EXPERIENCES IN THE WEST
Peter Richter
Division overcome? Don’t you believe it!
Not even in Berlin. Not even in the apartment ads: "Close to Bernauer Strasse U-Bahn
station," it said. A girlfriend of mine excitedly phoned the real estate agent:
"South or north of Bernauer Strasse?" The agent switched to delay tactics:
"Fantastic apartment, big, cheap…" The girlfriend, impatiently: "South
or north?" "Well, maybe a couple of metres north of Bernauer Strasse," the
agent sighed, "but…"
No but. And no chance either. She’d hung
up. The poor estate agent. The poor West. Of course, you have to know that the East is in
the South and the West is in the North. Get it? I hope so, because that’s the least
complicated bit about the whole setup. Bernauer Strasse is the road that divides the
district of Wedding, old West Berlin, from the district of Mitte that used to belong to
East Berlin. And those few metres still divide worlds, even now! But now, things are the
opposite way around, compared to when the Wall existed. It’s here, at Bernauer
Strasse, that almost all of those famous Wall photos were taken: of the people a couple of
floors up suicidally jumping from their later walled-up windows into the West, of the East
German People’s policeman making his last-minute leap over the barbed wire as the
Wall went up. And the strangest thing is: this osmotic pressure that, at the time,
compelled people to change sides almost by law of nature – can still be felt today,
after fifteen years without the Wall, the border guards with their orders to shoot on
sight and the barbed wire. But now, thank goodness, it’s taken on a far more harmless
guise. The thing is that the difference in living conditions and the associated social
prestige have changed direction.
Today, the promise of a better, brighter,
more exciting life now resides on the east of the old Wall borderline, where newcomers
from "West Germany" and the rest of the world celebrate a never-ending
Berlin-Mitte party in the renovated ruins of Socialism together with the last surviving
East Germans.
In my case, my mind was boggled more or less
the moment I set foot in the West. It was a week after the Wall was opened, when I finally
got my very first chance to go "over the other side" – I could never have
imagined for a second how incredibly difficult it would be to get rid of my money in this
cold, insensitive capitalist world. The media in both the East and the West had constantly
made quite the opposite ominous prophecies. Everyone is just after your money, and when
it’s all gone, you’re finished as a human being, and you end up on welfare. But
there you are with your "Welcome-to-the-West" hundred mark note stuck in your
wallet, just like when West Germans visited the GDR with their compulsory exchange of
twenty-five East marks that they just couldn’t get rid of during their day trip to
East Berlin. What could they buy anyway? As it happened, when I stepped into the West, I
actually entered Wedding, and for the first few metres all I could do was stare in
amazement at all the different western cars, although even then most cars in that area
were second-hand Opels rather than brand new Mercedes limousines. But when you’re so
new, it takes a while to acquire the necessary fine tuning in such important matters as
status and prestige symbols.
But one thing was crystal clear: that the
hundred mark note I’d just accepted a bit bashfully in the first bank I came to, my
welcoming gift from the Federal government, was different. The difference between these
hundred D-marks and a hundred East marks was like the difference between a valuable Dürer
drawing and a pathetic potato print. And apart from that, or maybe because of the special
reverence attributed to it: this banknote was far too big for my puny little eastern
wallet, so that it always stuck out over the edge and eventually ended up crumpled. I then
tried to change the note on the bus. The driver saw my blue-coloured GDR ID card –
and just waved me on.
I got off at the New National Gallery.
I’d be happy if I could tell you that I spent my first West cash on a museum visit
rather than on bananas. But for people from the East entrance to the museums was free too.
Then, when I wanted to buy a postcard (Barnett Newman! Abstract!! Free West!!!), the sales
assistant looked at me in amazement. The card cost fifty pfennigs. She then sold it to me
for one East mark. At the end of this first day in the West I still hadn’t spent any
of my hundred mark note, but I’d had a foretaste of the West’s generosity and
the lurking resentments we’d be facing in the future.
Fifteen years later: there are still
Westerners who have never once set foot in the East, and most likely never will. Those who
come to the East and get involved sometimes meet with animosity. Even now. In 2004.
Meanwhile, East Germans find it hard to understand why they should have to work longer
hours than colleagues in the West, but only be paid 80 percent of their wages. For a West
German it’s hard to understand why people in the East should even be getting 80
percent when productivity there is only 70 percent. Meanwhile, the number of billions that
have been poured into the East from the West is almost incalculable. But the number of
places where the billions have really been effective is pretty easy to count.
In my opinion old West Berlin is the clear loser in the
aftermath of change, compared with the East which is where the money’s going now. It
doesn’t bear thinking about, that originally the luxurious but no longer affordable
social systems of the Federal Republic may well have been a product of a social arms race
between the two German states – and so they have to be dismantled just like all the
other Cold War relics. The happy end of this Cold War, the miracle of the fall of the Wall
– sometimes they seem so damned far away, now that everyday life and the intra-German
mood are once again mundanely ruled by money. And the mood at the moment is extremely
touchy.Peter Richter; The columnist and bestseller author was born in Dresden in 1973 and
now lives in Berlin.
(Embassy of Germany) |
