One year after Berliners danced on the wall, Germany is one country again. But how did the reunification feel for a former inmate of Hohenschönhausen? A story about Argentinean steak at the Stasi headquarters, unexpected reunions and Berlin clubs.
By Regine Hader and Dr. Andreas Ludwig
"Suddenly everyone is here again“
The sky is cloudy. Where the horses of the Quadriga would normally tower high and lonely in the sky, there are silhouettes of people from East and West Berlin dancing exuberantly in the mist of the bonfireworks - just like on 9th of November.
They have climbed onto the Brandenburg Gate, which is framed by two additional crossings since 22nd of December. They lead from one German state to the other. The Berliners are celebrating so exuberantly that the Quadriga will have to be extensively restored afterwards. Christmas is only a few days. What would usually be a family celebration becomes a highly symbolic date in 1989, because citizens can now cross the freely. By mid-February, thirty new border crossings will open in Berlin.
Television stations from the GDR and the FRG are cooperating on this evening: they will alternately report from both sides of the Brandenburg Gate. Black, red and gold flags flutter through the picture again and again. Historians therefore speak of a "second turn", in which the desire for a reunification of the two German states prevails.
In Erfurt, as early as December, black clouds of smoke already rise into the sky. These are no signs of joy. Smoke blows out of the chimney of the Stasizentale. For years now, the lives of many GDR citizens here was as if in a distorted repetition: Their habits, their political thoughts, feelings, relationships, their most intimate details were written down by Stasi staff. Given to them with a whisper or a note, perhaps typed by their own neighbours, friends, relatives or by chance encounters. The Stasi used their knowledge as a means of exerting pressure on their own people. It was anger and despair over perpetrators, who covered their tracks, that drives the citizens and women's rights activists Gabriele Stötzer, Claudia Bogenhardt, Sabine Fabian, Tely Büchner and Kerstin Schön. They lead the occupation of the Stasi headquarters in Erfurt - Rostock and Leipzig follow.
Meat found in the Stasi headquarters | picture-alliance/ ZB | Thomas Uhlemann
Thanks to them and the squatters in Rostock, Leipzig and now also in Berlin, the files, which are evidence of violence and surveillance, but at the same time themselves an instrument of repression by the Stasi, don’t disappear in the shredder or through fire during these winter days, as originally ordered by Stasi boss Erich Mielke on the 6th of November. The moment these documents would have been dissolved into letters and strips would not only have concealed the system and methodology of the SED state, but would also have relieved the perpetrators.
Findings in the Stasi headquarters | picture-alliance/ ZB | Thomas Uhlemann
In the Stasi headquarters, the squatters open stuffed bags and inside find huge piles of paper. After years of queuing to get meat, fruit, sugar and everyday products, they discover luxury goods such as Argentinian beef and an in-house hairdressing salon of the Stasi. Between the stashed delicacies and the bewilderment, the feeling of a new era emerges.
The occupation of the ministry in Berlin is the end of this great development, which began in Erfurt. The only casualty that becomes victim to the storm, a desperate Stasi officer shoots himself in Suhl during the occupation, shows just how fundamentally the world is being turned upside down at this moment - and how quickly the situation could tip over.
The Wall was mostly open now as an air of departures and new beginnings settled on the wintry cityscape. By shortly before Christmas, over 200,000 East Germans had emigrated to West Germany. A bunch of them sat huddled together inside Berlin’s Marienfelde refugee centre. It was clear to everyone there that the camp was hopelessly overcrowded – and that the situation was becoming increasingly difficult over in East Germany. There was a manpower shortage: now that 250,000 workers had left, doctors and nurses could only provide makeshift care in the hospitals.
Then, when the weather turned almost summery for a few days in mid-February, many West Germans travelled to places they only knew from Theodor Fontane novels. They went on hikes across the Mark Brandenburg, accompanied in spirit by Herr von Ribbeck auf Ribbeck im Havelland (The generous protagonist of Fontane’s 1889 literary ballad: he gives pears from his tree to passing children). Front-seat passengers pored over road maps looking for towns with magical-sounding names: Stralsund and Wismar for Störtebeker fans, Quedlinburg and Görlitz for history fans, plus Leipzig and Dresden of course. The region reminded many of them of the 1950s, as though it were still waiting for a new era – which had in fact long since dawned on the other side of the inner German border. The gates of the National People's Army barracks had long since stood open and the soldiers were fishing – without a trace of the strict discipline that used to reign in the GDR’s armed forces. Many a West German day-tripper came home with a growling stomach because the handful of restaurants, cafés and inns there were, if open at all in winter, overrun with Western weekenders.
