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Life Behind the Iron Curtain

The World — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 12:29:18 +0000

The Geo Quiz heads for Germany this time. The former East German city we’re looking for is located right where two German rivers, the Elbe and the Mulde, come together. Allied air raids during World War II more or less flattened the city.

In 1961, when the Berlin Wall went up, the city was cut off from the west. Today, it’s known for its rebuilt bridges, parks and palaces. And its got some striking examples of Bauhaus architecture. The art and design movement flourished here in the 1920s.

And if you’re a fan of music from that era, this city in Saxony-Anhalt is the place to be when it hosts its annual Kurt Weill music festival.

The answer is Dessau. Up until the building of the Berlin Wall 50 years ago, residents of this east German town were able to move relatively freely between the East and the West. Reporter Miriam Widman profiles Dessau resident Ingeborg Stolloch:

Ingeborg Stolloch was a young widow in the early 1960′s. She lived in the East German city of Dessau with her young daughter. The rest of her family lived in West Germany. And as she tells it, her mother was constantly pleading with her to move there.

“Mom always said, you’re all alone with the child. And the relatives were all in the west. But at the time it was relatively easy to get to West Berlin. I said, Naa. I can visit whenever I want. But I always toyed around with the idea.”

Stolloch was toying around with the idea again when she visited her parents and sister in July of 1961 – just two weeks before the Berlin Wall went up. But she just couldn’t move. She’d finally finished furnishing her apartment in East Germany. And that was no small thing.

“I didn’t trust myself. Honestly. Because we had to deal with so much deprivation and until we had an apartment once again and with all that entails….a kitchen, the pots and pans and everything else that goes with that. We’d jus gotten it all new. And so I kept hesitating.”

But it wasn’t only the furniture. Stolloch had a sense of security in Dessau – something she hadn’t known in a long time. She was born in 1930 near what was then the German city of Breslau. In the bitterly cold winter of 1945, the Nazis kicked the family out of their house as the Russians were fighting their way toward Berlin. Stolloch’s mother thought they would be back soon… So they gathered some personal belongings, but left their furniture behind.

“She cleaned up the kitchen and packed up everything. Aaah. I even think she got coal out of storage so we could heat the house when we came back. She always thought we would return home. That’s what they told us. We never went back to the house.”

Stolloch’s family lost all their furniture and most of their possessions.

“We had nothing. After two days we lost all our luggage. No blankets. Nothing to wear. And all that by ice cold. It was dreadful.”

Ingeborg Stolloch kept her wardrobe from GDR days (Photo: Miriam Widman)

Today, Stolloch’s apartment is in a housing complex once part of the non-descript, Soviet-style apartment blocks built in East Germany. She enjoys making coffee and cake for visitors to her small, but well kept one bedroom apartment.

But her memory of World War II is very clear. Maybe, if she hadn’t already had the experience of losing everything and having to start over again, she would have stayed in the West during that visit in July of 1961.

“Yes, I was back home for 14 days. That was the end of July 61 and then August 13 they built the wall. And then it was over. You couldn’t go again. I was toying with the idea. What should you do here all alone? I don’t know. Maybe it should have happened that way.”

Stolloch sifts through a stack of official papers looking for a letter. In the late 1960′s her mother got sick, and she eventually died in 1968. Stolloch applied for permission to go to the funeral. But the East German authorities rejected it. The last time Stolloch saw her mother was on that fateful visit in July 50 years ago. She often thinks of what might have been had she moved to the west. But she did love that furniture – and the feeling of stability it gave her. And she still has the wardrobe.

