary entry in the wake of November 1989 expressing dismay that her countrymen ‘seemed content to slurp Coca-Cola and appeared to aspire to nothing more’.26 Petra, too, felt shame that so many Easterners had tried to leave the GDR through the West German embassies in Warsaw, Prague, and Budapest.27 How could she persuade West German politicians that there were good elements in the GDR, if East Germans themselves were so keen to bury it?
For Petra, the end of socialism in East Germany was not about the increased shopping opportunities it brought. She had been far more excited at the prospect of going to the exhibition on war and peace in literature held in the Hamburger Bahnhof in West Berlin. After the Wall fell, she remembers, a professor came into the seminar and threw the prospectus for the exhibition onto the table saying, ‘Now you can go yourselves!’
Neither the Stasi-state nor the Ostalgie characterizations mean anything to Petra. She certainly does not remember the GDR as a Stasi-state, but neither is she nostalgic for it, since she believes the principles of socialism were often not well implemented there. Ultimately, though Petra says she is not an opponent of German reunification, she finds many faults with the new political system, which, in her view, is not very humane and is very fixated on money in contrast to the GDR. She wishes that politicians today were more open to learning from things that did work well in the GDR, rather than rubbishing everything about East Germany to make their own actions appear in a better light.
2
Carola ~ Seeing the Contradictions
In January 1989 Carola left the GDR. In stark contrast to many more dramatic methods East Germans used to escape to the West, be it scaling the Berlin Wall, digging a tunnel under the border, or taking to the water to swim incognito across the border, Carola simply filled out a successful application for a tourist visa to visit West Germany, and never returned.1
In February 1982 travel restrictions for East Germans eased somewhat, with GDR citizens regularly gaining permission to visit immediate family in the West, particularly if there was a special occasion like a wedding, a funeral, or a big birthday.2 Carola had no one that fitted into this category. Her father, though, had a cousin in West Germany. And this cousin just happened to be turning 75 in January 1989. Taking the chance that no one would check her story, Carola filled in a tourist visa application form, claiming that her reason for travel was visiting her aunt to celebrate her 75th birthday. After filling out the application at the police station, an officer quizzed her on the fact that her ‘aunt’ was 25 years older than her father—an unlikely age gap between siblings. Carola simply played dumb. At one point during this encounter, the officer left the room leaving Carola alone to wonder what would happen next. A simple telephone call could have revealed that Herr Koehler did not have a 75-year-old sister living in West Germany. Carola did not allow herself to think about how the situation might play out. She tried to appear cool, knowing that she had to endure this interview if she was to make it to the West successfully. Luckily for Carola the call was never made. Her gamble had paid off.
Carola was very much in two minds about whether she would stay in the West when she got there. On the one hand, she knew that if she left for good, she might not see her parents for a very long time. She was also concerned that her parents might encounter problems at work as a result of her flight. On the other hand, she felt that she had come to the end of the road with the GDR. She could see no future for herself in the system and had no desire to conform to the regime’s expectations. This was a bad situation to be in at the age of 20, she explains. For many, like Carola, who chafed at the bit in East Germany, it was the utter predictability of life in the GDR which they found claustrophobic: ‘You graduate from college or professional school and you have nothing to look forward to except thirty-five years of work in the same job. Then you retire; then you can travel to the West; then you die.’3 The restrictions felt life-inhibiting—‘like wearing a corset’, Carola ventures. What kind of country had to lock you in to make you stay there? Carola pondered on this as she assessed her options.
figure 4 Carola’s GDR passport.
Courtesy of Carola Koehler.
figure 5 Carola’s passport, showing her tourist visa to visit West Germany.
Courtesy of Carola Koehler.
Should I stay or should I go? This was the question that nagged at Carola. Could she really up sticks and go, taking only one small backpack of belongings? Was she prepared to leave everything behind that was familiar—her home, her town, her friends, her memories?4 Others faced a similar dilemma. In an extraordinary case, one of Carola’s contemporaries Martin Schneider decided to escape over the wall. When he arrived at the border, he took off his much-loved Western jeans and threw them over the fence to save them from being ripped. Then, in a crisis of confidence, he decided not to flee after all. He was caught and sentenced to one year in prison for attempting to leave th
e GDR.5 Martin most likely shared many of Carola’s feelings as she was assessing her options.
