Berlin – Two weeks ago I wrote about how a German foundation invited me to an east-west discussion about architecture, but apart from me as the moderator, only West Germans should sit in the group. When I suggested that an Eastern professor be invited, it was said that the group was already full. So I canceled.
The article was discussed on social media. Many understood my decision and shared their own experiences. One told how he was the only East German to work between 120 West Germans in Hamburg and kept hearing that you didn’t even notice that he was from the East. A colleague wrote that maybe I was comforted by the information that she recently almost sat in the press club – but was then sorted out again, “because I’m unfortunately not an Ossi”. One woman called me Jammerossi. One man put forward the thesis: “This ossi cult was invented by the SED-PDS in order to ascribe all the blame for the collapse of their economy and the bankruptcy of their worldview to ‘the West’.”
Longing for the world
It sounded as if I had caught a conspiracy by old Politburo cadres who were spreading fake news about too few East Germans in ministries, universities, embassies and publishing houses. To keep the Cold War simmering a little longer. It was pretty absurd, and I wondered how I could get into such a discussion 31 years after reunification.
In the GDR I didn’t feel like an East German, if I remember correctly. I was longing for the world, I was friends with Hungarians, Czechs and a Nicaraguan, and when I went to a village disco with my friend Antje when I was 16, we put on our chicest clothes and told the village boys that we were from the west.
In the 1990s I worked for a western newspaper, walked over the former wall into my office every day and was happy that I could. I lived in New York in the 2000s and when my friends there asked me about the fall of the Berlin Wall, I said it was the best thing that had happened to me in my life.
My friends came from Brooklyn, Frankfurt am Main, Gothenburg, Dresden, were of Catholic-Irish, Polish-Jewish descent or grew up as East German atheists, like me. We talked a lot about our families, they wanted to know everything about the GDR from me, I pestered them with questions about their lives. Our different biographies were something that united, did not divide us in this huge immigrant city. Our conversations made me aware of the differences, but also of the similarities. I learned what made me special, how my life in the East had shaped me, and when I moved back to Berlin eight years later, I felt like a German, a European. The GDR was history.
Stasi perpetrators, Stasi victims, Stasi workers
But the arrival in Berlin was different from what I had imagined. The city had become more international, more open, politics wasn’t. Angela Merkel, my chancellor, hid her origins, the Palace of the Republic was torn down, the Lenin monument was buried. As if history can be forgotten by destroying its symbols. East Germans rarely appeared in public discussion unless they were Stasi perpetrators, Stasi victims or Stasi workers.
I missed talking to my New York friends. I was amazed that nobody asked me questions about the GDR and how often I heard the sentence that East and West had to be over now. I had the feeling that I had grown up differently, that I had lived in a different world, whether in East Berlin or in New York, was seen more as a threat than an asset.
Since then I have been wondering why it is, what the causes are and the consequences, why so many in the east are so dissatisfied, even though they wanted so much to live in the west. Perhaps it is too late to ask these questions, point out the problems, as one reader wrote it. Perhaps the anger and frustration of the East Germans have long been too deep. And maybe it is wrong to cancel a moderation in protest instead of accepting that there will be no East German on the podium.
Or maybe not.
A few days ago the head of the foundation wrote to me that he understood my criticism and that after my refusal, he invited an architecture professor from the east to the event. The discussion was very stimulating.
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