The Old Autobahn to Nowhere

Never has the aphorism “The road to hell is paved with good intentions” rang truer than in the forty year tenure of the German “Democratic” Republic. Since the falling of the wall, there has evolved a new fondness of recollection for the dissolved republic called Ostalgie, or nostalgia for the East German Ossi’s. This psychological wave was accelerated by films like Sonnenallee and Good-bye Lenin.

But the real animus behind Ostalgie is the frustrations of living in the new six of a United Germany’s sixteen states. High unemployment, defective infrastructure, outmigration trumps nostalgia in the real world. So the opening of a DDR Museum this summer in Berlin is full of the significance of transition. Across the street they are finally tearing down the Palace of the Republic which Erich Honecker built on the grounds of a razed Royal Palace. Palace fans fought long and hard to “save” it. They loved their memories there—dancing and dining under the fancy lights of what the cynical jibed was Honecker’s “Lamp Store”.

The address of the new museum is Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse 1 is a little white lie, to honor the head of the Communist Party who was murdered along with Rosa Luxembourg in the turmoil that followed the end of World War I. You have to actually turn off that main street and descend to a building along the southern bank of the River Spree. The real main street soon becomes Unter den Linden where the German Historical Museum has just opened a permanent exhibition on 2000 years of German history. The intellectual contrast between the two is shocking.One peddles interesting lore about life in the GDR; the other really assesses the meanings of German history in a serious way.

The DDR show begins with a description of how young people were taught how to think as Socialists. Young Pioneers for the lower grades. At fourteen you had the privilege of joining Freie Deutsche Jugend. (If you didn’t join, or you displayed contrarian tendencies in high school, forget about higher education or any specialties like nursing.) Founded in 1946, by 1985 about 80% of youth between 14 and 25 belonged to Free German Youth. TV and comic books used cartoon figures like Wattfriss (literally energy saver) to cultivate conservation habits and the Junkman to hype recycling.

The DDR made an honest effort to give workers free or reduced cost vacations, especially on the Baltic coast, the Harz mountains, or the woods of Thuringia—of if they were really lucky, subsidized visits to Communist countries like Poland and Hungary. My Ossi wife’s father was a pediatrician and he was expected to devote so many hours each summer to taking care of children on Baltic coast vacations. In 1982 the Free German Trade Union Federation owned 695 holiday homes, hotel allocations, and the cruise ship Arkona. They accounted for 1.7 million vacation trips that year, with families given preference.

In 1973 the GDR went international, with its Tenth World Festival displaying a new openness to the rest of the Socialist and non-Socialist world. But as the SED party tried to become more cosmopolitan, the people began to wonder why was more openness only a summer thing. The most long lived rock group, the Puhdys were first allowed to perform in the Federal Republic of Germany, then in the USA. I was astonished in listening for the first time to the notorious hit “Special Train to Pankow” to discover that it was GDR lyrics to “Chattanooga Choo Choo”!

One touching display talked about a young playwright named Edgar Wibeau who discovered in a discarded paperback copy of Goethe’s “The Sorrows of theYoung Werther”being used as toilet paper the story of a young idealist who committed suicide when he lost his true love. Wibeau wrote a controversial play about a worker undergoing a similar experience—to a bevy of disconcerted censors. Outside a viewing room where we watched the TV newsmagazine AUGEN ZEUGE (Eyewitness) you are informed that there were 39 newspapers, 2 TV stations and 4 radio networks but only one opinion. Every Wednesday, all the editors met to be given the party line! The theme of the newsreel was the Plattenbau apartments (prefab high rises) that were constructed beginning in the 1970’s to house the workers. The saddest thing was that during the entire half hour I didn’t see one person, young or old, smile.

But underneath the placid surface of total compliance, new energies were converging. The Berlin Zionist Community had developed a secret printing operation, with protecting the environment their cover theme. In November 1987 the STASI secret police stormed the secret basement, confiscated all the presses and jailed all the workers there. But the SED had gone too far: sympathizers light candles and stood in front of churches. The government finally gave in, and released the prisoners.

One of the most visited displays was a typical Plattenbau kitchen. Strangely, there is a sign warning visitors against taking away kitchen souvenirs because a video camera was watching them!

One of the saddest displays was about working women. They were coddled generously, with free day care, time off for birthing babies, and more and more access to good jobs and profession. But sadly, the patriarchal German fathers trumped these initiatives: the “freed” women found that they still had their old full time job at home, keeping house. Once again, good intentions merely led to more complicated frustrations. Incidentally, these museums seem to be mushrooming across the former GDR. There are no fewer than 30 small museums in towns along the border between the GDR and the FRC telling what it was like having their small towns split in two. And Trabbie old car meetings are also joining the Ostalgie Boom.