First Published in
Descant Magazine Issue 166 Fall 2014
I was three years old in 1967 when I first
visited East Germany. My mother had family there – her mother and two sisters.
There were also two brothers in the West. Over the course of my childhood, we
travelled to Germany every three years or so to spend six weeks of the summer among
my aunts and uncles and cousins. Most of this time was spent in the East and a
week or so in West Berlin. It was an education to have the political history of
East and West Germany explained as I traipsed along behind my mother and
sister, trying to keep up in this foreign land. The politics and historical
context were often beyond me. A more obvious difference to me, by the age of
six, was the quality of the ice cream. The ice cream we ate in East Germany was
most often eaten by the sea with the sun beating down, after a swim. But the
waffle cone was like cardboard and not very sweet and the ice cream was gritty,
as though the sand from the dunes had worked its way in. In West Germany the
ice cream was exquisite. Eaten at a sidewalk cafe on a busy city street with
cars honking and stylishly dressed pedestrians rushing by. Crunchy cones and
ice cream that felt silky smooth on my tongue. There was even gelato and one
summer I discovered Zitrone gelato.
When I asked for this in East Germany, they were most apologetic but no, I
could not have a lemon gelato here. I understood then, that these two
countries, though both inhabited by German people, were utterly and entirely
different. One was privileged and one was ruled. It was not fair. This was one
family and yet they inhabited such different present realities. What I
understood was that a wall divided the two Germanys and this was the cause of
the differences I observed. Everything I found unfair, absurd and random...all
this was due to one unanimously agreed upon factor: The Russians.
Flying from Frankfurt to Berlin, the
planes lowered their altitude over East German territory. My mother explained
to me that the guards in East Germany had to be able to see that the plane
flying overhead was a commercial airliner and not a military plane that may
have the intention of attacking or spying. This meant that if they could not
make out the Lufthansa logo, they may well shoot at us. I looked out the window
at the East German farms and roads and soon we landed in West Berlin. West Berlin
was occupied by British, American and French forces. As my aunt and uncle tried
to make this clear for my sister and me they made it sound like there were no
Germans in the mix at all. Their city was occupied. I looked around for signs
of these forces and couldn’t see anything to indicate that West Berlin was
inhabited by anything but Germans. To me, East Germany was the occupied country.
Guards, Volkspolizie, government
officials and paperwork everywhere we went. I heard a lot over those summers about
the ‘crazy’ Russians, the policies and attitudes that were driving a wedge
between East and West Germans.
The West was much like Canada. Everything
was vibrant and current and abundant. One of the first things that changed upon
transitioning from West Berlin to East – usually at the train station –
Friedrichstrasse, was the instant desaturation of colour. Within 100m of the
passport check, all colour drained from the landscape. There were no
advertisements for chewing gum or laundry soap. No signs other than ones giving
directives or listing rules. Every surface was painted gray. No graffiti, no
colourful clothing, nothing seemed animated. The people we saw all wore drab
and muted clothing. They moved slowly with methodical steps, as if their feet
needed specific, separate directions to where they were going.
The trains were old and cumbersome and
moved like aging cattle. Big green cars and humorless officials and train
conductors. Nobody took much interest in us as my mother, travelling with two
children and two large suitcases (no wheels) struggled up the long flights of
stairs to get to the checkpoint. The rules changed frequently. One year we
could check our baggage through and the next time we had to schlep it
ourselves. We searched for a luggage cart, but no such luxury was available.
In the washroom of the train station sat a
woman in a smock (anyone who worked anywhere wore a smock – in the Konsum, in the bakery, the women in the
street who shovelled coal – I hadn’t even read any Dickens yet but knew this to
be an endeavour that belonged in another era). This washroom attendant sat on a
stool preparing squares of toilet paper for the people who came in to use the
facilities. Upon entering she would ask: “Wollen
Sie Papier?” There was no paper in the stalls and so, yes, everyone would want
a couple of squares. I have never found, in all my travels, toilet paper that
even approaches the consistency of this East German hybrid of cardboard and
paper maché. For two, tough grey fibrous squares of this stuff the woman
demanded fünf Pfennig.