"I really liked the island of West Berlin in those days. At first, it triggered troubled and melancholy feelings in me – a new era was coming. But a lot changed in a very short time without any major proclamations.” The first clubs started up in the run-down buildings in the middle of East Berlin. “A lot was possible without official authorization. Now, after 28 years of stagnation – in West Berlin, too –, it was time to celebrate freedom. West Berliners had been stewing in their own juices for such a long time. And things were much worse over in the East. Suddenly, it all burst open! It was a matter of taking their lives back into their own hands."
People used to play Monopoly in one country and Bürokratopoly in the other, but, for a while there, clubs like the Tresor held parties without having to wade through mounds of red tape beforehand – and without any commercialism. Pop-up bars sprang up in private ground-floor flats whose residents sold bottled beer through their windows. The new decade brought life back to dilapidated downtown East Berlin. Just a stone’s throw from what used to be the border, run-down buildings and ruins were now transformed from symbols of stagnation into hotspots of free-form experimentation. "Club culture back then was not about business or consumption or making a quick buck,” explains Mario, “but simply about trying new things and celebrating freedom."
Some former neighbours of Mario’s parents who’d worked for the SED state apparatus suddenly landed jobs as managers and department heads. "A woman in the Internal Affairs Department who’d rejected people’s applications to leave the country suddenly became head of the employment office in Treptow-Köpenick. Thank God a whole lot of people recognized her and she was relieved of that post. But many others got a leg-up in the new country through old-boy networks, through contacts, and nabbed seats on the city council or even the German Bundestag – as Stasi informers!”
Mario underwent another commercial apprenticeship in the mid-1990s, working in the cigar department at West Berlin’s most famous department store, Kaufhaus des Westens (known as KaDeWe for short). "Actually, everything was all right. I was socially active in a Berlin Aids support group at the time and still on the works council, but not otherwise politically active. For many years after 1989/90, I didn’t care which of these model Communists were carving out careers in a united Germany.” But he would soon be made painfully aware of just that.
He still had fond memories of the past, of the time before he fled the country for love and to escape the constraints and narrow-mindedness of the GDR, but had repressed his memories of imprisonment. "On 17 January 1999, I can still remember it well, I came to work in the morning, KaDeWe, sixth floor, and set up my cigar stand. Suddenly there’s a man in his mid-forties standing in front of me, tanned, in a dark suit, at first I thought he was some celebrity. Then it was such an ‘aha’ experience: I know this guy. And all of a sudden, the scales fell from my eyes: he was the Stasi officer who’d harassed, interrogated and psychologically tortured me for months twelve years before, back in 1987, in the Stasi prison in Hohenschönhausen! When I recognized him, I turned white as chalk and started to tremble.” The former Stasi officer didn’t recognize Mario, however. "I felt like was looking the devil in the eye. Before that, I’d often thought to myself: where do I stick the gun if I ever see someone like him again? You can daydream or think about that sort of thing, but of course you can't do it." When that very scenario presented itself, however, other considerations flashed through Mario’s mind: "I'll punch him in the face because he sure as hell deserves it. On the other hand, I thought, ‘No, I'd be out of a job and a punch in the face will only bring momentary satisfaction, it won't help me come to grips with the past.’” All the same, Mario would really like to know "what makes the officer tick now. Until that moment I hadn't grappled with these issues at all and I didn't know anyone who’d apologized to their victims.”
In that instant, all that Mario had experienced, and which he thought he had already processed, welled up inside him: "It was just bottled up deep down inside.” He stepped out into the hallway and screamed. The in-house nurse gave him a sedative and sent him home. "I got really sick at home. I took an overdose of sleeping pills. A friend I was supposed to meet that night found me amid the empty pill tubes. I was brought back to life at the hospital, but I’d lost the will to live because I asked myself what for, when people like this Stasi officer have such good lives in our united Germany.”
Mario didn’t want to talk to the doctors. They didn’t know what they could do for him because everything seemed fine in his private and professional life. Then the chief physician learned from his parents that Mario had been locked up as a young "escapee" at the Stasi’s political prison in Hohenschönhausen, East Berlin. "He knew I was traumatized and came to my bed with a flyer from the Hohenschönhausen Memorial. ‘Young man, if you don't want to live anymore, then they’ve achieved what they wanted back then. The best thing – not for everyone, but for you – is to go over there and tell them what you went through, and then you’ll feel better.’ And I've been doing just that for over twenty years now," adds Mario.
Western wares
As spring gradually came to the grey cities and the trees began to bud, the future of the GDR still hung in the balance. Should and could East Germany go a "third way" and create a better form of socialism?
