Looking back over the twenty-five years she spent living in the GDR, Lisa recalls a handful of occasions where state politics entered her daily life. Aged 10, she remembers reading a West German news magazine, Die Stern, which her stepfather, a publisher, had brought back from West Germany after attending the international Frankfurt Book Fair. As she was poring over the magazine, Lisa came across a headline that she found puzzling: ‘FRG buys 5,000 prisoners from the GDR’. Confused, she asked her stepfather, ‘How can West Germany buy people from East Germany?’ Although the GDR had thirty-nine newspapers, each of these was controlled by the SED, so it was no wonder that Lisa noticed the West German headline which did not fit with the SED’s smooth narrative of the GDR’s inherent superiority over the West. Lisa’s stepfather was unhappy that she had seen the article, and hastily got up to leave the room to avoid talking about it. Later, Lisa came to understand that it would have been hard for her stepfather to explain the situation to a 10-year-old. At the time, though, Lisa wondered what she had said that was wrong.
Lisa’s family contact with West Germany nearly got her in trouble on another occasion. Through her West German uncle, Lisa received a pair of much-coveted Western ‘Wrangler’ jeans when she was still at school. The GDR did not make ‘proper’ jeans, Lisa explains, and there was only one other girl in the class who had a pair. So sought-after were they that before wearing her Wranglers to school, Lisa asked the other girl Hanna whether she would mind if she wore hers as well.18 On 8 May, the day Germany surrendered at the end of the Second World War in 1945, the GDR laid commemorative wreaths at memorials throughout the country, using it as a propaganda opportunity to emphasize how the Russians had ‘liberated’ ordinary Germans from the Nazis. On that day Lisa’s school all went to the local memorial and Hanna had been chosen to lay the wreath. However, when the teacher noticed that Hanna was wearing Western jeans, Lisa was picked instead. Lisa was actually wearing her Wranglers but because they were not so obviously Western the teacher did not notice. Though there were no serious consequences for Hanna on this occasion, the story goes to show how sensitive the Party was about any signs of contact with the West. Wearing Western clothing implied that the clothing provided in the GDR was inadequate and this could not be tolerated by the teachers, irrespective of the reality in which clothing was not always in abundant supply. For the same reason, many East Germans recall turning Western plastic bags inside out before they used them.19
On another occasion, Lisa’s obliviousness to the regime’s rules led to a brush with GDR police. When a friend came from Rostock to visit Lisa in East Berlin in the early 1980s, Lisa gave her a tour around, showing the friend where she had grown up. As it happened, as a child Lisa had always played in the Grenzgebiet border area, right next to the Berlin Wall. To give her friend a close-up view, Lisa took her behind the sign forbidding citizens to go any further, whereupon they were accosted by a border guard, who demanded that they get into the police van to be taken for questioning. Though Lisa found the whole thing ludicrous and rather funny, when they were locked into the van, she realized that this was serious. Lisa and her friend were then interrogated separately under the very serious charge of having ‘violated the borders’ of the GDR. Eventually, however, they were both released. Looking back on the incident, Lisa says, ‘I thought the whole thing was hilarious … I was then told that I might not be allowed to continue studying because I had violated the border. But somehow I saw it as amusing and could not take it seriously. It seemed so pointless and illogical. I didn’t feel threatened by it.’
In these three episodes, Lisa either asked an awkward question, wore the wrong clothing, or went into forbidden territory. In different contexts these scenarios could all have been much more serious: other East Germans faced far greater penalties for doing similar things. No doubt the fact that Lisa brushed up (admittedly very lightly) against the boundaries of the regime and came away unscathed informs her relatively benign image of the GDR. On these and other occasions, she certainly felt the limits of the system, but as she explains, ‘the GDR was my home. I grew up in this country, surrounded by the values it espoused.’