In a diary entry from November 1988 Carola reveals both how frustrated she was with the GDR and how torn she was about what she should do:
Restrictions, further repression … this society is becoming less and less humane and harder and harder to live in. Nothing is keeping me here. I’m getting closer and closer to the point of submitting an application to leave the GDR for good. I’m really warming to the idea … We’re further than ever from the ideals of freedom, socialism, and democracy. The government has totally deviated from the theories of Marx and Lenin, and has more in common with totalitarian governments like China during the Cultural Revolution or like the present regime in Chile … Is emigration [to the West] giving up? It isn’t for me. It would mean a new start for me, a new life, with freedom and individuality.
Carola’s preparations for travelling to the West show just how unsure she was about what she would do once she got there. She packed her A level certificates, indicating an intention to leave for good, and yet she only took enough clothing for one week. With a trusted friend from work, she made arrangements for the eventuality that she would not return to the GDR. If, when Carola got to the West, she decided to remain there, she would telephone her friend before the seven-day visa expired. No matter what was said during the conversation, the telephone call itself meant that Carola had decided to stay in the West. The friend would then be responsible for calling Carola’s parents to let them know, as well as for arranging the removal of Carola’s belongings before the GDR authorities came and cleared the flat, as they did in such circumstances.
Irrespective of what Carola would do in the long term, the first step was to get to the West. Arriving well ahead of time at Berlin-Friedrichstrasse railway station, she hung around nervously, waiting for the night train that would take her across the border. Carola was very aware that her A level certificates were stashed in her bag. How would she explain that if her bag was searched? No one checked her bag, though. Once settled on the train Carola slept right through to the morning, when she was woken by commuters getting off to go to work in Hessen. She was bursting with excitement, thinking about the new and unknown things that lay ahead. The journey was a necessary evil, which she wanted to get out of the way as quickly as possible, so that she could focus on the future. As Carola crossed the border, she recalls that she deliberately did not dwell on the potential significance of leaving her home behind, instead focusing on what there was to look forward to.
figure 6 Extract from Carola’s diary, 22 November 1988.
Courtesy of Carola Koehler.
It was never Carola’s intention to visit her father’s cousin in the West. She had always planned to visit an East German friend who had emigrated to Heidelberg the year previously with the permission of the authorities. Her East German confidante was certain that Carola would stay in the West. Carola had not been so sure. As soon as she got there, though, the prospect of going back just because her parents were in the GDR was not compelling enough.6 None of her friends in Eisenach had had the same burning desire to escape and they could not understand why she was so unhappy. However, in the six months before her departure, Carola had been living in East Berlin, where she had met others who also wanted to leave the GDR. Most importantly, Carola saw so many new opportunities in the West—the possibility of studying something that she herself had chosen, rather than a choice imposed by government officials, was especially exciting.7
Once Carola had made the decision to stay in West Germany, the procedure to make this official was actually quite straightforward. The FRG’s Basic Law stated that GDR citizens were also citizens of FRG. All Carola had to do was to go to the refugee registration camp at Giessen. Before long, Carola was studying German literature at Heidelberg University and settling into her new life in the West. Her parents were angry and sad in equal measure when they learned of their daughter’s decision. Her father, in particular, had been expecting her to return in time to celebrate his birthday in February. Luckily, however, the severe repercussions that Carola had feared for her parents never came to pass. Her father had to inform his workplace formally and her mother was called to the police station to provide details about Carola’s new address, but that was it. And with time Carola’s parents came to accept her decision, though it remained sad for all of them that they might not see each other again for years.
