Germany
Neuruppin is a small town in the former DDR. It used to be a fairly large town, but half of the population was made up of Soviet troops, and most of them have gone back to Russia now. The town was one of the major Soviet army bases just outside West Berlin, and there are still many signs of the Russian occupation. Occasionally a Soviet personnel transporter speeds around the town.
When the Soviets seized Neuruppin, they grabbed all the largest and most luxurious houses for themselves. These ancient mansions are mostly along the main road out of town to the south, and are now largely abandoned. They are still walled off by white fences, though, with signs in Russian and German saying that trespassers will be shot. For some reason the Russians painted all the houses uniform grey before leaving. Nobody seems to know why.
We stopped at a small kiosk in the town centre and bought two doughnuts. XQ asked if I had noticed anything about the town square. I said no. She asked if I didn’t think it was perhaps a little bit large?
I looked around at the town, then back towards the main town square. I said that yes, now that she mentioned it, it was rather big and empty. The roads were unusually wide, too.
XQ sighed, and explained it to me. The town square had been the centre of regular parades; it had been build wide so that troops could be paraded around it. She pointed at the lamp posts, and indicated a small protrusion about two thirds of the way up each post. A bracket, she explained, for mounting flags in spontaneous displays of enthusiastic celebration.
We walked on a bit further. I pointed to a large, well-kept and majestic building to the left. It had a big radio mast on top, with several smaller antennas and microwave dishes. That, explained XQ, had been the headquarters of the Stasi.
I bit further into the doughnut. Instead of jam, inside was something black and sticky and sweet. Peter Gabriel’s Digging in the Dirt started playing in my head. Molasses?
We carried on walking. The puttering of the engines of the passing Trabants was drowned out by the sounds of their tyres on the cobbled streets. XQ told me there was a statue of someone I’d recognize.
It was a small square, with two boarded up fountains. Between them was a statue of Karl Marx. Naturally; the main street is called Karl-Mark-Strasse, this was Karl-Marx-Platz. Whilst most of the places named after Russians have been hurriedly renamed, the Germans seem to have decided to keep all the street names referring to other Germans, even if they were Communists.
It makes a kind of sense; and besides, blindly renaming things is a Soviet way of imposing a culture. West Germany’s approach is far less subtle, and far more effective.
Wherever you go in the former East, it’s easy to spot the Western invaders. The rule is simple: anything brightly coloured is Western. A block of shabby brown and grey Soviet-style high-rise flats has a bright yellow telephone box next to it. The greying and yellowing Eastern road signs are gradually being replaced by gleaming reflective Western ones, in red, blue, green or white. Brown bus, east; orange bus, west.
A once-majestic but now crumbling building with peeling paint and dangerous-looking balconies has a cascade of bright lights and neon in one corner — Neuruppin’s first computer shop. Out near one of the housing estates, a small shopping mall has opened, with a supermarket and a bank. It also houses the town’s first restaurant serving foreign food: Italian, in this case. So far, none of the places selling food from other countries seem to have been attacked; as one graffito pointed out, Nazis eat kebabs. I suppose they’re at least grateful that they have the choice.
XQ is staying in a hostel for students of a technical college. The hostel is in Tresko, the southernmost district of Neuruppin. There’s not much out there; a Soviet communications and observation platform, a few farms, and a petrol station. There used to be a ball-bearing factory, but it was closed down as it was simply unable to compete with Western factories.
It’s the same story all over Eastern Germany. The old factories are about thirty years out of date, and aren’t really suitable for anything except closing. The problem is that no new factories are opening.
The German political system is currently ruled by a right-wing coalition. When it came to re-unifying the two countries, the coalition was obviously primarily interested in helping out its friends — rich landowners. So rather than selling off the land in the East and compensating its pre-Soviet owners at the going rate for whatever was seized by the Communists, the government decided to return as much as possible to its rightful owners or their descendents.
As a result, Germans have so far made over three million individual claims on property in the former East. The government has admitted that there is no way they will be able to process all the claims before the end of the century.
In the meantime, of course, nobody is going to build a factory on land that might suddenly be found to belong to someone else. Hence, pretty much the only Western private investment in the East is running shops in rented premises.
