2023-10-08 17:42:08
It was a long time ago, over and over. But that’s not true. Something from before still lives in me, perhaps an identity, a sensitivity. In any case, it is a characteristic that has to do with my East German origins – and that makes me helpless when it comes to insults that only target this origin.
How am I supposed to defend myself in front of people who didn’t know me in Eastern times but who assume that I have a quasi-innate weakness?
In 1990 I made a film for the SFB’s women’s editorial team, “Fiftyfifty. East Berlin women one year after the fall of communism”, with Jutta Wachowiak, Jutta Voigt, Daniela Dahn, Sibylle Bergemann. Editors supervised the work; the approval of the film was then the responsibility of one man.
Advertisement | Scroll to continue reading
False clichés about the East
“Oi öi, öi, that’s sentimental!” That’s how he began. “In the West, people tend to get to the point. You will still have to learn that. You just know what you want.” This is how it went on: “You suppress everything. I understand that, it wasn’t much different when we were 45.” And it ended like this: “Above all, you have to learn efficiency! You just have to walk across the Alex in the morning. You already know everything! So the way people walk is the way they work. Really, they work differently. A leisurely pace! Morning! This is transferred, even to me! I had a break before a meeting, was walking slowly, and suddenly, hoho, I completely forgot that it was work time. Haha, that only happens to me in the East.” Then he got up, said the film was taken off, and left without saying goodbye.
On the way back, I wrote down the words from memory in a notebook on the subway. At least that. I don’t want to forget this: That’s how it started for me with the West and the insults.
A couple from Bavaria tells my sister and me something about the TV tower: Visitors from the east would have had to leave the rotating café when the view from above reached the west behind the wall. “No, that’s not true!” we shouted. We had often been to the café. “That’s what we heard,” said the couple firmly. It didn’t believe us, the actual witnesses. It had heard something.
My time at Stern in Berlin
My first evening at the Robinson Club Nobilis in Turkey: you sit at tables of eight, call each other by your first name and quickly get to know each other. “You’re from Berlin, Regine?” asks a man. I nod. “And from which district?” “From Mitte,” I say. “Middle?” repeats the man, “but that’s the East!” “Yes,” I say, “I come from the East.” His wife calls out, everyone at the table and the tables next to it hears: “East ? But everyone was in the Stasi!” And what do I do? I leave the table because I’m in tears. I can’t tell these strangers my own life, which was so completely different in the GDR than these guests claim.
In 1994 I headed Stern’s Berlin office for a short time. With friends I met the prima ballerina Maja Plisetskaya, star of the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. I call the editorial team in Hamburg and make the responsible department head an interview offer. After a few minutes she calls back and literally says: “Your strange dancer doesn’t know a single pig here!”
The false image of Jammerossis
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, I have had several jobs and never had a boss from the East. One from the West was Mathias Döpfner. In 1994, Springer sent him to the Wochenpost and I became his deputy – not for long, we weren’t a good fit. But what stunned me was his private email exchange with a former employee, which became known in 2023. Something like this: “The Ossis are either communists or fascists. They don’t do it in between. Disgusting.” Yes, that’s silly of me, but I take it personally: He knew me, he let me edit him. How could he speak so generally about East Germans?
A really good friend and former colleague recently said that the Jammerossis thing had been going on for more than 30 years and he couldn’t hear it anymore. He had never expressed such an opinion before. That’s when I really understood for the first time that there has been hardly any empathy between East and West.
But I don’t want to lose him as a friend. What now?
Regine Sylvester, born and stayed in Berlin-Mitte. Film scholar. Screenwriter, including “The Solo Sailor”. Deputy editor-in-chief of the Wochenpost, head of the Berliner Stern office, senior editor of the Berliner Zeitung. Columnist Brigitte Woman. Books: “Prescribed altitude”, “Is this how you should live?”, “Up to here. And what next?” Author for Die Zeit, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Spiegel, among others. Theodor Wolff Prize winner.
Do you have any feedback? Write us! [email protected]
#East #Germans #walk #work