A SECOND HEART

by Jenny Erpenbeck, born in East Berlin in 1967

To set foot in a forbidden zone: who wouldn’t want to do that? This zone is filled with the aroma of coffee and laundry detergent, everything smells fresh and looks pretty and wholesome. The people in this zone are special people, the world has been their oyster for decades. They can buy whatever their hearts desire. What do these people look like? A friend tells me: “You can recognise a West German just from the casual way he swings the car door shut.”

The morning after the fall of the Wall, I’m sitting in a seminar. Our professor is shaken up. Instead of holding the seminar, he talks about his parents, who disowned him as a traitor when he became a communist. After the events of the previous night, will the flaws of the real existing socialism be another stain on his record?

With the opening of the Wall, the two peoples of the divided city plunge together. For a moment, there is curiosity on both sides. Fraternisation in bars. But a short time later comes the realisation, on both sides, that something strange is being swept in through the hole in the Wall. East Germans stand in line at the banks in the west to receive their 100DM of welcome money and storm the department stores like savages; West Germans promenade through the east and find that everything looks grey.

In December 1989 I write in my diary: “A second heart implanted, now you can’t breathe any more.”

Why don’t I shed tears of joy a few weeks later, when the border crossing around the corner from my apartment is opened? A woman from the other side asks me this question, then she jabs me with her elbow in the crowd.

Why do I rush as quickly as possible past the truck where a West Berlin paper store owner is standing on the tailgate, handing out free Christmas wrapping paper to us poor East Germans?

Why do I prefer to take the longer route to the university on days when I’m plagued by gloomy thoughts – a route that skirts the west? That only passes through the part of the city that I know so well?

Jenny Erpenbeck: ‘For just one moment longer, history holds its breath.’ Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian

But for just one moment longer, history holds its breath and is open on both sides. Could there be a society held together by solidarity, and not by business acumen? Could there be real freedom of opinion, not just the freedom to declare bankruptcy? Could there be something entirely new, something that has never been seen in this form before? For a few weeks, different social models are discussed. For a few weeks, it doesn’t occur to anyone that the opening of the Wall could have anything to do with the country next door, the Federal Republic.

And then this moment has passed. Then one chant gives way to another on the street outside: “We are the people” gradually becomes “We are one people.” Were our entire lives really nothing but a decades-long period of waiting that finally paid off in the end? My history no longer belongs to me, now it is told by my countrymen who want to be redeemed. Volkswagen, Levi’s, and Nutella beckon all of the lost sheep over to their side, but unfortunately those sheep have no idea what a tax return is, or a land register, or a private limited company. Suddenly there is talk of a monetary union. From then on, what used to be my life slips into the museum. Translated by Kurt Beals

THE GREEK LESSON

by Thomas Brussig, born in East Berlin in 1964

It was the summer of 1991 and I was on a walking holiday in Crete. I heard a commotion a short distance away: shouts and laughter. What was going on? Was it a party? A sports event? As I got closer, I realised the noise was coming from a small water park, one of those places with all kinds of slides. Some were the winding kind where you meandered down gently and slowly, others were steep and fast. What struck me about the place was that it wasn’t full of children, but of men and women in their 60s or even older. Like me, they were all East Germans. I soon had a sense of what the excitement was about: these people were well over 30 when the Wall went up, which meant they had never been to a water park like this. These slides only existed after 1961, and only in the west.

But now the Wall was down. And when a coach full of East German tourists stopped at the restaurant opposite the small amusement park, they didn’t file in for dinner, but thronged to the much more appealing water park across the road, where they promptly made up for what they had missed, what had been denied them for decades. One of them must have decided to have a go, triggering a chain reaction. Now everyone was whizzing down slides, and of course these revellers were all much heavier than the children for whom the slides were designed. Alarmingly, the segments were starting to buckle and creak, as the bulky bodies hurtled around the bends. The centrifugal force created was so great that the entire structure shook. And when one of these large bodies splashed into the water – and they were all on the large side – the bystanders would whoop and cheer.