How Germans remember the past

The World — Mon, 31 May 2010 20:10:41 +0000

On a day when we’re remembering soldiers and wars, it’s also useful to think about how we remember. That can depend on the nature of historical events, whether we identify with victors or victims, with brave acts or evil ones. In Germany, memory of the past is often painful: two world wars, the Holocaust, the Berlin Wall. Now, Germans are again thinking about how they remember these events. Writer Alissa Quart visited a couple of museums in Berlin that memorialize the past in different ways. Download MP3 (Photo: Gerry Hadden)

Neues Museum
Berlin-based Yiddishkeit band ‘Jewdyssee’
Berlin Wall graffiti

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MARCO WERMAN: On a day when we remember soldiers and wars, it’s also useful to think about how we remember. That can depend on the nature of historical events and whether we view them with pride or with shame. In Germany, memory of the past is often painful. Two world wars, the Holocaust, the Berlin Wall, now Germans are again thinking about how they remember these events. Writer Alissa Quart visited a couple of museums in Berlin that memorialize the past in different ways.

ALISSA QUART: Berlin is a city of odd collisions. Collisions of architecture, 19th century buildings next to severe modern ones. Angry graffiti on fancy stores in the former East Berlin. People collide here too. I was part of that briefly. An American Jew sorting through the city, adding the fragments of my own family’s history in Europe into the mix. Berlin’s buildings offered some clues. This is the Neues Museum. Neues means new in German and this museum is new, well pieces of it are. As I walk up the museum’s giant steps, I can see strips of exploded old bricks incorporated into sturdy new ones. The museum has been rebuilt using the ruins of the original 19th century museum building. It was bombed during World War II and then left to decay by the East German government. It reopened late last year. The new structure, renovated by British architect David Chipperfield uses bits and pieces of the 1850 one. There’s weird 19th century iron work, World War II bullet holes, walls and ceilings left chipped and stained. I had to fight through the crowds to get through. Olivia Zorn who works at the museum leads me around. She points out the layers from different periods.

OLIVIA ZORN: The idea of the conservation of this building was to show all what is preserved. The top painting, the paintings on the pillars. After that it was damaged in the Second World War. And we will show all these details.

QUART: We pass the bust of the Egyptian Queen Nefertiti. It’s the best known exhibit here. It too is surrounded by fragments of history. Sitting under a half-conserved kitschy 19th century mural of the Roman God Hercules. Nefertiti is very beautiful. The Egyptians want her back now. I am told I can’t ask about that. The sound of a large curved horn from the Bronze Age plays next to where the horn itself is displayed. Nearby ancient bracelets and rings are shown in dirt and sand. Some critics and curators find the renovation of the Neues Museum annoyingly artsy. The bullet holes and broken brick, a cliché of World War II trauma, all in clever quotations. A more direct approach can be seen at the museum at the Wannsee Conference House. It was at this house in 1942 that Nazi leaders planned the Final Solution, the extermination of Europe’s Jews. Among them, many in my own family. The museum is stark and the house unchanged. Tapes featuring the voice of Adolf Eichmann play in a corner of one room. I had forgotten that cigarettes and cognac were served during the planning of the Final Solution. The Neues Museum, of course, is aiming for a more self-conscious vision of German history. Art historian Benjamin Buchloh thinks the result is remarkable, incorporating fragments like corny 19th century wall paintings. Those reminders of the past hint at how the history of Germany’s heroic fantasies about itself long preceded Fascism.

BENJAMIN BUCHLOH: They really give us a sense of the intensity with which Germans in the 19th century desired to remake themselves in the image of the Greco-Roman culture. That type of imagery that is still left in the museum reminds you of that. So as you go through the museum, as you look at the collection, you start thinking about the history that necessitated and formed the collections and the museum architecture itself.

QUART: Buchloh is also impressed that the Neues rebels against a typical new museum building. Many new museums aim to invoke jaw-dropping awe, sometimes at the expense of the art they’re showing. And the Neues engages you more than those buildings do, says Susan Howe, an American poet who has been writing about the Neues. That’s because the museum doesn’t try to be a shiny new place that has all the answers. This museum is purposefully incomplete.

SUSAN HOWE: This building represents a feeling of no final intentions, or a museum that is open, open to the sky literally.

