In 1982, I was 20 years old when I
moved to the U.S. from my native West Germany. I went to college and grad
school. In 1984, I traveled to West Germany with an American friend who
wanted to see communist East Berlin. I had never visited, nor did anyone in my family ever suggest it.
My mom joined us on the trip. We did the
whole "day visa" jumping-through-hoops bureaucratic rigamarole. We could drive only a single pre-determined route through the part of East Germany that led to
a divided Berlin, the so-called "Transit Highway". It was used by West Germans only to
travel to West Berlin and back. Rest stops along the 100-mile stretch of East Germany were
sparse, and located in the median of the highway. Stops elsewhere were illegal.
Contact with East Germans was aggressively minimized.
We arrived at Checkpoint Charlie in West Berlin, where the real fun begun. Our visas and
papers were processed, we had to leave all Western currency behind and were
forced to buy about $100 in worthless East German "aluminum money", none of
which we were allowed to bring back. Seriously, East German coins were made
from aluminum. We were only allowed one small carry-on bag each. I had
stealthily taken along some tokens of Western pop culture, such as baseball
cards, small candy bars and a comic book. I got them in. I planned on "accidentally forgetting" them at various locations throughout East Berlin in the spirit of "Greetings from the West!"
We boarded
an ancient-looking subway train that took us past crumbling, dilapidated
platforms unused since WWII to the one subway station that remained operational
in East Berlin, also used exclusively by Westerners traveling in and out. We
found ourselves right near the historic Reichstag, even though that was not
immediately evident. My mother recognized it. It was a broken, bombed-out shell
of a building, had clearly burned at one point and been left to rot. Getting
closer, the signs of neglect became even more evident, along with the reek of
urine.
We moved on…
and entered a colorless, decaying, utterly depressing cityscape. The
absence of color was so complete it was jarring. No ads, no displays, no
signage, no storefront displays, no signs at all of anything
resembling commerce. No greenery. Blocky East German architecture
clashed with once magnificent pre-WWII buildings now blackened with soot and not
one repair made on their exteriors.
This absence
of color and vitality extended to the people we encountered, all dressed in
grey, drab, utilitarian clothes. I looked at the few girls I saw and wondered
what they would make of a colored hair tie. We did manage to spend some of our
money at places that were simply named "Café" and "Restaurant", all of it clearly
geared towards Westerners. Even after that, we were still flush with "East Mark" currency
and had no place to spend any of it. Someone got a huge tip that day. Where
they were going to spend it, I had no idea.
None of us
wanted to stay as long as we’d planned. Back on the subway we went, emerging at
Checkpoint Charlie, where we were prepared to be "processed out". The most
memorable part of the trip was still ahead of me.
We entered
passport control (one at a time), which put me alone in the same room with an
armed-to-the-teeth East German border guard and a locked door between me and
freedom. He was behind a huge wood and glass partition. I could only see him
from the chest up, uniform, machine gun barrel and all. He was all of 19, if he
was a day. I gave him
my passport. He took it and placed it behind the partition where I couldn’t see
what he was doing. I heard him flicking through it more than once. I had about
25 visa stamps in my passport at the time. He didn’t say anything for what
seemed like an eternity. I just stood there and the silence went on long enough
that I was starting to sweat bullets. All kinds of stuff went through my head. I
worked myself up to near panic, thinking "Shit. Maybe they saw me leaving that
stuff around East Berlin. Maybe they know I broke the rules. Shit. Maybe I was
followed. Maybe they follow all visitors. Shit. Shit. Shit. What was I
thinking?? They’re going to take me to an interrogation room never to be seen
again!" I was on the verge of tears. Or fainting. Or a heart attack, or all of
the above. I considered yelling for my mom. But what was she going to do? It
was pure torture. In reality, the border guard probably looked at my
passport for all of two minutes.
He finally
looked up at me, with not quite a smile, but interested. I didn’t want him to
be interested! I wanted out of there!!
He asked: "Do you really live in America?" This
blind-sided me so completely, I almost denied it. Finally, I managed to croak
out: "Umh… Yes." "Do you like it?" he
asked. Again, I was totally unprepared for the question and barely managed to
answer a second time "Umh… Yes." Now I
was confused as well as terrified and I considered faking a medical emergency.
