Anaheim German Club Toasts Reunification of Homeland

Edda Hampel remembers when East Berlin soldiers erected the wall that divided the city in 1961, when she was a young Berliner. Some nights, she would hear shouting, see searchlights followed by gunfire and know someone else had been killed trying to cross into West Germany.

“I will never forget that,” said Hampel, who emigrated to the United States three years ago and now lives in La Habra with her Berlin-born husband, Jack.

Those memories make Wednesday’s unification of East and West Germany into one democratic nation all the more surprising and joyous, Edda Hampel said while celebrating the unification at the Phoenix Club.

The Phoenix Club, which founders say is the largest German club in the United States, marked the occasion with champagne, bratwurst, Polish sausage, choruses of the German and American nation anthems and news footage of November’s crumbling of the Berlin wall.

About 200 people, most of German descent, sang and danced beneath a banner proclaiming: “ Vereinigtes Deutschland,” United Germany.

“I’ve always told my children that reunification would not take place in my lifetime--short of a war,” said Jack Hampel, 58, an auto-body shop manager who took off from work to celebrate at the club. “The amazing thing is, it did take place.”

Hampel, who has lived in the United States for 35 years, said unification will not be easy for Germans, who have lived as two nations since World War II.

“It will be very difficult to get these two countries with two cultures and two economies to get together,” he said. “Everything in life has a prices. Yes, taxes will be raised but people have to look at the rewards.”

When the Berlin wall went up, Jurgen Maerz, 42, was a Boy Scout staying at a Berlin youth hostel. “I saw them build that awful thing,” Maerz said.

He still remembers the people crying, the nighttime gunfire and wondering whether they would be allowed to cross the East German border to return to his home in West Germany. If you can comprehend those feelings of a country divided, he said, you will understand how Germans feel to be united again.

Although some are calling Wednesday a “reunification” of the Germanys, Maerz said, he stresses that it’s a unification .

“This is no re anything,” he said. We don’t want to put back anything. We don’t want to put back Hitler and we don’t want to put the Kaiser back from before,” Maerz said.

Wednesday’s celebration at the Phoenix Club initially was meant to be a low-key luncheon for members but grew after people kept telephoning to ask what was being planned to commemorate the event, club president Hans Klein said.

Another big celebration is planned for Saturday, when Walter Momper, Berlin’s mayor and third highest ranking government official, will visit the club to help celebrate unification and the official German-American Day, Klein said.