At the height of the Cold War in 1982 Martin and I left northern California to live in West Berlin's Kreuzberg Kiez, a bohemian district of squatters, left-wing radicals, Turkish guest workers, and others on low incomes. Underneath this multicultural overlay the core of resentful burghers who had remained behind after the Wall went up tried to preserve the stodgy stablity of the old working-class district. Waiting for the bus at the Heinrichplatz or descending from the elevated platform at the Kottbusser Tor, they muttered epithets at the chain-bedecked "No future/no hope" punks accosting them for beer money.
The Kreuzberg Kiez was chaotic and unpredictable, ready to explode at a moment's notice. Why did we leave our settled life at Stanford University to live in a rundown ghetto that was a disgrace to the German culture? Because after a two-decade career as a pastor and professor in North and South America, Martin had become profoundly homesick for his native Germany. He particularly missed the wry wit and scrappy culture of Berlin, a city that held wonderful childhood memories for him. He had lived there until he was eleven, when his father died and the family moved back to his mother’s home town of Dresden.
But that was many years ago. Now Berlin was divided and encircled, its western zones a struggling oasis inside a Communist desert called the German Democratic Republic. Hardly a place to feel at home, I thought with mixed emotions. I didn't want to leave, but if he had to go ....
The move might not be permanent. Martin had a sabbatical call for nine months to a parish which could not fill its second-pastor vacancy because no candidate would live there. The Thomas Church, a nineteenth-century brick monolith facing a grassy square called the Mariannenplatz, backed up against the Berlin Wall in a weedy corner of the Kiez. Candidates had looked out of the third-floor parsonage windows into the Wall death strip, stared at the mohawked punks roaming the neighborhood with unleashed dogs, and beat a hasty retreat to boring but safe Westphalia. Although Martin after twenty years of absence was no longer part of the German church roster, he was willing to take the call and an exception had been made for him. What would happen after the sabbatical was not clear.
Because of his personal history, my husband had a sympathetic reaction to the Kreuzberg Kiez. He had been a refugee -- his family had fled the burning streets of Dresden in February 1945 and lost everything -- so he knew what it was to be on the fringe of society, devoid of all normal security. He preferred to call that place the cutting edge. Nor did he fear the voices of protest. He hated his country’s division and understood the frustration of those who searched in radical new directions.
The alternatives had arrived after the Wall went up in 1961. Many Berliners had fled to West Germany, convinced the Russians were coming. With blocks of apartment buildings standing virtually empty, housing was abundant and cheap. The Turkish guest workers recruited to replace the lost East Berlin work force settled their extended families in Kreuzberg for the same reason. Martin looked forward to working in the colorful district where, as he told me, he could also keep an eye on the Cold War.
But one thing was puzzling. I understood that because of some long-buried need my husband now had to reclaim his roots; but I did not understand why he suddenly embraced Heimat, a nostalgic idea best translated as Home with a capital H. The word was full of warm fuzzies for most people who grew up in Nazi Germany, especially those from the lost eastern provinces which were now part of Poland, but Martin had always felt the term was loaded with hypocrisy.
On the night of February 13 to 14, 1945, he had fled for his life with his mother and younger sister through the burning streets of Dresden. After crowding onto a train heading west, they eventually found refuge on a Lower Saxony farm where Martin’s mother worked in the kitchen. In the first years after the war, Martin made the bitter discovery that the traditional markers of blood and soil touted by Hitler’s propaganda machine were a fake; they did not bind the Germanic peoples in mystic solidarity. The homeless teenage refugee from Saxony encountered among his western compatriots not comradeship but rejection and alienation. The Nazis had applied a mosaic veneer of national myths over the culture to further their purposes, and these myths turned out to be hollow shells. When we left Germany in 1959 six months after our marriage, my husband turned his back on his native land with no apparent regrets.
