Forty Autumns

by Nina Willner

  By now, having racked up $10 billion in foreign debt to Western creditors, East Germany’s economy was in shambles and slipping into bankruptcy. As suddenly as consumer supplies had appeared in the 1970s, by the end of the decade much had disappeared from store shelves and the quality of products seemed to be going from bad to worse. What was available became rationed or marked up, often becoming prohibitively expensive, the meager wages of the average worker preventing them from being able to purchase even these inferior products.

  East Germany had peaked and the system was no longer improving. In fact, things seemed to be going in the opposite direction. Nevertheless, as usual, Honecker reassured his people that the country was well respected and seen as a leader not only in the East Bloc but also in the West. At home and abroad, Honecker pointed to the country’s sports achievements as proof of progress. East German athletes were setting new world records and catapulting the reputation of the country to new heights, enabling East Germany to finally gain legitimacy from the rest of the world, which, he said, it so richly deserved.

  To those who for years had held on to the belief that the country was making substantial progress, it had become evident that it actually wasn’t. Though many had suspected or known this all along, others were beginning to awaken from a thirty-year slumber to see the truth: a decades-old promise by Germany’s now-aging dictatorship would never be fulfilled.

  By now 120 people had died, either shot or drowned, trying to get out of East Germany since the building of the Berlin Wall.

  Then in 1979, a spectacular incident occurred when two families took their escape to the skies. Having fashioned a hot-air balloon from canvas, bedsheets, old scraps of fabric, and a homemade gas burner, Günter Wetzel, a mason, and Peter Strelzyk, a mechanic, and their families ascended into the dark night sky and sailed quietly over the Wall to safety in the West.

  The escape made headlines around the world, with Strelzyk saying, “Freedom is the most valuable thing a human being can possess. The only people who know that are people who have had to live without it. If you’ve grown up free, you don’t know what it means.” After that escape, the sale of fabric and cloth was closely controlled in East Germany.

  But far more deaths occurred at the border than escapes. Not long after the successful balloon escape, in two separate incidents, eighteen-year-old Marienetta Jirkowsky and Dr. Johannes Muschol were shot dead at the Wall; the lifeless body of thirty-two-year-old Peter Grohganz was pulled from the Spree River; and twenty-six-year-old Thomas Taubmann was killed leaping from a bridge while trying to make a break for the West.

  East Germans started craving increased information and contact with the outside world and it became an open secret that many of them were tuning in to the West. While some chose not to listen to what the regime said were lies, and some were still afraid to tune in for fear of being reported by patriotic neighbors, many others started to tap into the airwaves.

  With renewed tensions, East Germany once again tried to jam BBC and U.S.-sponsored broadcasts like the Voice of America, which brought pro-Western messages about freedom and democracy to the East.

  Border areas logically offered the best reception while some regions had little or no access to the airwaves due to distance or geography. In Karl Marx City, Heidi and Reinhard were able to tune in and did so. The reception in their flat was weak but they had relatively good access to West Germany’s ARD and ZDF TV stations as well as to Radio Luxembourg and Deutschlandfunk, which became their favorite source of news and music. Reinhard’s parents in Stollberg tuned in to Tagesschau, a West German news service, but relatives living in nearby Dresden were unable to receive the signal. On occasion, Heidi was able to pick up grainy reception of the American soap opera Dallas. She marveled at the lavish American lifestyle of champagne, jewels, and Cadillacs; did most Americans really live like that? The regime’s worst nightmare, this mass movement of behind-closed-doors East German civil disobedience would grow and eventually become known as “defection by television.”

  One day Reinhard was dispatched to his manager’s apartment to fix an electrical problem and found the boss’s daughter glued to the TV set, happily watching a West German children’s show despite the boss’s own earlier strict order to employees not to tune in. What was clear was that, by now, the regime knew it could not possibly track every instance of eyes and ears tuning in to the West.