The East Germans, former citizens of the DDR — or Ossis, as they all seem to call each other to distinguish themselves from the pampered Wessis — are predictably unimpressed. It’s not that they aren’t grateful for the shops, the new roads, the telephones and so on. It’s just that they’d rather like some jobs too. If not new jobs, then at least the old ones they used to have. And private investment in factories and industry seems unlikely in the next few years, not just because of the property problem, but because of the looming German recession. Whilst I was there, the news was full of trades unionists outraged at the prospect of 15,000 job losses in the steel industry.
If they think that’s bad, I thought to myself, they should try living in Britain. We had 13,000 job losses announced just this week, with 30,000 a couple of weeks before that.
Many of the students staying in the Tresko hostel are busy retraining. Not through choice, but because there’s nothing else they can do. Even though they can cross the border, they don’t have the skills or the education to gain a job in the West. It’s these disillusioned young factory workers and engineering students who have ended up hating foreigners; and as luck would have it, there’s a large hostel of Asian immigrants next door.
So far there has only been one racist attack in Neuruppin, but doubtless there will be more as the situation worsens. XQ has made friends with some builders from Leipzig who are staying in the hostel. They have jobs rebuilding the town, so they’re more amused by the young ausländerin than anything else. When some drunken youths ran through the corridors banging on doors, breaking furniture and shouting “ausländer raus!” the builders confronted them and told them in no uncertain terms to shut up and get out. Since then it’s been quieter, but I still worry.
XQ is in Neuruppin working as a Fremdsprachenassistentin, or foreign language assistant, to get experience in teaching before continuing her teacher training.
For the teachers at the schools in Neuruppin, it’s been a bit of a shock. They’ve never had a native English speaker in the town before, and initially they were worried that the West German government was planning to replace them with foreigners or show them up as incompetent.
Feelings in the staff room were already tense. The teachers who were members of the Communist Party still sit at their own table and don’t talk to the others. One particular ex-Party teacher has become particularly unpopular, now that the release of DDR files has revealed that she was one of the main Stasi informers.
The main cause of resentment, though, is that Ossi teachers are only paid 60% of the salary of their Wessi colleagues. The fact that they are generally nowhere near 60% as capable only adds to the resentment.
The old regime had what British Tory politicians would call “A strong commitment to the three Rs”. The teaching methods were simple; read from books, write things on the blackboard, get students to write things and memorize them. Now teachers are expected to cope with class discussions in which pupils can say what they like without fear of a visit from the Stasi, and they’re finding it tough going. West Germany’s insistence on the use of the very latest teaching methods means that most of the teachers will need re-training.
The pupils love it, of course. As well as more interesting lessons, they now get some say in the way the school is run. They’re worried by the apparent fall in discipline, though. Many are oblivious to the pressures to behave which are exerted by a moderately democratic society, having spent so long behaving well at gunpoint.
Luckily for XQ, the teachers are starting to realise that she isn’t a threat, and the pupils are responding well too. She has started up an English Club, as the other teachers didn’t seem interested in experimenting with the format of English lessons. The English Club is proving popular, as amongst other things it teaches the kids what they want to know: how to watch British and American TV, and how to understand rock lyrics.
We went to the Neuruppin town library and browsed through the bookshelves. Many of the old DDR-produced books are still on the shelf; they can’t afford to replace them all at once. I had a look through some of them.
The Modern English textbook was interesting. It started off in the usual way: “This is John. John lives in a house in England. John has a dog called Fido.”
However, by chapter 8, John was attending Trades Union rallies and campaigning for workers’ rights. Set texts included speeches by union leaders from the British Labour movement. Questions included “Why do workers in capitalist societies need to join Trades Unions?”
There was also a short paragraph which (the book helpfully explained) was what a capitalist had said when asked about an “investment” he had made. This paragraph was followed by some questions:
The capitalist said “I had to risk everything”. What was he risking? Who does it belong to? Who would have suffered if his investment had been foolish? What are the effects on society of his behaviour?
Later, in a chapter on shopping, questions included this one:
Why did John worry that he would not have enough money to buy the goods he needed? How do we avoid such problems in a modern Socialist society?
A follow-up question said:
Write about a shopping trip of your own to your local store. You may find the following phrases useful:
- wide selection of goods
- good quality products
- cheap and affordable prices
- friendly and efficient service
Even XQ laughed at that one. She’s been to Russia.
