I remember when people who were allowed to visit the West came back and said the toilet paper there was soft, that it had double sheets and was decorated with flowers. ‘My God,’ we thought, ‘can you imagine?’ And we couldn’t! We couldn’t imagine a world where the toilet paper was decorated with flowers!26
Like many other East Germans who received visitors from the West, Katharina remembers feeling in awe of them. ‘Wow! The big wide world has come to visit!’ she thought. Above all, though, these visitors contradicted the government portrayal of the West. The East German government presented the FRG as a society in which the gulf between rich and poor was enormous, where crime, homelessness, and drugs posed big social problems because the state did not look out for its inhabitants. However, through meeting and talking to West Germans Katharina was immune to such propaganda.27 Unlike others with little or no contact with the West, Katharina was aware of an alternative discourse to that of the state from early in her life. When teachers of the ideologically marked citizenship lessons taught the history of the world from a socialist perspective in terms of class struggle, Katharina knew that there were alternative ways of looking at it from her home life, be it from a Christian perspective or a Western perspective.28 And through this church partnership with the West, Katharina developed friends on the other side of the Wall who shared the same fundamental beliefs.
Katharina’s family also gained an insight into the Western consumer world through the parcels they received from Christian friends and relatives in the West. Though not usually explicitly forbidden by the regime, such contact with Western Germany was frowned upon by the Party, as in the Cold War context, the FRG and the GDR were locked in an ideological battle of communism versus capitalism. Wearing Western clothes in the GDR, as we saw in Lisa’s story, was therefore taken to be a betrayal of socialism. The reality, however, was that many families like Katharina’s relied on parcels from Western relatives to clothe themselves. Illustrating this is the astonishing fact that the number of blouses posted from West to East Germany was almost double the number sold in GDR shops. On average, it seems that West Germans sent around 25 million packages a year to their compatriots in the GDR.29 Not all of the presents from the West actually arrived because the Stasi often opened parcels and confiscated books, magazines, and money. Nonetheless the items that did arrive were certainly useful to Easterners. As well as clothes, other popular items in parcels included soap, tights, chocolate, and coffee.30
Families in the GDR frequently delighted in wearing, eating, or drinking things that they simply could not get hold of in the East. In one rather amusing case, an East German doctor attended an international conference in Pilsen, in the Czech Republic—a town famous for its beer. Over drinks that evening the East German fell into conversation with a doctor from West Germany. The Westerner was surprised that the Easterner was drinking Coca-Cola all night instead of the local speciality. When the Easterner explained that they did not get Coca-Cola in the GDR, the Westerner promised to send him a regular supply of Coke—a promise he kept until the Wall came down.31 As well as Western consumables, some Western clothes were particularly sought-after in the East, such as Levi’s jeans and Adidas trainers, which were not available to buy in the GDR.32 Most East Germans were simply delighted and grateful to receive such gifts, but for some, these parcels made them feel like beggars, or at least second-class citizens.33 The clothes that East Germans like Katharina received tended to be worn-out, second-hand items. Nonetheless when this clothing was worn at school it was taken as yet another sign of Katharina’s family’s deviance from the ideal socialist model.
Katharina enjoyed the friendships she developed with the West Germans who came to visit, and she was grateful for the parcels that her family received from the West, but she had no burning desire to live there. ‘You need to imagine that I did not know anything else,’ she explains. ‘I was born at a time when it was not possible to travel to the West and I operated under the assumption that that would never change.’ Katharina had vague dreams of visiting beautiful cities like Heidelberg, London, and Paris, but she always knew that they were dreams. And having built up these places in her mind, after the Wall fell, she found Heidelberg something of a disappointment. ‘It’s not that it wasn’t pretty’, she explains, ‘but at the end of the day, Heidelberg is just a town!’ Katharina was always excited to receive the Westerners when they came, but she never thought about fleeing to the West. ‘I knew that I would never be able to come back to the GDR,’ she explains. ‘That would have meant leaving all my family behind.’
Delving back into her childhood, Katharina recalls going on holiday with her family outside the GDR. Like all other inhabitants of the socialist state, their options were limited. Of the Eastern bloc countries that they were permitted to visit, Poland and Czechoslovakia were the most popular with East Germans. The majority, though, travelled within the GDR to the Baltic, Tübingen, or the Harz mountains. Unlike Carola, who found the limited travel opportunities in the GDR particularly suffocating, Katharina did not find this aspect of socialist rule problematic at the time. Her family travelled in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, and Poland, enjoying the differing scenery that the trips provided. Within the Eastern bloc, Katharina noticed that the host countries always differentiated between East and West German tourists, with East Germans getting inferior treatment at every turn. This was because hard West Germany currency was far more desirable to tourist traders than the East German Mark.34 But while this meant that it was not ideal to be a tourist from East Germany, it never occurred to Katharina to wish she was from the West.