  To counter the television and radio threat from the West, the East German authorities aired Der Schwarze Kanal, the Black Channel, a play on words meaning sewer flow, a weekly propaganda show designed to discredit West German news stories. On Monday evenings at nine, East Germans could watch heavily edited versions of West German newscasts twisted with East German overdubs and political commentary meant to confuse and incite people to question the West’s version of the truth. However, Der Schwarze Kanal gained a reputation as the least popular show on East German television.

  As if Western television and radio broadcasts weren’t enough to cause concern in the regime, there was another reason for alarm: music.

  In the United States, I was a typical American teenager of the ’70s, with long, carefree hair and dreams of world peace. I wore bellbottom jeans and platform shoes and listened to Cat Stevens and James Taylor. They sang of love, peace, and freedom—things important to young people all over the world in that era.

  I loved the Beatles, as did millions in both the West and behind the Iron Curtain, where they had taken on near prophet-like status, even years after they had disbanded. Communist authorities perceived the Beatles’ music to be a grave threat—a countercultural phenomenon that spread antigovernment messages of revolution and questioning authority; just as dangerous, the Beatles’ lyrics of love and peace threatened to humanize the West. The East German authorities awkwardly tried to neutralize the Beatles’ impact by publicly branding them as deviants and referring to them as “a horde of wild mushroom heads,” but any attempt to lessen their influence only encouraged young East Germans to try to listen to them even more.

  In an attempt to counter the Western music threat, the leadership tried to appeal to East German youth by offering its own brand of regime-friendly pop music. Ostrock, or East Rock, bands like the Puhdys and Silly were strictly monitored to make sure they didn’t step out of line or weave double meanings into their songs, and when they played too close to the edge of what was allowed, the authorities simply put an end to their music.

  One of East Germany’s music superstars was my distant cousin Erich Klaus. Because of his Communist Party loyalty and willingness to sing songs sanctioned by the regime, he enjoyed spectacular celebrity, which came with plenty of perks, including access to Western goods, foreign clothing and shoes, a luxury apartment, and a lot of travel abroad. Because of his special status, he distanced himself from common citizens, including his own relatives, especially those with black marks like my mother’s family, believing, probably rightly so, that association with such a family would only jeopardize his privileged position.

  In one letter to my mother Opa wrote, “Erich Klaus is now world famous. We hear him all the time on the radio. He gets to travel a lot, was just in Mexico and will soon go to Austria. He does not keep in touch at all.”

  18

  PARADISE BUNGALOW

  REFUGE AND SOLACE

  (1980–1982)

  The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is the act of rebellion.

  —Albert Camus

  By the early 1980s, America had a new president. Ronald Reagan vehemently denounced communism and warned against ignoring Moscow’s dangerous ambitions. Americans steadfastly supported their new president’s impassioned anticommunist stance and continued to be hyperalert about Soviet spies and communists in their midst.

  In Washington, D.C., my parents attended a gala of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. Beneath a sparkling chandelier, amid tables covered in white linen, flowered centerpie
ces, and stemmed glassware, a local politician’s wife, looking to make polite dinner conversation, pleasantly asked my mother where she was from.

  “East Germany,” my mother gracefully replied, to which the alarmed woman gasped, “You’re a communist?!” That outburst brought the table to a sudden silence. After that, whenever my mother was asked where she was from, she lied and said she was from Hannover, West Germany.

  By now East German authorities realized they simply could not adequately feed their people, so the regime gave out 850,000 plots of land to citizens to use to grow their own food. Allotment gardens would allow weekend farmers to grow their own vegetables and fruit in order to feed their families and help stock state stores in order to sustain others. The move was a stinging defeat for communism, which was supposed to raise enough food on the collectives for the masses. But in East Germany that concept had failed, so the regime was forced to come up with a new plan. And so they reinstituted individual ownership of land. This was semiprivatization in a country that had outlawed private enterprise.