The picture books are no less bizarre. I looked through a picture book of Berlin. The pictures of happy, smiling people in 70s clothes (this was a book printed in the mid 80s) were interspersed with little poems, like:
Many happy people live and work in Berlin
capital of the DDR
A modern socialist society
liberated with the help of the Soviet Union
The picture book of London was more subtle. The pictures of shopping streets, for example, weren’t taken in Oxford Street, but instead in a run-down district near Soho. There were plenty of pictures of the House of Commons and Buckingham Palace, and pictures of policemen staring sternly at the camera. Pictures which showed people in close-up seemed to be around ten years old; obviously they didn’t want to show 80s fashions or cars.
We wandered through the library to the literature section. Charles Dickens had been incredibly popular under the old regime, although now his novels were clearly labelled Fiction. The old DDR reprints were still on the shelves, though. The English textbook had included some passages from Dickens, of course, with the expected questions about why young children in capitalist societies were forced up chimneys and made to steal by capitalist men.
The text was laughable to my eyes, but the picture books were really quite subtle. They were propaganda exercises of course, but spotting the bias was quite tricky, even for me.
Of course, the fact that many of the pupils in the school remember being a student in the DDR only makes things more uncomfortable for the teachers. Even the non-Party members had to read out official announcements — and read them out with every ounce of enthusiasm and sincerity they could fake lest one of the pupils report them to the Stasi.
As late as 1988, all the teachers in Neuruppin had had to read out a class announcement which had basically said:
“I’m afraid your fellow pupil insert name will not be joining us again. He and his family have defected to the West. This is a time for great sorrow. It is bad enough that his parents decided to defect, but he has betrayed his country by going with them.”
Obviously even the most naïve pupils in the Sixth Form now take what teacher tells them with a large pinch of salt.
XQ had made friends with a doctor and his family in Neuruppin. He owned a small flat in Berlin, and had offered to lend it to us for a few days.
The flat was a short bus ride from Prezlauer Allee, in what is a fairly well-off suburb by DDR standards. The cars parked in the streets were a mixture of Trabbis, Skodas, and newer Volkswagens and Audis. The block of flats was the usual featureless slab, with dark stairwells hidden behind featureless numbered doors. We found door 108, and walked up the stairs until we found the flat.
The first problem was negotiating the front door. The DDR-made locks operated bizarrely; I found that I could take the key out at any point, and that each of the two keys could make four entire revolutions in its lock, making two or three “clunk” noises on the way. Eventually I worked it out, and we stepped inside.
The flat was fairly small; about the size of my flat in Cambridge. A main room approximately four metres by six, a rather smaller bedroom, and a bathroom and kitchen that were smaller still. The difference was that this flat had belonged to a family of four. The style was different too, of course; the ducts and pipework from the flat above protruded from the ceiling of this flat, and no doubt our toilet was piped through someone else’s bathroom.
The journey into the centre of Berlin and back each day was fairly easy. In fact, the return bus trip from the station became something of a running joke. We would stand at the bus stop late at night, and I’d periodically glance at my watch. When it said (for example) 22:11, I’d say to XQ “The bus will turn that corner in thirty seconds.” We’d then stand and silently count the seconds. Sure enough, the bus would appear, and make its way slowly down the road to arrive within seconds of 22:12. I suppose I’m easily amused.
Of course, to someone living in Cambridge the very idea that buses might run at ten o’clock at night is absurd. The buses from the Innovation Centre and Science Park back into town stop shortly after six. And the idea that a bus might turn up at the time indicated on the timetable — well, it’s so crazy it’s laughable.
In Berlin, we went to the British Council Library to take back some library books XQ had borrowed. On the way we passed the American Cultural Center (sic). It wasn’t what I was expecting; it was a quiet, featureless white building. It wasn’t covered in neon, and it didn’t have any giant paintings of Mickey Mouse on the side. It didn’t even have a flag.
The British Council Library had a selection of video cassettes for hire. I looked through to see what they had chosen as representative of British culture. The largest section was Comedy, which for some reason included Max Headroom. Just about every genre of TV comedy was represented, from the heights of Yes, Minister to the execrable depths of Benny Hill, from Monty Python’s Flying Circus to Red Dwarf.
The only notable gap was that they didn’t have any tapes of Allo, Allo. I suppose Germany isn’t quite ready for loveable cuddly comedy Nazis yet.
A middle-aged man lurched onto the train as it stopped at Friedrichstrasse. He sat down opposite me, and mumbled something loudly in German. I gave him a blank look, reluctant to say anything. He was cuddling a large bottle of vodka, and began slowly unscrewing the cap. He spoke to me again, and I prodded XQ. She said something to him, and they ended up in conversation.