Katharina did not expect that the GDR set-up would change, but that does not mean she was content with every aspect of it. Like Mario, Katharina experienced the Stasi’s activities as very intrusive in her day-to-day life. This was especially the case after she married Gilbert, a former inmate of the Stasi prisons at Cottbus and Hohenschönhausen.35 Gilbert and Katharina first met in 1983. They had just got together when suddenly Katharina heard no more from him. Initially she assumed that Gilbert had decided to end their relationship, until she heard through friends that he had been arrested by the Stasi at work. The authorities had discovered that Gilbert was involved in writing and disseminating dissident leaflets, along with a group of punks who were critical of the regime. It was when Gilbert sent some of these leaflets by post to the West that his role was discovered. Slandering the state had severe penalties, and Gilbert spent two years in prison. When he was released in 1985, Gilbert tracked down Katharina in her student flat and they married soon after in 1987.
Gilbert’s two-year probationary period was a nervous time for both of them. Not only did he suffer regularly from nightmares, he had to behave impeccably or risk imprisonment again. Minor offences, such as going out without taking his passport or jumping a red light in his car, could have cost Gilbert his freedom once more. Both Gilbert and Katharina felt under pressure constantly to watch particularly carefully who they talked to and what they said. Though they did not know it at the time, Gilbert and Katharina were heavily observed by the Stasi in the early years of their marriage. Gilbert’s Stasi file later revealed a day-to-day chronicle of their activities, noting who their friends were, who visited the house, what conversations were had inside the house, as well as other observations including the fact that Gilbert was a nonconformist because he did not regularly eat a cooked lunch when he was at home. Sometimes Stasi officers took a more active approach when dealing with dissidents, attempting to disturb and confuse the dissidents’ minds by breaking into their apartments and moving things around—be it adjusting the pictures on the walls until they were slightly askew or empting the tea caddy and refilling it with an inferior brand.36 This, at least, Gilbert and Katharina were spared. Looking back at her life in the GDR, Katharina remembers the power and control that the government tried to exert over each individual. In contrast to Lisa’s carefree experience, Katharina’s life in the GDR was marked by fear.
figure 16 Katharina and Gilbert at the registry office in Prenzlauer Berg, East Berlin, on their wedding day, 23 October 1987.
Courtesy of Gilbert and Katharina Furian.
Both Katharina and Gilbert had a stake in seeing the GDR system reformed. Along with thousands of others in the autumn of 1989, they attended a demonstration agitating for change. Katharina had only recently given birth to her first child, so her thoughts were mainly focused on caring for her newborn son. Gilbert, by contrast, was much stronger in his feelings of opposition. Nonetheless, Katharina was interested to notice that people were starting to say things out loud that had previously been thought but left unsaid. That had not happened before. ‘I am not sure I believed we would change anything,’ Katharina later confessed. ‘But I still wanted to be there.’ It was increasingly clear that something was afoot. Indicative of this was the observation of one young girl about this time: ‘Suddenly Western films were shown in the East German cinemas a lot earlier than normal.’ Before, it had taken about two years for new Western films to appear in the East, but when this girl was able to see Dirty Dancing just a few months after it was released in the West, she thought, ‘Wow! Something really must be happening!’37
figure 17 Katharina and Gilbert on holiday in 1987 on Rügen, an island off East Germany in the Baltic Sea. Gilbert had injured his eye whilst drilling holes into sheets of metal—the job he had been allocated upon release from prison in 1985.
Courtesy of Gilbert and Katharina Furian.
So how did Katharina feel when she learned that the Wall had fallen? She felt free. ‘I knew that no one was going to lock us up anymore.’ Like Carola, though, she had mixed emotions. She was concerned about what would happen next and in particular how the Russians might respond. On the evening of 9 November, she and Gilbert and their newborn baby were staying at a dacha deep in the forested countryside. Nobody else was around and they were totally isolated. The dacha had no television but there was a radio. That evening, Gilbert heard Günter Schabowski on the radio talking about the eased travel restrictions. Calling to Katharina, he said, ‘Did you hear that?’ She had not been listening but thought Gilbert must have got the wrong end of the stick. ‘Nonsense! You misheard!’, she replied. ‘Let’s go to bed.’ Gilbert and Katharina therefore slept through the dramatic events of that night entirely, only to learn the full story on the radio in the morning. ‘We were both stunned,’ Katharina explains. ‘We couldn’t believe it.’ They quickly packed up their things and travelled directly to Berlin, keen to get across to the other side in case the border was closed up again. They were just one small family among the 2.5 million East Germans who visited the West within six weeks of the Wall’s fall.38 Thousands of East Germans like them were pouring across the border into West Berlin, picking up the 100 West German Marks of Welcome Money (Begrüssungsgeld) that every East German citizen was entitled to when they visited the West.39 Convinced that the border opening was only temporary, Katharina used the opportunity to stock up on vitamins. And then she and Gilbert sat in a café in Kreuzberg drinking fresh coffee, which was not easily available in the GDR.