West Berliners welcome East Germans at Invalidenstrasse. Photograph: Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters

The Greek lifeguards stood by chuckling. They sensed that this strange sight was something to do with the fall of the Wall, and after watching for a while I felt as if I was seeing the Wall come down again – as a spectator this time. It was the joy and the release, the surprise of it all, and the thrill of it being a shared experience. Those pensioners tumbling down water slides in hysterics were people who had survived the bombs of the war and the torment of the Hitler Youth, who had starved throughout the postwar years and led a life of austerity, boredom and deprivation in the GDR. In short, they had had little to laugh about. All of that was over, and even if this was a cheap pleasure, it was pleasure all the same. For the Greek lifeguards, it was also relief that another danger had passed. In autumn 1989, many, myself included, feared that a united Germany would return to its former belligerence, that it would pick up where it had been stopped in its tracks. The fact that these Germans were donning bathing suits and not army uniforms was as remarkable as it was reassuring. Translated by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp

BROWN SCHNAPPS

by Kathrin Schmidt, born in Gotha in 1958

It’s autumn, 1989. I’m half my current age and I have four children. The youngest is one and a half. I’ve been working for about two years as a psychologist in the youth health service in Marzahn, a new district in East Berlin, helping young people come to terms with themselves and find a place in society. An impossible task; a tug of war.

The GDR is constrained by its borders. We’re closely monitored on the western side, which lets through only the occasional artist (and those on “reconnaissance”); for the rest of the population it remains closed. But since Hungary opened the iron curtain on the night of 10 September, tens of thousands of GDR citizens have poured through to another life. That’s not on the cards for us. We want to stay and seize power, to dismantle the male-dominated gerontocracy and restructure the GDR from within. To do things our way – that’s what we like to think. But do we even know what that way is?

I belong to an alliance called the United Left, a group committed to revitalising socialism and building a free, democratic GDR. But no one is thinking about reunification. Not in the other political groups, either, whether it’s New Forum or Democracy Now. The confrontation of east and west blocs seems too deep rooted. But we’re growing, filling our lungs with air. What seems possible is changing day by day into something bigger, something we never expected. Are we going mad?

Train entering the station at Alexanderplatz. Photograph: Alamy

We live on the outskirts in Berlin-Hellersdorf. We’re lucky to have the U-Bahn trains connecting us to the centre where it’s all happening. Even so, it’s nearly 45 minutes to Alexanderplatz. In October, after the detentions and trouble on the GDR’s national day, my husband and I decide to stop leaving the children with the neighbours when we go to our political meetings. We need to go one at a time; one of us should be at home in case something happens. On 9 November, I’m the one in the apartment putting the children to bed.

We’re watching a lot of TV these days; we never used to. But what I see today doesn’t just take my breath away, it leaves me reeling: the Wall is open! I can’t believe it. I can’t even look, so I go and fetch a bottle of brown schnapps from the cellar; it’s been sitting there since it was given to us as a present. I’ve never drunk schnapps before. And I never will again. But on 9 November 1989 I downed almost an entire bottle.

The next morning I have trouble getting to work on time. It turns out it doesn’t matter, because there aren’t any patients anyway. Instead, as we look out on to the street, we see long queues at the police registration office. They’re queueing for visas for a future very different to the one that’s been touted to them all this time.

¶¶¶

Today, it’s a relief to be released from the belljar of that fake socialist utopia. Reality had caught up with us, and even if that reality was almighty capitalism, we have been brought much closer together than we ever were under the socialist ideology. That the climate emergency was the far bigger threat could not have been further from our minds back then. And yet, it was already critical on both sides of the Wall. Translated by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp

9 NOVEMBER 1989

by David Wagner, born in Andernach in 1971

My English stepmother – a foreigner – was outraged in the summer of 1989 when she saw East Germans proudly waving their new passports outside the West German embassies in Prague and Budapest. For 25 years she had had to renew her residence permit over and over again, and these people were being granted a West German passport just like that? And why couldn’t all the children born in Germany to non-German nationals also get German passports? Didn’t the kids in my class with non-German parents have much more in common with me, with us, and with West Germany, than that lot over the border in the east?

