The gates of Schlaraffia (English)
A journey across the remains of the Iron Curtain
(Dutch title: De grensganger)
Published by Meulenhoff/Manteau, 2006, 278 pp.
Excerpts translated from the Dutch by Brian Doyle
You can find the Dutch text in the original book on pages 25-48.
Chapter 2. The worldly-wise man, the first refugees from the Republic and the inhabitants of Little Berlin
The kitchen boy’s announcement that my Pommes are ready
resoundes over the terrace of Der Grenzgänger. In spite of the fact
that I am the only client, he nevertheless maintains his tradition of
announcing the orders out loud. I am given a paper plate with fries,
an inadequately rinsed salad and a greasy glass. Next to the bench
for tired hikers, there are metal swings and a seesaw. The garden of
the establishment, where children are agitating the chickens, used
to be full of Russian landmines.
There is no mention of this village on my map, although it is
mitten in Deutschland as the inhabitants are keen to declare. An
enamel plate on the wall of a farmhouse is unequivocal: the heart
of Germany lies precisely three-hundred kilometres south of Berlin
and three-hundred kilometres north of Munich! Might this also be
the legendary centre point of Europe? Apart from that, the village
has fifty inhabitants, generations of farmers who have populated
the area since time immemorial. The majority have never seen what
the world outside looks like, although many people have been
coming to see what their world looks like day after day for the last
few years. The inhabitants are unfamiliar with the distant capital
and three-hundred kilometres south of Berlin, there is nothing to
remind one of Berlin, but during the Cold War, this village had one
thing in common with the capital of the DDR: the Wall ran through
it. That is why the Americans nicknamed the place Little Berlin.
Little Berlin is actually called Mödlareuth, and it is situated
northeast of Bavaria and south of Thüringen, on the banks of the
Tannbach. The Czech border begins on the other side of the hill.
Fortified by my potato dinner I make my way into the village.
The languid air smells of vulture. A yellowed oak forest covers the
incline. An undulating band of smoky blue forestry stretches across
the horizon.
Mödlareuth consists of little more than a collection of farm
dwellings and barns: houses in soft indigo with dark shutters, a
little further a sand-coloured building, a peasant cottage in the same
gentle pink as the poppies along the roadside, and all the roofs
slated. The single street is graced with a maypole adorned with
ribbons and garlands. If it were not for the tractors and visitors
buses, Mödlareuth could easily be taken for the setting of a
seventeenth century Romanze, but the wind turbines beyond the
furthest farmhouses are sufficient to rob one of any illusions.
The remains of the Iron Curtain dominate the view of the
village: a pillar painted in the German tricolour, black-red-gold,
foreseen with the unambiguous words ‘Deutsche Demokratische
Republik’, a sign with ‘Landesgrenze’, another sign with
‘Grenzgebiet’, and then watchtowers, a white wall made of
reinforced concrete with cylinder blocks on top, a searchlight the
diameter of a bathtub, rusty barbed wire, iron fencing, knife-rests, a
ditch sided with concrete, cantilever barricades, horrifying signs
warning against high explosives: ‘Vorsicht Minen’. Running along
the side of a ploughed field Der Kollonenweg, two parallel lines of
concrete slabs intended for border patrol vehicles.
My journey begins on the Kollonenweg.
A worldly-wise man, born in the year Adolf Hitler wrote Mein
Kampf in Landsberg prison, is sitting on a bench next to a
farmhouse with his thumbs in his pockets and he nods in my
direction. The wind blows an empty tin can along Mödlareuth’s
main street. Behind the farmhouse, there is a waist-deep pond with
a plastic duck bobbing on its surface. The air is warm and smells of
manure.
I can call him Master Ewald. He is from one of the
neighbouring villages but has been visiting his relatives here in
Mödlareuth for as long as he can remember. He has worked his
entire life as a teacher and because he is blessed with an excellent
memory, untarnished by frustration and spite, I place myself in his
capable hands. He wears two gold rings on his finger, his own
wedding ring and that of his wife, who lies to rest ‘six feet under’
in Hof, the closest city.
I examine his face: furrowed, thin, with a slightly anxious
chin, gentle and yielding, and with an ever-ready smile, intended to
underline the gravity of what he is saying. He is a man who grew
up in a world with a hierarchical order and even today, in spite of
his advanced years, he exhibits an air of dignity and authority.
We look out over the hill for a while from the bench by the
river and then head down the street to the Tannbach and the
Kollonenweg where Master Ewald stops every once and a while to
straighten his tightly knotted tie or to add a full stop to the end of a
sentence with the point of his umbrella cane. I am reminded of one
of the main characters in the Günter Grass novel Ein weites Feld:
pompous, pedantic, know-it-all from a century that has gone
forever, but nonetheless an adorable grandpa.
‘No,’ he says, ‘the boundary that split Mödlareuth in two is
nothing new. We’ve known about it round here for generations.’
