Lastly, an apparent failure of understanding and sympathy amongst West Germans for what their Eastern compatriots were going through during the Wende was a further source of disappointment for many East Germans, whether supporters or opponents of the socialist regime.28 Before the Wall fell, West Germans supported East German friends or relatives by sending approximately 25 million parcels per year across the border.29 They had also shown solidarity with their East German brethren through symbolic actions such as putting a candle in the front windows of their homes to demonstrate that they had not forgotten them.30 Somewhat counter-intuitively, Germans from opposite sides of the Wall who had kept in touch before November 1989 often found that their relations with those on the other side crumbled once the Iron Curtain had been removed. Was this because the West Germans were no longer the charitable, benevolent givers with the upper hand?31 Or was it simply that the new unparalleled opportunities for face-to-face interaction revealed just how little they had in common?
After forty years living in societies with very different values, it is hardly surprising that in 1990 both East and West Germans said of each other that ‘their clocks tick differently’.32 As one joke from 1990 had it: the East German says to the West German, ‘Wir sind ein Volk’ (We are one people). The West German replies, ‘Wir auch’ (Us too).33 But because East and West Germans shared the same language and long-term history, it was widely expected, as former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt said on 10 November 1989, that the two countries would ‘grow together’ seamlessly.34 This has taken much longer than anticipated. Though it was a concrete wall that initially caused the East–West divide, in many ways the impact of division was brought into sharper relief when East and West Germans were standing side by side. The 1980s had seen the highest travel activity between both German states and with few exceptions East as well as West Germans consumed Western television programmes on a daily basis. However neither of these factors counterbalanced the very different outlooks that had developed over forty years of division. Through East German eyes, West Germans with their modern consumer society seemed to look down on every aspect of the GDR as inferior, and to see East Germans as having been infected with an unconvincing ideology.35 In fact, as one East German wryly observed shortly after the Wall fell, ‘Now we’ll be the Turks of West Germany’, alluding to the high numbers of Turkish immigrants in West Germany.36 East Germans disliked feeling categorized as second-class citizens and found it hard to accept that nothing from their old lives was worth saving. Looking back on the Wende and its impact on his identity, Felix R., who was 9 when the Wall fell, says, ‘It is only with reunification that I was made to feel East German.’37 Therefore, even though reunification gave East Germans significant new freedoms in terms of travel, expression, and purchasing opportunity, it effectively defined and denigrated their identity as East Germans and in so doing revealed ongoing divisions between the East and West of the country.
The way East Germany was incorporated into West Germany upon reunification exacerbated the failure of mutual understanding, especially from the East German perspective. In contrast to the GDR, where citizens had been encouraged up to a point to share their views with the regime, when it came to unification, the East German citizens (with the exception of a small minority like Petra) felt that they had little say in how the new Germany was shaped.38 The GDR story, as they remembered it, appeared to have been snuffed out. And instead, the official memory of the GDR seemed to have been established on Western terms through the West German newspapers and television channels that have prevailed over their Eastern counterparts since reunification. This ‘Western’ version of the GDR past, as East Germans like Robert see it, emphasizes the inferiority of the socialist system both economically and socially as well as the prevalence of the Stasi in day-to-day life which, as we have seen, many East Germans do not recognize as their experience under socialism. Regarded as the poor relations after unification, East Germans like Robert and Peggy have become keen to defend aspects of their former lives in the GDR, emphasizing some of its material and moral benefits.39 Given the way they had been incorporated into the West, many felt nostalgia for the familiarity of life in the GDR, a place that was home, in contrast to the foreign culture that grew up on their native soil after 1990. Social anthropologist Elizabeth Ten Dyke offers useful insights into why East Germans felt such a strong sense of dislocation in the new circumstances:
We can understand social situations and act in them in ways that are appropriate, and in our best interests, because we have a wealth of learning (memory) on which we can draw as we interpret a wide variety of settings … After the Wende East Germans had to function in an almost brand new world. They only slowly acquire the practical experience, and memories, they would need to be successful in this place … The Wende rendered a lifetime’s worth of memory largely inapplicable to the strange new world of capitalist West Germany.40