QUART: I, too, have long believed places and histories are more fractured than they appear. I think that’s what the museum is saying as well. In Berlin and in so many other cities, the best thing any new structure can do is disown the past and honor it as well. The Neues Museum does this by retelling the past in fragments, while still cherishing Nefertiti. For The World, I’m Alissa Quart, Berlin.

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The post-communist generation

The World — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 22:09:34 +0000

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This weekend may well see parties on the streets of Berlin.
But for some living in what was once the Eastern Bloc, the anniversary of bringing down the wall brings little cause for celebration. The last twenty years have brought the freedom so many longed for but it’s also brought hardship and uncertainty – especially for the youngest generation who have grown up without Communism. Laura Lynch visited a high school in Budapest, Hungary.

LAURA LYNCH: Students at this downtown school attend classes in a building that sits in the middle of Hungary’s storied history, is just blocks from the banks of the Danube where you can see the majestic Buda castle and the houses of parliament. But being surrounded by history doesn’t necessarily translate into knowing history, especially recent history.

SPEAKER: What are you going to be doing on November ninth? Do you know what November ninth is? Anybody?

LYNCH: The anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall isn’t a notable date for this class of seventeen and eighteen year olds. Their parents may talk about the events of twenty years ago, but Norbert Nag and Fahnee Kerestesh are pretty much unmoved.

NORBERT NAG: What it means to my mother is not the same what it means to me so of course she felt it much more personally as I did because I wasn’t even born at that time.

FAHNEE KERESTESH: I see it like any kind of other Hungarian historical event because it was important but not personally. Emotionally, it’s nothing.

LYNCH: Daniel Szabo says his parents describe it as a time when life was simpler and safer.

DANIEL SZABO: They said that there were more security on the streets and the police guys were on the streets not for get money from the bad guys but for make security on the streets.

LYNCH: The students do study Hungary’s history but the events of 1989 aren’t covered in the official curriculum. That’s frustrated for teacher Yanas Varga. He thinks students really don’t understand or appreciate the monumental change that took place.

YANAS VARGA: Sometimes I have time to tell them my stories. For example, when I was a student in the 1970’s, reading an English newspaper or reading a weekly such as the Newsweek was a serious offense. I was summoned by the deputy headmaster and I was threatened to be thrown out of school. I was really frightened. They laugh at it.

LYNCH: That apparent complacency is one of the reasons Hungary opened the so-called House of Terror a few years ago inside the former headquarters of both the Nazi and Communist era secret police. School groups are led through exhibits detailing the horrors of life back then. The trains that shipped thousands off to the Gulags, the harsh living conditions and toward the end, the killings. As an elevator descends to the basement prison cells, a video screen shows a former guard dispassionately describing the execution process. Curator Maria Schmidt complains Hungary’s transition to democracy was so quick, so relatively smooth, Communist leaders were never really forced to account for what happened. The story was never told from the victims’ point of view.

MARIA SCHMIDT: I wanted to win the battle against the monopoly of the left wing, narrative on Hungarian history of the mainly, particularly on the twentieth century. I think that’s the most important part of democracy that you cannot monopolize the way of people are thinking on history.

LYNCH: But twenty years ago it seemed there was no time for reflection. Instead, it was a headlong rush into the future and the future was capitalism. Few sense that better than George Hemingway. Today the American-Hungarian businessman is investing in the next generation himself, buying a soccer team and building a training ground in the suburbs of Budapest. Hemingway has been in the game of investing here from the moment Communism ended, flying in from his home in Las Vegas to do business.

GEORGE HEMINGWAY: When we came here in 1989, everybody thought I was making a foolish decision. And we made a ton of money.

LAURA LYNCH: Hemingway bought dozens of restaurants, food stores, a computer company and more. He introduced Hungarians to Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Dunkin Donuts. But a few years ago, the economy started to stumble. Government debt soared. Hemingway saw it happen and got rid of half of his portfolio.