David Wagner: ‘Going out on a week night was a way of showing that we were beyond caring about school.’ Photograph: Jean-Marc Zaorski/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

9 November 1989 was a Thursday, and at the nightclub my brother and I went to, every Thursday was indie night. We always went there on Thursdays because Fridays were hippy music and Saturdays were overcrowded and besides, as 18-year-olds in our final year, going out on a week night was a way of showing that we were beyond caring about school.

But I do remember that we had a Latin exam the following day and that the lesson, like the entire school day, was dominated by long and heated discussions about what was happening in this mysterious place called the GDR.

My memory of the 9th and 10th of November is mainly that of an extraordinary televisual experience, that vividness that – for the first time – made me feel like something real was happening. But it’s also the memory of Slime, the Smiths, the Fall, Joy Division and Catullus’s Carmina – the subject of that drowsy Latin exam, one of the last I had to sit. Translated by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp

THE TRICK IS TO WAIT

by Sabine Rennefanz, born in Beeskow in 1974

Once, at the fairground, I was in a hall of mirrors. I went in, boldly at first, then cautiously. The people who met me in the mirrors were warped like monsters, with huge heads and short, thin legs. You could have frightened small children with them. I moved along and stood on my head. It was as if gravity had been inverted. The next mirror swallowed my arms, legs and torso. My head floated in the void, like a ghost in a fairytale, an Aladdin without magic powers.

I remember that I had trouble finding my way back into the open.

When I think back on the early days after the Wall fell, I am reminded of that place: I lost my sense of direction. I put one foot in front of the other, cautiously, and laughed too loudly when I walked into a mirrored wall. Looking back, it strikes me that I could see how lost I was, how uncertainly I walked about.

In November 1989 I was 15 years old and I attended a boarding school in Eisenhüttenstadt, a socialist model town on the Polish border. When the Wall fell, it came as a complete surprise to me. We went to West Berlin on 12 November. Later I wrote in my diary: “On the streets the Trabbis from the east seem so small compared to the huge Mercedes. I feel like a small Trabbi.”

Sabine Rennefanz: ‘Thirty years later, it’s still hard to say what really happened.’

In the months afterwards, I watched the teachers, how they slunk slowly along the hallways. The civics teacher had slipped into a new western costume: fancy shirts, colourful pants, large wrist watch. It was as if he was the star of a sci-fi movie in which pills had been handed out that allowed you to forget the past.

I watched him as he wrote new catchphrases by the late West German business minister Ludwig Erhard, father of the so-called Wirtschaftswunder [the “miracle” of West Germany’s rapid economic recovery after the second world war], on the blackboard: “Social welfare benefits in the German Democratic Republic were far too generous given the country’s productivity.” “Unemployment is completely normal.”

Herr Weinlein was now the new social studies teacher. He repeated the new catchphrases with the same conviction as the old ones. “Peace and socialism” became “democracy and tolerance”. Both sounded hollow and lifeless. I found my old notes: in March 1989, I had defended the Wall as an antifascist barricade. One year later, building the Wall was an act of inhumanity. I couldn’t keep up with the pace.

It disgusted me how quickly Weinlein slipped from one system into the next. But I was curiously fascinated, too. I stood in front of the warped images and couldn’t look away.

The social studies teacher disappeared in the spring of 1990. One day he was there; the next, he was gone. Thirty years later, it’s still hard to say what really happened. The following explanation makes the most sense to me: Herr Weinlein had adopted the new views too quickly. In Eisenhüttenstadt in the spring of 1990, assimilating too quickly was the worst crime you could commit. We called those people turncoats. At the time, it was enough to know what you didn’t want to be: a turncoat; a Stasi captain; unemployed.

On 3 October 1990, the Day of German Unity, I wrote in my diary: “My dear countrymen, says [Helmut] Kohl. He isn’t my dear countryman!! My country doesn’t exist any more. And I can’t do anything against it. I know that we didn’t have real socialism, but we could have at least tried. But now we’re just the stupid Ossis! This day means nothing to me!”

I don’t understand why I was so furious. Not everyone was furious, but many were disappointed. For a while, all the bearded civil rights activists had dreams of building up a new GDR. But they were just beautiful fantasies.