Today, as every Monday morning, I had class with a group of German pensioners. This morning, I asked them what they were up to on this day twenty years ago, the day the Berlin Wall fell.
On November 9th, 1989, the four of them, all resident in the East, simply didn't believe the stories that the Wall had opened, even after seeing the press conference by Günter Schabowski that triggered the thousands of East Germans descending on the Wall, asking to be let through.
Two even went to work as normal the next day and really only began to believe the stories due to the fact that most of their colleagues simply hadn't shown up for work. One of the others, a dedicated traveller who has visited over one hundred different countries, went straight to the West's main airport, Tegel, to check it out, believing that it must be much better than the eastern airport. He was disappointed by how small it was, and noted that the West was just as dirty as the East. The fourth, a lady who worked as a graphic designer, went straight across to the West the next day to visit friends.
I found it surprising that none of them seem to have seen it as momentous an occasion as the rest of the world. After all, most of them had popped over to West Berlin at least once over the previous years on tourist visas. All of them had known West Berlin before the Wall had been erected, and felt that nothing had really changed in the twenty-eight years of isolation. All were comfortably employed with families and did not want for anything, aside from perhaps tropical fruits like bananas and pineapples. Since they were only available at Christmas, if at all, they were the biggest treat an East German child could imagine. Cuban oranges, however, were plentiful despite the fact that they were green and'tasted like straw'.
Only one, the graphic designer, ever thought of attempting to flee to the West. By the eighties, however, she was already in her fifties and didn't consider it to be worth the risk. In her younger years, she had got into trouble because of her 'big mouth', and initially was refused entry to university because of her criticism of the regime. When the Wall came down, she realised that graphic design in the West was far ahead that of the East - they used computers. She bought her first computer, a Macintosh, for a small fortune soon after.
The other three suffered initially after the Wall fell. Two of them lost their jobs and the third, the head of a railway station before die Wende, was soon relegated to selling tickets. Pragmatically, none of them minded very much, seeing how close they all were to retirement age anyway.
All four agreed that the major change brought about by the fall of the Wall is the amount of money that normal people these days have at their disposal. On a personal level, most felt that life was safer in the GDR - every neighborhood was constantly patrolled by a variety of police services and mugging and other crimes against the individual were practically unknown. None ever felt personally threatened by the regime, realising that it wasn't a bad system provided you were happy to say what the government wanted to hear. They even went as far as to suggest that it would have worked, if only someone in power had been willing to listen to their unvoiced criticisms.
Before the class, I had been worried that asking them questions about Germany's difficult past might dredge up bad memories. The horror stories are plentiful, but none of my four students had any of their own. They seemed to have been, and indeed still are, model GDR citizens, with no overt criticism crossing their lips over the ninety-minute conversation. Praise, interestingly, was in equally short supply. Born just before World War Two, their generation is one that learned to accept the status quo through being shunted from one flawed ideology to another. They left the revolution to their sons and daughters, who were all too aware of the injustice they had been born into.
In the end, however, all it took was one ill-informed spokesman to take down the Wall.
Here's to twenty years of a united Germany, for better or for worse.