* * * * *
We met in the fall of 1954 as passengers on the Gripsholm, a prewar boat that ferried exchange scholars and others across the Atlantic in the days before cheap air fares. I was a Fulbright student headed for the music conservatory in Stuttgart; Martin was returning home to continue his theological studies in Goettingen after an exchange year at an Ohio seminary. The chemistry between us was immediate. Four years would pass, however, until we sorted out our lives and acted upon our feelings.
We were married in August 1958 at Ramstein Air Base where Martin, now ordained, worked as a Labor Service chaplain. The following year we left Germany for a small church in West Virginia. As new opportunities arose, we took them. After Martin completed Ph.D. studies in Connecticut -- by now we had two children, Sara and Josh -- we entered the five-month Spanish language and culture program at Ivan Illich’s CIDOC institute in Cuernavaca, Mexico, after which we were sent by our mission board to a five-year seminary professorship in Argentina. After a two-year return to West Virginia we finally settled down in a Palo Alto town-gown parish serving the Lutherans of the Stanford campus community.
Silicon Valley -- a new cybergeographical concept at that time -- was barely a decade old. The Bay Area, people told us in the days before technology revolutionized northern California, was a place people did not leave. We, too, would have stayed indefinitely if Martin’s emotions had not caught up with him.
* * * * *
He arrived alone in West Berlin for his sabbatical at the Thomas Church on January 1, 1982. (I could not leave my Stanford Music Library job until June; except for a short Easter week visit, I would not see him for six months.) But Martin described his activities in long, detailed letters. Finding no food in the apartment of his new colleague Renate Schnurr -- she had collapsed with a nervous breakdown shortly before Christmas -- he went out for pizza that first evening. Then he located the house of the Mariannenstrasse 48 squatters and after some difficulty gained entry and was warmly welcomed. But his attempt to consult with Renate at the psychiatric clinic the following day ended in failure. Inexplicably, after having begged him to come she now refused to talk with him.
Anxious about being thrown into the administration of the parish from the start, he set up a conference with the office staff and met the rest of the twenty-four people on the parish payroll. In addition to the church office he supervised the employees of the day care center, a visiting nurse, the organist-music director, and the workers at the congregation-owned cemetery adjoining Tempelhof Airport.
He noticed a group of teenaged boys hanging around the church steps with nothing to do; the youth director had quit some months earlier. He got their help in finding castoff furniture for his bare apartment and soon had all the essentials in place. When a day care worker angered parents by teaching his class of three-year-olds protest songs instead of nursery rhymes, Martin managed to move him into the vacant youth director’s job.
He wrote glowing reports about waking up refreshed and ready to go, about the interesting people he met on his walks around the neighborhood, about the Turkish markets full of fresh vegetables for the stews I taught him to make before he left California. All signs of depression seemed to have disappeared. He mentioned occasional street demonstrations but didn't elaborate except to say that the police had used tear gas.
By the time I arrived the week before Easter, it was clear from talks with Renate’s doctors that because of her slow progress she would not be able to work for many months. If we left in September as planned, the parish would not have a viable pastor. After searching conversations and a few quiet tears, I agreed that if Martin were called as pastor to the Thomas Church, he would accept. But Renate would have to resign; he needed a working colleague. The synod agreed, promising her a new post when she recovered. Thus it was that in 1982 we came to live in West Berlin. .
* * * * *
“That’s the Kiez you’re heading into,” the taxi driver warned as he drove us toward the Oranienplatz. “You know -- the place where the action is. You want to stay out of there.” It was too late; we had moved in.
His reaction was typical. West Berliners avoided our neck of the woods. But sheer curiosity brought Wessis (West Germans) to the Kiez. Every weekend tour busses belched clouds of diesel fumes into the narrow Oranienstrasse, as their wide-eyed occupants stared from the safety of their seats at the purple-haired punks and swarthy Turks.
The Turks were blamed for the un-German atmosphere of Kreuzberg, but it was West Germany’s own youth that set the tone in our neighborhood. For the punks in particular, disorder was a necessity. Paper, transistor batteries, dog waste and other debris were dropped in the middle of the sidewalk as an existential statement.
