Like many others of her age, Carola was critical of how the East German government airbrushed inconvenient truths which did not fit with the Party image. The deteriorating state of the environment was one of the issues that really bothered Carola. Flying in the face of governmental attempts to suppress the facts, environmental campaigners pointed to the high pollution levels in the GDR caused by heavy industry, be it through releasing waste water from factories into rivers or by polluting the air through the use of brown coal. The chemical plants in Bitterfeld were known to be particularly bad for this. Influenced by the Green Party in the West, more and more informal environmental groups met in the GDR under the protective roofs of the churches. Indeed, by 1989 there were over sixty such groups in East Germany.12 Since such a high proportion of East Germans worked in industry and construction (48.6 per cent), the GDR was one of the worst polluted countries in Europe in the 1980s.13 Indeed, by the end of the GDR, seven of the forty-eight types of fish that had existed in East Germany’s rivers had died out entirely and a further nine species had become endangered. Furthermore, such was the poor quality of the air in the GDR that the government stopped publishing information about how this damaged the health of its inhabitants in the 1970s.14 All of this was very worrying for people like Carola who were concerned about protecting the environment.
Frustrated with the GDR government’s short-sighted neglect of Green issues, activists like Carola took symbolic action, taking part in the cleaning-up of forests or planting trees. Even if this did not make a massive difference, the rationale was that it was better to do something instead of simply sitting around and bemoaning the state of the environment.15 Others wrote and disseminated pamphlets highlighting the extent of the pollution in the GDR and raising awareness of the damage caused to the ozone layer by using aerosol cans. Indeed more and more of these pamphlets could be freely accessed at the Environmental Library in the Church of Zion (Zionskirche) in East Berlin, which had evaded state control from 1986.16 The Environmental Library also produced a magazine called Environmental Pamphlets (Umweltblätter) from April 1987, and this became the most widely circulated underground publication in the GDR. Around this time at the end of the 1980s there were also increasing numbers of protests focused on West German rubbish being transported across the border to be buried in landfill sites in the East.17 The SED government, like many other dictatorships, was very keen to control its image. Irrespective of the reality, it sought to silence anything that presented the regime in a bad light. It was this that environmental activists sought to change—they hoped to force the government to acknowledge the seriousness of the situation.18
Carola also felt restricted by the travel limitations in the GDR from a young age.19 Living in Eisenach, Carola’s family home was only 10 kilometres from the border with West Germany. It was at the end of the motorway for GDR citizens travelling west. From Eisenach, you could travel north, south, or east, but never west. From the age of 12, Carola says, she had a longing to travel further afield, in spite of the fact that her family made use of all the travel options that were permitted, taking holidays in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary.
As Carola got older, she felt the limitations imposed by the East German government all the more keenly. Did she hope for change from within then, I ask her? She certainly wished for greater freedom of travel, greater freedom of expression, and for the government to have more trust in its citizens. But, she says, the regime was so firmly entrenched in its position of power that it was hard to imagine that there would be changes.
So serious were Carola’s frustrations with the system that she got to the point of penning a draft application to leave the GDR for good. She wrote:
This is my urgent application to be released from my GDR citizenship so that I can move to West Germany. I have come to the decision after careful reflection because I feel like an undervalued citizen and therefore feel discriminated against. I find it impossible to live within this governmental set-up, which I see as a totalitarian, Stalinist system, far from the values of socialism, democracy, and individual freedom, far from the theoretical principles of Marx and Lenin, and run by outdated functionaries. I hope to hear about my application very soon. CK.
Interestingly, in the text Carola writes ‘ddr’ (Deutsche Demokratische Republik or German Democratic Republic) in lower case rather than capital letters. This, she explains, was deliberate, and symbolic of the low opinion she had of the East German state.
The minimal prospects for a change in political system also help to explain why Carola and her family consistently conformed to the regime’s dictates externally while criticizing it intensely within their own four walls. In private, Carola’s parents railed against the ideological narrow-mindedness of the Party. They found the inability to speak freely irksome, and thought the rigged elections a farce. The Koehlers also found the shortages of goods and the limited travel options irritating. However, like everyone else living in East Germany, they had no idea that the Wall would fall and that the regime would crumble. Accordingly, they had to adapt to the situation in which they found themselves. Indeed, as one East German later put it, explaining the overwhelming incentives to conform, ‘it is difficult to stand aloof from what supplies your daily bread’.20 After years of holding out, therefore, Carola’s father finally joined the Party in the 1980s to help advance his career. And Carola continued her membership of the East German youth movement, moving from the junior section, the Young Pioneers, to the senior section, the Free German Youth (Freie Deutsche Jugend or FDJ), at the age of 14 to enable her to do A levels. In fact, Carola’s last school report from 5 July 1986 was full of praise, noting how she was actively engaged in the FDJ and how her views were very much line with those of the state. Carola, then, had obviously been convincing in her outward behaviour at school, in spite of the strong animosity towards the system that she expressed in private.
