TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/012290/0122004.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 12.4 KB | 261 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 44

Voices of East Berlin


Talking to young and old alike, an American visitor discovers
an abiding love of East Germany -- and little desire to reunify

By CARL BERNSTEIN


    Perhaps I have been in a different East Berlin from the one
I have been reading about: triumphant, its citizens ready to
join their brethren in a single, capitalist Germany. The East
Berlin I visited last month was a gray city whose citizens
seemed to be reeling, exhausted, sad, confused, angry. Hopeful,
yes, of rebuilding a noncommunist socialist democracy, separate
from the West but in some way affiliated. Wary of capitalism
and worried about any prospect suggesting reunification.

    I am not a political scientist. But I have seen people in
shock before. Never before have I seen a whole city so numbed
-- not Washington in the days after it was burned in the wake
of Martin Luther King's assassination, not New York City after
the blackout, not even the Capital after the assassination of
John F. Kennedy.

    I am suspicious of what I have been reading and seeing on
television, suspicious because I see very few stories --
actually only a few quotes and sound bites and pictures of the
same demonstrators in Leipzig shouting their unification
slogans -- as evidence that the country's citizens are marching
headlong toward one Germany. In East Berlin, where I rode the
trains back and forth to the West from the Friedrichstrasse
Station, where I walked into cafes and discos and shops and
asked people their feelings, I could hardly find any citizens
who said they wanted a reunified, single Germany. Perhaps in
the far-off future, said a very few. Definitely not now.

    Most were adamant. Not ever, they said. They love their
country. The German Democratic Republic, not the Federal
Republic of the West. They believe in socialism. Still. Not the
socialism of their disgraced and discredited leaders but the
socialism they have been taught as an ideal for 40 years. Now
the attainment of that socialism may be possible, they said.
The tyrants are gone. The West is accessible, and relations
between the two states should be easy, and economic cooperation
should begin.

    Their answers surprised me, perhaps because we in the U.S.
are tempted to see the triumph of democracy in Eastern Europe
wholly through an American prism: as a triumph of American
values as opposed to human values. The voices I heard in East
Berlin told me this is a mistake -- presumptuous, wrongheaded,
shortsighted.

    In the bar of the Kempinski Hotel in West Berlin, an
American newspaper reporter assured me that "once these people
have spent a month or two crossing back and forth and been
blinded by the lights and BMWs of West Berlin, that will be the
end of all the talk about a new socialism." My colleague might
turn out to be right -- he has a pretty good track record in
this part of the world. Still, the words of the East Berliners
-- and more important, the intensity of feeling behind them --
left a deeper impression on me.

    There is no question that East Berliners have been blinded
by the lights of West Berlin. In several short weeks they have
become profoundly aware of the disparities between their two
cultures. Perhaps much of what I was hearing was the
defensiveness of the poor child who wants to show an outsider
that his life and that of his family, however threadbare their
clothes, are just as rich and full as his neighbor's.

    Indeed there is much that is childlike about the East
Berliners and the way they express themselves. "In the East the
heart is most important," a young nurse told me. "Not money.
Everybody can live here regardless of whether he has money or
not." One lady riding on the train said of West Berlin as we
crossed over the Wall and rode into the darkness, "Too much
light." For emphasis, she shielded her eyes.

    A few minutes earlier, on the Kurfurstendamm in West Berlin,
I had encountered one of the few East Berliners who spoke
enthusiastically to me of a single, reunified German state. He
was a young man in his 20s, strolling with friends whose
plastic shopping bags (embossed with Michael Jackson's picture)
were filled with purchases. He wanted to move to the West
(nearly 1,800 people a day are still moving)  as soon as
possible, he said. Why? He gestured to the store windows and
the bright lights and said, "My eyes have been opened."

    There is a shabby, Old World familiarity about East Berlin
that those who have lived there all their lives cling to -- at
least for the moment. "We have a culture -- theater, opera,
community -- the other side doesn't have," says the woman on
the train, the bright lights of West Berlin now behind her.
"Our stores are not empty." She is 34, a technician for the
state television network. Until November, she was last in the
West when she was six. This night she has returned to West
Berlin to go to a concert with a friend, her fourth visit since
the Wall opened. Would she live in West Berlin or wish to see
her city absorbed into some greater German nation? "Oh no, I
love my country so much. Here we have certain social and human
rights, especially for a woman."

    Such surprising references to "human" rights are frequent
in the East, and it takes a while to realize that East
Berliners are speaking of the economic inducements of a
socialist economy -- day care for children, full employment,
artificially supported prices.

    "If we go to the West or are absorbed by it, there are
economic problems for us," she continues. "We have no money."
Her doubts tumble out. "The culture in the West -- it's nice,
but the buildings don't go together. New buildings and old
buildings. Jarring. West Berlin is too new . . ." And, of
course, there are those lights.

    Just before midnight, she gets off the train, is processed
perfunctorily by the border guards at Friedrichstrasse Station,
and joins 40 others waiting for a bus in the cold night air.
The faces in the line are tired. For many it has been only
their first or second visit to the West. They seem subdued. For
days, TV and the papers have been filled with reports about the
thievery of the former communist leaders. "People feel
betrayed," says a young factory worker. "Desolate."