Yet Kreuzberg had a special character that softened the current cultural chaos. When the district was developed in the middle of the nineteenth century, property taxes were based upon street frontage. The land parcels were narrow but very deep, accommodating as many as five successive courtyards, each surrounded by several floors of apartments.
Tenants operated foundries, tanneries and other small shops in the back courtyards while their wives did piecework for textile factories in the cold-water flats upstairs. LIfe was hard. Families shared toilets on the landing and bathed in kitchen tubs. They hauled charcoal briquets from the cellar for heating and cooking.
The shared poverty meant that people looked out for each other. They knew each other’s business. When the need arose, they helped out. This neighborly tradition survived into the postwar period because Kreuzberg 36, the district that became the Kiez, was spared major destruction in 1945. Its sturdy houses and cooperative lifestyle survived, attracting a new generation of Germans raised in immaculate but impersonal towns and hungry for meaningful human interaction.
Students, toolmakers, artists and intellectuals lived side by side with elderly tenants in need of help carrying coals or groceries up five flights of stairs. The old spirit of neighborly concern flourished and initiatives were formed to deal with common problems. Thus when the Berlin Senate announced plans to cut a freeway through the area, demolishing blocks of old buildings in the process, the outraged residents sprang into action.
Using a squatter model pioneered in Holland, groups of protesters moved under cover of night into houses targeted for demolition and after living under primitive conditions for six weeks unfurled banners declaring: “Wir sind besetzt!” (We are occupied!) According to German law, they could not be evicted without due process. But the Interior Minister used every means at his disposal to get them out, often citing code violations or the dissemination of subversive material.
Yet in spite of intimidation, the squatter movement grew and spread. When Martin arrived there were twenty-seven occupied houses in the Thomas Church parish area alone, most of them dedicated to the preservation of a disappearing lifestyle.
* * * * *
After moving permanently to Kreuzberg in the fall of 1982, we immersed ourselves in two challenges: reviving a demoralized congregation, and weaving our California-honed skills of conciliation and compromise into the often dogmatic intellectual fabric of the Kiez. Martin gained the trust of the alternative community by sponsoring street fairs and other events organized by the squatters. He underwrote utility contracts for several occupied houses at some risk to our bank account. "Better that they pay for electricity and water than tap into the neighbor's lines," he told the dubious official who warned we would be liable for unpaid squatter bills.
On a Sunday morning in June 1983 after a violent street demonstration one of our worst squatter houses, the BesetzaEck on the Heinrichplatz, was raided by the police and the occupants evicted. Fifty bedraggled punks sat with their dogs and pet rats on the lawn in front of the church. Homeless and hungry -- grocery stores were closed for the weekend -- they begged Martin for help. They slept for two nights in the parish hall and cooked soup in the day care center while Martin worked with Kreuzberg’s deputy mayor to set up a tent city. For ten weeks the punks lived between the church wall and the Berlin Wall while negotiations took place with Mayor von Weizsacker and members of the Senate on the squatters’ behalf.
When the media got wind of the unorthodox enclave, reporters from all over Europe descended on the Mariannenplatz. Encouraged by the celebrity, the newly confident punks arranged a festival called Rock Against Eviction and an artist among them exhibited her pastel portraits of tentmates at the Kreuzberg Art Center in an exhibition she called SCUM.
By the end of the summer an agreement was reached: a nonprofit umbrella corporation called STATTBAU would administer the renovations and the squatter houses were legalized. No more old Kreuzberg houses would be razed to make way for flimsy apartment buildings. The punks went home, Kiez evictions ceased, and the streets became relatively quiet.
