A Chosen Few (61 page)

I
n November 1989, when the Wall opened up following a surprise announcement, Sophie Marum, the daughter of a rabbi and a longtime Communist party member in the East, was asked if she wanted to join the thousands who were rushing across to the West for a four-decade-delayed shopping spree. “I didn’t go there. I am not interested in eating something special. I don’t think the things here were so bad. I like apples. I don’t know why I must eat bananas.”

For a long time the Westerners had been talking about how the poor East Germans had no bananas. Their Germany was such a failure that it could not even offer its population bananas. Such was the religion of consumerism that West Germany had embraced. A society that offered bananas was better than a society that didn’t. When the Wall opened, a curious rumor circulated that parts of West Berlin had become strewn with banana peels. West Germans, Helmut Kohl, and probably most of the Western alliance wanted this moment to be their dramatic triumph, with the downtrodden East Germans, in hysterical joy, bursting into the West, basking in freedom. The cameras were there to record it.

There were people who seriously believed the
Ossis
would be flooding in to buy bananas. They did flood in. The West German government gave each of them one hundred marks to spend (about fifty-five dollars at the time), a small price for a government to pay
to assure its own version of history. According to West Berlin Mayor Walter Momper, Germans were now “the happiest people in the world.”

Ron Zuriel was happy. Still a photography enthusiast and still a Berliner, he went daily to the Wall to take pictures of the
Ossis
coming through. “I was happy for them. To see those faces when they came into the West and saw all those lights and the shops and all that. They came into a different world. For them it was a fantasy.”

After forty years of separation the visual differences were dazzling. The
Wessis
were throwing the party, and the
Ossis
came. Irene Runge, now a teacher of cultural anthropology at East Berlin’s Humboldt University, heard that the Wall had opened, and her first thought was, “What fun!” You could just cross over and back anytime you wanted. The first night she went over, she turned around and went back. As a privileged Communist academic, she had often crossed over before. There was nothing in the West that she wanted, other than the thrill of walking through without being stopped.

“I was not very happy,” said Sophie Marum. “I did not think it was good that we had gifts from the other side. I didn’t think so. Things for nothing. And I thought, ‘In time it will become difficult.’ I had no illusions.”

In not much time at all it became very difficult, and the staged moment faded. But for the first week Westerners were willing to go to great lengths to make it all seem the way they thought it should be. An American television crew asked Irene Runge, since she spoke American English, if they could film her shopping for food in the West. Irene never shopped anywhere but in Prenzlauer Berg. But they insisted, and she liked being on television. The gourmet floor of West Germany’s most deluxe department store, the Ka De We on the Ku’damm, was chosen.

“I would never go there. It’s too expensive,” she said.

But they argued that the Ka De We was where they had made all their filming arrangements, so for this one time she went shopping on the famous
Feinschmeckeretage
. Ka De We is the popular abbreviation for
Kaufhaus des Western
, or Western Department Store, so called because when it opened in 1907, the city center was the part of East Berlin where Irene’s Kulturverein was located, and this was the far western suburb. Bombed into little more than a brick pile, the rebuilding of the Ka De We in the 1950s was seen as
a symbol of the progress of West Berlin. Now it was being used as a symbol again, and Irene Runge, who lived in a badly lit world of pockmarked surfaces, was taken to this smooth, perfectly lit sixty-thousand-square-foot gourmet display on the sixth floor. The
Feinschmeckeretage
alone boasted more than one million dollars in weekly sales and claimed to be the largest luxury food store “outside of Tokyo.”

This was more than bananas. There was Irene in her habitual baggy plaid, followed by a film crew, careening through an alleged 25,000 food items, including fruit and vegetables from around the world, 1,200 varieties of sausage, 1,500 varieties of cheese, and twenty aquariums for salt- and freshwater fish. Was not West Berlin a fun place to shop, now that there was no Wall? Irene did look as if she were having fun. In Prenzlauer Berg where she usually shopped, there were a few apples, a few kinds of cheese, and some smoked fish. Here, the stands were full of things that she had never seen before, things that she could pick up and poke at—like a ten-mark piece of fruit from Asia. The only problem was that she had never seen prices like this in Prenzlauer Berg. Even most West Berliners didn’t normally pay Ka De We prices, and once the television crew turned off its floodlights and left, she could never afford to shop there again.