As well as family background, circumstances, and luck, personality too plays a part in explaining how people react to the situation in which they find themselves. Lisa was easy-going by nature, and was content enough with life under SED rule, even though the system made her life harder. She had gone straight into training as a typesetter aged 16 rather than studying for A levels. After a couple of years as a typesetter, Lisa then did her A levels at night school with a view to going on to university. This was an unorthodox career route in the GDR. Since Lisa had trained as a typesetter, in the GDR planned economy it did not make sense for her to be allowed to study again as it was not deemed to be in the interests of society as a whole. Though Lisa actually wanted to study German literature, after several attempts she was finally allocated a place on a course in Berlin preparing her to become an English and German teacher. The whole process had been made much difficult by the government rules and regulations, and she did not even get to study for the degree she wanted. Others might have given up and criticized the regime heavily. Not Lisa. Navigating the constraints of the system, she persevered to find a way of studying at university.
There was another occasion too, which might have caused Lisa to turn against the regime but for her easy-going personality. Aged 16, Lisa had an older boyfriend, Peter,20 who came from a very ‘Red’ family on the outskirts of Berlin. Peter’s father was an army officer and a loyal supporter of the socialist government. Peter wished to follow in his father’s footsteps and train to be an army officer over an extended three-year period, as opposed to the obligatory eighteen-month stint that all young men had to complete after school. When the time came to join up, however, Peter’s suitability was called into doubt. Stasi officers tracked down Peter, finding him at Lisa’s house, and subjected him to intensive questioning. Lisa’s family kept in touch with their relatives in West Germany, and Peter was tainted by his association with Lisa. His dreams of becoming an army officer were brought prematurely to an end. With careers made or lost on such fine margins, it is no wonder that many East German parents kept an eye on whom their children were spending time with.21
In the autumn of 1989, Lisa was an active participant in the women’s movement. Like many others, including Petra, she had no wish to leave East Germany, but was rather keen to see improvements in the way GDR society was run. It was a busy time for her. Alongside her commitment to the women’s movement, she was pregnant with her first child and was also finishing her university degree. The day the Wall fell, Lisa had met a friend early in the evening on the Frankfurter Allee. Soon after she returned home, her partner rushed in at around 9 p.m. and told her what he had heard on the radio. He explained that he was planning to drive across to the West and join the street party on the Kurfürstendamm, West Berlin’s most famous shopping street. Lisa explains that she was initially confused about how he was going to travel to West Berlin, but he said, ‘Everyone’s going. I heard it on the radio!’ Her partner, like many others, was eager to make it across to West Berlin quickly for fear that the Wall would be closed up again.22 With a bit of persuasion, Lisa agreed to join him on the trip. Unlike half the families in the GDR, who were either saving up for a car or waiting (sometimes years) for it to arrive after they had ordered it, Lisa and her partner had a car. Like many East German car owners that night, they sat in a massive traffic jam waiting to cross the border. The streets were packed with people buzzing with anticipation and excitement as they made their way to West Berlin. Once across the Bormholmer Strasse border, they decided to visit Lisa’s cousin in Kreuzberg. Not knowing the way, Lisa rolled down her window to ask another driver for directions and he led them part of the way there, where they met her cousin, even though it was midnight. They then drove down the Kurfürstendamm and looked at the Brandenburg Gate from the Western side. Some people, who later became known as ‘Wall wood
peckers’, had taken little hammers and were chipping pieces off the Wall as souvenirs.23 Others were drinking in the details of West Berlin’s streets, which were much more colourful than their East Berlin counterparts, with graffiti and brightly coloured advertising that was not to be found in the GDR.24 Lisa’s boyfriend took lots of photographs and they chatted to others on the street who asked where they were from. Finally, at 3 a.m. they had an early breakfast in West Germany before returning home over the border.
figure 9 East Germans are welcomed as they drive their Trabant into West Berlin on the morning of 10 November 1989.
© Robert Wallis/Corbis.