He turns at the river and faces the Kollonenweg that climbs
obliquely upwards. ‘You should know that the border was not
drawn after the Second World War by Stalin or the American army,
but four-hundred years earlier to be precise. Pay good attention!’
The Tannbach surges along close by. ‘In 1524,’ Master Ewald
contests, ‘it was decided that this river should form the border
between the principality of Brandenburg and that of Reuss. The
day-to-day life of the inhabitants continued unperturbed. They
could cross the border with ease to go to church, for example, in
Töpen.’ He points to a knee-high pillar with his walking stick. ‘Do
you see that? In 1810, the Brandenburg side came under Bavarian
authority and a year later, the tiny principality of Reuss was
absorbed into the newly established Freistaat Thüringen. The
Tannbach served as the boundary the entire time.’ He stoops at the
pillar and rests his hand on top of it. ‘That same year,’ he continues,
‘these boundary markers were set in place. On the one side the
Kingdom of Bavaria and on the other side the Principality of
Reuss.’
When I examine the pillars at close quarters, I can make out
the inscribed initials ‘KB’ and ‘FR’.
‘So the division has always been there,’ I say.
‘Correct,’ Master Ewald answers in his impeccable German.
‘Between the First World War and the great conflagration, half of
Mödlareuth continued to belong to Bavaria and the other half to
Thüringen. The school and the tavern were on Thüringian soil and
people went to church in Bavarian Töpen where, as they jokingly
say, the “grumblers” live.’
If the half-demolished Wall and the meandering Tannbach
had not been here, any division between the two halves of the
village would no longer be visible. But is there still a difference
nowadays?
‘Absolutely,’ Master Ewald laughs. ‘The two halves still
belong to different Länder. They have different postcodes, dialling
codes and license plates.’
‘And different local authorities?’
‘You won’t notice a thing if you walk through the village,’
says Master Ewald, ‘and it might seem absurd for a community of
fifty people at the most, but there are two mayors and you can
recognise them by the way they greet their people. The one says
“Grüss Gott” in Bavarian style and the other “Güten Tag” in good
Thüringian.
Master Ewald tugs me along the sloping street towards an
otherwise unobtrusive farmhouse. The sideboard is adorned with
decorative plates depicting pastoral scenes, a vase with orchids and
an earthenware beer barrel bedecked with jugs. It is clear from the
material spread out on the table that Master Ewald has
meticulously prepared my visit. He serves me sweet black tea and
opens a manila folder with the letters IH.
‘In her twenty-seventh year,’ he says, ‘in the last year of the
war, Ida Hoffmann, resident of Mödlareuth, kept a diary, providing
us with an eye witness account of the situation after the German
capitulation and the liberation.’ He follows the handwriting on the
page with his finger. ‘Please listen. “1945, April has arrived. Warm,
cloudless days. The sky is becoming more beautiful with each
passing day. You can hear the artillery fire of the advancing
American forces in the distance. What’s going to happen? What
does the future hold? Everyone is talking about it. We don’t receive
letters anymore. The telephone isn’t working. Only the rumours,
the grapevine reports. April thirteenth has dawned, April fourteenth.
People are saying ‘The Americans are everywhere. In Töpen, in
Gefell, a few kilometres from here.’”’ Master Ewald licks his lips,
enjoying himself as if he were reading a school essay. ‘And this is
the moment. “The fifteenth has dawned, like every other day, with
radiant sunshine. There’s an oppressive sense of dread hanging
over the village. Hours pass. Suddenly, around nine, they arrive.
Americans in the centre of the village. Everyone goes about his
business as if nothing is happening. There are no house to house
searches, no one is harassed.”’ Master Ewald closes the document
with a slap and adjusts his tie. ‘And that’s precisely what
happened,’ he says with a deep sigh, ‘because I witnessed it
myself.’
American soldiers described their remarkable impressions of
Europe after liberation: a part of the world in which people speak
incomprehensible languages and fight family feuds, a continent full
of alleyways too narrow for an overseas panzer division.
‘The inhabitants of Mödlareuth had expected the allies who
had defeated Germany to settle scores accordingly with the enemy
survivors,’ Master Ewald continues. ‘The final punishment! They
would massacre the villages just as they had devastated Dresden
and Berlin, but their fears were unfounded. Mrs Hoffmann’s words
speak for themselves. The arrival of the Americans brought
tranquillity to the village, at least in the first instance.’
‘So it didn’t last,’ I interject.