Getting citizens to toe the line is, of course, precisely what dictators hope to achieve: outward conformity by the majority is essential for the long life of any regime.21 And if there seems little chance of change in the system, it is understandable that people look to play the system in a way that will advantage them as much as possible.
figure 7 Carola’s draft application to leave the GDR for good.
Courtesy of Carola Koehler.
figure 8 Carola’s last school report from 5 July 1986.
Courtesy of Carola Koehler.
So strong was Carola’s belief that nothing could change the SED’s stranglehold on power that even Honecker’s resignation in October 1989 provoked mixed feelings in her.22 Soon after Carola left the GDR for good in January, her mother booked a trip to Hungary for the autumn, so that they could meet. The news that the General Secretary of the SED was stepping down greeted them on their last day of holiday, and they were unsure what to make of it. In spite of the reforms in Poland and Hungary inspired by Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika, the GDR leadership had been dogged in resisting such changes, even restricting visits to Poland and Hungary in a bid to stem calls for greater freedom to travel. Kurt Hager, the GDR’s ideology chief, summarized the SED’s intransigent position regarding the potential for reform by stating, ‘just because your neighbour has changed his wallpaper, there is no need to start tearing off your own’.23 It is unsurprising, then, that Carola and her parents were unsure how to interpret Honecker’s resignation. They were concerned, Carola explains, that the Soviets might invade East Germany to stop big changes from taking place. ‘In a way,’ Carola says, ‘we wondered whether it might be better if nothing happened, because we feared that the Party might impose greater restrictions.’24 Already at this stage, around 14,000 East Germans had taken up the opportunity presented by the opening-up of the Austro-Hungarian border to go to West Germany, so there was definitely a widespread awareness that something was afoot. But there was no sense of inevitability about proceedings. Indeed the decision by the West German Bild-Zeitung
that same year to stop referring to the GDR in inverted commas was an indicator that West Germans were not expecting the GDR to fall.25 Events then happened far more quickly than Carola expected.26
Living in Heidelberg, Carola was far away from the action when the Wall fell in November 1989. And her life continued relatively unaffected in the months that followed. East Germans did not visit Heidelberg in the same numbers as they did border towns like Kassel. Carola visited West Berlin out of curiosity, but found it totally foreign: both the people and the buildings looked very different. The fall of the Wall did, however, mean that Carola could travel back to East Germany to spend Christmas with her parents in December. And though her father had been initially angry when Carola decided not to return from West Germany earlier in the year, his anger had mellowed into understanding with time. In the years that followed, Carola’s decision to leave did not cause long-lasting damage to the relationship with her parents. The whole family were just pleased that they could see each other whenever they wanted.
Six years later, in 1996, Carola moved to Berlin to continue her studies at the Humboldt University. There she found that her East German past was more significant. The GDR, she explains, was a common topic of conversation at the time. She was shocked to find people younger than herself defending the old system; some East Germans were even critical of her decision to leave. At this point, the GDR had no positive associations whatsoever for her.
When Carola first moved to the West in January 1989, she felt that the world was her oyster. So many choices and possibilities were open to her. Though she had not glorified the West as a paradise, she did initially delight in her new-found freedom.27 Soon, however, she came to realize that freedom is relative, and that even within a democracy there are notable limits. ‘Freedom of travel’, she explains, ‘is only possible if you can actually afford it. And how significant is freedom of speech if no one listens to you and you’re not really heard?’
Looking back on the GDR, Carola feels that money played far less of a role there. Within the new capitalist Germany, life is all about making the maximum profit, she finds, which is not a very humane system. Her ideal set-up, she explains, would be a world in which everyone is okay—not necessarily with a really high standard of living, but with enough to eat and drink, access to education and culture, and the possibility of living in peace. Unsurprisingly, freedom of movement is also of central importance in Carola’s ideal world. Such a system, she acknowledges, does not exist yet.
Despite enjoying the new opportunities in the West, Carola explains that the transition to a united Germany has been tough for many East Germans. Sometimes, she says, she feels separate from West Germans because they were taught in another culture and another school system. Significantly too, Carola believes that East Germans of her age are still at a disadvantage professionally, several decades after the fall of the Wall. She puts this down to the dominance of West German cultural codes and expectations, as well as West Germans having more established networks of contacts to draw on. So ingrained is this view that when she sees an East German of her generation in an important position of authority, like Angela Merkel as German Chancellor or Joachim Gauck as German President, Carola is always rather surprised.
Reflecting on her GDR past, Carola believes there will always be a difference between Easterners and Westerners of her generation because of their contrasting socialization. Reacting to her GDR past, like many other East Germans Carola recoils from mass organizations, making a conscious decision not to join a political party, for example.28 Though Carola has successfully integrated into unified Germany, holding down a steady job in publishing, she still says that she finds common ground more easily with East Germans, with whom she feels an immediate sense of connectedness in comparison to people from West Germany. Walls may fall and governments may change, but habits and patterns of behaviour established over decades evidently take longer to shift.
