E. Germans resigned, philosophical

Press, 11 October 1979, Page 16

E. Germans resigned, philosophical

Waiting for dinner in the restaurant in Weimar I am reading a modem East German novel. The hero, after a row with his wife, decides to visit his old father on the other side of town. In the rain he has to choose between taking a tram and taking his car, which means a 15-minute cycle ride to the garage. I am still puzzling over this, to me, strange dilemma. when the food comes, and I get into conversation with the East German couple who share my table. They are in their early 30s. He is a works manager in a machine-tool factory, she a secretary’. They are taking a long weekend at a “luxury” hotel in the city of Schiller and Goethe. "It’s all you can do with the money, once you have bought a car and furnished your flat,” he says. "About cars,” I say, "why would a man keep his car a 15-minute cycle ride from home?” “That’s not far. When you've waited 12 years for it. you don’t leave a car in the open. Everyone is looking for a garage. The chap in your story was lucky.” A garage can cost 40 marks a month, four marks more than their subsidised flat 1 had been in East Germany a week. People wanted to know what I thought of it. I would say, truthfully, that I was confused: sometimes people seemed happy enough, at others the’ drabness seemed insufferable. The question of drabness came up one evening with another professional couple who stayed at my hotel with their two children. “Why are the shops so empty?” I asked. I expected them to blame the "planners,” but they did not. “Because of ‘recognition and solidarity’,” said the husband. Recognition meant winning international acceptance, solidarity was aid to allies —Mozambique, Ethiopia, Vietnam. East Germany could not afford either but was crippling itself, by exports, trying to do so. “Did you know we had a deep-sea fishing fleet? They’re away the year round. Cuxhaven (West Germany) is practically their home port. That is where the catch goes. It’s the same with timber and cement We’re short of both, yet we sell them to Sweden.”

I asked if they visited other Socialist countries. “Of course. Where else?” “Including Czechoslovakia? Aren’t they still angrv over your part in 1968?” “That was long ago. I was there, by the way. On army service.” “It can’t have been pleasant?” “It wasn’t. At the border we were stoned by our own people.” A silence followed, broken by his wife. “We don’t really enjoy the ‘friendly’ countries. We’re allowed hardly any of their currency, and, even if we take our own food, we can’t afford an evening out or anything. The ‘friends’ prefer West Germans any day.” She spoke factually, without bitterness. I observed that the word “Germany” w r as never used by their media, only the initials D.D.R. (East) and B.R.D. (West). Did they still feel German? “Of course. But you know, don’t you, that bur national anthem is no longer sung here, just played? They’re supposed to be writing new words for the anniversary. The old ones have a line about ‘Germany, united fatherland’.” They asked me what I thought of the cities I had seen. I said I did not know. There was Weimar, all neat and restored, like any West German town, except for the shops and lights. But then there were cities such as Quedlinburg where priceless medieval buildings were literally collapsing. “They have to wait for centenaries,” he said. “When one comes up, we do a little restoration for the television cameras, Potemkin-wise.” After the children had wished me a polite goodnight and gone to bed, I asked them if they always talked so critically in front of them. Were not they afraid? How did one counter political indoctrination at school? “No need,” said the wife. “The children do it themselves, watching Western television commercials.” So the old Western fear that the East would produce generations of convinced young Marxists was baseless? "Forget it. All the kids are interested in is discos and motor-cycles.” Before parting we talked about his job, the constant scrapes necessary to overcome spares and materials shortages. How would he

feel about swapping places with a counterpart in West Germany? He paused. “I could do his job. Could he do mine?” In Karl-Marx-Stadt I spoke with another industrial manager, a qualified engineer in his 30s who would not go higher be-

cause he was outside the Party.

The famous German work ethic was dead, he said. The new rule was long meal breaks, week-ends starting on Thursday. No point in working when there was nothing to spend your money on, except cars. Hence the 12-year waiting list for Wartburgs. Industry was going to pieces, he said. There were no spares and the factories were old-fashioned and too labour-intensive.

“Yet we were doing very nicely till the whistle blew.. A few years ago we were on top of the Comecon league. Fatal! They invented ‘economic integration'.” Sharing-out of production, he explained. The D.D.R. had to part with some of its most profitable and up-to-date industries.

“My firm used earthmoving equipment. Now it has to come from Poland, for hard currency, of course. We don’t build trams any more; they come from Czechoslovakia. Czech trams are heavier, so we have had to install new tracks and cables. “You’ve seen our little ‘barkas’? A first - class combi, a bit like the Volkswagen. They were easy on fuel and practically indestructible. The whole factory went to Rumania. Ten years ago we handed over production of fork-lifts to Bulgaria. Now we have to import them, and they’re always breaking down.”

I met Manfred, a student, aged 28, at an organ recital in Freiberg Cathedral. I taxed him with my question about the absence of “Germany” from the official vocabulary. Was it to make people forget their nationality? “Of course.” he said. “And so long as Bonn

maintains that we’re really all citizens of the 8.R.D., it won’t change.” Later I was in a bookshop in East Berlin. It was unbearably hot. I asked a young assistant, to open a window, but they were all jammed. She said she already had a headache

and was exhausted before the day even started. “Life's too hectic,” she said. Hectic. After six weeks of the slow pace of life in East Germany I was dumbfounded. “How?” I asked. “Let me think. Yes . . . It starts with the rush hour. Everybody fights to get on the bus till its bursting. And then there are the queues, in every shop,” she said. “Obviously there aren’t enough shops,” I said. “Even if there were, there wouldn’t be the assistants. There aren’t enough people.” I asked how she and her husband spent their evenings. “When we're home, we stay home. We don’t see another person. When life begins again in other cities, ours has stopped. I can see why you don’t feel it’s hectic. . . I think we create, this hectic feeling ourselves. We're all after something —- but what?

Why all the fuss? The worker is still at the bottom.” “Do you travel?” I asked. “Not since we've had the children. One is at school, the other is in day nursery. Just imagine, we’re waiting now for these children to grow up and help us. The labour shortage won’t get better till the children start working in five. 10 years time. Till then, each of us who actually works will have to work for two. “We have the baby boom, but not what, we need to bring the kids up. My big one is in a class with 38. They don’t learn a thing. And what if they did? Take, a look at the teen-agers in the street. They’re not interested, they’ve switched off. That's our future.’’ It was the eve of the thirtieth anniversary, and she was 25, the daughter of two Communist founders of the new post-war State.- —O.F.N.S. Copyright.

Last Sunday East Germany celebrated its thirtieth anniversary, with claims to have a higher standard of living than many Western countries. Before a new law prohibiting unauthorised contact

with foreigners, the London “Observer” commissioned a special correspondent to report, after a six-week tour, on what ordinary’ people were thinking and saying.