In Europe (106 page)

After that, things happened quite quickly. The price of a new Trabant dropped by fifty per cent in three months. The neighbours purchased a
satellite dish and began watching only West German television. Eckart, who had been required until recently to ask permission from his bosses for every international telephone call he made, could suddenly cross the border whenever he pleased. Gudrun already had plans to visit family in Canada that summer. ‘It was as though we'd been living in a scary fairy tale all that time,’ she said later. ‘We were as happy as rabbits that had been let out of their cage for the first time in years. But after we had danced in the field for a day, something else suddenly occurred to us: what happens if a fox shows up?’

They were exciting times, and our unexpected arrival was yet another sign that major changes were on their way. We had brought wine with us, and coffee and tea, and fresh fruit and Dutch chocolate, and Eckart talked about days gone by and his countless skirmishes with the Apparatus. Before the
Wende
, he had been required to report every rehearsal of the church choir. The second-hand plastic paint buckets from Christoph Unmack, extremely popular among the locals for use in their kitchen gardens, first had to be dipped in grey paint to cover up the gaudy Western labels. When Eckart heard about that, he stormed into the office of his technical manager – a well known Stasi agent – and shouted: ‘You people are no longer a party of workers, you're a party of bucket-dippers!’

He never heard anything more about it, but Gudrun – who was one of the best pupils at her school – ran into difficulties when she wanted to go to university. Eckart: ‘As long as you don't forget that: it wasn't Erich Honecker who did that, it was the work of thousands of little people together, all making each other's lives miserable.’

The revolution in Niesky in spring 1990 was subtly visible in the mast-head of the
Sächsische Zeitung
. For as long as anyone could remember, the local paper had been falling on the Winkler's mat under the title
Organ der Berzirksleitung Dresden der Sozialistischen Einheitspartei Deutschland
, but from early December 1989 it was simply a
Sozialistische Tageszeitung
, and from January 1990 the paper called itself the
Tageszeitung für Politik, Wirtschaft und Kultur
. In that same month appeared the first advertisements for trips to Paris: ‘No need to eat at expensive restaurants. Simple meals will be served on the bus, and can even be paid for with DDR marks.’

Niesky lived breathlessly, as though a fairy godmother had promised all the town's inhabitants three wishes: free travel, a solid Opel, and all
party nabobs thrown overboard. In the final weeks before the first free elections, however, a certain bitterness crept into the flat on Plittstrasse. Eckart had a good memory, and it was now working to his disadvantage. His managers, who had begun calling themselves ‘entrepreneurs’, were the same men who had recently insisted that all colourful plastic buckets be painted grey. For years many of the neophyte CDU candidates had toed Honecker's party line, enthusiastically and without question. They were
Wendehälse
, weathervanes. Eckart considered this the ‘selling out’ of everything for which they had all worked so hard. Inge: ‘During the demonstrations in November there was a pride in our own country unlike anything we had felt for years. We dreamed of something between capitalism and socialism, the best of both worlds. But when the West German politicians began interfering in our elections, it was all over. They're much better talkers, those
Wessis
.’

On election Sunday, 18 March, 1990, the whole family stayed glued to the radio. That morning in church they had been able to laugh about it, but the mood soured as the results trickled in. The ‘Western’ Christian Democratic Allianz für Deutschland received almost half the votes, the coalition of ninety opposition groups surrounding the New Forum barely three per cent. What it boiled down to was carte blanche for a merger with the West.

Friends from all over began calling. ‘What's it like over there?’ ‘Is this what we risked our necks for all those years?’ ‘We did all the dirty work for these new party bosses, we took the risks. They're just swimming along with the new tide.’ ‘Now they're all snapping to attention in front of Kohl.’ ‘They did it for a car, for the money, to fill their stomachs!’

Gudrun and Inge sat in their living room, weeping.