‘You will be aware, of course, that another liberator was on
his way. If that had not been the case, we would not be sitting here
together in the shadow of a watchtower. The second liberator was
the very opposite of the Americans in every sense of the word, with
the exception perhaps of his anti-fascist fervour and his hunger for
power.’ He browses through the pages of a photo album without
casting a glance in my direction.� ‘As agreed by international treaty,
the Americans withdrew behind the demarcation line, which
coincided with the traditional boundaries. The demarcation line
was the Tannbach, remember?’ His finger glides over a photograph
of an armoured vehicle full of laughing soldiers. ‘The Soviets
arrived on July 7th. They crossed the demarcation line and occupied
the entire village, in spite of the fact that the Bavarian side still fell
under the American flag... The Russian Ortskommandatur, as we
called it, was set up in one of the farmhouses. It was to take until
July 26th 1946 before the Russians withdrew behind the
demarcation line. From that moment onwards, one side of the
Tannbach belonged to the Russian zone and the other to the
American zone. The river served as the dividing line as it had
before, but for the first time ever the division also had a military
significance.’
He slowly gets to his feet, making a sweeping gesture with
his hand. The Soviet Russian Ortskommandatur,’ he says, ‘was this
very room! The inhabitants immediately invented an appropriate
name for the place: Stalinburg.’
Later that afternoon we take a walk along the Tannbach where
children are horsing around in the water. I am reminded of wartime
photos of enthusiastic people waving at the camera and I ask
Master Ewald to tell me how things transpired with the double
occupation of Mödlareuth after the war.
‘The farmers had no problem with it at first,’ he recounts,
‘although American and Russian expressions obviously caused a
stir. The inhabitants on the Thüringian side suddenly found foreign
words on their identity cards, words written in a different alphabet,
a strange spidery script no one could decipher. I couldn’t even
make sense of my own name in Cyrillic.’
When did it become clear to you that there were two
Germanies?’ I inquired.
‘In the initial years, intense negotiations took place on both
sides of the demarcation line regarding the organisation of the new
state. Things only became clear after October 1949. Then we were
made aware that there were two political systems and two nations
with the Tannbach flowing between them and the need for a special
permit if you wanted to cross it.’
‘From 1949? By that you mean from the foundation of the
DDR?’
‘Yes. Everything was simple in those days. Hell broke loose
three years later, however, when the DDR approved an ordinance
ostentatiously entitled Massnahmen an der Demarkationslinie
zwischen der DDR und den westlichen Besatzungszonen
Deutschlands, the DDR were experts in such language. In
ordinary terms, this meant that the border to the West was to be
completely closed. The process took place in stages. It was no
longer permitted to cross the river, and the boundary zone, the no-
man’s-land between the two halves of the village, officially
referred to as the Kontrollstreifen, was extended to a breadth of ten
meters. Five hundred meters of Schutzstreifen were later added and
the procedure was finally rounded off with a five-kilometre
Sperrzone. In those days, the border consisted initially of a wooden
hoarding but when the latter was destroyed by a hurricane, it was
replaced by a metal fence with barbed wire similar to those that
marked off the trenches in France during the First World War.
From then on, it was like living in a ghetto between two roadblocks
for those of us who resided in the eastern part. There was a night
curfew and assembly was comprehensively prohibited. And what
do you think they did when the fence fell into disrepair? Precisely!
They built a new and even stronger fence with a lightning
conductor on top.’
‘And more hermetically sealed?’
Master Ewald shakes his head. ‘People tried to escape time
after time. Cross-border travel was not the only thing that was
forbidden, we weren’t aloud to look or even wave at each other
anymore. They finally built a wall seven hundred metres long and
three metres high. Families were separated from one another. The
only way to get to the other side was to endure a long and
complicated bureaucratic detour. Stalinburg was only the herald of
a well-oiled bureaucratic machine with its engine in Moscow.’
On the western bank of the Tannbach a group of boys
assemble at a silent witness to the Cold War: a khaki Russian
helicopter and a brownish-yellow tank with its barrel aimed at the
village. A tractor sputters along a strip of arable land by the river.
The farmer at the wheel sees us: myself, the elderly schoolteacher
and the boys playing war games.
‘Don’t be surprised, grenzgänger, says Master Ewald as we
continue our walk along the concrete slabs, ‘by the different shapes
and forms your so-called Kollonenweg will take in the course of its
fourteen-hundred kilometre trajectory.’ He stops and pokes his
walking stick into the clefts in the concrete. ‘But one characteristic
feature never changes: it always consists of two rows of concrete
tiles intended as a carriageway for the panzer vehicles of the border
patrol.’
‘Let me tell you a final story,’ says Master Ewald.
A short distance beyond the village we pass a meadow with a
ruined farmhouse.
‘When they reinforced the border, the inhabitants of the
boundary zone, all of them farmers, were the worst off. That was
the same everywhere in Germany and not only in Mödlareuth.
Their houses were simply in the way! Villages were razed to the
ground, garden after garden transformed into a firing range. The
DDR authorities were terrified that the population would flee en
masse to the West. All sorts of reports were later found to confirm
their obsession. One stated, for example, that “a farmer named
Grimm from Venzka fled to the West in 1952 with two horses and
ten cows.” Laughable, perhaps, but there are also more dramatic
examples of entire families committing collective suicide after
reading the order to evacuate their property.’