* * * * *
Neither Martin’s older brother Dieter nor his younger sister Ruth shared his enthusiasm for living on the cutting edge of the Cold War. Dieter had spent five years in a Russian POW camp, an experience he rarely talked about, and now he lived in Hannover. He had no desire to see our barricaded city. He came to visit once as a favor to Martin, flying in just long enough to glance out the window, eat a bite of lunch, and return home.
Ruth stayed for two days, but she was on edge the whole time. “How can you stand looking at that abomination, day after day?” she shuddered. “It would make me sick.”
“You’d get used to it,” Martin reassured her. “Besides, life is quite peaceful back here in the boonies.”
That it was. For three years the only activity we saw in no-man’s-land happened when an occasional cleanup crew came through. Every so often a swath of soldiers appeared in the distance. They crisscrossed the strip picking up bottles, tires, mattresses and rusty car parts which they tossed into army trucks. There was a lot to haul away because people on our side used the corridor as a convenient dump.
Sentry duty must have been the most boring detail imagineable. The guards standing in the corridor saw only the huge round backside of the Thomas Church and the light reflecting from windows from our side. But there they stood, day after day, rifles slung carelessly across their backs.
Sometimes they relieved themselves against the whitewashed cement, or slumped down in front of it for a while. One day two sentries found a stray soccer ball in the strip and after some tentative skirmishing began to kick it against their side of the wall. Thuds reverberated for a few minutes until a window on the other side flew up and an angry face appeared. “Stop that damned pounding!” a woman yelled. The startled guards kicked the ball away and stood at attention. They probably knew that only officers and the party faithful lived in those border houses.
Allied presence in West Berlin was generally low key except near the military bases. Parts of Dahlem were completely dominated by the American presence, and in the British zone Germans complained bitterly about target practice in the Gatow fields. Sometimes when we walked along the fashionable Kurfuerstendamm, we came upon GI’s crouched in full battle regalia against a building. When I greeted members of the green team in English, the men looked away and didn’t answer. They probably felt silly playing war games among strolling pedestrians. But it was a comfort to know they were there in case the Soviets decided to test Western resolve again.
Martin took every chance he got to chip away at the political division of his country. In October 1982 when we were in Palo Alto packing to move, he had dropped in on a campus talk about the German Democratic Republic and afterwards exchanged cards with the Communist lecturer. We visited Dr. Borris often in his East Berlin office and attended a holiday concert of Christmas carols and hymns with him and his wife in East Berlin. Our host explained the performance of religious music by calling it part of the German “Volksgut” (folk tradition).
Shortly before our first New Year’s Eve, Martin went to East Berlin and visited the house directly across the Wall. He wanted to meet the young family we sometimes saw on the opposite balcony. He rang the doorbell and introduced himself to the man who opened as his neighbor from across the Wall. "We see each other all the time from afar," Martin explained to the nonplussed East Berliner. "It's only natural that I come by and wish you a Happy Silvester." The man had nervously returned the greeting and shut the door.
On New Year’s Eve at midnight we went onto the balcony overlooking the death strip and frantically waved sparklers at the people across the Wall. Fireworks arced through the night sky from east to west and west to east across the divide. Ignoring the border guards gesturing at them to go inside, the East Berliners waved and yelled greetings to us and our neighbors. Then, sparklers spent and voices hoarse, we all went inside.
* * * * *
The transit autobahns were lifelines that connected West Berlin to West Germany and allowed the surrounded city to survive. The Soviets had tried several times to cut the cord, most notably in 1948; the western Allies had responded with the Berlin Air Lift. In addition to truck traffic bringing in supplies and transporting manufactured goods out from West Berlin’s factories, the transits provided a chance for West Berliners with cars to leave the stress of the city behind for a while. Martin and I used this to advantage; we drove the Berlin-Helmstedt stretch frequently in our second-hand Audi to visit Martin’s brother in Hannover.
