Fast Food Nation - Eric Schlosser [128]
The protesters in other East German cities were mainly college students and members of the intelligentsia; in Plauen they were factory workers and ordinary citizens. Some of the demonstration’s most fervent supporters were long-haired, working-class fans of American heavy metal music, known in Plauen as die Heavies, who rode their motorcycles through town distributing antigovernment pamphlets. As the crowd grew, people began to chant Mikhail Gorbachev’s nickname — “Gorby! Gorby!” — cheering the Soviet leader’s policies of glasnost and perestroika, demanding similar reforms in East Germany, defiantly yelling “Stasi go home!” One large banner bore the words of the German poet Friedrich von Schiller. “We want freedom,” it said, “like the freedom enjoyed by our forefathers.”
Police officers and Stasi agents tried to break up the demonstration, arresting dozens of people, firing water cannons at the crowd, flying helicopters low over the rooftops of Plauen. But the protesters refused to disperse. They marched to the town hall and called for the mayor to come outside and address their demands. Thomas Küttler, the superintendent of Plauen’s Lutheran church, volunteered to act as a mediator. Inside the town hall, he found Plauen’s high-ranking officials cowering in fear. None would emerge to face the crowd. The equation of power had fundamentally changed that day. A mighty totalitarian sys-tem of rule, erected over the course of four decades, propped up by tanks and guns and thousands of Stasi informers, was crumbling before his eyes, as its rulers nervously chain-smoked in the safety of their offices. The mayor finally agreed to address the crowd, but a Stasi official prevented him from leaving the building. And so Küttler stood on the steps of the town hall with a megaphone, urging the soldiers not to fire their weapons and telling the demonstrators that their point had been made, now it was time to go home. As bells atop the Lutheran church rang, the crowd began to disperse.
A month later, the Berlin Wall fell. And a few months after that extraordinary event, marking the end of the Cold War, the McDonald’s Corporation announced plans to open its first restaurant in East Germany. The news provoked a last gasp of collectivism from Ernst Doerfler, a prominent member of the doomed East German parliament, who called for an official ban on “McDonald’s and similar abnormal garbage-makers.” McDonald’s, however, would not be deterred; Burger King had already opened a mobile hamburger cart in Dresden. During the summer of 1990, construction quickly began on the first McDonald’s in East Germany. It would occupy an abandoned lot in the center of Plauen, a block away from the steps of the town hall. The McDonald’s would be the first new building erected in Plauen since the coming of a new Germany.
uncle mcdonald
AS THE FAST FOOD industry has grown more competitive in the United States, the major chains have looked to overseas markets for their future growth. The McDonald’s Corporation recently used a new phrase to describe its hopes for foreign conquest: “global realization.” A decade ago, McDonald’s had about three thousand restaurants outside the United States; today it has about seventeen thousand restaurants in more than 120 foreign countries. It currently opens about five new restaurants every day, and at least four of them are overseas. Within the next decade, Jack Greenberg, the company’s chief executive, hopes to double the number of McDonald’s. The chain earns the majority of its profits outside the United States, as does KFC. McDonald’s now ranks as the most widely recognized brand in the world, more familiar than Coca-Cola. The values, tastes, and industrial practices of the American fast food industry are being exported to every corner of the globe, helping to create a homogenized international culture that sociologist Benjamin R. Barber has labeled