Today we are celebrating the 25th anniversary of the successful unification of East and West Germany!
For the first quarter-century of my life, East Germany was behind bars, behind the Iron Curtain. We had no relatives in the east, but my parents had friends - "pen-pals" in befriended church parishes - that we supported with parcels for christmas. I remember that the wish-lists usually contained "real" coffee. But as mail was always opened and searched at the border, the coffee often did not reach its destination but possibly made a border patrol family happy. One year, the wish list that arrived before christmas mentioned an "Engelsfigur". We were not sure whether sending an angel - a sculpture of an angel made from wood - to the atheist east was allowed but it was a wish so we dutifully packed and sent it unlabeled. In the letter of thanks after christmas, we heard that the angel had reached its destination but with a newly attached label, it had been reclassified by customs as "year-end-object" (Jahresendfigur)!
So, for us children growing up in West-Germany, East Germany seemed unreal, fallen off this world, far far away, much more distant than England or France, not in locality but in time, and with none of the attractions of distant places, an old-fashioned, lost country from centuries ago, forgotten in history and read about in books only in the context of the aftermath of the second world war. The east was associated with a forbidden forgotten area, its politicians utterly boring, and with a strange dialect of speech that was only heard in old films.
After the fall of the Iron Curtain, the first person I met, who spoke that old dialect that I had so far only associated with famous but out-of-fashion German actors from the 1930s, was a cashier at the local supermarket in Königstein, where we had moved in August 1990, upon our return to Germany from graduate studies in the US. She had been one of the early immi-emigrants from Leipzig, Sachsen, had been working in our new home town for a couple of months already, and by then was used to being stared at and asked questions, and luckily took it in stride.
This is 25 years ago now - a whole generation has grown up in the east of Germany to whom "East Germany" and the GDR are history only. Many of our friends have "inter-German" marriages, as every family has their own stories, and no one asks about it any more.
Last year we bought a flat in the historic part of Berlin-Mitte, which used to be the Soviet sector. From there, we hope to finally explore more of the Brandenburg area and northern parts of our country, towards the Baltic sea and the east that we so far only know from literature and poetry.
For the first quarter-century of my life, East Germany was behind bars, behind the Iron Curtain. We had no relatives in the east, but my parents had friends - "pen-pals" in befriended church parishes - that we supported with parcels for christmas. I remember that the wish-lists usually contained "real" coffee. But as mail was always opened and searched at the border, the coffee often did not reach its destination but possibly made a border patrol family happy. One year, the wish list that arrived before christmas mentioned an "Engelsfigur". We were not sure whether sending an angel - a sculpture of an angel made from wood - to the atheist east was allowed but it was a wish so we dutifully packed and sent it unlabeled. In the letter of thanks after christmas, we heard that the angel had reached its destination but with a newly attached label, it had been reclassified by customs as "year-end-object" (Jahresendfigur)!
So, for us children growing up in West-Germany, East Germany seemed unreal, fallen off this world, far far away, much more distant than England or France, not in locality but in time, and with none of the attractions of distant places, an old-fashioned, lost country from centuries ago, forgotten in history and read about in books only in the context of the aftermath of the second world war. The east was associated with a forbidden forgotten area, its politicians utterly boring, and with a strange dialect of speech that was only heard in old films.
Pictures from No-Man's-Land, crossing the Zonengrenze when I visited Russia in 1980.
After the fall of the Iron Curtain, the first person I met, who spoke that old dialect that I had so far only associated with famous but out-of-fashion German actors from the 1930s, was a cashier at the local supermarket in Königstein, where we had moved in August 1990, upon our return to Germany from graduate studies in the US. She had been one of the early immi-emigrants from Leipzig, Sachsen, had been working in our new home town for a couple of months already, and by then was used to being stared at and asked questions, and luckily took it in stride.
This is 25 years ago now - a whole generation has grown up in the east of Germany to whom "East Germany" and the GDR are history only. Many of our friends have "inter-German" marriages, as every family has their own stories, and no one asks about it any more.
Naumburg /Saale, Sachsen-Anhalt
The Oderbruch at Schloss Neuhardenberg, Brandenburg
Last year we bought a flat in the historic part of Berlin-Mitte, which used to be the Soviet sector. From there, we hope to finally explore more of the Brandenburg area and northern parts of our country, towards the Baltic sea and the east that we so far only know from literature and poetry.
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