Katharina, it seems, was quite calm and collected in response to accessing the Western consumer world for the first time. Others, by contrast, were more overawed by the experience. As one East German woman said shortly after the Wall fell, ‘We are probably the only region in the industrialized world where a soap or detergent commercial trumpeting how one brand can outperform another can be the sole subject of a dinner conversation.’40 Typically, East Germans recount their first visit to a West German supermarket, where the range of goods was overwhelming in comparison to the GDR. Angela, for example, remembers visiting a West German supermarket for the first time with a West German family friend. The friend was looking for clementines and was rather put out that there were none to be had. ‘It must be because of the floods in Spain’, the friend said. Angela was amazed by this episode: firstly that this lady could link the absence of food on the shelf with events in another country and secondly that she clearly expected to be able to eat clementines regularly—a fruit that was a rare luxury in the GDR.41
Whilst 28-year-old Katharina had a practical response to the wider range of goods in the West and took the chance to buy essentials that were more readily available in the West, and 11-year-old Angela was amazed by the availability of fresh fruit from abroad, other East Germans were more excited to sink their teeth into a bona fide Big Mac for the first time. In a letter sent to friends in the West on 13 November 1989 describing his first visit over the border, East German Thorsten Mueller explained that while he felt completely overwhelmed by drinking in all the details of the West, his girlfriend was absolutely focused on going straight to McDonald’s:
Katje absolutely wanted to go to a McDonald’s restaurant. She stormed in, and I stood outside just opening my eyes as wide as I could. I was shaking so. It was all so modern, white and made of glass, the windows were so amazing, the roof was constructed in a way that’s only familiar to us through western newspapers. Katje pulled me inside. I felt like a lost convict who’d just spent twenty-five years in prison. Katje had some money that we used to buy a Big Mac. I’m sure we behaved in such a way that everyone could see where we came from. Above all, I was in such a state of shock that I was stumbling over everything.42
For others who were a bit younger when the Wall fell, the most exciting thing was access to ‘real’ Western chocolate. In the GDR, children and adults alike had gone to Intershops. For most East Germans, visits were mainly to window-shop and look longingly at the wider range of sweets and other food that was available to Westerners. Families like Katharina’s received West German Marks from visitors which they could then exchange at the East German State Bank (Staatsbank der DDR) for special ‘Forum cheques’ to spend at the Intershops. It was only then that they would get to choose some Western goodies. For many like Katharina growing up in the GDR, Intershops were a kind of ‘childhood Mecca’, a paradisiacal ‘Garden of Eden of excesses’, far away from the reality of daily life.43
For adults who were loyal Party members, it was of course important not to seem to be longing for anything from the West, since this would imply that the East was deficient in some respects. So what did the Party make of so many of its members visiting Intershops? In one recorded case, an SED member recounted his dilemma. He had received some Western currency from relatives and was unsure what the right thing to do with it was from the Party’s perspective. Should he spend the money in an Intershop or should he do nothing at all with the money? he pondered. At a Party meeting, he raised the issue, asking for guidance as to how to proceed. He received the answer that since the GDR was short of Western currency, it was his patriotic duty to spend the money in an Intershop. The advice, however, was caveated with the fact that he should not, under any circumstances, visit an Intershop in his Party uniform! For many East Germans who had no access to Western currency, visiting Intershops was simply a matter of window-shopping and gave them a glimpse into the other world, beyond the Wall.
After reunification though, Katharina, like Petra, was embarrassed by the way East Germans rushed to fill their plastic bags with Western products. She was not a fan of the rampant consumerism, aware that she had done just fine in the GDR with much less. Echoing this view, Thomas S., who was a teenager when the Wall fell, reflects on his reaction to the new abundance of choice. He says, ‘I ask myself how we had enough to eat in the GDR if we need everything that is on offer today.’44 Other East Germans have also cast doubt on whether the greater choice of goods now available to East Germans was inherently beneficial. As one East German woman put it, ‘Who needs so many different types of chocolate?’45 For Katharina certainly, the greater access to material goods from the West was not the most significant aspect of the transition to reunited Germany.
In the wake of reunification, many East Germans tried to conceal their Eastern origins. They wanted to blend in with their more prosperous and moder
n-looking West German counterparts. Many felt self-conscious about their washed-out jeans, their generic grey shoes, and their acrylic shopping bags, all of which made them stand out from the apparently well-groomed West Germans. Although shopping in the West was in some ways novel and exciting for East Germans after reunification, it was also stressful, as they did not want to make choices that singled them out as being from the GDR. In fact, a small number of East Germans were so keen to blend in that when they bought a new car, they had it registered to the address of a Western friend or relative, so that the car would have a Western number plate.46 It was not only their external apparel that marked out East Germans, however.
Each day in reunited Germany revealed new ignorance for East Germans feeling their way on unfamiliar territory—ignorance that they were keen but understandably ill-equipped to hide. With new street names, new money, and new shops—to name but a few changes—it could feel overwhelming to get to grips with the new system. No one took East Germans by the hand and guided them through. And many felt shame that they did not know all the answers automatically: how to pronounce the food they wanted to order in McDonald’s, how the supermarket trolleys worked in the West, what to wear to be sure to blend in with Westerners. The wider choices that were available to East Germans after unification were certainly advantageous, but the interim, as they learned to navigate and fit in with the new modus operandi, was not without stress.47
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