Daily practices in East Germany that were so routine as to be subconsciously ingrained suddenly appeared both aberrant and bars to success in united Germany. Articulating the sense of uncertainty felt by many East Germans in the wake of the fall of the Wall, one woman noted in her diary entry for December 1989, ‘Everywhere is becoming like a foreign land. I have long wished to travel to foreign parts, but I have always wanted to be able to come home … The landscapes will remain the same, the towns and villages will have the same names, but everything here is becoming increasingly unfamiliar.’41 Above all, East Germans like Petra, Robert, and Peggy feel dissatisfied with the absolute nature of the takeover, which implied that nothing about their former lives was worth preserving. Voicing the resentment of many others, an East German bishop wrote a letter to the former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, saying,
We are expected merely to listen all the time. It is constantly suggested that we are not capable of anything, and that everything we have done was wrong. We are the only ones who have to learn something, because, it is said, all of our experiences belong on the trash pile of history. Apparently it is not worth listening when we are saying anything. But we can no longer take this permanent know-all manner and our degrading treatment as disenfranchised failures.42
While such sentiments were wholly understandable to other East Germans who had lived through the massive upheaval of reunification, it was nonetheless with these kinds of remarks that East Germans consolidated their reputation amongst some West Germans as moaning Easterners in the newly reunited Germany. They were also seen as ungrateful, not least because the financial burden of the union fell on West German taxpayers, to the tune of 140 billion Deutsche Marks per year during the 1990s.43 Conversely, as we saw in Katharina’s story, West Germans, who seemed overly confident, quick to criticize the GDR, or to lord over East Germans the superiority of Western ways, were often regarded as ‘Know-it-all West Germans’ by their East German compatriots. Fundamentally, though, for East Germans, ‘under the wreckage of the old [SED] regime lay most of the certainties of life that [they] had long taken for granted’.44
It is little wonder in this context that many East Germans in the mid-1990s stated that they preferred living in divided Germany. Marked social differences and uncomfortable economic realities are critical factors in explaining the far from seamless transition to a united Germany in the decades that followed unification. The same reasons account for the other prevailing memory of the GDR, based on nostalgia for the former East.
Though many East Germans in the years following reunification did express fond memories of life behind the Iron Curtain, Ostalgie is often misunderstood.45 The East Germans I spoke to did not describe their Ostalgie as nostalgia for the apparatus of the socialist state. Nor was their Ostalgie really captured by East German products like the Trabant and the distinctive Ampelmänner (East German traffic light men in red and green with unique hats) which have since assumed cult status—these are merely symptomatic of a resurgent fashion for vintage items, and a focus on such items is in fact damaging as it
belittles a very real and understandable desire to retain a connection with where they have come from.
figure 30 Traffic light men (Ampelmänner) in East Berlin.
© Getty Images.
With the fall of the Wall, a whole way of life evaporated. The certainties on which day-to-day routines had been built ceased to exist.46 The old and familiar life in the GDR was replaced with unknowns, and unknowns provoked fears: ‘Fears about change that we didn’t really want; fears about rules that we don’t know; fears about unemployment … and fears about drugs.’47 After the Wende, East Germans read uncensored newspapers for the first time—newspapers reporting horrible crimes that had not been covered in the controlled East German press even when such things happened. And with this, a naive feeling of safety was swept away for good. Whether or not the crime rates really were lower in East Germany, many interviewees expressed that they felt it was safer growing up in the GDR than it is in united Germany.48 Discomfort at unfamiliar cultural norms in reunited Germany and also the absence of their usual way of life combined to intensify fond memories of life in the GDR. Indeed, as one East German put it, ‘Even a topsy-turvy world is home when everyone lives there.’49 That home simply disappeared with the Wende. What emerges almost unanimously from the interview testimony, is that former GDR citizens draw a clear distinction between the regime (of which none of those interviewed harboured positive memories) and what people experienced as a specific culture. The nostalgia then is not chiefly political, but is instead nostalgia for the shared understanding stemming from joint memories and similar experiences. In many ways, then, it is no different from West Germans who remember aspects of their past in a positive light. Crucially, though, the FRG still exists but the GDR does not.
