Germans Reunite in Traffic Jams, Enjoy Unusual Fruits of Prosperity

It was not yet 9 o’clock in the morning on this first Monday after the reunification of the two Germanys and the chill, damp air was heavy with acrid smoke from the brown lignite coal that pollutes the air as it burns.

In the town square of this former East German city, beside the half-timbered house where Martin Luther lived with the Colte family when he was a choirboy at the end of the 15th Century, a market had been set up with shiny aluminum pots and pans, nylon Windbreakers in Day-Glo colors, cheap purses and belts and jogging shoes, potatoes and onions and carrots and grapes.

And bananas.

Heaps of bananas being weighed on old-fashioned scales at fruit stalls, being sold from the backs of vans, being greedily stuffed into shopping bags. There were stacks of empty boxes marked “Dole” where bananas had been, and truckloads of more bananas arriving. They were selling on this morning for 2.30 deutsche marks per kilo (2.2 pounds), or about 75 cents a pound.

Like Hansel and Gretel, we had followed a trail of bananas into the former Deutsche Demokratische Republik, where, until the fall of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9, 1989, bananas were a rare and exotic luxury. Now, yellow peels were tossed on the ground everywhere in the parking turnouts along the autobahn heading east as though drivers, overcome with desire, had pulled off and, engines idling, gobbled down three or more in a fit of passion. Already the smart-aleck young West Berliners have nicknamed the Easterners Bananen .

On the other side of the square, the gray clock tower on the freshly painted red medieval town hall lurched drunkenly to one side. Nearby was an old brick building with faded lettering on one side: Jugend Klub Sonne (Sunshine Youth Club).

An old woman glared at the bumper-to-bumper traffic, most of it with West German license plates, as she tried to cross the cobblestone street to the market. You could read her thoughts on her creased face--there didn’t used to be so much traffic and so many strangers here.

Eisenach, birthplace of Johann Sebastian Bach, hide-out for the adult Martin Luther, is also the home of the Wartburg automobile, as a banner extolling “10,800 new Wartburgs” informed us. The car is named for hulking, gloomy Wartburg Castle on a hilltop above the city, where Martin Luther lived alone in disguise for nearly a year after he was condemned by the Diet of Worms in 1521 for challenging the teachings of the Catholic Church and setting in motion the Protestant Reformation.

On the outskirts of town, brand-new supermarkets with fully stocked shelves and rows of chrome carts outside--looking almost like mirages--have been dropped full-blown into any empty space. Here and there, the red-black-and-gold flag of the former West Germany fluttered from upper-story windows. Chalked graffiti in English on one building said, “Nazi Nest,” on another, “Kill the Nazi pigs.”

Amid tidy homes with lace curtains and gardens of blooming dahlias, impromptu used-car lots for Volkswagens, Opels and BMWs have been set up in muddy vacant lots, tinsel flags bravely flying.

Just as bananas are a symbol, however frivolous, for the newly emerging consumers from the east, the Wartburg and its equally low-powered cousin, the Trabant, seem to have become the metaphors for all that was wrong with the former East Germany. (Before the Wall came down, they were the only vehicles that most East Germans had any hope of obtaining.)

Along Autobahn A4 leading to the former border at Herleshausen, the carcasses of burned, trashed and cannibalized Wartburgs had been shoved into the picnic areas, sometimes turned upside-down. And on Unter den Linden in what was East Berlin, only a block from the posh, Japanese-built Grand Hotel, we saw a small band of youths at twilight kicking and smashing a Wartburg parked on the sidewalk.

The traffic heading east to Berlin was choked with heavily laden trucks carrying everything from fresh fruits and vegetables to new ladders for sale. One battered eastern-made pickup truck was hauling a shiny new Volkswagen home. And a Wartburg boasted a new label painted across its back in old-fashioned German script--Volkswagen Baby.

We were constantly stuck in the fast lane behind chugging Ladas, Skodas, Trabants and Wartburgs, until we found ourselves agreeing with the West German transportation commission chairman who remarked that all East German drivers needed to go back to driving school.

There were no foreign entrepreneurs in evidence (at least not yet), only West Germans, and the beginning of an age of advertising. Along the autobahn , VW-Audi ads declared “We are there for you,” and on a side road, a Marlboro billboard not far from a barn with its wall painted in vivid pink and green for a cafe promising Echte (real) Hamburger .

And there were no borders (and very few police) anywhere. Never once were we stopped to show passports or car registration, although the Peugeot we had leased in Paris, which carried only domestic French plates with no national insignia and no rental car labels, drew a lot of curious stares.

Uncertain about the quality of lodging in the former east, we had reserved a room in a luxurious country inn, Hotel Hohenhaus, above the village of Herleshausen in the former West Germany, less than a kilometer from where the border had stood. If you wandered along the back roads here, you would still run across stern signs in English warning U.S. military personnel to proceed no further without authority.

Guenther Haderecker, the proprietor, had cautioned us about the heavy traffic we would encounter. “The businessmen are all going in to make deals,” he said, chuckling. His 26-room hotel has been filled 100% every night for the past year.

“Before, our guests came for several days of elegant relaxation in the countryside,” Haderecker said. “Now they are on their way to and from the east, always making business deals.” He says he hopes to have another 10 rooms in operation by the spring of 1991.

Our breakfast tray arrived with more than enough food for breakfast--tea, fresh orange juice, boiled eggs, a basket of breads and rolls and pastries, a showcase platter of cheeses and sausages, bowls of yogurt and fresh fruit, tiny cups of jam and curls of butter--so we made sandwiches for lunch as well, not sure where we would find our next meal.

But we needn’t have worried. In Erfurt, the most charming town in Thuringer, we managed to locate the Kramerbrucke, a medieval bridge lined with half-timbered shops and houses. There, across the way, a bright and shiny new wurst stand with red-striped awnings was set up, and we feasted on sizzling grilled bratwurst for about $1.50 each, the same price they were in what had been West Germany.

At the entrance to the bridge, someone had neatly printed “NATO No!”; at reunification, the eastern part of the country automatically became a part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

The streetcars that wend their way through the 15th-Century main square lined with handsome half-timbered buildings were embellished with Pepsi-Cola ads. At the top of a flight of steps is the city’s vast Gothic cathedral, with its remarkable 15th-Century stained-glass windows. Fifteen of them are still intact, along with five modern windows added in the 1960s. The Erfurt Madonna is a small, charming carved figure set into a stone niche. Magnificent carved choir stalls from 1350 are elaborately embellished with musicians, grapes, flowers and rural scenes, and a Lucas Cranach alter piece pictures the Madonna and Child flanked by St. Catherine and St. Barbara.

When we squeezed our way into a tiny parking spot on a side street in Erfurt, two neighborhood women stopped beside the car and watched us with steely eyes, saying something we couldn’t hear through the closed windows. Then they seemed to relax and nodded in approval.

After getting out, I asked them what they were saying, and they pointed in indignation to a car with West German plates in the next space, half of it pulled onto the sidewalk as Western Europeans customarily do on narrow streets--whereas our car was parked in the street.

“This is terrible,” one of them sputtered. “Terrible! This sidewalk is brand-new, look at the paving blocks, all set by hand. It’s all new, and people like this will ruin it.”

After I commiserated with them politely, the other woman shook her head sadly and said, “It’s not nice any more. People are not nice any more, not like they used to be.”

I thought again about Wartburg Castle, where the tormented Luther is said to have thrown his ink pot at the devil when it appeared before him while he was translating the New Testament. It may be that before all the dust is settled, more than one former East German will feel the same way.