When my colleague and I returned to Niesky two years later, in 1992, the fairy godmother had actually come by. The houses and side streets still looked a little dilapidated, but the main roads had been repaved, the air was twice as clean – new cars and stoves work wonders – and the shops were overflowing with kiwis and video recorders. All the Karl-Marx-Strassen and Friedrich-Engels-Strassen had been transformed into Goethe-and Schiller-Strassen. At the edge of town, a consortium of Western companies had within a few months thrown up an ultramodern shopping mall,
and the people of Niesky were packing their cars as though they'd been doing it all their lives: washing machines, colour TVs, it was one huge catch-up operation. Most people could afford it as well. Life in the DDR had in many ways been so inexpensive, with so little to be had, that almost everyone had saved up a considerable nest egg.

Niesky made a sprint through time; in one fell swoop it seemed to have swung from the 1950s to the 1990s. Everything it had taken a comparable Western European town forty years to achieve happened here in less than forty months. The grimy café on Görlitzer Strasse, where two years earlier the drunken and crippled comrades had spent their evenings arguing with the five local punks – ‘Do you snots have any idea who did the work around here for all those years?’ they shouted – had been turned into a kind of French tearoom: white tiles with light-blue trim, ornamental chairs, quiet music and neat tables covered in damask. Only the bicycle repairman had kept something of the flavour of the old days: he sold two varieties of bells: the shiny West German ones for five marks, and the old, indestructible East German bells for one mark.

Niesky in 1992 was one great paean to capitalism. The aerials on the old party headquarters were rusting, still aimed at Berlin. The building now housed an employment agency, and in its hall sat dozens of the unemployed, waiting with number in hand. One man there told us he had worked for a storage firm where, back in the days of the DDR, sixty employees had once whiled away their days, even though there was barely work for ten. Today that firm employed five people. Unemployment in Niesky was hovering around thirteen per cent, and rising all the time, especially among women. The fairy godmother had seen to that as well.

A modern bathroom had been installed in the Winklers’ little flat, the old DDR radio had been replaced by a brand new CD player, a computer screen flickered in one corner, and Eckart's ten-year-old Wartburg had made way for an almost new Opel.

In a way, Niesky during that second visit seemed like a German variation on Twin Peaks: it was a town with a past, with a secret everyone shared and which constantly threatened to disturb the peace and quiet of the present. Beneath the town's friendliness and
Gemütlichkeit
lay a morass of confusion, of right and wrong, of loyalty and betrayal. Almost every
week, another, even deeper layer was revealed: betrayal after betrayal, disloyalty beneath the old disloyalty, evil that went on and on.

Among the advertisements for ‘introductory visits to the Costa Brava’, the
Sächsische Zeitung
ran almost daily articles revealing local Stasi activities. It turned out, for example, that a doctor from a nearby psychiatric institution, acting on orders from the Stasi, had poisoned a dissident clergyman with psychoactive drugs. The clergyman – now a cabinet minister in the state government – had appeared on television after seeing his dossiers. He looked like a broken man.

Eckart and Inge wanted nothing to do with any of it, although they were sure that both of them had hefty dossiers as well. ‘Don't let the future be ruled by the past,’ they said.

On 6 October, 1991, Gudrun married her
Wessi
fiancé, a young doctor; at the wedding, all of the contradictions between the two Germanys seemed to meet. Eckart and Inge felt there were far too many guests, the West German family found the party much too sedate. The West felt that Gudrun's East German girlfriends were too docile and subservient, the East was amazed that the West German women depended on their husbands for their status. West felt that East was badly dressed, East found the West German women silly and lazy, and Gudrun found herself caught between the two extremes. It made her feel, she said later, ‘almost like a traitor’.

1993 was an important year for the family. Eckart had shaken off the yoke of his former DDR managers and, together with Jens, had started his own company in a little attic room. They earned a mere pittance in those days – even the purchase of a new drafting lamp was reason for intense consultation. But their enthusiasm was boundless, and gradually the jobs began trickling in. The bucket-dipping comrade was still managing director of the old plant. But he had done his best for all his employees, and Eckart had gradually – to his own surprise – come to appreciate his old enemy. He was optimistic about competing with the West, at least in his own field. ‘They're a little complacent, those
Wessis
, a little bit spoiled. They're going to have to deal with us.’

