[PRCo] Re: Fw: North side details

[Fred Schneider]

"Edward H. Lybarger" wrote:

>  The other universal comment deals with the fact that they are
> now permitted freedom of thought...something Americans can have a hard time
> understanding because they've never been exposed to anything else.  These
> folks have no fond memories!
>

Now Ed, we've opened a whole new proverbial can of worms.  You're absolutely
right.

I remember being warned by Hans Riedel on my first trip into the east that you
wait at a border check point until summoned, you don't have any cameras visible,
you don't give them a hard time, you volunteer nothing, you ask nothing, you do
not smile, etc., etc., etc.  Understand I'm only thinking here of the border
between Deutscheland (Germany) and the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (East
Germany) but I imagine the others were similar and perhaps worse.  But you could
plan on 15 to 30 minutes passing into the east at Helmstadt and another 15 to 30
minutes passing back out of the DDR into West Berlin.

My impression was that those buggers played for keeps.  Guns were always
visible.

I was an interloper.  A foreigner who naturally had bad attitudes.  I was
American.  I was not to be trusted.  I remember just one great example.  Hans
and I were having dinner with a man who today is the number one dog in the
transit authority in Berlin.   I knew I didn't want a beer or a glass of wine; I
want all my wits about me for the late night drive back to Helmstadt.  The last
thing I wanted was to be picked up for speeding in a trap set for westerners.
(They would post several signs in a row ... 100 km/h, then 80 km/h, then 60
km/h, then a police car, then a resume speed sign.)  As some of you will
remember from an earlier note, I did not like their version of Coke but I
figured I could live with it if I got it cold enough.  I asked the kellerin if
she could give it to me with ice.  Something that simple could start a
incident.  She reared back and looked at me with steely eyes and, in a voice
loud enough for the enjoyment of everyone in the restaurant to, told me that
"Ice Machinen sind capitalist.  Wir haben keinen."  I knew not to ask again for
"ice wurfeln."   Whether she was typical or not, I have no idea.  I do believe
that most residents were advised not to have contact with westerners.   (And I'm
wondered many times since what the waitress' attitude was six months later when
she walked into her first McDonalds in the west and was served ice.)

I learned enough about the streetcars in the East during one day in East Berlin
that I decided to go back.  I went back about one year later ... it took quite a
few months to set up the travel itinerary, the rental car, the hotels (you
needed those to get the visa), and then the visa.  By the time I went back the
wall had "fallen."  The two sectors of Berlin were now separated by only a
fence.  Citizens from D and the DDR could go back and forth at any check point
though I was, as a foreign national, allowed to go in with a car only at
Checkpoint Charlie and on foot at Frederickstrasse train station.  Currency
unification was only two weeks away.  And now the DDR border guards were
friendly. Friendly?  No maybe they bordered on the edge of public relations
types.   They behaved as though the weight of 1,000 elephants had been taken off
their shoulders.  They could be human.  They could smile.  They were now allowed
to be helpful.

I approached two of the border guards at one of the check points in Berlin, and
began a conversation in broken German about not thinking the old DDR flag would
be around too much longer and wondering if I could take their picture under it.
They posed under it just beaming with smiles.  Had I attempted that nine months
earlier, I would have been detained and only they knew for how long.   (Now is
when I wish I had a scanner to prove the point.)

On the second trip we found numerous examples of the change in attitudes.
People all knew that complete unification was only over the horizon.  It would
happen as the details could be worked out.   People that would not have been
allowed to talk to me before were now more than willing to converse.  Many of
them saw what they thought was a bright future though too many had no clue how
long it would take to eradicate a form of work ethic that went back to the
Depression.  I remember the waiter in the hotel restaurant in Erfurt who wanted
to know about something he had never experienced before ... tips.  He wanted to
talk to us about what it was like working in the west.  (I think we might have
told him that make believe jobs will end ... you want paid, you will work.   He
would no longer be serving two or three tables at dinner.  More than that, that
hotel by the train station, a monument to a bygone era, is empty today (or maybe
demolished in the last two years), replaced by the Days Hotel, the Ibis Hotel,
the Holiday Hotel and others, all out by the expressway.)

I actually treasure the fact that I was able to see the change in attitudes.  As
much as I squawk about our politicians, at least I have that right.  Under
communism, they did not.  They were told what to think.  They were told that the
party was universally correct (It may have had some good point but they were not
universal.)  They were told who they could talk to.  They were even told to
report their own mother to the authorities if she failed to pay a trolley fare.
Everybody was watching everyone, or at least many people thought they were being
watched.

And one more thing that Ed mentioned in passing, and perhaps the single most
important thing the people in the East gained with the end of communism was the
right to travel.  I was told that most people ranked that right up at the top.
No longer would they have to wait until they retired and the nation had got
everything possible out them.  They could not take a vacation and go anywhere.
And now they could actually take money with them on vacation.  Someplace in all
these piles there might be a note from a trolley motorman we met in Naumberg,
East Germany telling us where he went on his vacation ... West Germany, Munich,
the Alps.  The man was enchanted with what he saw.  And all the old jokes about
the waits to buy automobiles ("Yes, we built the Wartburg cars here in Eisenach,
but you have to go over to Jena to get to the end of the waiting line.")
vanished as used cars from the west came in overnight.  The motor vehicle
registrations in the former DDR increased three fold in one year (and traffic
became impossible).  But people were so unbelievably happy that they could get
in their car and go to Prague or London or Paris and no one was going to stop
them.   Perhaps that joy wore off as the money ran out and the jobs disappeared.