In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century

by Geert Mak

  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:

  We are the class of a million millionaires

  Being our own dictators makes us free

  For us, good work is a duty and an honour

  And each of us is a part of the party …

  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.

  ‘I was born in 1939; in the 1950s Europe to me was the Marshall Plan, cities, travelling, culture. In the 1960s I suppose I didn't have much to do with Europe. There were Catholic young people's conferences of course, international seminars, I even stayed in Lisbon for six weeks once. But, unlike my future colleagues Helmut Kohl or Jean-Luc Dehaene, I was not caught up in the “European adventure” from an early age. Europe was alive for me, very much so, but not as a political idea.

  ‘In 1973 I was appointed finance minister in the Netherlands. That was when I first started hearing talk of Europe, the jokes about de Gaulle, Luns and Adenauer. But to me, Europe in those days was more of a technical matter: massive dossiers, endless meetings, the old boneshaker in which you were driven to Brussels all the time. That's where the committees met, and it was only natural for a finance or foreign minister to play an important role. In those days, the meetings were hard-nosed, they had nothing to do with European idealism. You were there as a cabinet minister with administrative responsibilities. And, of course, a lot of issues were still being dealt with entirely outside the EEC. The Netherlands, for example, had a head-on trade conflict with Japan, and as a Dutch cabinet minister in those days you went to Japan to negotiate directly. It was only gradually that things like that became European issues. The 1973 oil crisis wasn't seen as a European affair either: we still saw that as a Dutch problem. The OPEC boycott, after all, directly impacted only the Netherlands and the US.

  ‘Four years later, as parliamentary leader for the Dutch Christian Democratic Alliance, I first became acquainted with the European Christian Democrats. That was the first time that I met men like Kohl, Martens and Andreotti as fellow politicians. And gradually I began to form a new perception of Europe, a political perception, very different from the bureaucratic Europe I had known before.

  ‘In 1982 I was appointed prime minister of the Netherlands. In Copenhagen, at the European Council of Ministers, I met my European colleagues for the first time. I already knew Wilfried Martens, Helmut Kohl and Margaret Thatcher, of course, but there in Copenhagen I saw the whole club together for the first time. Right from the start of that meeting, there was this incredible tension between Thatcher and Mitterrand. The crux of Mitterrand's arguments was that investing in Europe meant turning our back on America, discovering our own strengths, protecting ourselves. After that, and on that basis, one could start initiating dialogues outside Europe. His story, in short, was an anti-American one. Our own strengths first. Thatcher said: “Rubbish. Rot. Open the doors. Free trade.”

  ‘The bureaucracy of the 1970s seemed to have vanished, and I found myself taking part in a political debate, all afternoon. Ten years before that, as far as I know, such open discussions between European heads of government simply did not take place. In those days Europe was still seen as a matter for intergovernmental officials, plus a few cabinet members, usually the ministers of finance, agriculture and foreign affairs. That was it, that was Europe. Very concrete, based on a limited number of institutions, dealing with practical problems.

  ‘That evening in Copenhagen, after dinner, the discussion continued informally about what Europe really meant, about European culture, even about the role of the Reformation. At that point, looking back on it now, we were already working on an entirely new concept of Europe – not a technical Europe, but a political one. And despite all our differences, we formed a kind of club.

  ‘Which is not to say that the practical cooperation between our countries went without a hitch. There was a lot of talk, wonderful plans were made, but it all went rather awkwardly. Bit by bit, though, between 1982–9, we succeeded in conquering that “Eurosclerosis”. At Schengen in 1985 we decided to do away with internal border controls between the Benelux countries, France and Germany. Later on, more and more countries joined. In that way, a single policy could be formed with regard to border controls, security and asylum issues. In 1989 the internal market was ready to go and then finally in 1991 you had the Treaty of Maastricht which made way for, among other things, the arrival of the euro in 1999 and 2001.

  ‘In the 1980s, though, we had to deal not only with a European policy line, but also with a NATO line and everything that brought with it. The EEC and NATO were two distinct cooperative structures, separate worlds, each going their own way. Helmut Kohl and I, for example, were very opposed to the stationing of cruise missiles, while Mitterrand was much more accommodating on that score. Not because he was pro-American, but because he felt that a clear reply to the Soviets was needed.

  ‘Naturally, we were very interested in what was happening in the Soviet Bloc, and we talked about it among ourselves, along the lines of, “What do you think of this Gorbachev fellow?”, but we didn't see it as a common issue. Until the wall came down. Then, suddenly, we had to deal with it. Kohl foresaw the consequences right away: this was the historical opportunity for which Germany had been waiting so long. He put everything he had into effecting the merger of the DDR and the Federal Republic in 1990, and he succeeded. But for us, well, how does one deal with that? Were we to grant unconditional support to a reunified Germany? And what would happen after that? Wouldn't that new Germany go on to lay claims to what had once been East Prussia? Historians are wrong when they say that, around 1989, no one was worried any more about the sanctity of the Oder-Neisse border with Poland. Because there were powerful political forces at play within Germany, people who would have loved to see the old situation restored. Major potential conflicts still lay between Germany and the rest of Europe.

  ‘So Mitterrand and Kohl made a deal: you, with your strong Deutschmark, will support the European Monetary Union (EMU) and the new European currency – and, along with it, the French franc. In return, we will support German unification – on condition that you leave no room for doubt concerning the definitive status of the Oder-Neisse border. I was worried about Poland as well, but Ko
hl gave me his word that maintaining the Oder-Neisse border would be the sine qua non of the debate. He was convinced of that, but I still had my doubts. Had a decision to correct the border in an easterly direction been put to the vote in Germany – and all kinds of groups were trying to get things to that point – we would have had a major problem on our hands. And Kohl was enough of a politician to know that the slightest thing could have moved it all beyond his control. Those millions of old Heimatvertriebene, such powerful forces, there were such strong emotions involved …

  ‘Later, Kohl wrote to Gorbachev and said: I've made the German parliament abide by the Oder-Neisse border, and now I'd like you to do something for me … I don't think that was merely bluffing on his part. He really saw it as his own personal achievement that, by acting calmly and wisely, he had reconciled the Germans to the immutability of the OderNeisse border. But if that was truly an achievement, logic says there must also have been a chance that things could turn out differently. Kohl was always reassuring the people around him, including me, telling us there was no need to worry. But to say it wasn't an issue, oh no. Of course it was an issue.

  ‘Ruud Lubbers and Helmut Kohl, two old European friends who split up over German reunification, that's the way publicists wrote about it later. But that's not what it was about. We were on very good terms, true enough, we often carried on long conversations. And until Maastricht, one year after German reunification, everything was still fine. Right before the Maastricht summit, in fact, Kohl and I had lunch together. We had a good talk, both of us were in favour of the creation of the EMU, that was our common line of approach. Kohl accepted the fact that I would chair the meeting, not only on technical matters, but also in terms of its content. At that point I was probably the only one who could keep the British from exercising their veto. The treaty was hammered out with a great deal of difficulty, but the old feeling was still there: excellent, so now we've done that. Europe was on the move again, we were actually headed towards a single currency, that had all been taken care of.