Shovelling coal:
There was a dull resignation to the
Communist regime by the time I experienced it. There were so many rules and
everyone complained about them, but there was no fight anymore. The rules may
have been arbitrary, but everybody abided by them, no matter how idiotic they
seemed.
You were not allowed to photograph trains
or the officers working on them. No photos of guards or police. Nor any
buildings like factories or schools. No bridges. And absolutely no photos of
the border. When I was older and defiant at the age of thirteen I made a point
of photographing anything they said was forbidden. The town of Forst where my
grandmother lived was right on the Polish border. There was a bombed out bridge
spanning the Neisse River. The bridge used to lead to Poland. I have pictures
of that. Polish guards patrolling their side used to answer our calls of dzień dobry. I found this unusual as the
German Volkspolizei would never do
that. They were a dour bunch. There were uniformed Volkspolizei everywhere and I did not take any pictures of them
because they did scare me and they were authorised to take cameras from people
caught breaking the rules.
My cousins at a playground - blown out bridge in the background.
One afternoon after we had gone for a hike,
we stopped at a restaurant for cake and coffee. There were about seven of us.
The restaurant was empty. The tables were set for four. We asked if they would
mind pushing two tables together to accommodate our group and they would not do
it. They were not allowed. By some punishable Communist rule the staff was not
allowed to push two tables together. Diese
Schweinerei – was what this kind of behaviour was referred to by my aunt.
This piggishness – it doesn’t sound nearly as infuriating in English. When my
mother hung her sweater over the back of her chair she was told that this was
not allowed either. This was indeed a strange land.
In West Berlin I ordered a pepperoni pizza
at an Italian restaurant. The pizza was covered in green chilies and nothing
else. I guess they were pepperonis in some other language but not what I
wanted. I told my aunt what I meant to order was meat – sausage, so they took
the pizza back and brought me one with salami on it. Much better. What would
those East German waiters have done? Consulted the rule book, no doubt.
When we visited East Germany we stayed at
the house in which my mother was raised, a three story Italian style villa with
a big yard, a small sunk-in swimming pool, a wall around the perimeter, pear
trees, apple trees, cherry trees, gooseberry and red currant bushes. By the
time I saw the house there was extensive shell damage on the outer plaster.
(The family had to flee during the war as the front advanced). In the middle of
the large front hall, covered by a rug, was a large scorch mark where Russian
soldiers had started a fire to keep warm when they occupied the house. I stared
at these crumbling gaps in the plaster and could not fathom bombs dropping
right here in the garden where I had been dispatched with a pail to pick fruit.
There was a lot of damage done all over Germany. But in West Berlin it seemed
they had managed to clean it up by the 1970’s. The ruins that remained were
deliberately preserved as memorials.
Space was at a premium in East Germany.
The upper level of my grandmother’s house had been let to a young, single man
and the second level served as offices for some government department. My
grandmother was given no choice. A senior citizen with no other occupants in
the house doesn’t require a three story home. The main floor remained hers to
occupy, but the rest of the house she was forced to rent out.
My grandmother's house in Forst, Lausitz, DDR circa 1976. Steps to the pool on far right.
While staying at my grandmother’s, it was my job every morning to walk to the bakery three blocks away and buy buns. I was instructed to bring back six Kaiser rolls and six Semmeln (wheat rolls). There was always a line up. The bakery did not open before 7:30am. They baked only a certain amount of buns and bread daily and once this was gone they closed shop again until the next day. In line with me every morning was the teacher for the local Kindergarten. She had to buy buns to feed the children in her care. There was no special provision for her to have an order set aside. If she happened to miss out on the buns then the children would not eat. They were equal too, I suppose, these young children. I don’t remember if there was a quota for the buns, but they always did run out before the last person was served and I would stand there nervously every day wondering of one day I would be left with nothing to carry back home.
This kind of thing was unheard of in West Berlin. We still went in the morning for buns but there were always lots and many different kinds to choose from and even delicious cakes and sweets to buy for our afternoon coffee.
The Bakery: No line up.
