E-mail
Print
a
Jochen Schmidt, 38
Writer from Berlin
The wall came down on my 19th birthday.
If you grew up in East Berlin at this time and with a Christian background, as in my case, there were two ways to talk. One for the family and friends, and one for the teacher and officials. It was in your body, where to say what. I didn't feel bad about it.
Some parents tried to protect the children and didn't tell them the truth, because if they knew, they would have problems at school. In my case, my parents told us, for example, what happened in Budapest in '56, and they said you couldn't talk about it in school. There were other families more openly in the opposition, but that meant you couldn't study, and you wouldn't have a good job. Open opposition was a decision to live apart. We didn't want this.
I had joined the army eight days before the wall fell, because I was 18 and going to study, and if you had a place in university, you had to serve in the army first. Things didn't fall apart right away. By December, we had just two cases of desertion -- people who stayed in the West. You'd think everyone would have left, but we didn't know what would happen. We didn't know if we would survive in the West.
It's hard to understand now how unimaginable everything was. Even on the 9th of November, the idea that reunification would take place a year later was utopian. I was even against it because I was young and stupid.
I remember that everyone in my army squad thought they were so clever that they would get a job in the West. But a lot of them would be jobless very soon, and that was the hard part of reunification. The East German was very able to solve problems. Everyone could fix his car. You had to know how. You saw a West German guy with a fancy car, but he didn't know how to change the spark plug. In East Germany, everyone had a job and a second job to get things. People were really handy. But then there were no jobs because companies from the West that produced something a company from the East also produced would buy up the Eastern company. Then they closed the company in the East to eliminate the competition. On top of that was the problem that if you were from the East, everyone had been conditioned for 40 years to think that everything from the West was better, so even East Germans bought everything from the West.
I'm not adjusting very well to the changes. I can make a living, but I'm not really happy. They destroyed the charm of Berlin, and they seem determined to destroy things from the East. Take the Palace of the Republic, the former parliament and leisure center. I didn't really love it before; it wasn't an important memory for me. But I think it was wrong to tear it down and rebuild the center of Berlin as if the past never happened.
At 38, I already feel old, because there's already a part of my life that has disappeared completely, and it's part of my job to keep it alive. It leaves me in the position of fighting to preserve the memory of things I was against when they existed.
Jochen Schmidt, 38
Writer from Berlin
The wall came down on my 19th birthday.
If you grew up in East Berlin at this time and with a Christian background, as in my case, there were two ways to talk. One for the family and friends, and one for the teacher and officials. It was in your body, where to say what. I didn't feel bad about it.
Some parents tried to protect the children and didn't tell them the truth, because if they knew, they would have problems at school. In my case, my parents told us, for example, what happened in Budapest in '56, and they said you couldn't talk about it in school. There were other families more openly in the opposition, but that meant you couldn't study, and you wouldn't have a good job. Open opposition was a decision to live apart. We didn't want this.
I had joined the army eight days before the wall fell, because I was 18 and going to study, and if you had a place in university, you had to serve in the army first. Things didn't fall apart right away. By December, we had just two cases of desertion -- people who stayed in the West. You'd think everyone would have left, but we didn't know what would happen. We didn't know if we would survive in the West.
It's hard to understand now how unimaginable everything was. Even on the 9th of November, the idea that reunification would take place a year later was utopian. I was even against it because I was young and stupid.
I remember that everyone in my army squad thought they were so clever that they would get a job in the West. But a lot of them would be jobless very soon, and that was the hard part of reunification. The East German was very able to solve problems. Everyone could fix his car. You had to know how. You saw a West German guy with a fancy car, but he didn't know how to change the spark plug. In East Germany, everyone had a job and a second job to get things. People were really handy. But then there were no jobs because companies from the West that produced something a company from the East also produced would buy up the Eastern company. Then they closed the company in the East to eliminate the competition. On top of that was the problem that if you were from the East, everyone had been conditioned for 40 years to think that everything from the West was better, so even East Germans bought everything from the West.
I'm not adjusting very well to the changes. I can make a living, but I'm not really happy. They destroyed the charm of Berlin, and they seem determined to destroy things from the East. Take the Palace of the Republic, the former parliament and leisure center. I didn't really love it before; it wasn't an important memory for me. But I think it was wrong to tear it down and rebuild the center of Berlin as if the past never happened.
At 38, I already feel old, because there's already a part of my life that has disappeared completely, and it's part of my job to keep it alive. It leaves me in the position of fighting to preserve the memory of things I was against when they existed.
Digg
Twitter
Facebook
StumbleUpon
Save more than