East Germany – Look back not in anger but with understanding

The more I think about the last 25 years, the more it seems like an experiment. There are two main kinds of experiments. In one you have a hypothesis and the experiment either confirms the hypothesis or not.

But there is a second way of conducting an experiment: an exploratory style where you are not sure what you are doing, you don’t know what you don’t know and you simply go forward, gathering knowledge.

This is the more typical type of experiment today in science and politics. In my experience it is how we got through the 1989 period and theyears since: a long-term, exploratory-style experiment.

My earlier life in the GDR also felt like an experiment, an experiment that attempted to stop time. All utopias – positive and negative – share this characteristic of wanting to abolish watches. Utopias insist nothing must change and this is why they are at odds with the realities of life. Time moves on, you have children and you get older. Yet for me, the GDR was an attempt to create a state like a chunk of crystal, where everything was frozen, everything stood still.

When I think back to 25 years ago, I begin thinking of how quickly western concepts of law, justice and legal language forced its way into the political debate. The GDR, its legal system and language were no longer needed, particularly after the victory for Germany political unity.

In hindsight, I think this was a mistake, a misjudgment that continues to cause problems today. For instance, we are still debating in Germany whether or not the GDR was an Unrechtsstaat, a state without a legal basis. It's a debate that keeps recurring, most recently in the past weeks.

Of course we had law in the GDR, any legal counsel will confirm that. But is that how we judge law and justice? The real question is what rights a GDR citizen had in their dealings with the state? Could an individual take on the state, or defend themselves against the state? Did this individual have a right to do so and have even a chance of getting justice?

Rule of law

Looked at from this angle, the GDR looks quite different. And, as long as we judge regimes by their least flattering side, then the GDR wasn’t a state based on the rule of law. After all, we don’t judge the Nazi era through its autobahns but through Auschwitz.

When I think of 1989, I also think of the idea of mergers. Officially, unification in 1990 was a merger between West and East Germany. But, to view it as a caricature, German unification was a merger between an elephant and hedgehog of which one of two things can emerge: elephog or an hedgehant.

The elephog is a strange beast with a hedgehog’s tail, and that small pointy bit that is, for me, the first half of my life in the GDR. The bulky front half, the Eleph, is what I have experienced since 1989: an unbelievable acceleration and enlargement of life in the united Germany. This elephog is, in my opinion, a rare animal native to the old East Germany.

The other animal that can emerge from such a merger is the hedghant. This animal is more at home in western Germany, where I lived for a time. It is a malicious being because it questions a basic axiom of German unity, namely that the GDR is over. I think this is a reason why we are still talking about the GDR because, though it is legally gone, it lives on in one crucial point: mentality.

The GDR will continue to live on, I think, in the ways of performing bureaucracy, in wanting to make everything equal and in an obsession with ordering things. These needs are not unique to the GDR, they are eternal human qualities, but I would argue they found stronger expression in East Germany. They came to the surface in East Germans’ awareness of the power they had, and how they used and abused this power.

That brings us to the issue of pride. My generation, today aged 45-50, were lucky because we could start again with our lives ahead of us. But my parents’ generation paid a high price. They had invested more in the GDR so I understand their pride in the state and how its demise undermined their pride.

When I look back, I think their pride was based on a pride in being able to repair almost anything. In this economy of scarcity, the GDR and perhaps the whole socialist bloc was Europe’s largest repair shop. The genius of the people lay in the tricks they thought up to make broken things work again. Their pride was rooted in their talent for improvisation. I remember we had a genius plumber who installed in our house a coke-burning furnace of his own creation that pumped hot water into every room. Every visitor from West Germany always took pictures of that furnace.

Improvisation

Every driver of the East German Trabant knew that, if the fan belt tore, a woman in the car took off her tights to use them as a replacement belt – a trick that only worked in the Trabant. But the year 1989-90 meant that, at a stroke, this genius for repairs was no longer in demand. Why repair a broken fridge if you can buy a new one? And so this repair genius, this pride in repairing and improvising that was an achievement of easterners, was now surplus to requirements.

Sometimes I wish East Germany had ended a different way. I know there are people here in Germany, particularly in the arts scene, who say socialism was a good idea that was badly implemented. To this I always wonder: why is it that this good idea is always implemented by those who will do so badly?

There are times I wish the GDR hadn’t had such a soft landing, but more like what the Romanians and Czechs experienced. A tougher collapse would have put a stop to the old East German legends, trotted out from the old GDR gang who are still there, people who often draw larger pensions today than the people they ruled over.

When I think of the state of East Germany’s economy towards the end, I recall my time working in our second-largest mine for lignite, the GDR’s main source of energy.

I remember a friend pointing out to me: "That over there is the hill for 1990, there is the pile for 1991, and then it's over. What will we do then?" It was over. Economic data for the East German economy in 1989 shows the country had a productivity rate of 15 per cent compared to West Germany. Today we have made enormous progress and, if you take a step back and leave ideology aside, the oft-cited blossoming landscapes, mentioned back in 1989 by Helmut Kohl, have come to pass.

Turning point

Why do we Germans keep thinking about the “

Wende

”, the turn we took in those years in 1989-90? Perhaps because such a transformation is a permanent process of transformation that keeps recurring; just look at the Arab world.

For all the problems we had, the Wende of 1989/90 passed off well, without violence. All sides kept their heads, something that is important to recognise.

A Wende, a turning point of history, has to do with hope. So much goes wrong in life, but this didn't go wrong. Given how much has gone wrong in German history, I sometimes wonder whether this Wende really was our history. But it was, and it is, a turn for the better.

Uwe Tellkamp, born in Dresden in 1968, is a German physician and a celebrated writer. As an East German soldier he was imprisoned for refusing to break up a demonstration in October 1989. His novel Der Turm (The Tower) won the German Book Prize for its description of a middle-class family in 1980s Dresden, disintegrating in parallel with the regime around it.