Soon, most East Berliners began to realize that the change was not going to be quite what it seemed at first. “This euphoric feeling disappeared very quickly because they expected too much,” said Ron Zuriel. “They expected to be on the same footing as the West tomorrow. Not in a few days, but tomorrow. So their expectation was too high, and the German government promoted this.”

West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl had rushed to assure East Germans that their future would be decided democratically by their own choice. Then he proceeded to lure their votes, bribe them with promises, guarantee them that in a united Germany they would get all the bananas and other goodies that the successful Federal Republic, the Bundesrepublik, had to offer. Factory workers were promised that their pay would be brought up to West German standards by 1994. Later, in the spring of 1993, they were told that the economic situation had changed and that their scheduled 26 percent pay raise was just not possible. When workers responded with the first industrial strike since before the Third Reich, West Germans expressed surprise at the depth of bitterness the
Ossis
were showing. What had happened to those radiant faces
that Zuriel had photographed coming through the Wall and the happy woman in the oversize coat shopping at the Ka De We?

Irene had been naive about the changes that were taking place. Walking over to the West, she did not at first realize that her country was about to vanish. “I never thought that the GDR would be lost,” she frequently said. “I think I just didn’t want to believe it. Now I can’t believe that I didn’t believe it.” She always referred to the unification as “the beginning of the not-the-GDR time.”

“I thought this would be the time for the better East Germany.” But soon there were elections, and the right-of-center parties backing Helmut Kohl won 48 percent of the vote. The Communists, who were offering the kind of program to reform the GDR that Irene had hoped for, only won 16 percent, and in October 1990, Irene’s country ceased to exist.

The Stasi, the GDR’s state security police or Staatssicherheitsdienst, died with its state, and now its secrets were left unguarded. The Stasi had wanted to compromise everybody. According to Stasi records, it had deployed 100,000 agents and another 400,000 “unofficial agents,” its euphemism for informers. Some East Germans had spied for the Stasi. Others had fed it information. Others had simply been duped into an association. It had reputedly operated one of the world’s finest espionage networks. It even stole the underwear of suspects, filing it in jars so that later they could be tracked down by sniffer dogs. Before it covered up the graffiti on its walls, it would analyze the lettering and brushstrokes. It collected minute details of peoples’ lives, such as what time they went to bed. But it also did an excellent job of monitoring popular sentiment. Stasi files showed that there had been a growing disenchantment with the regime.

Once the Stasi files became accessible, people started finding that their friend Irene had talked about them. “You know, I gossip with everyone, and I gossiped with them. That was the problem,” Irene explained without a hint of embarrassment. Someone found a postcard they had sent Irene years ago stored in a Stasi file with a notation that Irene had turned it over. On the other hand, someone else found a letter Irene had written them, apparently turned over by someone else and filed by the Stasi, with the notation “This must be the Irene who teaches at Humboldt.” She had signed only with her first name.

Irene had used her bilingual skills to show journalists and other foreigners around and then report to the Stasi on their activities.
She was frequently questioned on her colleagues’ attitudes about the regime, and later on about people she knew in Jewish circles. But Irene tended to see everyone in her circle as loving the GDR. By 1985 the Stasi were convinced that she was untrustworthy and were having others inform on her.

After the collapse Irene was the one compromised German who seemed to like talking about the Stasi and who often mentioned it. Certainly the many parliamentarians from the former East Germany who were involved with Stasi never mentioned it, because it would have destroyed their new political careers. All three new political parties in the East lost their leaders when they were ruined by Stasi revelations. Even the staff of the Committee to Dismantle the Stasi was found to include some with Stasi links.

