Impressions of a foreign country linger as single, disconnected scenes, like tourist snapshots, and that is how I remember my brief excursion into East Germany late last summer. The nation itself hung in limbo: The week I roamed the countryside, its government voted away its own sovereignty by agreeing on merger with West Germany. I wanted to see the land before it disappeared, or was “franchised” by the affluent West.
You needn’t drive far—100 yards across the former border will do—to note glaring differences. West Germany looks as uniformly neat and prosperous as any society on earth. East Germany is drab, run-down, colorless. The farms are bigger (communal), but far less productive. Soot-colored buildings sag, in dire need of repair. Railroads are slow: After World War II, Soviet conquerors stole half the railroad tracks so that now a train must pull onto a siding to get around each oncoming train.
Strange, I think, how we romanticize societies less developed than our own. Right-wing regimes in Spain and Portugal forestalled development for decades, and when they opened up, Western tourists flocked in to see pristine coastal villages and charming cities unspoiled by modern skylines. After a few years of freedom they began looking like those in France and Italy. Now the tourists are invading East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary for a last look before those nations, too, sprout McDonald’s and video rental shops. We yearn for what we’ve lost; they yearn for what they’ve never had.
West Germans love to gossip about their Eastern cousins, who wear bumpkinish clothes, putter about in ridiculous Trabants (“plastic cars that rats eat,” said one friend), and gawk at gaudy window displays. Stories abound of those who eagerly hired Easterners, only to find they didn’t understand the work ethic: They showed up late, took no pride in their work, and could not master basic principles of pleasing the customer. The stories are eerily reminiscent of what I used to hear in the American South, when white employers first began hiring blacks.
Walking through an East German village freshly stocked with coffee grinders, lingerie, and CD players, I catch a glimpse of materialism in its precynical stages. Window shopping has become a serious art form. These people actually stop and listen to a vacuum-cleaner salesman hawking his wares on a sidewalk. They study his brochures like gospel tracts.
Astonishingly, they express the same studious interest in actual gospel tracts. In Bonn, say, a tract distributor braces himself for scorn and verbal assaults. But near East Berlin, I saw Germans eagerly going up to ask street evangelists for their literature. It was a curious scene: four overweight guitar pickers stood in a town square and sang—in English!—“There is power in the blood.” And still people took their tracts.
My guide, a long-time friend and a leader in West German church renewal, tells me, though, that the church in the East has never been more confused and disoriented. The bright light that shone during the peaceful revolution a year ago has dimmed. Many people left the church after it had served its political usefulness; others defected in protest over a pastor’s decision to shelter the Communist leader Erich Honecker.
For that matter, says my guide, all of East Germany seems confused and disoriented. The underlying myth or “story” of an entire society has been rejected. Remnants of the old story remain. Tourist brochures at the palace in Potsdam, unedited since propaganda days, lecture sternly against the filthy capitalists who enjoyed such luxury at the expense of the poor. Now everyone is courting the filthy capitalists, voting for them, inviting them in to straighten out their economy.
My guide offers a sad comment: “It pains me that all we have to send them is a truckload of deutsche marks. No one here is talking about qualities of a better humanity, as Václav Havel does in Czechoslovakia. The church, too, treats the merger like a business takeover. How do we sort out our differences in pension plans, publishing policies, and seminary requirements?”
A moment of grace, swallowed up by law.
Portions of the Wall that once divided Germany remain. In rural areas, it snakes across the landscape, its watchtowers sticking the sky like splinters. It has to be the ugliest construction in history, with none of the elegance of Hadrian’s Wall in England, or the Great Wall in China. Concrete bunkers slotted for machine guns, searchlights mounted on steel scaffolds, a barren “no man’s land” once patrolled by attack dogs, concrete posts laced with miles of barbed wire—this wall, bizarrely, was built to keep people inside, not out, a prison wall 20 yards wide and several hundred miles long.
And yet in Berlin the Wall is mostly gone. We had to ask four people before finding a section of it tucked away between rows of buildings. The Germans, anxious to heal disfigurement, have hacked the Wall apart, sold it as souvenirs, and recovered the ground with bicycle paths, walkways, and outdoor sculpture gardens. Checkpoint Charlie stands like a frontier ghost town, manned by two lonely guards with nothing to check.
The Museum of the Wall still does a thriving business, displaying the homemade planes, balloons, catapults, and submarines used by brave escapees. But it seems oddly anachronistic without the looming presence of the Wall. Perhaps future generations of Germans will rebuild sections of the Wall as a darkling shrine—just as the Allies rebuilt portions of bulldozed Dachau.
At the end of 1989, Germanies East and West were filled with joy and hope. At the end of 1990, realism has settled in to temper those emotions. A generation may pass before the two societies feel comfortably assimilated.
The broader world is also adjusting to the changes being worked out in miniature in Germany. A year ago, as communist regimes fell almost weekly, some historians were crowing about “the end of history,” a time when liberal democracies would triumph and a new, peaceful world order would emerge.
Nations may change, history changes, politics change, but human nature does not change. I was reminded of that fact, too, while visiting East Germany: It was the week Iraq invaded Kuwait. When some walls fall, others spring up to take their place.