  At work, Heidi’s boss, Meier, assembled his workers and read from an order that the state was rewarding them with a small plot of land they could use to harvest their own food. The workers were thrilled; there were smiles all around. Naturally, Communist Party members were to receive priority as there were a limited number of plots, and not everyone would be selected. Heidi stood in the back. She knew she would be at the bottom of the list and did not hold out much hope of receiving such a highly prized gift from the state.

  A similar proclamation was made at Reinhard’s workshop, where he too looked on as Party members were called forward. For the naturally industrious Reinhard, it was a fantasy to believe that he could essentially have his own mini-farm.

  Several months went by when Heidi was called to Meier’s office, where, out of earshot of others, he recognized her for her outstanding performance. With a reserved smile, he handed her an envelope containing an announcement that she had been selected to receive a plot.

  She raced home that evening to report the news to Reinhard. Incredulous at their good fortune, the two embraced, shedding tears. Reinhard read the notice over and over, studying every word. Nothing could be better, he thought, than owning a piece of land in the countryside where they could not only grow their own food, but even more important, have a sense of independence, ownership, and freedom. This was a windfall, he thought, and he fully intended to run with it.

  That night, Reinhard, who by not joining the Communist Party had hampered his opportunity for education, went to bed with his head spinning with ideas about how to best design and build not only a bountiful garden, but a dwelling of some kind, a little country home, where they could even stay overnight on the weekends.

  That first weekend after receiving the envelope, Reinhard, Heidi, Cordula, and Mari took a bus, then walked the nearly two miles to claim their little patch of land. On the outskirts of a forest they came upon a large clearing about the size of four football fields, with fertile, unturned soil. Reinhard canvassed the grounds, then carefully studied the map provided with the paperwork, finding their allocated lot on the south side, near the middle of the field. There, one foot in front of the other, he paced out the perimeter of their land, a 24x18-yard rectangle, mindfully measuring and marking every inch of the circumference of their plot, one of some forty that would become gardens on that undeveloped stretch of land.

  Over the next few weeks, other citizen farmers started arriving to claim their new land as well. Before long there was a frenzy of activity, happy fellow landowners digging and raking to loosen the soil, as the earth was prepared for planting, everyone sharing tools, wheelbarrows, helping one another to get their gardens up and running. Soon people were passing along gardening techniques, exchanging tips about where to find the best materials, shovels, rakes, and seeds.

  This was the kind of zeal and passion the leaders of East Germany had envisioned would propel the socialist country to new heights, but which had never materialized. Yet when provided the means to do so, these hundreds of private small-plot farmers, who controlled only a tiny fraction of the county’s arable land, would in the coming years produce almost half of East Germany’s vegetables. It was a dilemma for the authorities, who worried about the long-term impact individual enterprise could have in undermining their command-and-control economy.

  It also greatly concerned the regime that the garden plots could be seen as a refuge from the constraints of communist society.

  Over the next weeks and months, Heidi and Reinhard spent every spare moment working on their land, and after a while their crops began to bud. Then Reinhard acquired some concrete, which he mixed and poured into a 12x25-foot foundation. For the equivalent of about sixty dollars, he bought a prefabricated shed kit, a box of crude parts that included little more than four thin, poorly constructed wooden plank walls, a cheaply made door, and a quarter-inch plywood roof. Taking the challenge to a new level, with paper and pencil he reconfigured the layout, switched out and recast parts, improvising at every turn to improve the shack’s design. Along with his architectural drawings, they hauled the parts to the plot.

  For Reinhard, the search for materials and building supplies for the cabin turned into a near obsession, his every waking moment preoccupied with plans about how he could best improve the family’s new country retreat, how he could use wooden planks he had scrounged to build braces to strengthen the cabin’s frame, or repurpose a corrugated metal fence into the ideal weatherproof roof.

