Lives divided by a wall in time

The world turned upside down when Katrin Geissler was born, and it turned upside down again when she gave birth to her son, Valentin.

They made their appearances in 1961 and 1989 -- bookends of the Berlin Wall. Twenty-eight years apart, mother and son both grew up in Berlin, but they might as well have lived on different planets.

Barely a month after Katrin was born on July 2, 1961, the communist-run eastern half of Berlin began erecting a barrier, block by concrete block, until, like a scar, it zigzagged through the city, separating west from east, capitalism from communism, freedom from totalitarianism, family from family.

The Berlin Wall would last forever, or so it seemed to a young girl growing up in its shadow.

At the dawn of 1989, she was heavily pregnant with her first and only child, Valentin, who entered the world on Jan. 13. Before the year was out, that world would be entirely different.

The fearsome Soviet Union was collapsing under its own weight. On Nov. 9, 1989, travel restrictions were abruptly lifted, and thousands of East Berliners poured through to the West for the first time.

The Berlin Wall had fallen.

For Valentin, life has been lived in a city unified in name, if not 100% in attitude and mentality. These days, crossing from his apartment in eastern Berlin to his job in the west is a simple matter of buying a tram ticket.

To meet Katrin and Valentin is to see a remarkable physical resemblance between mother and son -- the gentle cheekbones, the smiling eyes. But to hear them talk about their experiences of growing up in Berlin is to hear two entirely different stories.

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She felt secure, but watched

Katrin Geissler remembers being 4 years old and on her way to ballet school when she first tried to peek through the wall.

“You would just try to get a glimpse. . . . It was very strange, because as a child you had the wildest imaginings about what was on the other side. . . .

“For me, the wall was just a reality. I knew about it even before I went to school. When I was little, my grandmother would take me to town and she would explain to me that this was the wall that divided the two cities.”

Katrin’s parents had experienced a very different Berlin in the aftermath of World War II.

“They would talk about how it was very common to live in East Berlin and work in the West, and in the West you had things you didn’t have in the East, like oranges and bananas. You could take those back and trade them for things.

“There was still a lot of communication going on between the American and the Russian sectors. The trains would go back and forth. The city was alive as a whole.”

But shortly after Katrin’s birth in 1961 in the northeastern suburb of Bernau, the Berlin Wall went up. Her father’s job helping to build machines in the West ended overnight. Later, when she was a schoolchild, communist indoctrination became part of the curriculum.

“Apparently there was a blacklist in Bernau, and my father was on it because he worked in the West. People who worked in the West were called ‘border walkers,’ and they were politically suspect.

“It was the other side of the fence. At school . . . we were taught that we were the better people, that capitalism was evil, that we were the future, that the sun rises in the East.”

At 18, she joined East Berlin’s Komische Oper as a dancer, -- and got her first taste of the workings of the Stasi, the East German state police, which spied on practically everyone.

“The first time I experienced something like that personally was when we were supposed to go on tour for the opera, and the Stasi actually went around the house and asked the neighbors about me. The neighbors sometimes knew before I did that there was going to be a tour.”

Yet, perhaps because it was all she knew, life was not intolerable for Katrin, who steered clear of politics. Neither she nor her family thought of fleeing, though thousands of others succeeded in doing so, through tunnels, ingenious hiding places in cars, even by hot-air balloon.

“I didn’t feel oppressed. In a way, I was privileged. My training was free. I could study for free. I got everything I wanted. If there was something I didn’t get because of them, because of the Stasi, I didn’t know about it. . . .

“There was no one in my circle of friends who tried to flee. But at the opera company, there would be people who would stay in the West when they were on tour; suddenly there would be one fewer person in the orchestra.”

The status quo seemed unlikely to change. But as Katrin nursed Valentin at home in late 1989, anti-communist demonstrations in East Germany began building in force. And as incredible as it seemed, word came that East Berliners, after a generation of being separated from the West, were being allowed to cross to the other side.

“At that time we had a visitor from Bulgaria. . . . He came back from a trip to West Berlin and said, ‘The wall has fallen, and you can all go over there.’

“I thought, no, that can’t be true, and he said, ‘Turn on the TV.’ . . . It took really a long time before I got over the shock and dared to cross over to the West. It was too strange for me, and I also didn’t trust that it was really allowed.

“I went two weeks later. Everybody else had already gone and they said, ‘Don’t you want to go too, and have a look?’ . . .

“I crossed at Checkpoint Charlie. It was anxiety-inducing for me. At that time the wall was still there -- now you can’t see anything of it anymore -- and there was a long border strip you had to cross. There were soldiers, and you could see the towers, and there was a tiny gap in the wall where all these people were trying to get through.

“It wasn’t like with the people on television who were all so happy. To me it was more frightening. I didn’t feel liberated at that moment. . . .

“It didn’t sink in right away at the beginning. I thought they might just close the border again; it would’ve been very easy to do. It wasn’t until much later when everything had settled and everyday life started up again that I started to think of the opportunities it meant and to make plans for the future.”

Now, 20 years later, Katrin is, in many ways, a new person. She has a new career as a certified physiotherapist. Two years ago, after nearly four decades of living in Berlin, she moved back to Bernau, though she still works in the city.

Germany’s reunification has not been trouble-free, and at heart, there is still something of the old East German inside her.