figure 31 A Trabant outside the Brandenberg Gate, Berlin, 1984.
© Getty Images.
Having considered some general reasons why East Germans have such contrasting abiding memories of the GDR, what can we learn from the eight stories we have heard? Since historians are ill-equipped to peer into the inner workings of the human brain to understand why it retains some pieces of information while discarding others, accounting for the different versions of the transition of 1989 will be more achievable by reaching back into the protagonists’ individual histories in the GDR. What were their lives like as they faced a new reality in united Germany?50
Interviewing people for this project has confounded my expectations at every turn. People resist categorization. It might seem reasonable to think that a person would react in a certain way because of what age they are, where they are from, what religion they are, or how they interacted with the state—and then they surprise you. People do not always remain consistent in their views and opinions, and it is a mistake to expect them to be wholly logical or rational.51
Thinking about it rationally, Mario had every reason to be delighted by the demise of the GDR. It was the country that had denied him his freedom, imprisoned him for exercising the internationally recognized human right to leave his country of origin, and left him with fragile mental health. Katharina also had good reason to be pleased to see the back of the socialist state: as a Christian she had been bullied and mocked for her beliefs at school, and made to feel like an outsider among the atheist masses; her opportunities for further education were restricted to theology, and in the years after her dissident husband was released from prison, she was acutely aware that their behaviour had to appear impeccable to the regime if he was to avoid being rearrested. And yet neither Mario nor Katharina had the reactions we might expect to the new status quo. Mario was initially anxious and frightened, scared that the Wall that had kept his persecutors at bay (once he had been allowed to move to the West) would no longer protect him.52 And Katharina, although she firmly characterizes herself amongst the winners of the changes of 1989 and has achieved more genuine freedom to exercise her beliefs, still believes that day-to-day life in the GDR was nowhere near as bad as outsiders seem to think.
Significantly, it was when the interviewees reached their teenage years that they generally began to knock up against the state’s boundaries. The stories told here show how disparate the responses to these restrictions were—from risking life and limb to escape, to lobbying the government for change, to accepting the circumstances pragmatically. For people like Petra, Lisa, and Peggy, whose behaviour provoked very little trouble with the authorities, the socialist system felt much less restrictive than for those like Carola, Mario, and Mirko, who found it more of a struggle to conform to the state’s rules. While Mario genuinely feared encountering his Stasi interrogators, Petra or Lisa by contrast had no reason to have a strong aversion to supporters of the socialist government. For people like Robert, who came from a humble background, the regime’s active promotion of the working classes gave him and his family greater opportunities than they would have had in a Western capitalist country. At the same time, for Katharina, her family experienced many more difficulties than they would have encountered in the West, because of their Christianity. And while some interviewees like Robert and Peggy describe the sense of loss following the eradication of their socialist milieu, all the protagonists explain that the Wende brought hugely positive opportunities.
