Born in the GDR

by Vaizey, Hester

  Overall, spending the first sixteen years of life living in a socialist system has had a profound impact on Mirko. In direct reaction to the shortcomings of the East German state, as an adult Mirko remains active politically. Having experienced first-hand how extreme politics can shape daily life for the worse, through his work in countries like Belarus, Mirko is determined to protect individuality, freedom, and privacy where possible. As a teenager Mirko questioned and challenged the established structures of the GDR and after its demise he has retained a critical stance towards state authority in united Germany.

  8

  Peggy ~ Feeling Safe and Secure

  When Peggy woke up on the morning of 10 November 1989, she knew that something was amiss. As she lay in bed, she could hear the familiar splutter of the coffee machine and smell the aroma of bread rolls as it wafted into the bedroom. Normally, though, Peggy’s mother would come into the bedroom, open the curtains, and then sit by her on the bed, talking to her and stroking her face until she was finally awake. That day, her mother did not come in. Confused, Peggy slipped out of bed, careful not to disturb her two younger sisters who were sleeping in the beds next to hers. She found her mother sitting at the kitchen table, hands wrapped around a cup of coffee and staring into space. ‘Why didn’t you wake us?’ was Peggy’s first question. ‘The Wall’s fallen’, her mother replied laconically. Peggy was unsure what her mother meant. She followed her mother’s gaze out of the window, expecting to see the fence at the end of their garden in small-town Prenzlau knocked down. ‘Not that wall,’ her mother explained, ‘the Wall in Berlin!’

  A number of thoughts passed through the head of 10-year-old Peggy. She had heard about the West being rife with unemployment and homelessness, so one of the first things she thought was ‘I hope we get to keep our flat and I hope my parents don’t lose their jobs’.1 Much like Lisa, Peggy believed what she had been taught in school about the long queues outside the (un)employment centres in West Germany, where people were not guaranteed work, despite having good qualifications.2 She accepted what she had been taught about West Germany being the enemy, a society with an imperialist, capitalist, and allegedly inhuman world view.3 Fear much more than hope, then, characterized Peggy’s initial reaction to the news. She had no inkling that the change would bring new opportunities for her. She certainly did not feel relief or a sense of freedom at last.4 And a more pressing concern was whether her school camp which was scheduled to start the next day would still happen. The class had been looking forward to going to Templin together as a reward for their ‘good socialist behaviour’. Now, events in Berlin called the trip into doubt. Peggy was relieved to learn from her mother that the trip was still on.

  Peggy had noticed the rumblings of discontent in the year running up to the fall of the Wall. Before her family had moved to Prenzlau that autumn, they had lived right on the market square in Frankfurt Oder. She and her sisters had a great view of the protestors who were calling for change below with their big banners. Her mother was philosophical about the situation in the GDR: it might not be perfect, but she was equally sure that the Western way with its unemployment and lack of social security had its downsides too. Her father, by contrast, frequently complained about the state of play in the GDR, and took part in the demonstrations. He even left his family behind to travel to the Prague Embassy in September 1989, hoping to secure safe passage to the West, only to change his mind and return to his family the day before the West German Foreign Minister Genscher said that all the applicants would be let through.5

  The weekend after the Wall fell, Peggy’s family decided to drive to West Berlin. Since Peggy was away, her family took a 40-kilometre detour via her camp to see if she wanted to go with them. When they arrived, however, Peggy decided to stay with her friends—there was a disco happening that night to celebrate Fasching, the start of the carnival period celebrated in Germany between the middle of November and the start of Lent each year, and Peggy and her classmates were going to wear fancy dress. She asked her parents to bring her back one thing above all: a Hanuta wafer biscuit. For years, Peggy had watched the TV adverts singing the praises of Hanuta. They were made to seem so heavenly that Peggy had long felt aggrieved that she was not able to eat them: ‘When I saw Western adverts, I thought it was really mean that I couldn’t eat Hanuta. How come I don’t have the pleasure of eating those? I always thought. After the Wall fell one of my biggest priorities was to eat a Hanuta.’6 When she finally got to taste this biscuit a few days later, the Hanuta was something of a disappointment. This was Peggy’s first step towards a realization of how exaggerated Western advertisements were.7 In our interview she says this is indicative of her experience of dealing with West Germans generally: they are good at presenting themselves in the most favourable light possible, but this promising presentation is not always a true reflection of their abilities.8

  Peggy’s first visit to the West in February 1990 made a favourable impression on her. En route to Hamburg, Peggy’s eyes gaped at the huge Western cars she saw on the motorway. What would it be like, she wondered, to be so rich that you could drive around in cars like the ones she saw? These cars looked so different from the Trabant her family were driving in. When they were about to park up, a big Mercedes rushed in and took their parking bay. Was this just typical arrogant Wessi (West German) behaviour? Peggy’s family wondered. But no! The driver had not seen them and was profusely apologetic when he realized. He backed out and found another bay so that Peggy’s family could park where they had intended. This man then came over and introduced himself. He was fascinated by the Trabant and joined the family for a spin around the car park. He was a local man and was keen to take the family on a guided tour around the city in his Mercedes. Once the family had seen the cultural highlights of Hamburg, the kindly West German took them to McDonalds, insisting that he order one of everything on the menu so that the family could taste all that was on offer. Peggy could not believe it when she saw that the total bill for the food was 120 West German Marks—more than the 100 West German Marks of Welcome Money that East Germans received when they visited the West. The whole experience was very exciting. West Germany seemed wonderful and new but it also felt quite different.

