The Actress: ‘My Ambition Was . . . to Make It a Better East’

It was only a few weeks before the fall of the Berlin Wall that Walfriede Schmitt stopped kidding herself.

The noted stage and screen actress--a Communist Party member and committed builder of a socialist utopia--was watching television with her teenage son, Matthias. A newscaster for the state network explained that droves of East Germans fleeing to the West were victims of foreign agents who had drugged their tea.

“My son said he felt ashamed and asked me what kind of party I was involved in,” Schmitt recalls. “I realized it was no longer possible to change from within.”

Then 47 and bestowed with all the perquisites the state had to offer its artistic vanguard, Schmitt quit the party, renounced her privileges and organized an independent actors guild. The actors used their collective fame to inspire a nation to demand democracy.

An inaugural gathering at the People’s Theater held under the menacing watch of state security agents quickly flared into pro-reform marches and demonstrations, culminating in a Nov. 4, 1989, protest at East Berlin’s central Alexanderplatz that drew more than a million people.

“My ambition was never to change our system into the West, but to make it a better East,” insists Schmitt, who now stars in a weekly TV series. “But I realize now that was impossible.”

Like many who retain fond memories of the solidarity and greater idealism they say they found in the materially deprived East, Schmitt is dismayed by today’s persistent frictions between Ossis and Wessis. But she has come to respect the newfound power of the individual. “I’m not an egotistical person, but I understand now that self matters, that I have the power to make things happen in my life. It’s all on me.”