Irene had thought that since everyone wanted to start talking about this Stasi business, she should come forward. She and a friend made a joint announcement that they had been Stasi informants. It seemed like the civic-minded thing to do at this point. Other colleagues at the university could come forward as well, she reasoned, and they could discuss this Stasi issue. “Everyone said we have to talk about it. We have to talk about the past,” Irene explained. It was the old Communist way of doing things—have a meeting and discuss it. The new German way, however, was to fire both of them immediately. “All our former colleagues who we never knew were so antisocialist only turned out to be that way after the unification,” said Irene angrily. “I still think it is stupid what they are doing to marginalize people like us, but technically I agree. If they win the war, they will dictate the conditions.”

A Canadian journalist interested in Jews in the former East wanted to speak with her, and he brought along an interpreter from the German government press office. Irene explained that there was no need for the interpreter since she was completely fluent in English. But the interpreter sat in on the interview and wrote careful notes in a little book. Suddenly Irene turned to him and in a loud, good-natured voice said, “I know what you’re doing. I used to do the same thing for the Stasi!”

Stasi scandals ruined many of the most productive people from the East, including not only political leaders but important writers and scientists. Most of these people were not agents but simply people who wanted to do things and had been compromised by a conversation—or a series of conversations. Where was the line to be drawn in a society where, as Martin Mandl in Brno said, you
had to make decisions every day about what degree of collaboration was acceptable? When Polish General Jaruzelski offered to release Adam Michnik from prison if he would be willing to accept exile and forgo a trial, Michnik angrily responded, “To believe that I could accept such a proposal is to imagine that everyone is a police collaborator.” That was exactly what the system wanted to imagine.

After unification the West Germans, who had never purged the Nazis from their ranks, who had lived for forty-five years with Nazis in government, Nazi judges, teachers, and policemen, now wanted to disenfranchise, fire, and disgrace all half-million East Germans on file at the Stasi, if they could find them. Not all of them made it as easy as Irene.

Moritz Mebel, after years as an outsider because of his Soviet Army record, managed to become head of the urology department at the Charité Hospital. He built a reputation for the department, starting its kidney transplant program, and always felt that the West Germans showed great interest in his work. But once Germany was unified, the same West German professionals suddenly looked down at the work at Charité, somehow implying it was second rate. “I think that all things that were good in the GDR must be put down,” he said. In 1988 he had retired from both the hospital and the university. Under the GDR he got a pension of 5,600 marks monthly, but once the GDR was dissolved, his pension, like many of those that had been paid by the GDR, was reduced by the German government to 2,010 marks.

“When the Wall came down,” said his wife Sonja, the microbiologist, “it was already clear that the GDR was over.”

“But that it would come in the way it came, that we would be a colony,” said Moritz, pointing toward Sonja. “She saw it better than I did. I thought they were more intelligent than that, the Western politicians.” The Mebels’ daughter, Anna, lost her job as a paralegal working for a city service. Most of the East German civil service was fired. But Anna’s husband knew how to adapt to the new Germany. In 1990, when he lost his job as a lawyer in the Ministry of Trade, he started retraining as a tax lawyer.

T
HE FIRST THING
Mia Lehmann did to prepare for unification was to reinforce the thin wooden door that had served her Prenzlauer Berg apartment since 1946, with new thick steel plating. She
thought the steel very ugly and covered it with her grandchildren’s drawings, but you could not live in this West German society without a strong door. She was not the only one who thought that. At the time of unification East Berlin experienced a run on locks.

In the last years of the GDR, Mia Lehmann had seen dissident meetings in her neighborhood broken up by the police. “I found it horrible. They had a different meeting, and they were persecuted just for that.”

But asked if she was surprised, she laughed, “No. It has happened before.” The years of the exciting new democratic socialist Germany had been weighted with disappointments. But to Mia, the new united Germany was even more horrible.