TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/021290/02120011.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 9.5 KB | 200 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 31

THE GERMANYS


"The revolution came from the people. It is they who will bring
our nation together."

By JAMES O. JACKSON


    "Hello, boys," cries Ursula Schubert, 39, waving to a pair
of green-uniformed border guards in Posseck, East Germany.
Without bothering to show a passport or other identification,
Schubert, with two of her children in tow, strolls past the
smiling guards and across a blacktop that covers part of what
was once the "death zone" between the two Germanys. "I'm off
to pick up the newspapers," she explains, gesturing toward the
West German border post 200 yards away.

    There are few formalities at the Posseck crossing these
days. Traveling from East to West has become so commonplace
that nobody, not even the border guards, pays much attention.
Yet as recently as a year ago, entering that stretch of plowed
frontier was an offense that could bring death. Until last year
the East German guards, today pleasant and unarmed, carried
automatic weapons and had orders to shoot anyone trying to
escape to the West. Until the mid-1980s there were mines and
trip-wire-triggered automatic guns, and even now the zone may
not be entirely safe. "Stay on the footpath," Schubert warns
her youngest son, Christian, 3. "We don't know if they took away
all the mines."

    The Posseck crossing is one of 73 holes hacked into the
858-mile-long East-West German border since Nov. 9, when East
Germany granted its citizens unrestricted travel rights.
Schubert's daily chore is to pick up 25 copies of the
Frankenpost, a newspaper published in Hof, a sizable town on
the West German side. She is unaware of and untroubled by the
fact that politicians in Bonn and Berlin have yet to agree on
terms for the distribution of West German newspapers, which have
been banned in East Germany for the past three decades.
"Frankenpost has a special edition for us, with advertisements
for clothes and such," she says. "The West German border police
bring the papers along, and I pass them out in the village.
Sometimes it's hard to believe this is happening."

    Yet it is happening. In a thousand ways large and small, the
two Germanys are being united. Not by law, not by treaty, not
by politicians: what is happening is happening from the bottom
up. Silence and suspicion have been replaced by traffic jams
and love affairs. While the allies talk of treaty commitments
and politicians dither over the touchy issue of unification,
Germans East and West are playing soccer together, going
shopping together, drinking beer together, dancing together
and, oddly, breeding rabbits together. "Don't laugh," says
Arnold Friedrich, the mayor of Modlareuth, a divided border
town near Hof. "There are rabbit strains over there that have
developed separately, and rabbit breeders are eager to get
them. There are government rules on sending animals across. So
naturally, smuggling rabbits is very active."

    Farther north, in Wolfsburg, where the giant Volkswagen
factory turns out 4,000 cars each working day, Mayor Werner
Schlimme reels off half a dozen other examples of spontaneous
East-West contacts that have occurred since the Iron Curtain
lifted. "One day in November, a couple of garbage men from
Klotze came over and saw one of our municipal garbage trucks
at work," he says. "They thought it was wonderful how it lifted
the cans and emptied them automatically." Garbage men from the
two sides, separated by politics and technology but united in
language, began talking trash. The West German workers,
inspired, suggested to their superiors that Wolfsburg give one
of its old trucks to Klotze. The city did. Observes Schlimme:
"There is no better way for reunification to happen than for
the people to do it instead of the governments. The revolution
over there came from the people. It is they who will bring our
nation together."

    A similar situation occurred in the border town of Zicherie,
15 miles north of Wolfsburg. The local volunteer fire
department voted to give an old rescue van to Jahrstedt, a
small East German farm center just 1 1/2 miles away via a newly
opened border post. But the transfer bogged down in government
red tape, and the van sits idle in a garage in the West. Still,
the offer led to discussions among the fire fighters. Within
two weeks the fire departments met over steins of beer and
plates of wurst for professional talk. At present they are
working out disaster plans and communications problems.

    Less formally, new friendships are sprouting, and old ones,
long in forced abeyance, are being renewed. "I went to my
family's old farm for the first time in 32 years," says Adolf
Matthies, the former mayor of Zicherie. "It's part of a
collective farm now, and I don't know anybody there anymore.
But the people who lived in our old house were very kind to me.
We had a meal together. I always believed that this terrible
border would open and that our nation would be together again."