GEORGE HEMINGWAY: The government was spending, spending and spending without any idea where the country, where it was taking the country. Even what they were spending, they were spending badly and Hungary became a basket case.

LYNCH: The global financial crisis made matters worse. Last year, Hungary had to turn to the World Bank, IMF and EU for a twenty five billion dollar bailout. There are new austerity measures in place. Hemingway thinks Hungarians still haven’t come to terms with the sometimes harsh realities of the free marketplace.

HEMINGWAY: Yes they won freedom and yes they want to make money and yes they want capitalism as much as they understand it, but they also want free healthcare, they want free schools, they want free universities, they want to go to the mayor and get some money if they don’t have it.

LYNCH: It’s a combustible mix for a country still rising from the ashes of its Communist past. The disappointment has led to deep political divisions and as in other former Eastern Bloc nations, a rise in popularity for extreme right wing groups. Historian Attila Pok finds the shift disturbing.

ATTILA POK: For the great euphoria of ten years ago totally vanished and people who have no option, find these black and white answers appealing.

LYNCH: High school student Norbert Nag says he knows people who miss the stability that came with Communism and he kind of understands it.

NORBERT NAG: You don’t want to know my opinion.

LYNCH: I do, go ahead and share.

NAG: No, it’s just a childish opinion, you know. Dictatorship maybe because no, that’s not going to work, really. It’s just a joke, a childish joke.

LYNCH: This generation may not know that much about what happened two decades ago, but there’s no doubt these young men and women carry the weight of the past. The expectations of 1989 have come to land at the feet of those who will have to move forward into the country’s uncertain future. For The World, I’m Laura Lynch in Budapest.

First breach in the Iron Curtain

The World — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 21:56:58 +0000

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Before the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, Hungary tore down its barbed wire. Hungary’s prime minister didn’t ask permission in Moscow. He just told Soviet President Gorbachev it was a done deal. Hundreds would escape to the West in a single day. The World’s Laura Lynch went back to Western Hungary.

Retired border guard Arpad Bella remembers when the fences at the border were electrified. (Photo: Laura Lynch)

MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI, and WGBH in Boston. The Berlin Wall came down 20 years ago signaling the end of the Cold War. That of course happened in Germany but some, including a former German leader, say it was communist Hungary that kicked the first stone out of the wall. It all involved some critical decisions by a handful of Hungarians and a fateful picnic. The World’s Laura Lynch has the story from Western Hungary.

[TRAFFIC]

LAURA LYNCH: Cars cross freely into Austria on this narrow road just outside the border town of Sopron. There are no guards, no one checking passports. Under European Union rules everyone can pass freely. Retired border guard Arpad Bella remembers when it wasn’t like that at all. The fence was electrified, land mines were underfoot and he was ready to shoot.

ARPAD BELLA: [SPEAKING HUNGARIAN]

TRANSLATOR: It was an order up until 1989 to fire if someone tried to cross the border illegally. If someone wanted to cross and he didn’t stop when he was ordered to do so, when that person tried to flee we had to use our guns.

LYNCH: But things were starting to shift at the beginning of 1989. The then prime minister, Miklos Nemeth, decided to order guards to switch off the electricity and dismantle the barbed wire billing it as a cost-saving measure. Advisors warned him against it. They feared there would be a repeat of the violence of 1956 when the Soviets cracked down on an uprising in Hungary. So in March of 1989 Nemeth went to Moscow to tell Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev about his plans.

MIKLOS NEMETH: I was not asking for permission from him but I briefed him. I told him that we made already the decision to pull down the Iron Curtain between Hungary and Austria mainly for financial reasons. For us, or for me, it was the most important thing – to check how strong Gorbachev position was that time. So then I told him we destroying, physically destroying, the barbed wired. First test. No negative reaction.

LYNCH: The fence at Sopron was dismantled. Nemeth made certain everyone knew about it. Laszlo Magas, a professor in a nearby town, got the message loud and clear. Magas had his own personal reasons for wanting to see the Iron Curtain fall.