Running the gauntlet of concrete walls, barbed wire and armed guards to enter a control point was unpleasant enough, but I never relaxed on the transit roads because there were real perils on the two-hour trip. Traffic was monitored by police cars people called the “white mice” and you were strictly forbidden to leave the transit for any reason. You could not talk to East Germans who drove the same roads and used the same rest-stop facilities. If something happened to your car, you were not under any circumstances to flag someone down for help; you used the yellow roadside telephones. If your car had to be towed, you could be charged its full value; if you balked, your vehicle could be confiscated. Any violation of the rules could result in blacklisting at the very least, a great inconvenience. Blacklisted West Berliners could no longer enter East German territory and had to fly in and out of the city.
Of course these rules were violated. But one had to be careful. We found out how this worked when our transit car trouble brought help from other drivers. We had a very special experience with an East German specialist -- we would call him a mechanic -- who fixed our fuel pump at an Intertank station with Martin’s pen knife and a piece of string. When he nervously declined payment for an hour’s work, Martin walked to the nearby Intershop and bought him a carton of cigarettes and a bottle of whiskey, returning just after a police car cruised past.
With the help of an East German pastor we met at a retreat in Bavaria, we obtained the proper visas to enter the German Democratic Republic. The purpose of our visit was a study of GDR churches under Communism, but we had additional plans. Among other things we visited Goethe and Schiller’s graves in Weimar, drove to the Buchenwald concentration camp on the fortieth anniversary of its liberation, and toured the Wartburg Castle where Martin Luther was held incommunicado after being declared “vogelfrei” (without legal protection) and thus subject to assassination.
We went to the Erzgebirge ski village near the Czech border where Martin had spent his first four years and looked up the churchyard where his father had been buried in 1941. The grave was gone; another name was on the stone. German gravesites were not forever, I learned. Because of the Iron Curtain, Martin’s mother could not renew the lease and the site was given to someone else. What had happened to his father’s bones and the gravestone? Martin didn’t know; he had never thought about it. I left East Germany two days later with a feeling that there were still areas to explore in my husband’s search for his elusive Heimat.
* * * * *
When the tent city aroused unwelcome media attention in the summer of 1983, some of the older neighborhood residents complained to members of our church council that they resented the image being projected around the world because of “that pastor from California.” Many voiced outrage that they no longer could sit safely on the Mariannenplatz because the punks constantly wheeled shopping carts of beer bottles back and forth across the square. When an anonymous caller threatened to burn down the church if the punks didn’t leave, the tenters had set up a night patrol.
Martin's congregational council had initially supported the action. But half of them were newly elected recruits from the lively Bible discussion group he held after church and on Wednesday evenings. None had previous leadership experience, but the mostly young participants had gained in confidence over the months as they voiced their opinions in a supportive, respectful environment. Martin had high hopes that this council would take the Thomas Church into a more relevant direction, cooperating with the neighborhood’s civic leaders to combat the many social problems.
But as the murmur of dissatisfaction in the streets and local pubs grew, the fledgling council caved in under the pressure, led by a shady member whom Martin had not recruited and later discovered from confidential sources was an embezzler and part owner of an Oranienstrasse brothel. The unsuspecting council took away Martin’s authority over property and financial affairs, citing his busy schedule, and gave it to the swindler. Unable to tell what he knew, Martin quietly started a file on the man and monitored his every move.
* * * * *
One evening our daughter Sara called, distraught and sobbing. Sara was a first-year student in New York University's graduate acting program, a coveted spot for budding actors. She had left California for the Big Apple with some trepidation, but we had assured her we would be there for her, no matter what happened. She lived in a Brooklyn house with six other theatre majors, and although she spent twelve hours a day in classes and rehearsals the lack of privacy and nervous energy of the city were taking their toll. Sara had no more reserves; she pleaded with us to return. If we couldn’t come, she would quit the program and return to California.
The call hit Martin like a bullet between the eyes. He had promised to be there for his daughter, but he assumed that meant verbal and financial support. He was not prepared for the turmoil that Sara's cry for help aroused in him. Stunned by his own emotions, he lashed out at me. "You were supposed to be enough for me," he said, tears streaming down his face. "So why do I feel pulled apart? You were supposed to be enough!" Angrily he got his coat and went out.