    Near Matthies' home lies a memorial stone engraved with the
words DEUTSCHLAND IST UNTEILBAR (Germany is indivisible),
placed there three decades ago by a private organization. Yet
Zicherie and the East German town of Bockwitz, just across the
double fence, were divided for 32 years. In the old days,
getting from Zicherie to Bockwitz entailed a drive of 120 miles
and special permission, rarely given, to enter the border zone.
Few took the trouble. On Nov. 14 East German workers cut the
wire, and now hundreds of two-stroke Trabants pour across the
line every day, loaded with East German shoppers headed to
Wolfsburg to buy cheap clothes or tropical fruit -- or to find

increasingly, Volkswagens and Opels trundle in the other
direction as former East Germans head back to visit friends and
relatives. Polls indicate that an astounding 47 million of the
61 million West Germans plan to cross the border on visa-free
visits during 1990.

    "Can you believe it? We ran away four days before the border
opened," says Birgit Zittlau, 26, stopping in Bockwitz with her
husband Bernd, 27, to chat with an old school chum, Ulrike
Bromann. "We didn't know if we'd ever see our friends again.
Now we come over once a week." Bromann says she was shocked and
saddened when the Zittlaus fled: "I thought they were gone
forever, but here they are." A divorced mother of three,
Bromann says she would never contemplate leaving East Germany
for the West, adding optimistically, "Anyway, the standard of
living over here will be the same within five years."

    The Zittlaus have prospered since they left. Bernd found a
job as an electrician in Tulau, a farm village near the border.
The family moved into a modest apartment, made a down payment
on a 1979 VW and began a new life only two miles from their old
one in the East. "We'll never come back here to live," he says.
"But we can visit whenever we want. Everything is normal now."

    Not every resettler has found it that easy. At least 125,000
newly arrived East Germans are still jobless, and West German
officials hope the shortage of work will prevent a further rush
from the East. More than 58,000 East Germans crossed over
permanently during January alone, and by some estimates 3
million are ready to flee westward if general elections
scheduled for March 18 fail to produce a government capable of
reforming the economy and restoring stability.

    "Everything depends on democratization," says Wolfsburg
Mayor Schlimme. "People have to see that they have a future
over there. Otherwise, they will come over here to find it. And
no businesses from here will take risks in the East unless they
have the security of a reliable democracy." Nevertheless,
Schlimme is enthusiastic about the prospect of Wolfsburg as an
economic magnet drawing on resources stretching from Hannover
in the West to Magdeburg in the East. "VW employs 65,000 people
and draws them from a radius of 60 miles," he says, sketching
a 60-mile semicircle cut off by the East German border. He
then completes the circle, taking in Magdeburg, only 40 miles
away across the border. "Why not draw workers from here as
well? And why not have workers from Wolfsburg go to factories
in Magdeburg?"

    Volkswagen, in fact, has already made a large commitment in
East Germany. A development company financed by VW is planning
a plant in Karl-Marx-Stadt to produce an East German-designed
replacement for the beloved but outmoded Trabant. "With our
help they can do it," says VW spokesman Ortwin Witzel. "They
have excellent workers and fine engineers. They just haven't
had a chance to show the world what they can do."

    In Posseck something else is happening. Schubert's
17-year-old daughter Yvonne, pretty and blue-eyed, shows up to
read the Hof newspaper. She is wearing a Hof-bought T-shirt
embossed with the word KAMIKAZE and a grinning skull in Day-Glo
colors. "The kids from here go over to Hof a lot," she says.
"We shop for clothes. We try new cosmetics. We listen to music.
We go to clubs. We meet other kids." Youngsters from the West,
she says, come back with them to Posseck to play music and
dance at the village youth club, once the ballroom of a manor
house confiscated from a former aristocrat.

    Does she have many Western friends?

    "Yes."

    A young man?

    Blue eyes flutter; a blush rises.

    "Yes."

    In Posseck, in the Schubert household, unification has
already arrived.