In West Berlin we frequently ate out and
enjoyed Italian or Chinese. It sounded so strange to me to hear Chinese food
ordered in German. Eine Frühlingsrolle
– a spring roll. The grocery stores were much like the ones at home where
multitudes of brands vied for the consumer’s attention. There were never any
line ups outside the grocery store and you pretty much knew what would be
inside and that you would find everything on your list and little extra treats
found in the aisles.
In the East: line ups. Always line ups. At
the bakery, at the butchers, at the grocer. People stood there holding their
nylon or canvas shopping bags because the stores did not provide the customers
with bags, something I found to be very un-advanced, compared with the
limitless plastic bags available for free in the West. The customers stirred
and shuffled. While they waited they discussed what they might find inside.
Nobody knew, but they lined up anyway. Maybe sour cream or herring. The shelves
often were bare. No brand names, only food stuffs. Mustard was mustard. Ketchup
was ketchup. Toothpaste was toothpaste. There was one kind, one choice. It was
either on the shelf the day you wanted it or it was not. A bushel of mealy
apples pecked at by birds were now picked over by people. I remember helping my
aunt select some of these apples, thinking, at home, none of these would make
it out of the store. They all had bruises and nicks. Not one perfect apple
among them.
Life was basic in the East - no frills
living. Herr Kielon had a small farm across the street from my grandmother. Herr
Kielon was old world. He wore faded blue shirts and pants and a hat with a
dirty brim. He cut his grass with a scythe. He didn’t even have a lawn mower.
Such was life under the Communists, I thought. I spent my mornings there
feeding the chickens and rabbits. He let me hold the baby rabbits and one day gave
me a freshly laid egg that my grandmother whisked up in a cup for me with some
sugar while it was still warm. I drank it down bravely, as it was meant to be
something special. The first and last time I drank an egg.
We ate rabbit stew made from a rabbit from
the farm. Nothing like this would have occurred with my relatives in West
Berlin. Such an old world idea. In East Germany I ate peasant food. Sausages
and potatoes. Lentil soup. Cabbage soup. Cauliflower soup. Lots of soup.
Everything was home made. Whatever was available, we ate. There was not much
choice. The jam was homemade. They had to eat homemade jam because they couldn’t
get anything better at their sorry excuse for a grocery store. Eating it in my
grandmother’s dining room on those fresh buns, I didn’t appreciate it one bit.
Nothing came from a farm in West Berlin – it all came from the store. And, there were no pets in East Germany. They served no purpose and so were unnecessary. It somehow added to my bleak impression of the place. My cousins in Berlin had pet guinea pigs and a dog and cat. No such thing in the East. Other than my aunt. She had a canary named Charlie. Herr Kielon’s rabbits and chickens didn’t count since he ate them.
On the street. My mother, my grandmother, my aunt.
In West Berlin our attention was drawn to
the way they treated West Germans at the border when trying to cross into East
Germany. Common stories: They kept us there for five hours. They took the
entire car apart. Seat covers, floor mats, ashtrays. They checked the
undercarriage with mirrors. They whole time we waited. They took the coffee we
were bringing over and they found the Bunte
magazines and took those as well.
My uncle said he didn’t bother to hide
things anymore. When the guards looked into the car he showed them the
newspapers on the back seat beside the good chocolate and bottle of brandy.
“There is it. Take it if you must.” Sometimes they took it and other times they
waved him through. Nobody knew what the guards did with the confiscated goods.
There were likely rules to follow. They surely would have wanted the items they
found and I wonder if any of them dared sneak some home for their families, as my
uncle was trying to sneak it over to his.
As Canadians travelling the same route, we
were not subjected to this kind of treatment. We still had to hide things just
in case, but the guards never looked. We made sure we brought what we could.
Clothing for my cousins, books, magazines, coffee, chocolate. We hid things in
socks or behind a carefully constructed row of books at the back of our
suitcase. I always celebrated a small victory over the oppressors at having
smuggled an Abba cassette over or some teen magazines or a pair of jeans for my
cousins.
We brought Westmarks that could be spent
in the Intershops. These were shops stocked with Western goods. Clothing,
chocolates, candy, coffee, cookies. Mostly what my cousins bought there was
chocolate. It was a way for more Western currency to make its way into the East
German coffers.