“I learned a new profession partly because I had to but also because it was a new opportunity. I traveled a lot. I couldn’t have done that in the DDR [Deutsche Demokratische Republik, or German Democratic Republic, as East Germany was known]. For me it’s just a great thing to see new things, widen your horizons, have new experiences. . . . I wouldn’t want to be without that.

“[But] there’s a great deal of insecurity; people are afraid for their existence, whether they’re going to be able to make a living. . . .

“In the DDR, it was like a little dollhouse; you would get a job, you could make a living. A doctor in the hospital would make the same as a regular worker, so the social differences weren’t so great. There was also a greater appreciation of labor. It didn’t matter whether you went to university or not.

“Today life is faster, more hectic, and you have to deal with it, or you go under.

“The East mentality has definitely stayed with me. I was 28 when the wall came down. I spent my formative years, my childhood, my education, my university years there.”

But she hasn’t forgotten the magical moment when that feeling of liberation finally hit her, months after the wall fell.

“The first time was probably when I went to France or Italy and saw the ocean and had the feeling of the wide world before me. In ‘91, I went to New York. It’s as though stepping over the border was difficult, but going to New York, flying over the Atlantic, was easy. And at that moment, I felt happy.”

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For him, freedom is normal

Valentin Geissler has no memory of the wall.

He was just 10 months old when it fell, and most of its traces have by now disappeared. But it still hovers over the city like a ghostly presence.

“Sometimes I can see in the city where the wall was. . . . I don’t remember specifically when I was told [about it]. I guess I kind of grew up with this knowledge.”

But the wall didn’t play a big role in his childhood, not the way it had loomed over the lives of his parents. The restrictions, privations and other hardships of life in the former East Berlin are an alien concept.

“A few things are quite hard for me to imagine. My father had to trade stuff to get certain records for his record player. These things were really hard to get. . . . Money wasn’t the problem; it was where you would get it. This is bizarre to me.”

Though the Berlin Wall was gone, the division of the city continued to be felt as Valentin grew up.

“The schools closed. After the wall opened, people stopped having children, so all the classes after me were pretty empty. They closed one school after another, so I had to change schools. I probably went to four different ones. . . .

“You could always tell which teacher was from which part of Berlin. They had different styles of teaching, and often they disagreed with each other. . . .

“There were certain methods that only a western teacher would try. They’d usually want the class to be quieter; they had a more strict style, while the teachers from the east seemed more interested in getting to know the children.

“On the other hand, they had old teaching methods, such as that you learned vocabulary only from the textbook. The teachers from the west would try new things they picked up in a course somewhere. . . .

“The west teachers would use different words from the eastern teachers. I knew the eastern words because I grew up in the east. . . . It still happens now.”

But those differences weren’t explored in a systematic, educational way. Interestingly, the history of a divided country and a divided Berlin does not figure prominently in the curriculum of many German schools. Surveys have shown that young people have only hazy ideas about their nation’s recent past, often informed more by what they have seen on television or in movies than from textbooks.

“At school the focus of history is more the Third Reich. Even in primary school they start with this. Only when I did Abitur [college prep] did they specifically talk about DDR [Deutsche Demokratische Republik, or German Democratic Republic, as East Germany was known] history. . . .

“It’s not in the lesson plans of the school. And in the west, they seem to know less. Sometimes they ask questions that seem silly to me, like, ‘Did you have toilet paper?’ They’re my age, and they know less. I realize how close it was to me, and how far it was from them. . . .

“When the wall came down, the whole east was changed. All the factories that didn’t work were closed. A lot of people had to reorganize their lives, just like my parents. Every time you go to a museum, there’s always this aspect, about how when the wall came down, everything changed.”

It is mostly through his parents and their former East Berlin friends that Valentin has developed his sense of what the city was like before he was born and how lucky he is to be living now.

“From my father I hear about what it was like in the army and how easy I have it now, that I don’t have to go into it. When my father thinks I’m doing something he could never have done, he has a story about it or he tells me how much he appreciates how different it is now. . . .

When he was 16, Valentin spent a year in the U.S., living with a family outside Denver, an impossibility for students of his father’s era.

“It was very positive for me to have this experience. . . . It was a different mentality.

“The family was very different. It was very American. I don’t have any sisters or brothers, but they had three kids and all lived together. The family was chaotic and I wasn’t used to that much chaos, but after one month, I really liked it.

“And maybe because I was raised by parents who grew up in the DDR, the whole capitalist-consumerist thing wasn’t so important for me. . . . So it was completely different from me but always very exciting. Even the bad stuff was still exciting.”

Freedom of movement and other rights feel like second nature to Valentin, a far cry from the heavily circumscribed world the older generation in the east grew up in.

“For me, travel is something normal. My family has done a lot because they hadn’t had the freedom before. I can’t imagine how it would be where you would only have three or four countries in the east that you could travel to. . . . [For] people my age, in my class, it’s normal.

“Sometimes we even smile at these stories from our parents because it seems so far away and so unrealistic, and even absurd.”

He’s happy to be living in Berlin as a unified city and Germany as a unified country, but as his parents’ son, Valentin has inherited some of their east-bred values and attitudes, which means that the west holds less appeal.

“It might be different, but I could imagine living there. It’s not so weird to me. . . . But I think the east might be more comforting to me, would feel more like home, with stuff I’m used to, or with people I can better understand or have a closer mentality to mine.”

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henry.chu@latimes.com