World - Raising a glass to East Germany

Stephanie Kirschner
"I don't know if I ever hit anyone, it was always dark," says a 50-year-old truck driver and occasional DJ who gives his name only as Hans-Holger. He is recalling the days when, as a 19-year-old border guard for the old German Democratic Republic, he was required to shoot at fellow citizens trying to flee to West Germany. Later, he himself served a 17-month prison sentence for attempting to escape the GDR. Still, he's nostalgic for the old East, which is why he's a regular at "Zur Firma," an East Berlin pub whose theme derives from the GDR's feared secret police organization, the Stasi. "I feel snug in this place," says Hans-Holger. "Ostalgia is better than what we have today."

With its orange walls and rustic interior, the small pub in the former working-class district of Lichtenberg may look like most other bars in the neighborhood, but where other establishments might sport a deer head, Zur Firma has a surveillance camera. Other appointments include old wiretap devices and what appears to be a 1970s interrogation room. And then there's the venue's name, which translates as "The Firm," a colloquial name for the Stasi used in the old East Germany. And also its slogan: "Come to our place — or we'll come to yours."
Victims' organizations don't see the joke: They reacted furiously when the pub, situated only yards away from the large gray building complex that used to house the Stasi, opened last month. The Union of Organizations for the Victims of Communist Oppression called for a boycott of the bar, warning that it would "negate the suffering of thousands of former political prisoners or victims of persecution" by turning it into a "fun factor" in order to make profit. Owner Wolfgang Schmelz, not unhappy with the publicity generated by the controversy, dismisses the accusations. "Nothing is being trivialized here, no victims are being mocked," he insists. "All it is, is satire."
Making light of a very dark past — "Ostalgia" as the phenomenon is known — has come into vogue in Berlin recent years. Visitors to the once divided German capital can browse souvenir stores selling "authentic" GDR memorabilia; stay at the "Ostel", a hostel decorated in GDR fashion; or take a "Trabi-safari," which involves a sightseeing tour in the notoriously rickety Trabant, ubiquitous passenger car of the GDR. Just last week, former Berlin Senator for Cultural Affairs Thomas Flierl denounced as "tasteless mockery" the service that allows tourists at the old "Checkpoint Charlie" crossing between the two sides of Berlin to be photographed with actors dressed as U.S. and Russian soldiers.
The "Ostalgia" industry leaves people like Klaus Schroeder speechless. "People really seem to think the GDR was a big joke, which results in such crudities as a Stasi pub," says the professor of political science at Berlin's Free University. "What's gonna be next, a Gestapo Inn? It's absurd."
Schroeder is the author of a recent study about how little German youngsters today actually know about the GDR. He and his colleagues surveyed over 5,000 students aged between 15 and 17, and found that many, especially those actually living in areas that formed part of East Germany, have an extremely distorted view of the GDR. More than half of the respondents, for example, believe that the GDR was "not a dictatorship," and that the Stasi was an intelligence service like any other, deployed mostly against people of other countries rather than against its own citizens. The figures are slightly lower among respondents in western Germany. The study also found that students tend to remember the social policies of the GDR in a very positive light, often ignoring the repressive character of the system.
"What people remember is not the real GDR, but a fictitious country that never existed," says Schroeder, whose study caused a stir when it was published last month. "We have published many studies in the past, but we never had such a strong resonance," he says. "This issue is really stirring people up. Germany still seems to be more divided than people think. It's like an open wound and when you touch on it, it hurts."
So how is it that a political system that many remember only for the pain and trauma it inflicted is a source of nostalgia for others? Schroeder is sure that parents and teachers are to blame. "The older people are aware of what the GDR really was like, but they don't say it," he says. "People generally tend to have a blurred vision of their own past lives. And the public and schools have failed to act as a counterbalance."
Talking to the regulars at Zur Firma, however, it's clear that one of the main sources of "Ostalgia" is the economic disappointment experienced by many former residents of the GDR that followed reunification. Unemployment in the east is high and so is resentment at the insecurity and unpredictability of life under a competitive capitalist system, and this fuels nostalgia for a state that assigned a job to every citizen and took care of basic needs.
An idealized memory of a more egalitarian economy seems to guide Jutta, 50, another regular at Zur Firma. Asked what she tells her daughter, now 22, about the former country in which she was born, Jutta answers: "I talk about social behavior. I tell her that people were there for each other without expecting something in return." Most of the GDR's approximately 200,000 former political prisoners are unlikely to agree.