Money was a big thing for the East German Communist government, I was told. The Russians needed Western currency and so they sought every possibly avenue of obtaining Westmarks. We paid a certain amount for our visas and then for each day we stayed in the East we had to exchange 25 Westmarks into Eastmarks. Then there was the matter of spending this money. We tended to stay in the East for at least three weeks so we had a lot of Eastmarks to spend. But, in a Communist country, things don’t cost very much and I remember my mother trying to spend all this money before we left because you couldn’t exchange it back to Westmarks again. I bought a lot of toys, clothes for my dolls and later on sheet music and classical recordings on the Eterna label. My grandmother used to joke that the Russians would surely take the wall down if they were paid enough to do it.
KDV Foodhall. Opulence of the West:
I loved spending the summers with my
cousins. The Russian my cousins learned in school I found hilarious and useless.
Not like my cousins in the West who learned English, a perfectly sensible
language to learn. When I told them I was learning French it seemed hilarious
and useless to them too. But, we chattered to each other in our rudimentary
second languages and had a blast regardless. It was summer, so we went swimming
in both East and West Germany. Up at the Baltic Sea in the East, and in the Glienicker
See, a small lake in Kladow-West Berlin, close to where my cousins lived. The
border crossed right through this lake and was denoted by a string of buoys.
“What if you swim across the buoys?”
“They will shoot you.” They kind of rolled
their eyes when they said this. The Russians had put up the wall and now they
had to employ these extreme measures to protect it. West Berliners had become
pretty blasé about it as though the shoot to kill policy was one more quirky
Russian thing they had to put up with. My relatives had endured these trigger
happy guards for years and their presence at a beach where children swam and
families picnicked simply raised their threshold for irony.
From our relatives in the East we heard
about the injustice of the travel restrictions. Travel to the West was strictly
forbidden and one of the main reasons the wall even came into being was because
of the flow of people from East to West in the early years after the war. People
had to apply for a permit to visit relatives in the West for special occasions
(weddings, funerals). Sometimes their request was granted, sometimes not. Once
a person reached 65 years of age, it was easier to get a permit.
One year, my uncle neatly arranged for my
grandmother to obtain a temporary West German passport. The passport was good
for one month and would allow her to visit her son. At the end of her visit,
she would have to surrender the passport. Communism really only requires the
efforts of the able bodied. My grandmother got her visa because she was over 65
– a retiree and therefore no longer of any use to the state. If she fled to the
West, what did it matter?
My grandmother travelled all the way to
Canada on that visa for my sister’s confirmation. Nobody in her home town was
allowed to know. In our letters to her preceding the trip, we were not allowed
to mention it. It was top secret. We were not allowed to say: “I can’t wait to
see you. It will be so awesome for you to see Canada for the first time since
your eldest daughter fell in love and decided to stay here and get married and
stay in Canada! at the age of twenty-two.” The letters most certainly would be read.
Anybody in the East with ties to the West was under suspicion. Suspicion of
what? There was no good answer. If we mentioned that she would be visiting us
she probably wouldn’t get her visa.
A few years later, when my aunt turned 65,
she was granted a travel visa and came to Canada for a visit. I remember her
reaction at a shopping mall. After about an hour of browsing and feeling the
garments, she sat down, exhausted on a bench and said, “I don’t know whether to
cry for joy or weep for despair.” She was talking about the abundance, about
the variety, the choices and the immediacy of the possession. In East Germany
people waited for everything. For a one bedroom instead of a bachelor
apartment. (One person doesn’t need all that space.) Months for a telephone, a
washing machine, years for a car.
The idea that she could just swoop through
this mall and have whatever she wanted had become unfathomable to her. This
place, with all its colourful clothing, advertising and smells of delicious
foods, clean and bright, did not in any way resemble the drabness she was used
to, reminding her of the sameness of each day, present and future.
The vibrancy that colour adds to a
landscape can be taken for granted. This was one of the most noticeable
differences to me, between these two countries – worlds apart by the time I
experienced them. Even the wall looked different depending on which side you
stood. The Western side was covered in graffiti – more colour! And on the other
side – nothing. Just a blank, heavily guarded wall.