Meanwhile the
Sächsische Zeitung
was writing about attacks on foreigners, about the 26,000 illegal immigrants who had been rounded up on the Saxon border in 1993, and the classified ads offered work in a ‘famous
nightclub’ for ladies between the ages of eighteen and thirty-three, including housing and excellent amenities. Almost everything on the supermarket shelves came from the West. As part of the local drive to ‘Buy Saxon Wares’, Inge had done her best for a time to purchase milk, vegetables and other groceries exclusively from local suppliers. But those suppliers had proved almost impossible to find. The West saw to everything, the East barely seemed to exist any more.

In September 1994 I went to visit Gudrun. The last time I had spoken to her, she had read aloud to me from one of her old textbooks:

Four years later she was living on the other side of Germany, in a Dortmund suburb. ‘Sometimes I wish I hadn't been born in the DDR,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I feel ashamed. And sometimes I sit in the car here, I see how everyone here eats and argues, and then I hate the West.’

For years, as though seeing something of herself in a mirror, she had been able to pick out other women from East Germany whenever she saw them on the street: by their rather subservient posture, their uncertainty, their clothing.‘For one whole year I wore the same thing to church each Sunday: a white dress with a pullover. Out of protest, but also out of insecurity.’

They still go back to Niesky on occasion, and last time there was one thing in particular that had struck her: there were no children being born. Almost all the young people had gone west. From Gudrun's class alone, nearly half the people had left. Since 1989 the town's birth rate had decreased by a third. ‘The women have become unsure of themselves,’ Gudrun says. ‘They are the first to be laid off, the company meals and other facilities that once allowed mothers to keep working are being dismantled. The women are being sent right back to the kitchen sink.’

Today, in autumn 1999, Niesky looks like a town where nothing has ever happened. The houses are painted in cheerful pastel tints, the new library
is the pride of the surroundings, on Zinzendorfplatz the final chrysanthemums are blossoming in festive hues. The
Sächsische Zeitung
talks about the local high school's recent field trip to Prague: the bus was searched at the border and no less than seven children turned out to have hashish with them. Hashish! In Niesky!

This Sunday a wedding service is being held in the church. Eckart is wearing his black cleric's garb. I sit beside little Elisabeth, she's eleven now, pretty and soft as a fawn. Two little girls in crisp starched dresses play a violin duet. The choir sings. My friend preaches – off the cuff, without much ado or outward display – on a text from the Gospel of St John about peace, meekness and acceptance. The choir sings again. Eckart addresses the bride and groom, he speaks of ‘a humble life before the eyes of God’. The bride keeps her own eyes on the floor, while the groom, a chunky blond boy in an ill-fitting black suit, wipes away his tears. They say ‘I do’, and kiss shyly.

Now the whole congregation files past to congratulate them: Inge, Jens, Alund, Elisabeth, the catechism teacher with her purple hair, the little group of hunched widows, a pair of burly workmen from Christoph Unmack, the choirgirl with the naughty piercing in her nose. Then everyone goes outside. They throw rice, the children step forward for a song, a curtsey and flowers, the groom tosses a few coins, there's a bit of singing again, then everyone shouts:‘
Hoch!
'The bride and groom climb into an antique car and drive off. We all standing waving at the curb. ‘A 1934 Opel!’ says Eckart, always the impassioned technician, even when in his clergyman's suit. ‘If only that car could talk!’ ‘As a student, I went to Berlin once with a few friends on one of those inexpensive junkets. It was 30 April, the queen's birthday in Holland, so we decided to go on a spree in East Berlin. Which explains how I ended up the next morning in that huge, deathly quiet Stalin-Allee, walking along there on my own, not another soul in sight. Then suddenly, still half asleep, I heard a rumbling and saw something moving in the distance, and there they were: Russian tanks! Having grown up in Holland, you think: the war has broken out! Until I realised that it was only the start
of the 1 May parades. But that's how violent our reactions were back then, still moulded by that constant tension between East and West.