  Every Saturday morning, except for weekends when Cordula had swim competitions, the young family quietly slipped out of town on a bus, loaded down with tools, new seeds and wood planks, glass panes, salvaged bricks, all sorts of materials they would recycle into some useful part, odds and ends they were able to scrape together, had scavenged, traded for, or bought. While their parents turned the soil, creating one entire section just for flowers and others for vegetables and berries, the girls played nearby in the dirt, watered the plants, or dropped seeds into holes. At the site, Heidi and Reinhard worked indefatigably from sunup to sundown improving their cottage and garden, often finding themselves still working long after other gardeners had gone home. Exhausted at the end of the day, they often slept under the stars in a makeshift tent, even when it rained.

  Bit by bit, the bungalow came together. These were immensely happy days for the family and they reveled in their work and in every little achievement, in every new construction and every tiny bud or shoot that sprouted. In just a few seasons, their square of land had been completely transformed.

  In the summer of 1982, two years after they had first received their dirt plot, they were tremendously proud of what they had achieved. Together the four stood standing, taking it all in.

  Surrounding their plot was a tidy chain-link fence with a wooden picket gate. Inside the gate was a lush wonderland carpeted in a blanket of green grass. In the garden beds, yellow and green pepper plants stood tall, and leafy growth from celeriac, kohlrabi, and beets shot up through the earth. Tomatoes climbed upward along wooden dowels and on the garden floor, parsley, chives, beans, and zucchini grew and ripened. Farther in, tiny pink buds dotted dark green vines that curled around a homemade wooden arbor, and red flowers peeked out from an old, broken-down wheelbarrow-turned-planter.

  In the middle of it all, standing resolute against the blue sky, was the cottage. A small miracle in the form of a handsomely built, modest country cabin, though hardly luxurious, it had an enchanting, dreamlike quality and bore all the excitement, magic, and innocence of a child’s secret fort tucked away in the forest.

  They took in a breath. Reinhard took Heidi’s hand and together they walked up the stone-brick path and block concrete steps to the wood-planked porch and into the cabin. Inside to the left stood a tiny makeshift kitchen complete with running water sourced by a large barrel of rainwater.

  While their flat in the city remained sparsely decorated, they had adorned the b
ungalow with expensive Plauen lace curtains that now graced the windows of the main living space, a six-by-eight-foot sitting room with wooden cabinets that Reinhard had fashioned from wood scraps and fastened onto the wall.

  Below the cabinets stood a small couch made up of patched pillows and sofa parts propped up on a wooden frame. Three chairs they had hauled from the apartment stood on either side of a card table. In the center of the table, a drinking glass with fresh flowers topped a white, handmade lace doily and a small battery-powered radio.

  Around the corner from the living room was a small alcove with a fully functioning dry-composting toilet. Across from it there was just enough room to squeeze in a narrow double-decked sleeping loft. Thick, fluffy comforters topped two wooden beds. They went back outside and turned to face the bungalow.

  It was, to put it simply, a triumph—a testament to ingenuity and perseverance in a society that forbade individuality and independence and shunned innovation and creativity on one’s own terms. The natural-born engineer who had not been given the same chance as others had found a way to achieve something out of nothing.

  A victory not just in the physical sense, their little paradise stood as a symbol against the limitations imposed by communism, against all that their government had denied its people, and in fact against everything the regime stood for. They had created a place where they could retreat to not only their own private physical space but, along with it, their own private thoughts. Despite being born into and living their entire lives under the haze of authoritarianism, at the bungalow they felt free.

  As night fell, they lit a candle and put the girls to bed, then Heidi and Reinhard returned outside to the darkness, where they sat back and uncorked a bottle of Rotkäppchen sparkling champagne they had bought and saved just for this one glorious moment.

  They toasted to each other and to their life together. Then Reinhard turned on the radio. After searching for a while, he picked up a scratchy signal from the West, tickled when he happened upon a singer he had recently discovered: a man by the name of Elvis.