A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [207]
“Horrible. There are about two million people out of work. The factories are gone. The teachers are changed because they were GDR people and had to teach people what the party said. The doctors are changed. Everything is gone. Everything that was good in our system—And they are so awful. They think they know everything—everything was good in the Bundesrepublik, and here everything was bad.”
Mia's figure of two million thrown out of work in the East was the often-quoted conservative estimate. Among those thrown out of work was her daughter, who had worked at a state-owned communications center that was eliminated after unification. Nor was Mia's criticism of the West unusually harsh. A good-natured new television comedy about Wessis and Ossis was popular, but in real life to most Berliners, the differences were more heartfelt than amusing. Ossis sometimes called the West Berliners Besserwessis, a play on the word Besserwisser—someone who thinks they know better.
Even time was different in the East and West. In the East there was always time to sit and discuss, to schmooze in both senses of the word, according to popular mythology. Easterners were even reputed to have better sex. The Westerners, from the Eastern point of view, were always in a hurry, always cold and insincere. They did not have true friendships. All they seemed to value was money.
To the Wessis, the Ossis seemed lazy, unproductive, backward, and parasitic. They had promised the East Germans everything to make them happy about unification, and then they became irritated because the Easterners expected them to deliver on their promises, as though Ossis should have been grateful that they got promises.
As time went on, East Berliners grew increasingly nostalgic about things that reminded them of the GDR. Not agents and informants or guard dogs. But they liked their neighborhood stores with their limited choice of second-rate food. They, in fact, were willing to continue their bananaless lifestyle. The once official party organ, Neues Deutschland, still maintained about 95,000 circulation. Club Cola, the East German Coca-Cola substitute, also maintained a following. Sales were greatly boosted with an advertising campaign that used a 1970s slogan “Hooray, Fm still alive,” with clips of excited crowds from the early Erich Honecker days.
There was the right-turn-on-red debate. After unification the green arrows next to East Berlin stoplights, which indicated that a right-turn-on-red was permitted, were taken down because there was no such traffic rule in the West. East Germans began painting green arrows next to stoplights. So many East Germans demanded their right-turn-on-red back that a government commission was set up to study it. In East Berlin, where the rhetoric of Communism was still in the vocabulary, this produced the headline, “Green Arrows Rehabilitated.” Local elections in 1994 showed that the Communist party was also being rehabilitated in East German cities.
Berlin remained a divided city, with most Berliners keeping to their own side. Only the tourist map changed, because what had never been mentioned when the Wall was there was that most of historic Berlin was in East Berlin. West Berlin made no sense as a European city. It was a city only in the way that new American cities are—a series of ingrown suburbs that pass for a city because of a critical mass of population and economic and cultural activity. A map of Berlin from before the late nineteenth century does not even include present-day West Berlin. Once the city was divided, people in the West did not like to mention to tourists that the historic European capital called Berlin was actually in the East. That was where the Spree River was, on which the city was built. The old city center was there, along with the working class districts that had grown up around industrialization. The old Jewish neighborhood, the streets