Master Ewald takes a seat on a low rectangular wall
reminiscent of the farmhouse that once stood in its place.
‘On June 5th 1952, listen carefully, because I witnessed this
with my own two eyes, the evacuation commission appeared at
the Wurziger family mill. The communists had invented an
appealing term for their action: Zwangsaussiedlung. Farmer Arno
Wurziger enjoyed respect throughout the village. He had restored
the house just before the war and his farm had started to function
again just a few short months before the eviction order. He told me
this in person.’
Master Ewald stands and pretends to open a no-longer
existent front door.
‘Arno Wurziger was a smart lad. He told the commission
members that he would pack his bags. It was early in the morning
and two trucks had arrived. The inhabitants had been told they
could take their furniture with them. Wurziger’s wife was already
packing but Arno had “different plans” as he himself would later
put it. The entire family disappeared while feeding the animals in
spite of the three double observation posts and the six
Volkspolozisten. The women had climbed down through a window
in the stables where the Bavarian inhabitants were waiting to lend a
hand. Arno Wurziger and his son had made their way up to the
hayloft and father Wurziger jumped to the ground where the drop
was not too high followed by his son where it was a little higher. In
an instant they were outside! The Landrat, the district supervisor, later ordered the clearance of the entire farm. In the days that
followed, Wurziger watched from the other side of the border as
they completely ransacked the place.’
‘Didn’t they devise a name for Wurziger’s crime?’ I note.
‘Republikflucht.’
‘It was tantamount to treachery,’ Master Ewald nodded.
He suddenly remembers something. He takes me to the
bushes behind the farmhouse where the meadow changes into
marshland.
‘Speaking of Republikflucht,’ he relates, ‘farmer Wurziger
and his family were not the only ones to make their escape. After
the sawmill, the mill itself and the stables were demolished, the
farmhouse was used for a while by the border infantry. On May
25th 1973, thirty-two years ago to be exact, something spectacular
took place there!’
He narrows his eyes in order to describe the images in his
mind as best he can. ‘It was midnight. A driver passed the
Haidefeld checkpoint and the border post at Mödlareuth’s
Schutzstreifentor in his Barkas B 1000. He was in possession of a
valid permit so the soldiers let him pass. He drove ten, twenty
metres further. Nothing out of the ordinary. At a point invisible to
the border post, however, he suddenly turned off the road, switched
of his headlamps and drove the across the six metre wide control
strip up to the wall of the mill.’ He points with his umbrella cane.
‘Exactly where you’re standing right now! When the border guards
in their wooden observation towers realised something unusual was
going on by the wall of the mill they aimed the searchlights at the
truck.’ Master Ewald can’t resist a snigger. ‘But the driver had
already placed his metal ladder against the facade and succeeded in
no more than a few seconds to jump over the wall.’ He opens his
eyes, winks and grins. ‘A fusspot of an officer, who couldn’t
believe the simplicity of the escape, had the whole thing
reconstructed at a later date.’
‘But were no shots fired?’
‘Thanks to the fusspot officer, we know that the border
guards had twenty to thirty seconds to use their weapons.
Nevertheless, the driver arrived unharmed in the Bundesrepublik.
It’s hard to believe, but not a single shot was fired.’
‘What were the consequences for the village?’ I ask.�
‘After this particular Republikflucht, the DDR pioneers set up
a metal fence along the street in 1973 and three years later flattened
the building with a bulldozer. From that point onwards, the border
was fixed and it remained closed for sixteen years.’
Our walk along the Kollonenweg gradually reaches its end. I
accompany Master Ewald back to the farmhouse where we met
earlier in the afternoon and we say our cordial goodbyes.
I walk along the Kollonenweg through Mödlareuth one more time,
alone. It was quite calm when I first arrived but in the meantime
packs of border tourists have arrived, the elderly in buses, and
young people on bicycles. Children clamber up the watchtowers,
adults peer around in astonishment and dismay.
I try to imagine the trajectory of my walk on a map of Europe,
straight through the heart of the continent. If I listen carefully, I can
hear an echo of Wagner from Beyreuth to the south on the other
side of the Fichtel Mountains and of Mozart from Prague to the
east. Bach lived in Jena, Weimar and Eisenach to the north. And
the ghost of Luther is lurking around every corner.
I would have liked to have spent the night in Mödlareuth but
Der Grenzgänger doesn’t rent rooms and it closes its doors
pitilessly at the stroke of eight. The board depicting a hiker
recommending the Pommes looks a little lost.
As a drive out of Mödlareuth I decide to zigzag across the
border for the rest of my journey, as if weaving both sides together,
and to stay as close to the Kollonenweg as possible.
Chapter 3.
