Voices Of East Berlin

• Share

Perhaps I have been in a different East Berlin from the one I have been reading about: triumphant, its citizens ready to join their brethren in a single, capitalist Germany. The East Berlin I visited last month was a gray city whose citizens seemed to be reeling, exhausted, sad, confused, angry. Hopeful, yes, of rebuilding a noncommunist socialist democracy, separate from the West but in some way affiliated. Wary of capitalism and worried about any prospect suggesting reunification.

I am not a political scientist. But I have seen people in shock before. Never before have I seen a whole city so numbed -- not Washington in the days after it was burned in the wake of Martin Luther King's assassination, not New York City after the blackout, not even the Capital after the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

I am suspicious of what I have been reading and seeing on television, suspicious because I see very few stories -- actually only a few quotes and sound bites and pictures of the same demonstrators in Leipzig shouting their unification slogans -- as evidence that the country's citizens are marching headlong toward one Germany. In East Berlin, where I rode the trains back and forth to the West from the Friedrichstrasse Station, where I walked into cafes and discos and shops and asked people their feelings, I could hardly find any citizens who said they wanted a reunified, single Germany. Perhaps in the far- off future, said a very few. Definitely not now.

Most were adamant. Not ever, they said. They love their country. The German Democratic Republic, not the Federal Republic of the West. They believe in socialism. Still. Not the socialism of their disgraced and discredited leaders but the socialism they have been taught as an ideal for 40 years. Now the attainment of that socialism may be possible, they said. The tyrants are gone. The West is accessible, and relations between the two states should be easy, and economic cooperation should begin.

Their answers surprised me, perhaps because we in the U.S. are tempted to see the triumph of democracy in Eastern Europe wholly through an American prism: as a triumph of American values as opposed to human values. The voices I heard in East Berlin told me this is a mistake -- presumptuous, wrongheaded, shortsighted.

In the bar of the Kempinski Hotel in West Berlin, an American newspaper reporter assured me that "once these people have spent a month or two crossing back and forth and been blinded by the lights and BMWs of West Berlin, that will be the end of all the talk about a new socialism." My colleague might turn out to be right -- he has a pretty good track record in this part of the world. Still, the words of the East Berliners -- and more important, the intensity of feeling behind them -- left a deeper impression on me.

There is no question that East Berliners have been blinded by the lights of West Berlin. In several short weeks they have become profoundly aware of the disparities between their two cultures. Perhaps much of what I was hearing was the defensiveness of the poor child who wants to show an outsider that his life and that of his family, however threadbare their clothes, are just as rich and full as his neighbor's.