It was both the pull of possibilities available in the West as well as the push of the frustrations of life in the East that influenced Carola’s decision to stay in the FRG. She was under no illusions that life in the West was perfect—she did not glorify it. She knew that there was poverty in the West in a way that did not exist in the East. And yet, Carola explains, growing up in the East, she had the feeling that everything from the West was somehow more precious; visitors from the FRG even had a certain aura about them. In fact, such was the lure of the West for some young East Germans that when East Berlin schoolboy Ralph H. was asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, instead of saying a train driver or offering another common answer, he said, ‘I want to be Grandma because she is the only person in the family who can travel to the West’ (permissible because she was a pensioner, the GDR authorities counting on the fact that older people would be less keen to uproot their lives to the West and also being less concerned if they did decide to stay there).8 Carola loved getting the books, clothes, or records that her grandparents brought back from trips to West Germany. Nevertheless she was less motivated by the material advantages of the West than by the chance life there would give her to focus on what she was really interested in.
Before trying her luck with the falsified tourist visa, Carola had discussed alternative options for leaving the GDR with her best friend. Leaving their parents in a difficult position was one cause for concern. Another worry was that they would not be allowed back to see family and friends in the GDR if they left illegally. A good option, they agreed, was to find a West German man to marry. They could then live in the West, they reasoned, but visit family in the East when they wanted to.9 The scheme fell at the first hurdle, however: not only did these girls never meet West German men, the time frame for getting a West German to agree to marriage was also too slow for their purposes.
What frustrated Carola about the GDR above all, it seems, was the impossibility of having an open discussion about anything. As she was growing up, Carola knew that the Stasi were everywhere, observing people in school, in the workplace, and on the street. Occasionally, she explains, she worried that she had said something careless while talking to friends on the train. There was always the fear that people could overhear and misconstrue a conversation conducted in public, leading to problems with the Stasi. Carola craved the intellectual freedom to discuss issues that affected society from every angle, not just a socialist one. Citizenship classes in school, called Staatsbürgerkunde, for example, proceeded from the assumption that ‘the teachings of Marx are all-powerful because they are true’. These lessons took pupils through history, giving it a Marxist spin from the Ice Age onwards.10 Socialist ideologues, Carola felt, were trying to fit the circumstances of the late twentieth century with the Marxist teachings from over a hundred years previously.
In marked contrast with Petra, who accepted what she was told in school and believed in the regime’s socialist goals, time and again Carola noticed the difference between what she was taught in citizenship lessons and what was happening in daily life. In school, for example, they were always told that the East would soon advance and overtake the West because the socialist system with the economy organized by the state was far superior to the capitalist system of private ownership. Yet, Carola noticed, there were regularly shortages of consumables like fruit, tomato ketchup, and oil, leading to long queues outside shops as people jumped at the opportunities to buy goods as and when they appeared. When the discrepancy was really obvious, she explains, the teachers would say, ‘Well, this
is what we are working towards. It will be sorted out in a few years.’ Carola’s doubts about the Party’s claims were further reinforced by doing a work-experience placement in a factory, where it became clear to her that loudly trumpeted successes of exceeding production quotas were based on figures plucked from thin air with no basis in reality. The older Carola got, the harder it became for her to ignore the discrepancy between the socialist rhetoric she was taught in school and the reality outside the classroom.11
For Carola, church circles provided a release from the relentless need to conform in daily life. Within the safe haven of the church, Carola met other, like-minded young people and had open discussions about how they thought society should be. The church library gave her access to literature that was not widely available in the GDR because it did not reinforce the socialist world view. Carola was very excited to get hold of books by Freud—simply because titles by Freud were banned made her think that there must be something really good in them! Everywhere else, Carola says, her mind operated in a schizophrenic way, differentiating between private criticism and public lip-service. It was refreshing, Carola found, to be able to voice views other than those which reinforced Party ideology. Carola’s parents, however, were less enthusiastic about their daughter’s heavy involvement in the church youth group, and tried to restrict it. Though they were churchgoers themselves, they feared that Carola’s close connection with the church might damage her chances of being allowed to study for A levels. This was because only a minority of pupils were able to attend ‘extended secondary school’ to qualify for university entrance in the GDR (and a mere 10 per cent of each year were then allowed to go to university).
Born in the GDR Page 5