The Wall came down 30 years ago today. I grew up in West Germany in what was known as the border zone, and I remember a short visit to the GDR - sorry, but it was spooky.
Before the fall of the Wall on November 9, 1989, West Germans tended to think of West Germany as North and South Germany. People didn't tend to say "East Germany", the linguistic usage was mostly: GDR. And in the far west of Germany, for example in Cologne, the GDR was probably much more of a foreign country than France. And then there was the zone border area, the towns, hamlets and countryside close to this side of the border. That's where I grew up.
Grotesquely enough, there was talk of the "West parcel" when once or twice a year a parcel of sweets had to be sent to the "friendly" class in the GDR. "Friends" is put in quotation marks here because there was no real question of friendship - the contact was established after a class trip to the inner-German border - including a trip to Eisenach (Thuringia, then GDR), where we Westerners were left speechless.
Politicizing instead of chatting
While we had simply wanted to have a light-hearted chat with the GDR students, those trained, indoctrinated peers (we only understood this later) wanted to make us believe that the GDR was a model state and as such superior to the FRG in all respects.
Outside, it was the 1980s after all, the mountains of coal lay meters high in front of the morbid houses. It was late fall, it was cold and wet, thick smoke billowed out of the chimneys, the air was stifling because the heating was already on and the Trabants were driving around. The range in the grocery stores was very limited. Bananas? Zero.
We children from the West also had to exchange Deutschmarks for GDR marks, as all visitors to the GDR had to do from 1964 to 1989 - and some classmates quickly regretted having bought a GDR wristwatch for ten or twenty GDR marks. One of the watches was already broken as soon as we left the store. Most of the others were broken within the next week. I'll never forget the joking classmate whose watch lasted and lasted. But after two months, it too had broken down. Send it to the East for repair, to the GDR? Good joke.
Notorious border control
GDR border police also checked our bus on the way back. When a schoolmate laughed about something, and not even loudly, a border policeman asked him what he was laughing about - and pointed at him threateningly. It was as quiet as a mouse on the bus, and the feeling that this man had given us of having committed a crime by visiting the GDR reverberated for a long time. We were just children, on the cusp of adolescence.
Years later, when deciding on the year's graduation trip, Berlin was the first idea that came to mind, but as time went on, more people voted for Munich. To Berlin, to this island for which you had to cross the other Germany? They were dreading just having to check the German-German border again. But not visiting Berlin turned out to be a missed opportunity for some. Because soon - 30 years ago today - the Wall came down. And by 1990, the GDR was dead.
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