LASZLO MAGAS: [SPEAKING HUNGARIAN]

TRANSLATOR: In the 50s for political reasons my mother was in prison for one and a half year precisely because she tried to escape to the west and she was caught.

LYNCH: Magas says what happened to his mother inspired him to organize what he and other activists called pan-European picnic at the end of August in 1989. They wanted to hold the picnic at the border, open it up for a few hours as a symbolic gesture, then go home. What neither Magas nor guard Bella Arpad knew was that bus loads of East German’s were on their way to their border intent on escaping to the west. They were in effect refugees who had come to Hungary on holiday and stayed until they saw posters written in German advertising the picnic. Hungary’s government was responsible for the posters – part of a plan to encourage the refugees to the border that day. Arpad and his fellow guards weren’t told about the plan or what to do when the East German’s approached.

BELLA: [SPEAKING HUNGARIAN]

TRANSLATOR: It was impossible for the five of us to stop 600 East German’s who were coming toward us. The only way to stop them would have been to use our weapons. The government simply dumped the responsibility onto our shoulders.

LYNCH: Arpad had only seconds to make a decision.

BELLA: [SPEAKING HUNGARIAN]

TRANSLATOR: If we had tried to stop them it would have made things worse. If we had fired warning shots there would have been so much panic. There would have been violence. We would have had to use force. But if we let them go without doing anything then I would be responsible for it because I didn’t obey the orders.

LYNCH: Arpad told his fellow guards to stand aside. All day long the East Germans kept coming. Six hundred and seventy one of them in total. Laszlo Magas watched in amazement and also with a little bit of fear.

MAGAS: [SPEAKING HUNGARIAN]

TRANSLATOR: Obviously we all thought this might have consequences and in the evening we did get threats. But the next morning people said we made history. And something really important had occurred.

LYNCH: Over the next few weeks more and more East German’s poured over the border. Within three months the Berlin Wall had fallen and Prime Minister Nemeth was presiding over a new Hungary.

NEMETH: I did not do the impossible. But I have done all it was possible that time. And that’s why I am so proud of the very fact that when I stepped down in May 1990 and I went back to see in my native village my father, he clapped my shoulders and said to me son well done.

LYNCH: Two decades later the country is struggling. The economy is in tatters. There are deep political divisions and a recent poll suggests many Hungarians say they’ve lost more than they gained since 1989. Standing at the site of that momentous picnic Laszlo Magas acknowledges the problems but he believes it’s all been worth it.

MAGAS: [SPEAKING HUNGARIAN]

LYNCH: He says, I think yes the fact we got freedom that my family is living in peace. As for the conflicts we’re facing now they’re part of human nature. I’m not going to get into that now.

For The World I’m Laura Lynch, near Sopron, Hungary.

Remembering East Germany

The World — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 20:15:21 +0000

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, young people in Germany don’t give a lot of thought to what was once known as the GDR or East Germany. The communist state once carved out a large portion of their homeland, dividing it not just geographically, but also ideologically. But now few know much about a place that ceased to exist before they were even born. Though Germany was unified in 1990, much of the eastern part of the country still lags behind in unemployment, investment, and innovation. And while some teachers and parents would rather not dwell on a recent but painful past, others say remembering is the only way to move the whole country forward. Susan Stone reports from Berlin. Download MP3

MARCO WERMAN: German Chancellor Angela Merkel delivered a speech today to a joint session of the US Congress. Merkel grew up in what was communist East Germany. Today she thanked US law makers for America’s support in the years leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall. That happened 20 years ago next week. Now there’s a whole generation of German’s born after the wall came down and as Susan Stone reports from Berlin many young Germans know little about their country’s recent painful past.