Lisa recalls how exciting the atmosphere was on the night of the Mauerfall (fall of the Wall). She had grown up with this Wall and now it was open.25 ‘The West had been a white speck on the horizon when we were living divided by a wall’, she explains. Suddenly that white speck had become a real place. What followed in the months and years afterwards, Lisa experienced as extremely enriching. Unlike in the GDR, where everything was planned by the state, including what jobs individuals would do, in the FRG life was far less structured and each individual had to forge their own path. This, Lisa says, was quite a shift. For her this was positive, as it gave her many more options, both in her work and in her spare time. She initially worked as a teacher before taking up a job in a publishing house as an editor, alongside her primary job as a novelist.
figure 10 ‘Wall woodpeckers’, 12 November 1989.
© Ulrich Hässler/dpa/Corbis.
Lisa, it seems, made the best of the circumstances in which she found herself before and after the Wende. The fact that she did not fight the system or hold strongly critical views of the regime in some senses make her story less obviously newsworthy than the more dramatic tales of resistance.26 Nonetheless, her story is typical of many. Coming to the end of our interview, Lisa says, ‘I was brought up in this system. When I was living in the system, there were many things I did not have the distance to challenge. I did not have another perspective.’27 Everyday life did not feel political: it was about meeting friends, falling in love, and going about your daily business.28 Ultimately, Lisa knew no other world than the GDR, and therefore quite understandably did not view her situation as especially restricted. It was actually only after the Wende that it became clear what she had missed out on.29
4
Mario ~ Feeling the Regime’s Wrath
The old Stasi prison in Berlin now has a café and a shop where you can buy postcards of the prison. Who would you send these to? I wonder as I wait for Mario, a former inmate, who has agreed to meet me for an interview. Shortly after half past ten a tall lean man comes in, dog in tow. He deposits the dog behind the counter with the receptionists before greeting me and leading me down a long corridor to a quiet room for our interview. Mario comes to the prison three times a month to give tours. All the guides at Hohenschönhausen prison were once incarcerated here. Each of them tells their story to remind people of the brutal side of the East German dictatorship, which is so often remembered with nostalgia as a paternalistic state providing employment and a safety net for all.
Mario, who is now 43, turns the clock back to when he was 16 to begin his story. He explains that on leaving school, he, like all his other peers who were not going on to do A levels, had to get a job within a limited number of weeks or risk prison. With this in mind, his father arranged a position for him as a waiter. Mario was not thrilled at the prospect, having set his sights on becoming an actor, but he gradually grew accustomed to his work and found release by dancing the night away in various gay clubs in East Berlin. Being homosexual was not explicitly forbidden but it was still a sign of deviance, a sign of being part of a subculture not controlled by the state.1 There were always Stasi informants, colloquially known as Horch und Guck (Eyes and Ears), amid the partygoers.2 Nonetheless it was not specifically Mario’s sexuality which brought him into conflict with the regime.
figure 11 Sixteen-year-old Mario on holiday in 1984.
Courtesy of Mario Röllig.
After some time training as a waiter, Mario took up a position serving customers at Schönefeld, East Berlin’s main airport. There he became friendly with a politician from West Berlin called Gottfried who travelled through regularly, and they started a relationship.3 It might seem surprising that Mario and Gottfried were able to sustain their relationship, given that they lived on opposite sides of the Berlin Wall. However, for West German citizens in the 1980s, it was actually quite straightforward to get a day visa or even a longer one, provided that you were not a former Nazi or a former citizen of the GDR who might seek to undermine the basic tenets of the socialist state. West Berliners could go to several offices to apply for a visa to visit the GDR. One such place was behind Zoo railway station, another was in a shopping centre in Steglitz.4 Applicants would then hear if they had permission for their visit within two to fourteen days. On the day of travel, West Berliner visitors to the GDR like Gottfried would take their passports to the border, where their name would be checked on a computer by a border guard to ensure that they were allowed to travel. They would then hand over 25 West German Marks for each day that they were spending in the GDR and they would receive 25 East German Marks for each day in return. These were the conditions of travel and West German travellers had to comply, in spite of the fact that 25 West German Marks was worth