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1994-05-02
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<text>
<title>
'In The Belly Of a Beast'
</title>
<article>
<hdr>
World Press Review, June 1991
'In the Belly Of a Beast'
</hdr>
<body>
<p>By Martin Ahrends, a former East German writer now living in
Hamburg. From the cultural weekly Freitag of Berlin.
</p>
<p> The most disappointing thing about the west is that there is
no spiritual alternative here, only an economic one--making a
living, in the broadest sense of the word, but not making sense
of one's life.
</p>
<p> My first impression of western Germans were of gray-haired
young people, of people with empty faces, of smugness and
indifference. Get to know them, I told myself, but my first
impressions were not disproved. The richer the material world,
the poorer the human one. When one looks strangers in the eye,
one sees shop windows.
</p>
<p> Western Germans lack restraint, and self-doubt is utterly
beyond them. They smile about the crazy Zonis (people from the
former East German, or Soviet-Occupied Zone), about how they
will have to learn to take their piece of the pie. Western
Germans have more and are poorer. They must always give their
all, but it is not always their best. Things do not just move
faster here but also more violently (in a very civilized way).
</p>
<p> Getting ahead, eating, being well groomed--the lesser
things of life have been cultivated to the utmost and made into
the higher things of life. Shopping, furnishing a home, travel--they are what is important. From the outside, western Germany
looks as if it must have a great culture: The lesser things of
life are so carefully attended to that people must have had
their hands and heads free for the higher things. Wrong. Both
their hands and their heads are consumed with taking care of the
lower things, and the lower things have become the real mark of
the culture.
</p>
<p> Everything in the west is consumed--ideas, interests, even
the consumers. Highly paid specialists have discovered
everything touching on my existence. I no longer need to look; I
need only consume. Wear out my old clothes, wear out my carpet.
My life has a price tag on it, a certain value for those who
want to sell my labor. This price tag takes all of the value out
of life.
</p>
<p> The customer is king? People in the west talk to me as if I
were an object. I look away, but their techniques are designed
for just such behavior. Advertisers seek to arouse every tiny
trickle of interest before it is ready to be indulged. We are
not supposed to "earn" our pleasures but "indulge" them, the
more frequently the better.
</p>
<p> Prosperity does not ask why or to what end. It has, in the
best of cases, a bad conscience. Deprivation, on the other
hand, demands explanations. As a result, people in the east have
(or had) more connection to the idea of Germanness. The ideas
of the postwar world and a better Germany had to make sense to
them. Learning from history and building a better Germany--socialist or not--was a project worth some sacrifice.
</p>
<p> In the east, I always had the sense that something important
could happen. That it was worthwhile to be open. In the west I
have closed my eyes, because I have become sure that everything
that could come already has. The west has no positive idea of
itself, no perspective. In the west, one lives as if in the
belly of a beast blindly stumbling through an empty landscape.
One simply lives. It "costs" so much to live, and one's life is
"worth" so much--but only in money.
</p>
<p> In the east, life cost, too, but it had value as well. Money
was a peripheral issue. It was also worthwhile to "keep clean."
Life had value when you rejected professional advancement and
various sorts of privileges offered by the state that would
have cost too much. It was in this moral battle that the east
made its achievements, although they were scarcely as visible
as the economic achievements in West Germany.
</p>
<p> In East Germany, one had to decide whether one wanted to
stay in one's profession to improve things--or at least to
prevent the worst--or stay clean and be shut off from power
and influence. In the west, one did not generally confront
these choices, for better or for worse. Western society asks far
less of people's consciences than the east did. For if we were
working hard at something in the east, it was not at making
cars or highways but at creating a culture of conscience. What
the westerners are now reading in their newspapers--the lack
of conscience of the East German secret police and of many of
those who were in power--is proof of how clear the dilemma was
for each of us. We could go along and profit from the system,
with the eventual consequence of being despised by the people
and not being able to sleep nights. Or we could drop out.
</p>
<p> By the 1980s, the role of the dropouts had become
paradoxical: They had had many years to come together as a
social force under the protection of the church, and the force
that they created was one that the secret police could not
master. The dropouts had nothing to win or lose, because their
minimal existence could not be threatened. Anyone who could
come up with the ridiculously low rents would not lose his
housing; the cheap food also was not a problem. So people did
not need to exert their every effort--as they do in the west--just to guarantee their existence (the fact that this
existence was on a different level is well known).
</p>
<p> Those who "thought differently" led lives that were reduced
to the basic necessities, and they therefore looked for chances
to expand in other spheres. Relationships with their children
were important (and children were comparatively "inexpensive" in
East Germany). Conversation, friends, playing music, creating
theater, learning crafts, initiatives of every sort to fill
lives--these were the things that people in the waiting room
called east Germany had plenty of time for, and they cost
nothing. People invented their own lives and, perhaps, felt
within these lives a political responsibility for the entire
nation, a responsibility that the gray men who were in power
were less and less capable of assuming.
</p>
<p> Under this pressure and amid this maneuvering room, people
learned virtues that were surely worth preserving: modesty,
courage, solidarity, active responsibility for the whole,
imagination and serenity in political disputes, patience,
tenacity. In the west, these virtues seem not to count.
Yesterday's heroic East Germans are today's unemployed and
hard-to-retrain employees. They are living in poor housing that
they may well lose. They were the vanguard but now find
themselves on the bottom rung of a world that they hoped they
had left far behind.
</p>
</body>
</article>
</text>