XQ explained to him that we were British, and that I didn’t speak German, only French and English. He said that he had been to England once, many years ago, and that he had forgotten the language. I could believe that, given that my last German lesson had been almost ten years ago, and I’d forgotten almost everything in that time.
The man explained that he had been a soldier in the Volksarmee, the People’s Army of the DDR. When the Communist state had collapsed, he had been out of a job. After years of military life, he had been completely unprepared for the task of fending for himself. He had gone from a respected and feared member of the elite to a homeless drunk sleeping in doorways in the space of a year or two.
My first thought was that anyone who was prepared to join the People’s Army, and shoot civilians who were trying to escape to the West, probably deserved what was coming to him. On the other hand, he seemed a nice enough person. He didn’t hate foreigners, he wasn’t a Communist, he was simply an ordinary guy who had picked a career with good promotion prospects and the chance of travel. He had done his job, and his reward was to sleep on the streets.
As was often the case, my own reactions to life in the former Eastern Bloc were making me feel uneasy. It was easy for me to judge him harshly; but what would I have done under the Communist regime he had grown up in? Often I found myself laughing at how things had been in the east; the cobbled streets, the propaganda, the Trabbis, the shortages.
The idea of paying in advance and waiting twelve years for a Trabant is undeniably funny. I suspect that it was rather less funny for those who received their Trabbis just before the DDR collapsed. Next year, the Trabbi will be banned from the roads.
I have a sneaking suspicion that totalitarianism is only funny when it happens to someone else.
A young girl stepped onto the train. She had very short red hair beneath a yin-yang headscarf, and was wearing black leggings and Doc Marten boots.
She sat next to an old lady, who looked quite perplexed for some reason. Eventually I noticed that the girl had a bulge in her jacket, and she was stroking something inside. The old lady was watching.
Eventually, a small pink nose ventured out from inside the jacket. The old lady said something to the young girl, and they began to chat to each other. Eventually the young girl brought out the rat and let the old lady stroke it.
The rat was a pale golden yellow colour; it sniffed at the air inquisitively and looked around the crowded carriage. Nobody seemed to pay it much attention.
The girl smiled.
The sky was overcast but beginning to clear as we walked into the reception area at the bottom of the Fernsehturm, the famous TV tower. The tower rises in brutal Soviet modernity overlooking Alexanderplatz, the area which used to be the showcase of the DDR.
An illuminated sign said that there was no view to be seen, but I thought otherwise and the girl in the ticket booth was willing to take our money. We walked into the base of the tower, the interior of which resembles a set from “2001”, a space-age womb of ribbed curving walls and soft lighting. For some unknown reason, the cramped lifts were colder than any other area of the tower.
Approximately 45 seconds and 300 metres later, we stepped out into the observation lounge. The tower is basically shaped like a huge sharpened spike, with first a sphere and then a smaller cylinder impaled on it about a third of the way down. The part of the spike under the sphere is the usual concrete, the top part is painted in red and white stripes, and the cylindrical bit is fitted with a selection of dishes, aerials and microwave receivers. The whole construction looks like what you’d get if you crossed a Soyuz spacecraft with a giraffe.
The observation lounge is in the bottom part of the sphere, with its windows angled at about 45 degrees to the vertical. The glass seemed to be about a centimetre thick, and I had sudden visions of James Bond fighting some evil East German spy
XQ pointed out the various old buildings as the evil Communist spy gave Bond a vicious left hook, lifting him and throwing him against the window. Miraculously, the glass failed to give way. Quickly, the spy jumped up onto the window ledge, and he and Bond began grappling with each other as XQ indicated the Museum Island and the course of the river.
Bond eventually manoeuvred his assailant’s back against the glass, punching him viciously in the stomach. As the East German struggled for breath, Bond grabbed his trusty Walther PPK and shot at the corner of the window. The glass fractured and collapsed under the weight of the spy, and he scrabbled to grab the window frame to prevent himself from falling back and following the shards of glass in their lengthy descent.
A cold wind whipped in from the broken window as XQ pointed down at Marx-Engels-Platz. Bond smiled slightly as he walked up to the East German and gave him a gentle push. His grip broken, the evil Communist spy plunged three hundred metres to his death. I leant forwards and watched him fall, the statues of Marx and Engels in the background.