There were no more controls at the borders, so West Germans could safely zip over to East Berlin to snap up cheap goods – which they did, en masse. The official exchange rate for changing West to East German marks was 1:1, later 1:3, but on the black market the rate was 1:10 and falling. Meanwhile, East Germans were buying up expensive consumer goods, although they cost more there than in the West. They were afraid that, given the relentless depreciation of the East German mark, their savings from those long years of hard work might not be worth anything in the end. Western consumerism caught on, with thousands of variations on the same products put out by various brands. They didn’t need the stuff, but it was the antithetical answer to years of longing and queuing. The craving for Western consumer goods made East German products appear unappealing and inferior. As a result, the East German economy was hovering on the brink of collapse.
Mario Röllig viewed this rampant consumerism in the first months after the Wall came down as an expression of political will, too: they wanted the West’s system. Longing and pain would be numbed by compulsive consumption, as is the way of the world in consumer societies like West Germany since the 1950s.
In the wake of these transformations, the spectrum of existing political parties could no longer encompass the reality on the ground, the thoughts and everyday lives of people on either side of the divide. Various groups and institutions in East and West Germany were eager to engage in meaningful exchange. But the established parties had divergent visions for the future of the two German states: The PDS (Democratic Socialists), the successor to the SED (Socialist Unity Party of Germany), clung to independence and called for East Germany to go its separate "third way". Some East German bloc parties, on the other hand, suggested forming multi-party coalitions, but they had no parliamentary clout. They soon found West German parties to partner with, however. The two free-market parties received the support of the West German FDP (Free Democrats), whilst the East German CDU (Christian Democrats) joined forces with their West German counterparts. In February 1990, members of the East German civil rights movement formed an alliance called Bündnis 90. After their tremendous achievements in standing up to the SED regime, they now pinned their hopes on East Germany’s democratic development as an independent state, so it was only natural that they should do without West German partners.
The Allied powers saw the early Volkskammer elections as a sign that German reunification might be imminent. With the exception of the US, they were sceptical about the prospect: Should Germany really be restored to its former clout as a power bloc in the middle of Europe? As Margaret Thatcher put it: "A united Germany is simply too big and powerful to be one more actor in Europe.” Shortly after the Wall came down, French President François Mitterrand aired doubts about the prospect, writing reunification off as a "legal and political impossibility". So the prevailing sense in Berlin of a new era dawning was accompanied by an awareness of a shift of power, for the two German states were key parts of the whole Cold War system. The Soviet Union was particularly opposed to the idea of a reunified German state joining NATO. On 10 February 1990, everything changed: in a conversation with Helmut Kohl, Gorbachev gave the go-ahead to reunification. A few months before that, on 7 October 1989, demonstrators shouting "Gorbi, Gorbi, help us!" had already pinned their hopes on the Soviet leader to usher in a policy shift in East Germany. But no sooner had Gorbachev departed than the protests were brutally quelled. And now, just a few months later, he’d cleared the way for the Two-Plus-Four Talks to begin between East and West Germany and the four Allied powers that had occupied Germany and Berlin since German defeat in World War II.
The resulting treaty assured Germany of the Four Powers’ full support, and they pledged to waive any special rights they held in the reunited country. The two German states, for their part, officially recognized the German borders as drawn in 1945. The people of West Berlin in particular breathed a sigh of relief. The medium-range missiles stationed in East and West Germany, for example, served as constant reminders that they were still at the mercy of the Cold War powers.
On 2 October 1990, the eve of official reunification, the Volkskammer convened one last time. In just 181 days, it had made active contributions towards achieving unification. Its efforts were duly honoured at this last assembly, amid a by and large optimistic outlook for the future.
The very next day, the 3rd of October, 1990, Germany was reunited.
The country now had to contend above all with economic, social and environmental challenges, which many of its citizens, especially those from “Eastern Germany”, thought would be handled differently. On that momentous October evening, however, they put aside their misgivings and breathed a collective sigh of relief.
But German reunification was also the point of departure for new economic power dynamics within the country, against the backdrop of which biographies like Mario's would come to be reinterpreted and reappraised, and in which German society as a whole would have to seek and find new shared values.
Mario talks about his efforts to share his own past experiences with the next generation: "Lately I’ve been on the road a lot: giving talks at universities, schools and various foundations, too. This is, so to speak, my revenge for the injustices done to me at the time: the good life I have today as payback for those terrible memories of the past." He pauses, then adds, "I can’t do this too often, though, or I'll never get my thoughts out of prison."