  Of course not all East Germans had such positive initial encounters with their West German counterparts. Felix R. from Pankow in East Berlin was a young teenager in the early 1990s. He and a friend took a shopping trip to ‘Zoo’ in West Berlin, whereupon they were accosted by an old man. The old man showed the boys needle marks in his arm, while claiming that he had a knife in his pocket which he would use to kill them if they did not hand over all their money. Fearing for their lives, Felix and his friend ran to the nearest underground station and only felt safe when they got to the Eastern part of the city. In mere moments, East German propaganda about the problems with drugs and crime in the West had been confirmed to these boys as true.9

  Other East Germans, who did not have such extreme experiences on their first visit to the West, nonetheless frequently commented on how foreign West Germany felt. Once they had satisfied their curiosity by venturing over the border, many retreated to their own half of Germany, later explaining that, although it was interesting to see the FRG, it was all very unfamiliar and simply did not feel like home.10 Fourteen-year-old Robert Ide noticed in particular how different the food was: ‘The bread rolls from the lurid yellow bakery chain tasted bland and looked like they’d been pumped full of air. The macaroni seemed too fat and the spaghetti too thin.’11

  Small differences like these were accompanied by so many other big changes that in the years that followed, some East Germans like Peggy came to feel that they had lost their homeland.12 They also had the impression that West Germans looked down on their education system as inferior and treated them as though they were unquestioning supporters of socialist values or, at the very least, might have some strange opinions and beliefs.13 This feeling was often even more pronounced among those East Germans who experienced
the transition to unification at a later stage in life. Nina Benedict, a woman in her sixties, for example, sank into a deep depression following the amalgamation of East Germany into the West: ‘No one asks me for my advice any more,’ she wrote. ‘Who today wants still to hear, or indeed ever to have heard, a body of thought that was once “infected” by socialism?’14 Another lady, who had been mayor of a town called Kella between 1980 and 1990, echoes Benedict’s dejection, describing what it was like to have her beliefs and actions challenged so fundamentally: ‘When I think of how hard I worked and how I fought for every little thing … And now to think that was all wrong. Everything I did! For this village! I didn’t necessarily want that [communist] system, but simply to help make life somewhat more bearable for the people here.’15

  Although Peggy was only a young girl when the Wall fell, and was therefore not challenged to justify her past actions in the way that many of her elders were, she nonetheless has a sense that Westerners may take her views less seriously if they know that she grew up in the GDR. ‘I can’t speak High German,’ Peggy adds. ‘It makes me feel fake.’16 This in itself marks her out from West Germans. ‘In part it is the way they talk and the words they use, but it is also the fact that their whole way of behaving is different’, she says.17 To this day, Peggy feels like an outsider if she is in a group of West Germans and is more comfortable in East German settings.18

  Long before the fall of the Wall, the German-speaking Czech novelist Franz Kafka articulated the negative impact on a friendship of very different experiences:

  Once there were two friends. One had spent six weeks in a hospital bed. The other had spent the same time travelling. When the traveller visited his friend, he would talk of nothing but the fabulous time he had. Although the two had been friends for a long time, they could no longer communicate. Their recent experience made them strangers.19

  For those East Germans like Peggy who had had little or no contact with people in West Germany, it understandably took a long time to build friendships with Germans who had lived on the other side of the Wall.20 In the early years of transition many of them observed that the West German way of life was faster, louder, and more colourful but simultaneously also very alien. The cultural norms of everyday life were simply very different, and many missed the sense of security and shared mission that they had felt in the GDR. It therefore took many East Germans quite a while before they felt at home in their newly reunited country, and for some, like Peggy, this remains an ongoing process of adjustment.21 It was with some foresight, then, that Erich Honecker, as General Secretary of the SED, declared, ‘Ideological work has lasting influence on the development of the people.’22

  Looking back on her childhood in the GDR, Peggy has overwhelmingly positive memories. Too young to feel the impact of the travel restrictions, she simply recalls happy times with her family on holidays, close to home, organized through her mother’s work.23 Most workplaces in the GDR organized holidays for their employees within East Germany and since these affiliated holidays were subsidized, they were much cheaper than taking a holiday independently. Peggy’s best family holiday, she says, was in a forest near a lake only 20 kilometres away from their home, but it still provided a change of scene, nice weather, and parents with spare time. What more does a child need on a holiday, she asks? In today’s world, by contrast, Peggy questions whether it makes sense for people to fly halfway around the world for their holidays when they don’t even know the places of natural beauty on their doorstep.

