Born in GDR

In 1988, Bruce Springsteen gave a concert in my country. Thousands of young East Germans, me included, sang “Born in the USA”.  Half a year later, at the beginning of the peaceful Revolution, a super cool punk band came out with the song “Born in GDR”. 

A song full of sarcasm, it highlighted the surrealistic situation we were living in.  Their pain, over the lack of our self-respect, was my pain.  I shared both the feeling that this country seemed often to be nothing more than a bad joke of history, and the stubborn refusal to accept this. Too many of us would have preferred to live anywhere else but here.  When my country disappeared, I started to miss it, and I felt my identity was disappeared as well.

So I try to remember.

I was born in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), aka East Germany.  Not through conscious choice on my part, but my parents’.  My parents both still believed till the end that ours was the better of the two Germany’s.  They both worked hard to make it better.  That included giving their kids the gift of critical thought, a very broad education, and lots of love.  Maybe that’s why I never just walked away.

Born out of the ashes and ruins of WWII, East Germany was nothing more than a miscarriage due to the fallout of the winners of this war, liberated by the Soviet Union from Fascism and then slowly subjugated to Stalinism.  It’ people was a strange mix of former fascists, communists, and everybody in between – victims and perpetrators, refugees from the east, POWs, child soldiers, bombed-out civilians, raped women and rapists, and last but not least the small group of untouchables who lived through this nightmare as nothing had ever happened.  Altogether about 15 million people ended up in a country devastated by the war and hardly the size of New Brunswick.  There was hate for the Russians and enthusiasm for all things Russian, guilt for German crimes, and hope to build a better Germany.

Or so I heard.  What was left during my youth was bureaucratic stupidity and the utter absence of self-reflection. It felt often frozen in time as nothing would ever change. 

The old men who ran this country might have lacked the ability to deal with reality but they certainly did not get soft-hearted with age.  They had no time for change or criticism.  For them, that meant working for the enemy, and the betrayal of the communist values.

So people went to prison for the most ridiculous reasons; for wanting to live somewhere else, for protesting the wrong things, for not being willing to be drafted into the army.  Others got demoted from their jobs and sent to factories or farms to get in touch with their working-class roots.  People had their property seized, some got forced out of the country, and some were not allowed a higher education. 

I remember watching the West German news of another East German shot at the border while trying to escape.  As a teenager, I felt confused when I started to think, that it is not right to shoot or jail people just because they want to live somewhere else.  I heard rumors about people disappearing.  I remember self-censorship and censorship of books, movies, and songs.  People were afraid of somebody listening, unhappy people.  I walk again through the grey cities, the dark towns, smelling of coal-fire and full of unsmiling people. 

Stepping out of line was not acceptable.  Neither was individuality.  No room for discoveries, no time for experiments.  Military parades and organized demonstrations, official meetings, and flags ceremonies in school.  The newspapers were full of boring bullshit, pages filled with the endless speeches of the communist leaders of the Soviet Union. Until Gorbachev came to power that is - his speeches got first banished to the last pages, and later banned altogether. Together with that they suddenly forbade magazines and even movies from the Soviet Union.  Citing the Russian Big Brother turned from the cure for all problems into a recipe for disaster.

Prisons were horrible in my country.  There was sometimes endless solitary confinement, torture, and no due process.   

If you went for political reasons, you hardly got another chance after release, blacklisted until you died; from film editor to factory line worker, from university professor to janitor.  If you were lucky the West Germans bought you while you were still in prison.  Officially there were no political prisoners in East Germany.  Unofficially, the Department of Commercial Coordination (Koko) of the Ministry of State Security (Stasi) made about 3.5 Billion Deutsche Mark selling them.  Some got exchanged for goods.  The very first load of political prisoners, including their children, altogether about 20, were exchanged against 3 truckloads of potassium fertilizer.  What a deal...

When the boss’s wife took responsibility for all children and youth matters, the children of political prisoners were taken often away from their families and put in state-run homes.  If the parents were released to the West, they had to leave their kids behind.

In the early years, before the wall was built, some people run away from East Germany and just left their children behind.  Not so nice either.

We took the West German's shit (literally) and they our free-spirited and smart people, successful farmers and businessmen, and talented artists.  What an amazing trade-off. West Berlin, the island of the free world in the middle of a communist flood, had no room for its own shit, so we got paid to take it and dump it onto our fields turning them into the famous, stinking fields around Berlin.  For west money, we did about everything. There were even some speculations that west-shit smelled sweeter.

Koko also made money through the expropriation of "enemies of the state", and through theft of antiques from people they blackmailed or people who wanted to leave.  Koko sold the antiques to Belgian truckers, who bought the stuff blind by shelf length.  Their trucks, carrying some western consumer goodies to us, were empty on the way out of the GDR.  The Truckers turned into antique wholesalers.  A colleague of mine, who had been part of this deal, told me the story many years later in Toronto.  I laughed very hard because it was even weirder than I had imagined.