The forgotten city beyond the enchanted forest
and a way of life like whisked milk
I zigzag my way from Gefell in the east to Töpen in the west,
meaningless places unknown to my map. In this part of East
Germany the villages have been plunged into poverty. The
courtyards and market squares smell of stray cats. A couple of
farmers have parked themselves on an upturned barrel by a stable
door waiting for the cool of the evening. A hoarding attached to a
half-collapsed wall announces the ‘Festival of Central Europe’. The
barn behind it stands in the shadow of a centuries-old elm. A cart
with two broken wheels lies abandoned in the yard. A donkey
ambles alongside the fence.
A drunk is trying to strike a match in the middle of the street.
I offer my lighter and inquire about the infamous Kollonenweg.
Stinking of beer and manure he gives me a detailed but
incomprehensible answer and then gesticulates agitatedly with is
hand towards the west where the sun is setting. The only word I
can pick out is ‘Schlaraffia’, Cockaigne, the Land of Plenty.
In the West, the less significant places on the map are
represented by staked out building plots, allotments and holiday
villages with the same warning, 'Bissiger Hund’, on every other
gate. Lace curtains twitch here and there behind half-open windows:
a breeze or an alarmed resident? There are rooms for rent in the
local sports club building, but, as I am thoughtfully informed ,
they are reserved for young athletes and they don’t have a bar to
allow me to console myself with drink in response to this
information.
I take a random deserted road through a forest of deciduous
trees back to the East. A road sign leads me to Hirschberg. The
Erlkönig haunts my thoughts: ‘Wer reitet so spat durch Nacht und
Wind?’, a poem by Goethe set to music by Franz Schubert. The
story tells of a father and his son making their way home in the
middle of the night. The boy is convinced that the Erlkönig is
following them but his father puts his mind at rest: the boy has only
seen a wisp of cloud, a Nebelstrief, nothing to worry about. When
they arrive home after their frantic journey, the child is found dead
in his father’s arms. I was introduced to the song in the Berliner
Ensemble, Bertolt Brecht’s theatre in East Berlin, in 1996. I was
attending the final production of the controversial artist Heiner
Müller who, while himself terminally ill, had staged a version of
Brecht’s Arturo Ui with generous portions of Shakespeare woven
into the dialogue and a magisterial opening scene set to the music
of the Erlkönig. Müller had died a few days earlier. After the
performance, Germany’s entire art world came to mourn him in the
stairwell of the theatre.
I shake off the shivers, drive out of the forest and suddenly
find myself at the highest point of Hirschberg. Behind a gaudy war
monument, an ochre-yellow house exhibits the same traces of
mutilation as all the palaces that were revamped under communism
as collective farms. The building is now encased in wooden
scaffolding and is being restored to its original state. Dozens of
windows peer out over a valley where early morning lights are
burning in a cheerless town spread out over the hill.
The further I drive into the valley, the more I have the
impression that Hirschberg seems to be clinging to the side of the
hill in the hope that it won’t fall off. Almost all of the streets are
named Gasse, and I am reminded once again of the American
liberators with their panzer vehicles penetrating deep into the
European labyrinth.
The town centre is little more than a miserable square with a
church and a grocery store cowering under a couple of streetlamps.
The decrepit houses lean shoulder to shoulder. Half of them are
‘For Sale’. In the DDR days, Hirschberg was a typical old
‘proletarian’ hideaway, in stark contrast to the new Stalinist
housing estates. Nowadays it’s not only old and proletarian, it’s
also impoverished: the workers are unemployed, alcoholic and
devoid of euros, and if they’re young they tend to go west. Multi-
storey edifices are dotted across the valley, high-rises in which no
one wants to live yet here and there, I still detect signs of life
behind the broken glass.
Every street slopes downwards towards the Saale. Only the
walls remain of the factories that once stood around the potholed
square on the banks of the river. New Germany’s enterprises rise
up in the distance. I search the town centre for a display-board, an
advert, a signpost or a pub, but it appears as if a neutron bomb has
destroyed every form of life in the place and left the houses
dilapidated but still standing. I am reminded of small towns in
eastern Poland, Ukraine or Russia that have survived wars of every
sort and seem to be doomed to bear witness to the fact in aeternum.
On the opposite hill beyond the Saale where a new enchanted
forest appears to begin, I discover a street lined with stately houses,
likewise exhibiting years of neglect and eroded by time but not
quite in such a deplorable state that they might collapse at any
minute. I stop at the final building, a Gaststätte with a neon
advertisement for Warsteiner in the bay window. A flabby
individual, stripped to the waist, gawps at me from the upper
balcony. I toss a ‘Guten Abend’ in his direction and descend three
steps into the pub.�
Welcome to Hirschberg’s nightlife. In a basement of tattered
velour, a small group of elders are sitting around a poorly lit table
chewing on their cigarette butts and playing poker. The torrent of
depressing thoughts in my head is unstoppable. They’re not
surprised at my arrival. One of them, a man whose head is too
small for his body and reminds of a tortoise, makes his way to the
beer tap and pours me a glass. Once my eyes have adjusted to the
light, I examine the black and white pictures of Hirschberg on the
wall: choirboys, soldiers, women with hats, proud residences, ruins,
allotment gardens... One of the photos depicts a laughing woman
pointing at a DDR pillar next to a roadblock.