He had that not-quite smile again and handed me my passport back. "Thank you",
he said and buzzed the door open. I fled.
I still have the passport, now a historic relic, invalid, expired and issued by a country that no longer exists. Above is an example of the type of J-1 class U.S. student visa that probably got the border guard's attention. The visas took up two whole pages. Each year, I had to return to the U.S. Embassy in Bonn (then capital of West Germany), prove continued enrollment at a U.S. university and obtain the stamp that allowed me to live legally in the U.S. for a year. These days, I'm a legal U.S. resident by marriage to a U.S. citizen and my passport is a lot less colorful.
I still have the passport, now a historic relic, invalid, expired and issued by a country that no longer exists. Above is an example of the type of J-1 class U.S. student visa that probably got the border guard's attention. The visas took up two whole pages. Each year, I had to return to the U.S. Embassy in Bonn (then capital of West Germany), prove continued enrollment at a U.S. university and obtain the stamp that allowed me to live legally in the U.S. for a year. These days, I'm a legal U.S. resident by marriage to a U.S. citizen and my passport is a lot less colorful.
Once back safely
on Western soil, my fear, terror and panic fell away and quickly, very quickly
morphed into anger, then rage.
Ok, so maybe
the border guard delighted in making West German tourists sweat bullets; I
could see how that would hold a certain appeal. But why ask about my adopted
home country? There were a 1,000 other things more effective he could have mentioned, if he had just wanted to mess with me. No, I decided upon reflection. He
was just curious, plain and simple. I mean, he was a teenager. Like me, he
had never known anything but a divided Germany. Unlike me, he had never seen
anything outside of Germany, and East Germany at that. He was asking me for
first-hand info about a place he had only heard about.
I have
thought about this encounter a lot. The reason I got SO angry then was because
I realized that all my fear, panic, terror - all of it was generated internally by ME based on
what I had been conditioned to believe all East Germans with guns are like:
Brutal, murderous, merciless. The actual moment of contact I had with the
border guard was so far removed from all that it was ridiculous. Suddenly, in a
very visceral way, I understood the nefarious power of propaganda. I almost ran
back inside to tell the guard all he wanted to hear about America. However, by
then my mom came out of the building. I took it out on her.
"How could
you let THIS happen?" I yelled. "What?" my mom, asked, bewildered. "THIS!"
gesturing at the Berlin Wall behind her, "ALL of THIS!" Several others tourists were nearby and took
note. "It’s wrong! It’s perverse! How could your generation put your children
through THIS??" I was on a roll. "You know what? This will NOT stand! We will
not put up with this! Not here, not in East Germany. My generation will make
this RIGHT! This monstrosity – gesturing again at the Berlin Wall – we will
demolish it! IN MY LIFETIME!"
During my
tirade, my American friend had emerged from passport control, completely at a
loss. She didn’t speak German well enough to discern what was going on.
I wasn’t
done, oh no. I gestured at the East German watch towers, each one holding a
heavily armed East German soldier. "And YOU! Up there in your little towers with
your big guns! Is THIS the life you want for yourself? For your kids? Guarding
a rotting, decaying country! Yes, I KNOW! I was just THERE!"
Now my mom
physically dragged me to the car and told me to shut the hell up, that I didn’t
know what I was talking about, and do I want to get shot? But I was 22 by then,
with almost a college degree and it wasn’t as simple as all that, not after
what I had just experienced with the teenage border guard.
The ride
back was tense. My mom kept insisting that if I knew what the Russians are
capable of, I’d stop this foolishness. I, in turn, used the phrase "being fused
into a sheet of radioactive glass" a lot. I knew very well what the Red Army was capable of. But I did not believe for a second that my peers on the other side of
the Iron Curtain wanted to be fused into a sheet of radioactive glass any more
than I did. "What do you think is going to happen if both Germanies decide to
tear down that cursed Wall? The Russians are going to nuke us?!" "Yes!" my mom
replied, with conviction.
At the first
rest stop through East German territory, I seriously considered bolting in
rebellion, against my mom, against the Berlin Wall, against the whole damn Cold
War. Streak across the highway, disappear into the forest, find a small town,
blend in for a while, maybe form a posse of like-minded people, spread the word,
let freedom ring! I envisioned myself leading groups of people, challenging
armed Stasi agents: "What are you going to do, huh? SHOOT me? Shoot ALL of us,
right here? We are the SAME, you fool! Same culture, same language, same
history, same ancestors! We are not mortal enemies, regardless of what our
governments want us to think!"