a lot more in real terms than 25 East German Marks. Not only this, but West German visitors either had to spend all the money they exchanged or hand over their remaining cash when returning to the West by ‘donating’ it to the Red Cross in the GDR. Since the GDR was always short of West German currency and American dollars, the GDR visa authorities were generally quite lenient about which West Germans were allowed to travel across the border. Gottfried travelled across to the GDR quite often on day visas to see Mario, and together they would eat in restaurants, go for walks, and dance in discos. In this way they were able to sustain their relationship. However, like all those West Berliners who travelled across to East Berlin on day visas, Gottfried had to leave the GDR by two o’clock the following morning. Mario recalls many a time when he said a regretful goodbye to Gottfried at the so-called Palace of Tears (Tränenpalast)—the colloquial name given to the former border crossing at Berlin-Friedrichsstrasse railway station, because it was where so many East Germans said goodbye to Western friends and relatives travelling back to the FRG and West Berlin.5
Picking up on Mario’s relationship with a West German politician, the Stasi approached him and asked him to pass on information about Gottfried. The Stasi was particularly keen to find out about what was happening in West German politics, because in the competitive Cold War climate, they hoped to use this information to the GDR’s advantage. Mario explains that the Stasi had operatives in West Germany who would bribe West German politicians to vote a certain way on parliamentary policies, with the aim of undermining and influencing politics there. Mario, however, declined the Stasi’s request, and this is where his problems with the state began.
Following his refusal to collaborate, Mario was demoted from his job as a waiter to doing the washing-up. He was also followed by the Stasi. They were blatant about it, he explains. They would get their camera out very ostentatiously so that Mario knew he was being photographed and under observation.6 It was around this time that Mario decided to try to leave the GDR: ‘It was at this point that I thought even if there’s a 90 per cent chance that I’ll be shot, I want to leave. I can’t stand it for one more day. I thought, even if I have to sleep under a bridge in the West it would be better than continuing to live here.’ It was actually illegal for East Germans to leave the GDR permanently and the Stasi went to great lengths to enforce this, even though the GDR had signed the Helsinki Treaty in August 1975, which stated that it was a basic right to be able to leave one’s own country. The only change for East Germans after Helsinki was a slight relaxation in the travel restrictions: they were allowed to apply for a tourist visa to visit
relatives in the West but whether this visa would be granted was entirely up to the authorities.7 These visa conditions were of no use to Mario, however, who wanted to leave for good.
Mario’s solution was to escape illegally. Given that the border with West Germany was observed by approximately 50,000 border guards in watchtowers and on the ground who were sanctioned to shoot anyone trying to escape, not to mention the land mines and self-firing devices placed on the border strip as deterrents, Mario decided not to try and breach the Wall in Germany. Instead, he chose to go through the Eastern bloc, specifically to Yugoslavia via Hungary. He settled on Yugoslavia because it was not a Warsaw Pact country, and therefore was not bound by the 1955 terms which assured mutual defence between eight of the communist states within the Eastern bloc. This meant that Yugoslavia had a more liberal brand of socialism under Tito.8 Staying with a friend in Hungary, Mario concocted a plan to swim across the River Donau at its narrowest point to Yugoslavia.9 He then planned to travel to West Germany from there.
When the day of his escape came, 25 June 1987, he changed into his swimming kit and began to make his way towards the border. All of a sudden he was under fire, bullets whizzing past. He made a run for it but was caught—not, it turns out, by the border police but by a local man not far off his own age of 19, who had been bribed to guard the border. Mario begged his captor to let him go. The young Hungarian was clearly torn about what to do, but with tears in his eyes he explained that if he let Mario go, he himself would be sent to prison. Understandably, as he was handed over to the border police, Mario felt extremely scared. When he planned his escape, Mario explained, he had considered two outcomes—either that he would be successful or that he would be shot dead. Around 1,000 people were shot dead attempting to escape across the Berlin Wall or the 1,378-kilometre inner German border, and between 200,000 and 250,000 East Germans were imprisoned for political reasons between 1961 and 1989—most commonly for trying to escape the GDR, the crime being Republikflucht (flight from the Republic).10
Born in the GDR Page 7
