or The Wall in the Head
by MARKETPLACE listener Jeff Payne, who contributed this article to the Berlin website
Click on thumbnails to receive a full-size JPEG-picture
My mother and father met in Berlin in 1947, he a GI and she a young, single German. They married in 1948 and my brother was born in Berlin during the airlift, in February of 1949. I was born in Wurzburg in 1957, and lived in Karlsruhe in the late 60s. My mother was originally from Beuthen, Silesia (now Bytom, Poland). As displaced persons, my mother's family moved east...some settled in the Cologne area, others near Dresden. When the wall went up the family was split for 40 years.
When the wall came down, one of my Dresden cousins, Dieter and his wife Inga, came immediately to visit his American relatives. He didn't even visit West Germany first. His visit to the U.S. was profoundly moving and disturbing to him. He told us he had always been taught that the U.S. consisted of either extreme luxury (as in New York penthouses) or utter poverty. The vast middle class he observed astounded him (coupled with the immense size of the country, it was nearly inconceivable to him). He marveled at it all...how did it work? Where did the money come from? Who built the malls, if the government didn't? Simple things intrigued him: billboards...so entertaining! So colorful! Band-Aids, what an idea! He was impressed by the number of churches, with their plain, relatively undecorated style which spoke of a practical and fundamental integration of religious beliefs into daily lives. He loved the accessibility of public, especially government, buildings. His appreciation for everything we showed them was in stark contrast to our Western cousins, who by the 1990s had grown affluent and, to me , into "Euro-snobs". I remember my uncle from Cologne, during one visit in the late 70s sniffing his nose at some rough pavement on a South Carolina interstate, saying "Hmph...DDR roads".
The relationships between my western and eastern cousins soon was strained by some intemperent remarks by a western cousin. The remarks are now family legend. She supposedly commented to her eastern relatives "now you will know what it is like to work for a living" and "because of you we will not get a raise this year".
These comments stuck in the craw of my eastern cousin Dieter, especially. He was an engineer in the DDR designing turbines to be sold to the Soviets. After the reunification, the Soviets could not afford the Deutsch marks, and the westerners looked down at the poor quality (comparably speaking), so the plant closed. Dieter says they were still using slide rules at the time the wall came down. He reflected, "Talk about working hard! Think what we could have done with computers!"
The eastern branch of the family has mostly regained its footing, psychologically and materially. Many resettled in the western states, and opened their own businesses or found good jobs. Dieter (who because of party connections in the old DDR had been nicknamed "Dieter the Red") now sells Amway, quite successfully. One family even made enough to buy their own home, much to the envy of our mouthy western cousin, who owns a cramped apartment in suburban Cologne, and has little hope of ever owning a free-standing home.
The two sides have resumed conversation and visit occasionally, but as I understand my mother, there is still tension between the two. I guess time will heal eventually.
Another Dresden (Pirna, actually) cousin is making his first foray to America this summer. It will be interesting to see his reaction, now that he has been living in a unified country for seven years.
Thank you for your stories. They are thought provoking and touching to me. I hope to get to Berlin and Dresden sometime early next century, after the major reconstruction is complete. Your stories make my desire to visit even stronger. Good job.