This plan
presented a number of practical obstacles as I pondered it. I abandoned my
crazy plan with a sigh, telling myself I didn’t really want to die that day,
anyway. With all the nukes pointed at both Germanies 24/7, I wasn’t in too much
of a hurry.
I returned
to the U.S. and dealt with all things German as little as possible. Within the
year I moved to Berkeley, CA, a self-proclaimed "nuclear-free zone", which felt
at least a little like a symbolic victory, the best I could hope for at the
time.
Ten years later, well after the fall of The Wall, I had personally spoken to enough former East
Germans to realize a startling truth: My "crazy plan" may not have succeeded,
but it likely wouldn’t have gotten me killed. As far as kindred spirits were
concerned, I would have found many. By that time, many, many East Germans had long
ago arrived at that same point where I found myself one fine day in 1984: They
would rather face a totalitarian police state, stare down the guns
and risk death than live for another second in fear with this twisted,
perverted continuation of WWII that the career Cold Warriors just couldn’t let
go.
In 1984 the
time wasn’t quite right yet. Five years later, it all came together in a set of
circumstances that saw East Germans determined to change their fate walking up
to border guards, saying: "So, you’re gonna shoot us, or what? Because we’re
LEAVING." A set of events that opened
the flood gates and brought down the Berlin Wall, without bloodshed, much
sooner than I expected in 1984.
Around 1990,
in my hometown Bad Oeynhausen, soon after West Germany made the unprecedented decision to exchange worthless Eastern currency 1-to-1 for hard currency Deutschmarks, I ran into a woman, 40ish, in a supermarket, who was clearly
from the East, based on her clothing. I decided to be a good Western ambassador
and introduced myself. She regarded me with the kind of suspicion born from a
lifetime of living in fear, but then opened up a little. She told me this was
her first trip to the West. That she’d come across the border from her small
town in the East by train to shop in the Western markets she’d heard about. She’d
been told my hometown was a small, safe place with plenty of shops far enough away
from the former East/West border that they weren’t continually picked clean. We
were right next to the train station. I realized this woman was likely
experiencing her first exposure to what food shopping in the West is like, what I had taken for granted my entire life. She
looked at the large display of meats and sausages in front of us and frowned.
She asked me "What do I get?" "Anything you want!", I answered, with a smile
that was supposed to convey "Isn’t it GREAT?" She kept frowning and said "But
who tells me what it is that I want?"
Image credit: SZ Photo/Forum
At that
moment I flashed back to my little "We are the SAME!" speech I had composed in my
mind years earlier. I realized that I had vastly oversimplified the situation.
That re-unification, if it was about to happen, would be far more difficult
than the happy, ecstatic celebrations a few months before.
Also in
1990, West German scientists determined that all bodies of fresh water in East
Germany – all of them – were so polluted that they were biologically dead. A
team of Western European inspectors was sent to East Germany that same year to
assess the state of East Germany’s numerous nuclear power plants, many of them
with Chernobyl-class reactors. Stories circulated that, upon their return, every
single one of the inspectors packed up their families and moved far, far away.
This hastened the influx of East Germans into the West for reasons entirely
different from shopping opportunities.
Three years
later, many former West Germans began to clamor for the Wall to be put back in
place. Cultural differences and animosity between the two sides hardened to the
point that new labels emerged: "Wessies" and "Ossies", creating a different socio-cultural
division that persists to this day. My dad, with his characteristic wry humor,
began to refer to the new all-German national holiday, October 3, "Tag der deutschen Einheit" (Day of German Unity),
as "Tag der deutschen Zwietracht" (Day of German Discord).
It is up to
my generation and the next ones to heal the lingering wounds created by a
division that many Germans at the time on both sides tacitly accepted as punishment
for German atrocities committed during WWII. It is not a coincidence that I was
born into a divided Germany the year The Wall made the Iron Curtain real: 1961.
Unlike most West Germans, I never mastered the art of ignoring The Wall and what it symbolized. East Germans
never even had that option.
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