The men wipe the foam from their mouths with their sleeves
and order another round, including one for me.
In the conviction that I will soon be enjoying the summer
evening from the balcony of my room I inquire about availability.
‘Es tut mir leid,’ says the tortoise from behind the bar, ‘but
we’re fully booked? Why don’t you try here...’ He draws a map on
a beer mat, the snake being the Saale, and scribbles a name
underneath.
‘Viel Spaß,’ the poker faces exclaim in unison.
The address provided by the tortoise turns out to be a plain
whitewashed building on the banks of the Saale, without doubt the
best-lit place in Hirschberg. There are three entrances, guarded by
longhaired cats. I choose the wrong entrance twice and end up in a
labyrinthine room full of cash machines, which appears to me like
the engine room from some future century in a small town such as
this.
The unlit entrance at the back of the building is what I’m
looking for. Instead of a balcony looking out from some stately
home, I end up in a dusty B&B with a not very communicative
hostess who must be eighty if she’s a day. I spend the night
between a chamber pot and a sconce candlestick.
The only evidence to confirm that time has not stood still in
Hirschberg is the vending machine on the corridor offering
American pop, Dutch beer and Belgian peanuts at scandalous
prices.
My bedtime reading is the history of ein Land gennant die
DDR, which is a chapter in the history of Germany, which in its
turn constitutes a considerable portion of the twentieth century
European narrative into which the Iron Curtain has been woven as
a sort of leitmotif.
Cities like Hirschberg leave the visitor with the impression
that they have just managed to leave the war behind them. Time
appears to have come to a halt in May 1945, the month in which
the German Wehrmachtsfürung capitulated. The statistics are
difficult to justify because they round off the number of people
involved in percentages. Nevertheless, they still offer an idea of the
scale of events. I pore over a number of figures referred to in
relation to the genesis of the DDR. Fifty to sixty million people lost
their lives between September 1939, when the Second World War
broke out with Hitler’s invasion of Danzig (now Gdansk) in
northern Poland, and May 1945. In the Soviet Union alone, there
were twenty-five million victims and in Germany’s eastern
neighbour Poland around six million. The German Reich had been
on a war footing with no less than 67 countries. The end of the war
was accompanied by horrifying allied bomb campaigns, some of
which were completely meaningless from a military standpoint,
given that Germany had already lost the war.
I am reminded of the pictures in the cellar with the poker
players, portraits from a ruined era. Another image drifts across
them: a photo of three gentleman at Potsdam, the ‘Big Three’, the
British prime minister Winston Churchill, the American president
Harry S. Truman and the party secretary of the Soviet Union
Joseph Stalin. When it became obvious that Germany was losing
the war, the Big Three were known to have consulted one another
repeatedly. In February 1945 they had already discussed post-war
Europe at a meeting on the Black Sea Crimean peninsula. It was
then decided that Germany should be ‘punished’ by dividing the
country into four zones: the northwest under British authority, the
northeast under Soviet authority, the southeast under US authority
and, upon the insistence of Charles de Gaule, the southwest
under French authority. The border demarcating Soviet territory ran
along the old boundaries and minor rivers usually constituted
demarcation lines.
In July 1945, the world leaders gathered in Schloss
Cecilienhof in Potsdam. Under pressure from Stalin, the decision
was made to hand over the territory to the east of the Oder-Neiße
line, roughly twenty-four percent of 1938 Germany with a
population of ten million, to Poland. It was also agreed that the
Germans living in the Soviet zone of Eastern Europe should be
evacuated. The latter boiled down in reality to little more than
ethnic cleansing. The subdivision of Germany was not yet on the
cards in those days. On the contrary, a common policy for
Germany was the ultimate goal and costly oaths were being sworn
with words like ‘demilitarisation’, ‘de-nazification’ and
‘democratisation’. Stalin vehemently insisted on having a say in
decisions relating to the mineral resources and the industrial
potential of the Ruhr territory. The Potsdam Conference was
simultaneously the final summit of the anti-Hitler coalition and the
first in a series of East-West conferences intended to hold the Cold
War in check.
A few months earlier, during the days of the liberation, three
groups of functionaries from the German Communist Party
returned from the Soviet Union intent on bringing Germany’s
eastern zone under the authority of Moscow. The groups in
question were headed by Walter Ulbricht, Anton Ackermann and
Gustav Sobottka who had flown on a secret mission to the Kremlin
on June 4th for a meeting with Joseph Stalin. It turned out that the
leader of the Soviet Union made a statement during this meeting
that was to become reality a short time later: ‘In spite of allied
unity there will nevertheless be two Germanies.’