XQ finished her narration, and we decided to climb the stairs to the revolving restaurant. Ever since as a child I’d first read about London’s Post Office Tower, I’d wanted to sit in a revolving restaurant. Sadly, once the Post Office Tower had been declared an Official Secret for reasons of national security, the restaurant had been closed.
We found an empty table and sat by the windows, facing each other. Eventually XQ waved at one of the passing waitresses, and she tossed a menu to us with all the polite grace I had come to expect in the East. Even without the moody expression and air of “I suppose you can order something, if you insist”, it was plain that she was an Ossi. The over-use of tacky makeup and the slightly seventies cut of her clothes made it sadly obvious.
We scoured the menu for something that wasn’t too much of a rip-off. Eventually XQ settled on something hot, fruity and alcoholic, and I picked a coffee and some Black Forest Gâteau.
When the food and drinks eventually arrived, they were surprisingly good. We sat and watched the world revolve around us, chatting about the various buildings that swam into view.
A lone sponge finger swept majestically past on the window ledge, a lonely confectionery digit seemingly raised in obscene salute towards the DDR buildings and statues beneath it. A couple of the buildings still had adverts for Škoda, Intourist or Berolina, no longer illuminated, but most had been torn down and replaced with bright neon saying Technics, Casio and Coca-Cola.
I suddenly felt sorry for Karl Marx. What a fate, to have his statue in Marx-Engels-Platz, forced to stare at these bright symbols of capitalist victory 24 hours a day.
The two young women walked down Unter den Linden, past a poster advertising a retrospective of DDR propaganda posters in one of the museums.
The poster depicted the Berlin Wall, or “anti-fascist protection shield” as the government of the DDR had called it. Beyond the wall, two capitalists were leaning over, trying to grasp at the buildings of Berlin (East). One wore a Nazi helmet and had an evil grin; the other had swastika symbols instead of eyes. “They are waiting to grab us”, warned the poster.
One young woman sighed, and said to the other “Well, they got us in the end.”
She paused, uncertain, and turned to look at XQ. “That is, you got us in the end.”
On the plane home, there was only one British paper to choose from — the Daily Mail.
XQ had taken a copy of the Mail with her when she left for Germany; she had wanted to be able to show the German kids what a British tabloid newspaper was like, but had been too embarrassed to buy The Sun. As luck would have it, that day the Mail had had a two-page spread by Paul ‘Why oh why’ Johnson, entitled “What if we had made peace with Hitler?” and detailing how Sir Winston Churchill would have been publicly executed as a traitor.
The copy of the Daily Mail I got to read on the plane was almost as frothing. “Plans are underway,” it revealed, “to rebuild Hitler’s Reichstag as the centre of a united Germany.”
Well, not quite. Firstly, the Reichstag was almost entirely rebuilt long ago. What they’re planning is to do something about the glass dome on the roof, which was never replaced after we bombed the shit out of it at the end of the Second World War.
Secondly, it makes as much sense to talk about “Hitler’s Reichstag” as it does to talk about “Thatcher’s House of Commons”; the Reichstag was the centre of German government at least as far back as the nineteenth century. In fact, it was the burning down of the Reichstag in 1933 that Hitler used as an excuse to suspend constitutional rights; the Nazis found a convenient scapegoat and decided he was guilty of arson, although the suspicion is that they burnt the building down themselves.
This twisted little article was only a side-attraction, though; most of the rest of the page was taken up by the story of the Russian journalist who had supposedly found bits of Hitler’s skull in a box in some KGB archives. The Mail was obviously very excited, and included some real big pictures of Hitler, with dotted lines showing which bits had been found.
I found myself wondering what on earth the plane’s German passengers must have thought of the Daily Mail’s articles. The question was answered when I overheard a voice from the next row of seats: “I’ve got a copy of the Guardian here. Who wants to start the bidding?”
I certainly knew when I was back in Britain. We arrived at Heathrow a quarter of an hour early, because German air traffic control had been unusually efficient. We then had to wait three quarters of an hour for British Airways staff to unload our baggage. BA claims that it doesn’t have enough baggage handlers; but curiously, it sacked half of the ones it used to have last year, doubtless so that Lord King could have his golden handshake.
Eventually I collected my luggage. The next day the coach to Cambridge was half an hour late. I almost wonder why I came back.