Devastated, I collapsed on the sofa and tried to make sense of what was happening. Although we had not discussed the future -- it seemed premature -- Martin apparently thought we would spend the rest of our lives in the city where he felt at home. Sara's call had shattered this dream, and it was somehow my fault.
I thought about how his eyes lit up whenever we passed his childhood home near the Nollendorfplatz. He had lived there when his beloved father died. "Look," he always said, "That was our window." It had become a sort of mantra, and I always indulged him with a smile and a murmur. But now I suspected that more lay behind that wistful remark. His father had died when Martin was eleven, and when the boy fell into what the doctor called a deep melancholia his mother sent him to recuperate with friends in the country. Martin said that his family never spoke of the death. As life went on, his grief remained frozen in time until at midlife a thaw set in. When the unblocked sadness became too much to bear, he had to return to the place where his father was once alive. There he would find Heimat. In Berlin he could live in the past and the present at the same time.
I still loved Martin intensely. I had loved him from the moment he slid into a chair beside me at the dining table on the Gripsholm thirty years ago. I had fought the attraction then because I had dreamed of an operatic career; but when I found no peace without him, I gave up my dream. I handed him my life and never looked back.
Now his cutting words brought into focus a change in our relationship since we came to Berlin. Martin’s center of gravity seemed to have shifted. We had always been of two minds but one heart, disagreeing on some things but sharing everything. When one of us was hurting, we were on the same side.
But lately an invisible wall had arisen between us. As I struggled to cope with off-putting German behaviours and attitudes that left me feeling baffled and alienated, I looked for strength in Martin’s sympathy and understanding. But his patience now seemed to wear thin. When I came home with tales of unprovoked rudeness, he responded with dismissive remarks. “You take everything too personally,” he would say. “They don’t mean things the way they sound. Grow a thicker skin. Get used to it.”
I had finally stopped sharing my frustration with him. Yet I still deeply resented the “we versus them” mentality that caused people to either bark at me as a foreigner or ignore me completely. I didn’t appreciate hearing the same arrogant cliche over and over again: “Everyone knows Americans have no culture.” I would never feel at home in a society that so distanced itself from the traveler, the stranger and the foreign-born, a society that could never accept a non-native citizen as truly German.
What did this mean for our future together? I searched deep inside to find the truth, however painful. I had learned that I could avoid unpleasant encounters socially and in public best if I said little, voiced no opinions, and faded into the woodwork. Martin did most of the talking and did not seem to notice my silence. But even if I made compromises for the rest of my life, even if I decided to become part of German society, the Germans themselves would never accept me as an equal partner. No matter what the subject, the same distancing words would come: "Wir Deutsche" (We Germans ...) Even Martin had begun to use the phrase, -- common culture trumping common humanity. I could not follow him there.
I heard his key in the door and got up to face him. I was shaking. "I love you so much," I sobbed, "but I have to go back, Martin. Not just because of Sara but for myself, too. I'll find a job and a place for us to live and you can visit us ..."
"Eloise, stop. It's O.K." Martin said. " I'm going with you. I thought about everything, and Hermann Hesse was right. 'Nicht Heimat suchen, sondern Heimat werden, sollen wir.' Do not search for Home, but become Home. That's what I have to do." “- - Are you sure?"
"I'm sure," he said. "Whatever happens, we belong together."
After some inquiries, Martin received a call to a tiny German-language congregation on Manhattan's Upper East Side, where Sara could join us in the spacious brownstone parsonage. Martin left the Thomas Church in the capable hands of his vicar, who had grown up in East Germany and ignored the view of the death strip outside the living-room window. He briefed her about the embezzling administrator, and six months after we left she caught him altering the books.