The following day, Hirschberg has clearly traded yesterday’s
lamentable appearance for one of bustling activity. I make my way
to the market via the steep streets, one of which, Karl-
Liebknechtstrasse, still has to turn in its old DDR name for a new
alternative. It’s already swelteringly hot by nine o’clock.� Water
clatters incessantly from a tap into bluestone troughs. Children’s
voices resound from upper-storey balconies, kitchen sounds, piano
music. A man emerges from the shadows of a garage, trailing a
threadbare string basket in the direction of the grocery store,
tapping the uneven pavement slabs with his walking stick. In the
Soviet days such a net was called an avozka, a ‘just maybe’. You�
never knew when it might come in handy in a country that was
short of almost everything.
There is a smell of paint in the city, more concentrated in the
centre. The only building that has been restored is the town hall.
The street sign with ‘Marktstraße’ on the corner is badly in need of
replacement. Two well-tanned thirty-year-olds are assembling
scaffolding, cigarettes hanging from the corner of their mouths.
They have all the time in the world and make use of every
opportunity to lay down their tools: a passing friend, a girl with
bare shoulders, a call on their mobile. The rhythm of the utopia,
boastful of its full employment record, is still well-ensconced. I am
reminded of Thomas Rosenlöcher who described the history of the
DDR as a forty-year long work-to-rule. They nod and watch me as
I pass. Even I turn out to be an excuse not to do any work.
I have a weakness for churches of all sizes, especially in this
part of Europe where religious practice was forbidden by the
authorities and going to church was tantamount to resistance. After
the Wende, the bank gave priority to the restoration of the churches.
Sadly, vandalism is also on the increase and the buildings can only
be visited during services. As is often the case in Germany,
Hirschberg’s bronze bell has been accommodated elsewhere, next
to the fountain in the courtyard.
What I described as a grocery store turns out to be an all-
purpose store. There’s little to infer from the window display, a
rolling landscape of green felt with tin can villages, but once you
open the sticker-covered door you enter into a different world, so
small there’s barely room for three customers at a time, yet
containing everything you might expect to find in such a god-
forsaken place as Hirschberg. A mixture of smells wafts towards
me: fresh cinnamon, bread, liqueur, plumbs, tobacco, ironed
sheets... And a whiff of cheap deodorant as one of the remaining
three customers turns around in the narrow space to take one or
other product from the shelf. The women behind the pre-war
sewing machine that serves as a counter has skilfully filled every
inch of space from the floor to the topmost shelves.
All I want is a bottle of cold mineral water but the atmosphere
in the smallest shop in Central Europe lures me into stocking up on
everything my hands can carry: a crate of beer, a magazine with
revelations relating to the DDR (the amount of material published
in this regard is beyond comprehension), glassy grapes, a fountain
pen with a rubber suction device instead ink cartridges, and a
miniature Russian car, a Wolga.
Chins are wagging in the grocery store as they would in the
market or the pub, but the confined space helps to sharpen the
conversation’s edges a little. Opinions are expressed and called into
question, about what’s going to happen to the dilapidated building
in the Liebknechtstrasse as well as the hidden power of the ex-
communists in the federal government.
Just as I walk into the place, they are rounding off a
conversation about the news that wolves have been spotted again in
Cottbus near the Polish border after two hundred years, a
consequence it is claimed of the accelerated depopulation of East
Germany.
‘They’re demolishing more than they’re building these days’,
says the sixty-year-old woman at the front of the shop with a bunch
of leeks on her arm. ‘The old folk are dying and the young folk
don’t want to stay. That’s when you get wolves!’
‘Logical,’ says the shopkeeper behind the sewing machine,
but she might just as well have said the opposite.
I read the words Besserwessis and Jammerossis on the cover
of the magazine I’m about to buy. One of the first pages contains
the headline: Was East Germany a just a fart in history?
‘Five euro and thirty cent,’ says the shopkeeper to the woman
with the leeks.
The second customer, a middle-aged man who is having
trouble deciding what brand of coffee to buy, nudges his neighbour,
the third customer: ‘Well, Miss Erika, we haven’t seen much of
you these days.’
‘I’m busy,’ grins Miss Erika, who must be around forty,
glancing nervously around her, ‘refining my lifestyle. Whisked
milk, if you get my drift. And a whisked lifestyle.’ She takes a tin
of tomato sauce from the shelf. ‘Only it’s hard to make it happen
on the daily wages you get in this shit-hole of a country.’
The man nods but raises his eyebrows at the same time, taken
aback by the frankness of her language.
On another page in my magazine, I find pictures of all the
politicians who will be setting the intensity of election fever later in
the year. A joke at the bottom of the page reads: Question: ‘Was
erhält man, wenn man einen Ossi mit einem Wessi kreuzt?’ Answer:
‘Einen arroganten Arbeitlosen.’
‘They turned their back on us,’ says the woman with the leeks
who can easily read along from where she’s standing, ‘after trying
to work out what we were all about...’
‘Now, now,’ the man mumbles.
‘I know what I’m saying,’ nods the woman with the leeks,
‘utopia’s second class citizens.’