Koko bought West German consumer goods with the west money to pacify the East German population, invested some in the stock market, sponsored political parties in the West, corrupted, and made a fortune.  Koko dealt weapons, found ways to bypass the computer embargo of the West, and pimped out unknowing East German patients as guinea pigs to pharmaceutical companies from the western world.  After the end of Communism, the function of guinea pigging went back to the Third World or people of color and nobody seemed to be upset about that.  

East German prisoners were forced to labor for western companies like IKEA, which got sued for compensation in mid-2000. 

Every two weeks for 8 hours from grade 8 on, we ‘child labored’ as part of our curriculum - sometimes for western companies as well.  I remember how we packed soldering irons in fancy plastic boxes for some West German company and one of us had to slap nice stickers - made in West Germany- onto the boxes.  We competed in stealing as many of those stickers as possible.  Guess we tried to rebrand ourselves. The soldering irons for the local East German market were stuffed into brown paper bags.  They looked sad compared to their western cousins - an excellent recipe to install pride in your home country.

When it was all over, a lot of money disappeared. The former boss of the charming organization Koko, Schalck Golodkowski, had ‘escaped’ to the West around the time the wall came down.  There he had some friendly chats with the good people of the democratic intelligence communities.  Nobody ever dared to charge him for all of his crimes.  He only got in the nineties some time on probation for illegal weapons deals.  Schalck died in 2015, very wealthy, and for sure there was no connection whatsoever to his former profession.  Very little is found written about him.  He always had good lawyers.  And he (so he stated) never got invited to the Stasi boss’s birthday parties.  Schalck never had to serve time for his crimes.  But some people remember.

Meanwhile, Markus Wolf, the head of our outside espionage, went to jail after reunification.  But then he went to the aforementioned birthday parties and if there is a lesson to learn, it’s to not party with the secret services at their secret parties. Nothing stays hidden forever…

Markus Wolf used the time spent in jail very productively to write a cookbook, “Secrets of the Russian Kitchen”.  These were the only secrets he was willing to reveal, and according to a friend of mine, they were definitely worth revealing.

I think I was not the only one who had some sympathy and respect for this grand old spymaster, and some strange pride because he was considered one of the best spymasters ever.  Who am I to judge this man, who fled as a child with his family to the Soviet Union and came back to Germany as a Soviet soldier. His father, a medical doctor, was at least a triple target for the Nazis – a Jew, a communist, and an author and playwright.  Markus’ brother, Konrad Wolf, became a famous filmmaker and the head of the East German Film school.  Markus Wolf’s spy organization worked in foreign espionage, not informing on the inside. He took some responsibility and had the balls to try to speak on November 4th, 1989, at the largest anti-government demonstration in Berlin, a nonviolent protest for freedom, democracy, and a whole new better country without a secret service…though he was not really welcomed there. 

The boss of the Stasi, Erich Mielke, was in his 80's when East Germany ended.  One of the most hated people in my country, responsible for untold crimes and tragedies, he nevertheless got only charged with the murder of a police officer going back to 1931 and bemused us by stammering in court: "But I love you all..."  I had to suppress the urge to vomit.  Mielke not only terrorized the people in East Germany, but he was also one of Stalin’s henchmen in the Spanish civil war, sneaking behind the front lines, to kill anarchists and communist apostates and renegades.  Because the Stasi worked so wonderfully, he exported this model of a secret service to some communist countries in Africa.  He was a proud co-signer of the shoot to kill order for East Germans who tried to escape "illegally".  This order was given to all the border guards, but its existence was vehemently denied after the end of East Germany.

When Mielke went to prison for his old crime he was so obviously sick, that he got released early and finally died in the year 2000.  Many of his victims wished he would have rotted in jail much longer, and that he would have died there.

Once it was all over I was allowed to study.  

One of the seminars dealt with the psychological defects of East Germans.  It was a shared project with the West Berlin University.  How strange it was to sit there, with people your own age, speaking more or less the same language.  But so different they were, so whole and healthy and full of themselves it seemed.  Among them was a young woman desperately looking for answers.  She was originally from the East and had spent more than a year in prison, after being caught trying to escape.  Then the West Germans bought her release.  Now she was one of them, or not - not being able to forget and to forgive, not knowing who needed her forgiveness.  She ended up confronting us, the East German students and demanded answers or at least some attention.  I am afraid we treated her badly, not knowing what to say, confused and defensive about heaven knows what. We had not yet learned compassion, not learned that just an acknowledgment of her fate would have been a lot and that one can be sorry for crimes committed by others in one’s country.  Instead, we were silent, feeling watched and judged by the West German students.  Maybe we were a bit jealous that they, by being born on the other side, had turned into the better people (and better-dressed people).  No need for them for soul-searching, for explaining and justifying choices made so far, no cracks in their biographies. 

I decided to end this embarrassing situation with the utterly dishonest admission, that we East Germans were indeed crazy and damaged, and could we please move on now. Move on I did, first to a bar, with the whole group of West Germans, minus this woman, and later into bed with one of them. So it goes. My contribution to reunification at least.