    "The East must be changed," says a restaurant worker. "But
there should be two Germanys, I think. I work with a lot of
young people, and most want to stay here. Most don't want one
Germany. Maybe sometime in the next century. Maybe then."

    "Two Germanys," says a university student, Barbara, firmly.
"One isn't correct. To be correct we need two different
systems. So we can have the best of both."

    "Germany is different from Hungary and Poland," says Astrid,
26, a nurse. "We were fighting for something special. We want
real socialism, like the socialism we learned in school."

    On this night she is one of only half a dozen men and women
in the disco on the 37th floor of the Hotel Stadt Berlin in
Alexanderplatz -- the modernistic public square where most of
the demonstrations in East Berlin for this new, democratic way
of life have taken place. "People are exhausted," says the
bartender. "It is too much to comprehend."

    "We are reading too much," Astrid says. "Everyone is reading
everything now -- five newspapers a day. Never before, because
it was all the same. It was only good things in the newspaper
-- every plan 100%, 130%. Now we read about problems. Now it
is possible to say what you are thinking.

    "We learned in school that in the capitalist countries the
boss makes the money from the workers. And now we know our
leaders are the same. That is why we are so sad." She is
chagrined at the signs all around her that ordinary East
Germans -- including the bartender in the disco -- are playing
currency-exchange games with visitors from the West.

    "On Nov. 9 there was dancing on the Wall," she notes. "Not
since." She fears unity with West Germany, though not close
relations. "Keep the Wall," she says. "If they make some
problems, we can close the border. We hear there are
neofascists in West Germany. We know this from their own news.
We have no fascism, and people here will never accept it.

    "Now maybe there will be some mixed economy. But not if
there will be more poor. We will not accept unemployment.
Democracy and socialism. That is the goal."

    Midmorning. "It has been a quiet revolution," the woman is
saying. She is sixtyish, an actress in the Berliner Ensemble,
the repertory theater founded by Bertolt Brecht. In the corner
of the room, images flicker on the television screen. The
pictures are of villas and hunting dachas and the commentator
is talking about hundreds of millions of deutsche marks
smuggled out of the country and into Swiss bank accounts.

    Erich Honecker's picture flashes on the screen. "We knew our
leaders were old and stupid and reactionary -- but not this.
It's like people living next to Auschwitz who said they didn't
know. If you had told me about this a couple of months ago, I'd
say it was American propaganda. It's as if you were suddenly
told that your grandmother was a thief, your mother was a
whore, your father was a drug dealer."

    She and her daughter, an actress in her mid-20s, have been
active in the opposition. She recites a litany frequently
heard: kindergartens, excellent schools and libraries; this is
not the Soviet Union with bread shortages, this is not Poland
with its Catholic Church, this is not Hungary with its historic
antipathy to the Russians and socialism . . .

    "This all should have happened long ago. Now if we can make
this into a democracy and get some of the money back, this
could be one of the most pleasant places to live. Give us a few
years. Nobody here gets sad watching Dallas on West Berlin TV
and says, `I wish I had a dress like that.' We don't want to
be the Taiwan of Europe."

    "Yes, the future is socialism. But not the old socialism.
We need a new socialism. But how? It is only possible with
young people. Young people in new structures. The old
structures are death. The challenge is to create these new
structures."

    I am in the Journalisten-Haus, a kind of press club across
the street from the train station. The speaker is editor of a
youth paper for politics, culture and economic topics --
circulation 1 million. He is in his 50s, having a sandwich with
Reimund, 39, the press agent for the huge, state-owned Zeiss
optics and microcomputer industries.

    "It's a revolution for me and for him, a continuing daily
revolution," says Reimund. "You don't know what the day before
was. But 40 years is 40 years . . . I don't want reunification.
This land is this land. But people want cooperation with the
Federal Republic. We are Germans and they are Germans. And not
all is bad here the past 40 years. Our people are more advanced
than Poland. Poland wants capitalism, not us. We have more
welfare, more consumer goods. There are no better-fed refugees
in the world than the ones who went to the West. They went to
West Germany in cars."

    It is evening, and together we walk toward the border,
passing by the embassy of the U.S.S.R., a huge imperial palace
with a bust of Lenin bathed in subdued light.

    "Now it is the hope to make this country better," says the
editor. "Yet ours is only a hope because there are many
problems. Daily we are learning a new life. We can write
differently now. Journalism in this land is now powerful . .
. Every day a new revelation. Yes, the country is in shock. But
not so much shock that there is no action. Daily there is
action."

    For an American, the biggest surprise is to hear Germans
speak with fear of Germany. "Helmut Kohl said a united Germany
is a capitalist Germany. But a capitalist Germany is a
dangerous Germany for Europe," Reimund continues. "Because the
power is so big that people in other countries say this
country, this united Germany, is a danger for peace in Europe.
Because the history in this country was capitalism. A big,
powerful Germany is an aggressive capitalism."

    As we speak, we pass the U.S. embassy, smaller than the
U.S.S.R.'s, less imposing, and, with its picture-window display
of satellite views from outer space, it seems even less
relevant to these new East Europeans.