SUSAN STONE: As the autumn sun sets a group of 15 and 16 year olds from the central western city of Selm have just about had their fill of history. Still they crowd around Hans-Michael Schulze, a guide at Berlin’s DDR Museum. The boys perk up when we get to the Trabant exhibit. Schulze tells them how long East Germans waited to get these cheap plastic polluting cars and why they were nearly the only autos available.

HANS-MICHAEL SCHULZE: [SPEAKING GERMAN]

TRANSLATOR: Giving a tour like this now, 20 years after the end of East Germany, well it’s really astounding how little is known.

STONE: The kids have the basics. They know there was a Berlin Wall and the Stasi, the secret police, but not much more. History teacher Nicole Abendroth is accompanying her class. East Germany is on the lesson plan for later in the year. She says the tenth graders don’t have much of connection to the former East.

NICOLE ABENDROTH: [SPEAKING GERMAN]

TRANSLATOR: I think in the end the DDR amounts to a feeling. What people experienced here essentially confined to their country and that is truly how to convey I have to admit. That’s why I think it’s important to come here. That the students really get a chance to get to know what it was like.

STONE: Across town at the Stasi Museum 18-year-old Kathrin Weiss and her classmates gasp and laugh as a guide describes the miles of files the Stasi kept on ordinary citizens. Weiss says she’s heard a bit about East Germany from her godmother who grew up there. It wasn’t so bad, her godmother told her. As long as you didn’t criticize the system you could have a normal family life just like in the West. But Kathrin is starting to question that.

KATHRIN WEISS: [SPEAKING GERMAN]

TRANSLATOR: It’s not right what she said but she probably just didn’t know. She never realized. She never noticed. And maybe, my God, when you’re not seriously confronted with it you don’t really deal with it. She grew up that way so she didn’t know anything else.

STONE: Kathrin is from Bavaria what was once part of West Germany. Students like her often know more about the former East than young people living in the region today. That’s according to the Stasi Museum’s Uwe Hillmer. He and colleagues at Berlin’s Free University spent three years interviewing students about this period. But Hillmer says it’s not just students who are uninformed.

UWE HILLMER: [SPEAKING GERMAN]

TRANSLATOR: The division of Germany in the post-war period is probably one of the most documented in history. But the reality is that the collective historical memory is at zero. And all these countless 20^th anniversary events aren’t changing everything. We’re stuck at zero.

STONE: Not far from the Stasi Museum sit two teenagers, Robin and Robert, whose parents grew up in East Germany. Have they visited the Stasi Museum, the DDR Museum, or the Berlin Wall Memorial?

ROBIN AND ROBERT: [SPEAKING GERMAN]

STONE: The answer each time is no. And that’s not uncommon for young people in Berlin. Robert says he’d like to visit a museum with his father to give them a better venue for discussing this history than the car or the breakfast table. Robin hasn’t talked much about East Germany with his parents but he does remember this comment.

ROBIN: [SPEAKING GERMAN]

TRANSLATOR: My mother told me for example, it was a very socially-minded time. That there was work for everyone. Not like today where we have so many unemployed people just sitting around. Actually it wasn’t such a bad time. I think it was good.

STONE: These are troubling statements for some Germans who view it as a dangerous nostalgia. But they’re also legitimate memories that contribute to a national fabric of understanding says Leopold Gruen. Gruen is a Berlin-based film maker who grew up in East Germany, later married a West German woman, and had two kids. The fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification paved the way for his family.

LEOPOLD GRUEN: [SPEAKING GERMAN]

TRANSLATOR: For me the most important thing in relaying history is that you have to search for traces in your own biography, in your family. Then ultimately you have the chance to share the experience of history. Private histories are the tiles of the mosaic. They’re like the pieces of a puzzle that can somehow be put together.

STONE: As successive generations grow up and pass on complex histories to their own children, it’s important again in Germany not to forget the past. The hope is that in this anniversary year marking the fall of the Berlin Wall somehow the shadows of the past will illuminate Germany’s future. For The World I’m Susan Stone in Berlin.