As the plane circled in the gray sky, I looked down at the slash dividing the city and assumed it would be there for generations to come. Who knew that in three short years Hungary would cut a hole in the Iron Curtain and let fleeing East Germans through, that the Soviet Union would fall and take the mighty concrete fortress down with it? Before the decade was over the Wall would disappear, hacked into colored shards of history.
* * * * *
In January 1991 we stood uncertainly on the pavement in front of our former Berlin house and tried to remember where the Wall had been. “I think it was here,” I said, gingerly stepping onto what had been the death strip. “No, you’re too far out,” Martin called. “Over here.”
We were completely disoriented. For the first time we could see right across to the houses we knew only from a third-floor vantage point. We could walk over to them, if we mastered our hesitation to enter the former no-man’s-land. We looked at the vacant guard tower standing a hundred yards away. “Oh, my,” Martin said, “Oh, my.”
We walked to the Alexanderplatz and watched two groups of Yugoslavs running shell games for a fascinated crowd of murmuring onlookers. We strolled through the Brandenburg Gate and across the muddy fields which were the Potsdamer Platz. Standing on the mound of dirt which covered Hitler’s suicide bunker, I felt that World War II was finally over for me.
We spent two weeks revisiting old haunts, catching up on the former squatters and eating dinner with Dr. and Mrs. Borris in their East Berlin apartment. Our Communist acquaintance was now in the “Warteschleife,” the holding pattern of being unemployed while not actually fired. Many things still needed to be sorted out three months after reunification, including the confusion of two legal systems operative at the same time in and around Berlin. Stamps bought in Potsdam had to be used in eastern mailboxes, and eastern driving regulations were still in effect. But the eastern police were nearly invisible, a prudent posture for them.
After the first euphoria, dissatisfaction had set in on both sides. Eastern friends who lived within sight of the Thomas Church still talked about going “over there.” “But it’s just across the street,” Martin insisted. “Well,” they said hesitantly, “We don’t really feel safe. You know, the punks in Kreuzberg.”
But the alternative scene had essentially disappeared, dispersing as rents skyrocketed. Kreuzberg was now hot property. Located five minutes from the newly resurrected center of the city, the former bohemia had an upscale look. The Turkish shops selling sparkly shawls and exotic teas had been replaced by trendy little boutiques. The Red Harp, a former squatter watering hole on the Heinrichplatz, was now a well-appointed restaurant with oriental rugs and polished furniture.
We visited a Dresden family which had enjoyed the privileges of Party membership under the former regime -- university education, six weeks of free vacation at the North Sea, a spacious apartment in a suburban villa -- and heard how they were coming to terms with the new political reality. They were upgrading their job skills, learning English, submitting without complaint to their new western bosses. But they grieved over the loss of what they called the humanity of the former workplace. “Die Wende” -- the changeover, the turnaround -- was the victory of one side over another. There was no need to negotiate about human values.
A decade after our post-unification visit, letters in German papers are bemoaning the fact that former East German citizens did not get the reeducation in democracy that West Germans received after 1945, and that is why there is such resistance “over there.” The writers impy that their own forced reeducation sank in. Yet I wonder about that. Why did the Bonn government make an issue of the disappearing blood line, even proposing incentives to increase the “German” birth rate in a country teeming with children? Why do so many westerns voice as much alarm as easterners about the diversity in their midst?
Although none of our German friends condone violence against foreigners, they insist that theirs is not an immigrant nation. Yet Germans have names like Howe and Penta, Lafontaine and Chrobog, Biontino and Opoczynski, Yuereklik and Mukurarinda. To deny the hyphenated reality of the German bloodline is to deny historical truth.
I hope that in the privacy of their homes, their pubs and their social clubs, Germans will finally discard the myths of blood and soil that have plagued them for so long. I hope they teach their children to celebrate a new, hyphenated identity in their multicultural Euro-Heimat. Diversity renews and revitalizes every society. America may seem a messy model to some and a non-culture to others, but there is a reason we have been such a hard act to follow.