‘They said they wanted to know everything about us,’ says
Miss Erika, whose face is disfigured by too much schnapps, ‘but in
reality they just fobbed us off.’ She turns her attention to the
ingredients on the tin of tomato sauce and concludes: ‘Fobbed off,
fleeced and fucked.’
‘Our eyes glistened with delight,’ says the indecisive man,
‘when the turnaround came. But we didn’t understand what we saw.
Reality only dawned on us little by little.’ He quickly grabs two
bottles of liqueur and tries to hide them as if he were ashamed. ‘It
was absurd,’ he mumbles, ‘from the word go.’
‘Lunacy... Luxury... Lay-offs,’ chants the woman with the
leeks. ‘We were ignorant of the first, we wanted the second come
what may and the third is what we ended up with.’ She worms her
way towards the door using her bunch of leeks as a machete.
The man with the two bottles of liqueur moves his eyebrows
up and down. ‘It’s terrible that the young people are without work,’
he says, ‘but if they were robbed of every opportunity for
ideological reasons then it’s a crime. That was the DDR. Good for
nothing Eastalgia!
Just before the woman with the leeks treads on my toes, she
also begins to hold forth about the word Eastalgia! She looks at me
penetratingly for a moment, as if all the Hirschbergers she knows
are passing in review, and then disappears with a snort.
Lifestyle Erika abandons her inspection of the tin of sauce
and braces herself in the now available space. ‘If you ask me,’ she
says to me in confidence all of a sudden, ‘I think it’s terrible that
the Wall is gone, but I think it would be worse if they were to put it
back.’� A grin exposes her nicotine-stained teeth.
I shrug my shoulders and stare unconsciously at my miniature
Wolga.
‘Who would buy such a Soviet wreck in God’s name,’ she
snarls suddenly, turning her back on me for good, while only a
moment before I had the impression she was someone I could have
a conversation with.
It’s now the turn of the man with the two bottles of liqueur.
He turns with spontaneous animation towards my angry neighbour
Erika. ‘How is it possible that some people, I say some people want
to declare East German hallowed ground with retroactive effect?’
‘If you don’t bring back your empties, you pay ten euro
twenty,’ says the shopkeeper.
‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph,’ the man groans, inspecting the
contents of his wallet. ‘Can I have the second on tick?’
He is granted the favour, not out of congeniality but rather out
of convention.
‘It’s possible,’ says Miss Erika as she returns the tin of
tomato sauce to the shelf and opts for a different brand. Then she
looks at me again. ‘You don’t happen to be a foreigner, do you?’
I nod, trapped.
‘Do you see what I mean?’ she continues uninterrupted. ‘In
the past we had one of everything, not even a brand name, just one
of everything: a tin of tomatoes was labelled “Tomatoes” and a tin
of gherkins labelled “Gherkins”. Everything was clear.’ She opts
for the American variety and as the man with the two liqueur
bottles – the second of which is on tick – wriggles his way to the
door she blurts acidly: ‘It is quite possible that some people had it
better in the past than others.’
The man avoids her gaze and flees outside. I’m left alone
with Miss Erika and feel as if I'm involved in some kind of plot,
especially when she hisses in the direction of the door: ‘Stasi pig!’
She finally pays and tosses a ‘wiedersehen’ in my direction.
‘If you’re a foreigner then you must be a businessman or a
journalist,’ says the shopkeeper. She hesitates for a moment and I
sense her eyes glide over my chest. ‘But a businessman would be
wearing a tie!’
I smile, relieved.
‘Journalist then?’ she asks almost pleadingly.�
‘You might put it that way,’ I say.
‘And what are you going to write about us? Ach, what
difference does it make. Write about what it’s like here, because
out there they have no idea.’
What shall I write? When I walk through the Marktstraße
again a little later, the street sign still hasn’t been replaced and the
two thirty-year-olds are sitting on their arses drinking beer. I note
‘Men drinking from Dutch beer cans...’
A man in a tailor-made suit exits the glass doorway of the
town hall and greets the workers. A little further down the street he
gets into a jet-black chauffeur driven limousine. I note ‘Man in
tailor-made suit departs...’
A car marked Reed Cross stops in front of a small shop that I
hadn’t noticed before. The man who gets out is addressed half in
Russian and half in German: ‘Charasjo? Gut, ja, charasjo!’ Boxes
are loaded and unloaded, cigarettes are exchanged, amusing
anecdotes...
That’s life here.
A stunningly beautiful girl passes on her bicycle humming as
she goes. Everyone in the street stretches their necks to watch as
she disappears unsuspectingly around the bend in the road towards
the enchanted forest.
Copyright: Johan de Boose
Flemish Literature Fund
www.vfl.be
for information on translation subsidy please contact Greet Ramael, grants manager: greet.ramael@vfl.be
Meulenhoff/Manteau
For information on translation rights please contact Harold Polis: harold.polis@standaarduitgeverij.be
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