  Peggy also remembers her time as a member of the socialist Young Pioneers as great fun. What with the uniform, the singsongs, and the regular outings, there were plenty of things to enjoy with friends.24 ‘I have positive memories of the Pioneers,’ she says. ‘We went on excursions, days out visiting museums and going swimming.’ She and her friends used to collect old material to be recycled, and they would receive money for the cloth, paper, and glass which would go into the class fund.25 In her spare time, Peggy sometimes collected cloth as a way of getting a bit more pocket money. One time, she earned 10 East German Marks through her efforts. When her teacher got wind of this, she asked Peggy in front of the whole class whether she was going to donate any of her gains to the class fund. Feeling under pressure, Peggy gave 8 East German Marks to the fund and kept just 2 for herself. This is a small example of the values that pervaded GDR society and in particular the rejection of private interest and ownership.

  figure 28 Claudia’s school report from 1989.

  Courtesy of Claudia S.

  The school report from 1989 belonging to Claudia S., a girl two years older than Peggy, tells us a lot about the values that the regime wished to instil in young people, in particular about the importance of working together as a society, with a far greater importance placed on the collective than the individual. It praises Claudia’s active contribution to ‘working groups’ within the school, and states that ‘She interacts with her fellow pupils in a comradely manner’.

  Unlike other children in her class, Peggy did not have many relatives from the West, and this was a source of envy. Though her father’s relatives had sent a parcel once, she explains,

  I always wanted more Western relatives. I was jealous of others in my class who had more relatives in the West. They got clothing from the West, or sweets. My grandmother was almost of the age when she could go over, but then the Wall fell. I was looking forward to when she could go over, aged 60, because a friend of mine had a granny who brought things over from the West. But I did not want to go to the West. I was not aware that it was an option. It seemed like an absurd idea.

  Only one truly negative memory of the GDR sticks out for Peggy, and this relates to the corruption of authorities. Each Saturday morning, Peggy’s class went swimming. The girls had their lesson first and then the boys came after so that the girls could go home to dry their hair before returning to school. Peggy enjoyed swimming and had a good rapport with the sports teacher who was quite authoritarian in his teaching style. Sport was a serious matter in the GDR. Its founding father, Walther Ulbricht, had declared that ‘Everybody, Everywhere, Should Play Sports Every Week’.26 Sport was viewed by the Party leadership as the key vehicle for transforming East Germans into socialist citizens. Success in sport at an international level, so the thinking went, would raise the profile of the country throughout the world and instil pride and loyalty in its citizens. Training young hopefuls was a key stepping stone on this path to socialist glory.27 At swimming training one Saturday, Peggy had been joking around with the teacher. As the lesson progressed, he got frustrated with the girls who could not swim and chucked a bucket of cold water over them. Emboldened by their jokey rapport, but also cross at the way the teacher had been mean to the struggling swimmers, Peggy soaked the teacher with a bucket of water. Taken aback by her behaviour, the teacher took a swing at her with his arm which sent her flying across the room—an act that was seen by all the girls in the pool and by all the boys who were crowding to look through the window while they waited for their lesson. When she got home, Peggy told her parents what had happened. They went straight to the school to report the incident to the head teacher. The head teacher was not inclined to listen to such a story and after several meetings it was decreed that Peggy should retract her claims and apologize to the sports teacher in front of the whole class, saying that she had lied about what happened. At the time Peggy realized that something was not right about this situation. Children these days, she believes, would not be so easily manipulated.

  Despite her clash with the school authorities in the third grade, a more positive experience with another teacher helped to even out Peggy’s opinion of those in charge. Every parents’ evening at school, the best exercise books would go on display. Parents who were in the Stasi were often particularly anxious to see their children excel academically and would take an active role in ensuring that the work was neat and that the pictures were stuck in as tidily as possible. One parents’ evening, the teach
er chose to display Peggy’s work, despite it looking less perfect than some of the other books. The teacher explained that she chose it because it was clear that Peggy had done the work herself. This example helped Peggy to retain her trust in the system.

  As our conversation turns to the Wende, Peggy tells me that in many ways she believes reunification has worsened the quality of life for East Germans. Fundamentally, her values remain those of the state in which she was born. Peggy’s stance is not taken out of a feeling of envy or resentment, nor because she has failed to thrive in the new circumstances. She is perfectly content with her lot. However, she genuinely believes that the GDR system had some real benefits. In keeping with many East German women, Peggy began having children relatively young by Western standards, aged 26.28 Like Lisa and 95 per cent of East Germans who responded to a major opinion poll in the early 1990s, Peggy feels that too much emphasis and import is placed on money and material goods in reunited Germany, and she notices this particularly in reference to raising children.29 Whereas she had her first child while she was still a student, so that she would have lots of time with it, and now works very reduced hours as a freelance historian so that she can pick her children up from school and spend time with them every day, Westerners that she knows put off having children until their mid-thirties when they were materially more established, and then they remained focused on work after having children with the aim of providing expensive equipment and toys for their offspring. For Peggy, having more money is not the answer and life in a consumer society does not nurture the values that she considers important. ‘I don’t need lots of money,’ she says. ‘I just need enough money. Apart from that I want free time to spend with my family.’