Ultimately, Carola found life in the GDR hugely claustrophobic. It grated on her that the ideology she was fed at school so patently did not tally with her experience of daily life. She found it frustrating that there were so few places where she could voice her opinion freely, and she hankered after a new life with greater room for individuality, as well as greater freedom of travel and freedom of expression. Given that Carola actively chose to move to West Germany before the Berlin Wall fell, it is perhaps unsurprising that she had such a smooth transition into life in reunited Germany.
3
Lisa ~ Accepting the Circumstances
‘What’s it like with all that unemployment?’ Lisa asked her uncle, who was visiting from West Germany in the late 1970s. She was in her early teens at the time and curious to learn more about life on the other side of the Wall. High unemployment was just one of the negative things that Lisa had been taught about West Germany at school. With nothing else to compare it to, she believed the East German propaganda which portrayed West Germany as the enemy, and she genuinely thought that the Berlin Wall was there to protect the GDR from the West.1
Since she had known nothing else, Lisa did not find the limited travel opportunities for GDR citizens restrictive. She grew up in the 1960s and 1970s at a time when it was difficult to travel and she operated under the assumption that this would never change.2 Unlike Carola, who took a great risk when she escaped from the GDR, it did not even cross Lisa’s mind to leave. West Germany was simply a country on the map, albeit a country that spoke the same language, but it was just an accepted fact for Lisa that she could not go there. Lisa made the most of the choices that were on offer, visiting Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Hungary, but she did not feel that she was missing out by not being able to go further afield.3 ‘It is not like I would experience the restrictions if they were put on me now, nearly twenty-five years later’, she says. In that era, Lisa explains, foreign travel was far less of a mass-leisure pursuit than it has become in the age of the Internet and budget airlines, and this was the case in the West as well as East Germany. Like many others of her age, Lisa did not dwell on what she could not do, but rather focused on the things she could do.4
Living in East Berlin, the capital of the GDR, where there was lots going on, such as plays and films, parties, and discos, Lisa reasons that there were many distractions on the doorstep and therefore more opportunities to let off steam than elsewhere in the GDR.5 Everyone could find something to suit their interests, she believes, echoing the conclusion of West German diplomat Günter Gaus, that the SED leadership was able to maintain its stranglehold on power for forty years because there were niches into which ordinary East Germans could withdraw from the demands of the system.6 While Lisa found many of these in East Berlin, other East Germans found non-political havens in their dachas (small summer houses out in the German countryside), where individuals could retreat from the gaze of the state.7
With no other experience of how daily life could be, Lisa felt content in the GDR. She felt no kind of envy towards her Western relatives, she explains, because ‘my ideals were not about money or travel, but rather about living humanely together in harmony with others’. There was no reason, she felt, to long to live in the West.8 Lisa, like many other East Germans I have spoken to, observes that money played far less of an important role in the GDR in comparison to united Germany.9 With food and rent subsidized, life was affordable in the GDR. More frequently it was a lack of readily available goods, rather than a lack of money, which stopped people getting hold of what they needed.10 When goods were available, therefore, people often bought them in bulk, irrespective of whether they were running short, not knowing when the supplies would next be available.11 Frequent shortages, Lisa believes, made people more creative and encouraged a system of bartering in communities. Some people grew vegetables and flowers which they could exchange for items in short supply. Carpenters and mechanics, amongst others, offered their services to locals, knowing that they could call on the help of others when they were lacking certain food or other
items.12 For car owners, keeping on good terms with the local mechanic was wise, as car parts were notoriously difficult to come by in the GDR.
Talking about the shortages at the time, one East German explained, ‘We’ve got masses of cauliflower at the moment. Peppers are in short supply. And fruit—we’ve got lemons, but bananas and oranges are a rarity, and I’ve only seen kiwis on Western television. The most important thing for an East German to have to combat shortages is “Vitamin B” (“B” for Beziehungen, which means connections).’13 Living in a society where there were fewer options, there was more to gain from knowing people. All of this, East Germans from both the towns and the countryside later said, created the sense that everyone was in it together—negotiating need and shortages bound them to each other. After the Wende, though, when the shortages decreased, so too did the sense of togetherness and connections became less important.14 In the GDR, an East German might have approached a neighbour with an apple tree to get the essential ingredients for an apple cake. In reunited Germany there are always apples in the supermarkets and so there is less incentive to interact with the neighbours.15
Lisa, though, had never felt the need to build up a strong network of connections. She recalls enjoying eating tinned pineapple that she bought in an Intershop,16 but did not mind that she could not eat it all the time. Even though she now really appreciates the easy access to exotic fresh fruit that did not exist in the GDR, at the time she never wanted for enough to eat. However, she lived in East Berlin, which was generally far better supplied than the rest of the GDR. Her stepfather, furthermore, had relatives in West Berlin, which meant that their family had greater access to Western goods than those without contacts in the West. All of this helps to explain why Lisa, unlike many other East Germans who were envious of the Western consumer world, did not long for a more Western lifestyle.17
Born in the GDR Page 6