The West was what I knew, growing up in
Canada. The landscape we survey everyday is bright and filled with some attempt
at attracting our attention. In East Germany there was no such effort. Nobody
was expected to be happy with their life, but they would be provided for.
Everyone was tended to via the same set of rules. This ideology discourages any
kind of personal effort. There is no getting ahead and so there is no sense of
accomplishment. There is no need – the state will provide. If the state will
provide, then nobody helps each other. Everybody worked even though this meant
the workforce was full of redundancy. People were assigned mundane and often
meaningless tasks with several people doing a job of one. No unemployment meant
no poverty and so there was no charity and very little goodwill.
People spied on each other and were
rewarded for it. My aunt and uncle found out after the fall of the Berlin wall
that their good friends and neighbours who had lived next door for years had
been informing on them to the Stasi for all of those same years. I had met them
too. They seemed like nice people and we were always invited to their home for
coffee and cake whenever we were visiting. Who knew what they had to report on
my aunt and uncle. I never heard. But the relentless gathering of information
for the sake of gathering information may have started in East Germany.
The war had been lost. All of Germany
blamed Hitler. The East was saddled with the Russians and the West with the
blame for the horrific atrocities. The wall divided the country. An attitude of
shame and helplessness grew in the West while resignation and disgust ate at
the East. The Russians kept the country divided for twenty-eight years. I remember
during those early visits, the adults discussing the East/West situation late
into the evenings. Unless there was a soccer game on, this was the topic of
discussion. They explained to me that while there was a wall dividing them,
they very much considered Germany one country. But I could tell with each
subsequent visit that these feelings were fading. While the West advanced, the
East stood still. That wall was going to be there forever. These were clearly
two different countries. This was obvious as soon as you turned on the
television.
In the East, you could sometimes obtain
weak signals from Western broadcasters and everybody who could would watch
those programs, particularly the news. There were shows broadcast by the East
German government but they were unduly boring and colourless with poor
production value. I was always happy to return to West Berlin because the
picture was so much clearer and the shows less gloomy. Even the commercials
were cheery and corny.
There, nobody ever fiddled with the
antenna to try to find a weak signal from the East to see what was going on.
That never happened.
During my grandmother’s visit that one
summer, my mother took her British Columbia to see the Rocky Mountains. One day
they set off on a hike in Banff, with their knapsacks and sturdy shoes, looking
forward to finding a spot with a view to sit down and eat their picnic. All of
a sudden to the left of their path, about eight feet away, they saw a grizzly
bear, up on its hind legs. Its front paws were up against a tree. The bear was
over six feet tall. When they realised what it was they decided to turn around,
not wanting to walk past it. There were no other hikers on the path. Before
turning back, my grandmother had a good long look at the bear. Maybe she wanted
to stare it down, like she would have those Russian soldiers who set up camp
inside of her house while she fled with her five children to the countryside.
That bear, symbolic of the invaders and conquerors of her homeland stood before
her, a hulking and clumsy animal, blocking her path.
My mother and grandmother started back and
after a short time they encountered two ladies from England who were headed in
the direction from which they had just come. Together they decided to join
forces and make enough noise to scare the bear away. They tried to think of
songs they all knew and finally came up with The Happy Wanderer. My mother and grandmother sang in German and
the English ladies, in English. They all hiked back towards the bear, singing
this enthusiastic Wanderlied as loud
as they could:
I love to go a-wandering,
Along the mountain track,
And as I go, I love to sing,
My knapsack on my back.
Val-deri,Val-dera,
Val-deri,
Val-dera-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha
Val-deri,Val-dera.
My knapsack on my back!
The four women marched along the mountain trail, singing lustily and
with bravado. My grandmother, no doubt delighted at the opportunity to thwart
this Rocky Mountain grizzly bear, to bring him down from his hind haunches and
send him lumbering back into the woods.
Mein
Vater war ein Wandersmann,
Und mir steckt's auch im Blut;
Drum wandr' ich flott, so lang ich kann,
Und schwenke meinen Hut.
Val-deri,Val-dera,
Val-deri,
Val-dera-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha
Val-deri,Val-dera.
Und schwenke meinen Hut.