As we have seen, German reunification represented a major transformation in the lives of ordinary East Germans. Superficially at least, everything changed. But the changes also brought a clash between the values and practices established in the socialist system and the values and practices in the new status quo. Whilst East Germans were forced to adjust to the situational differences at once, their habits, behaviour, and values were not so easily altered. Internal change did not mirror the external transformation, or at least not as quickly. It was not possible to snuff out years of socialization.53 The country they had grown up in no longer existed in fact, but it continued to exist in their minds.54 No matter what they thought about that country, their individual day-to-day lives were bound up with it. As one East German explained, ‘We belonged to it, it belonged to us.’55
The stories told here show the long-lasting impact of socialist socialization on East Germans. We see this in Peggy’s critical attitude to capitalism, in Mirko’s dislike of the fact that the state still holds a great deal of personal information about individuals, be it through CCTV or as a condition of receiving state benefits. We can also observe the long-term effects of living under socialism in Robert’s heightened appreciation of literature that he previously could not get hold of, and in Mario’s dislike of cashiers behind desks in banks, which remind him of being interrogated at Hohenschönhausen. In addition to this, Mario, Robert, Peggy, and Mirko are all engaged in work which relates to their experiences of living in the SED system. As we have seen, Mario does tours of Hohenschönhausen Stasi prison, with the aim of educating visitors about the brutal side of life in the GDR; Robert and Peggy conduct tours in Berlin’s GDR museum, both in part motivated by a desire to correct visitors’ often negative misapprehensions about daily life under socialism; and Mirko runs a cultural institute arranging exchanges between Eastern European and German youths, in the hope that participants will learn about different cultures and types of government through their trips. The collection also illustrates how foreign West German ways continue to seem to former citizens of the GDR. Indeed, Carola, Lisa, Robert, and Peggy all explained that, more than two decades later, they still generally find common ground more easily with East Germans than with West Germans.
The stories furthermore reveal that the protagonists were often disappointed in West Germans. Robert, for example, is disappointed that Westerners often seem so ignorant about life in the GDR, and appear to base their views on the false impression that East Germans did not have enough to eat and were constantly trailed by the Stasi. Katharina is disappointed at the lack of humanity among ruthless West German capitalists, many of whom traded on East German naivety to make a profit after 1989. Peggy feels disappointed that West Germans often seem unable to understand the magni
tude of the upheaval for East Germans following reunification. Petra laments the fact that reunification was not based on more of a mix of the two political systems, and feels disillusioned that Westerners were not open to learning anything from the East German set-up. And Mario feels it is wrong that the West German justice system that operated after unification did not do more to prosecute those who had worked for the Stasi. Generally too, among the interviewees, there was a feeling that the ongoing difficulties facing East Germans since the transition have been sidelined and that the government believes these difficulties will self-correct with time.
Despite the personal tumult and uncertainty that the Wende brought for East Germans, none of the interviewees would wish to return to the GDR, even if it were possible. There are a number of reasons for this. In the eyes of many East Germans the old system has been discredited. The socialist leadership promised a classless society with social equality and easy access to food, shelter, and employment. And many of those I interviewed grew up firm in the belief that ‘what we’re doing here [in the GDR] is the right thing’, with fair and equal opportunities for all.56 After 1989, however, it gradually became apparent that some were more equal than others in the GDR: Party bigwigs lived in relative luxury in the forested area of Wandlitz outside Berlin, and their lives were free from the worries that concerned ordinary citizens in the GDR since they had ready access to Western goods. This hypocrisy, that these politicians claimed to be striving for equality while hoarding privileges for themselves, has made it easier for many East Germans to leave their GDR past behind them.57 For some, like Mario or Carola, who had hated many aspects of life in the GDR, there were overwhelming upsides to be had from living within the Western model. For the majority, who had grown used to the terms and conditions of living under socialist rule, German reunification was still a positive development when viewed over the longer term. It was a facilitator. Now, from the comfort of what they see as an improved situation, East Germans like Robert and Peggy can point to elements of the old system that were good.58 Critics of the old system like Mario understandably fear that any positive recollections may overshadow the very real suffering that the regime caused. Can there really be anything to learn, they ask, from a country that used barbed wire to keep its people locked in?59 On the other hand, it is equally understandable that other East Germans wish West Germans would acknowledge that the West could in fact learn from some of the GDR’s ideals, policies, and approaches, even if they were not perfectly executed at the time.
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