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By Root 1448 0

Although the committee included Democratic Socialists (former Communists) like Gregor Gysi, it also featured Christian Democratic leader Peterm Diestel, former mayor of West Berlin Heinrich Labertz, and Berlin Tageszeitung editor Michael Sontheimer, as well as such former East German dissidents as writer Stefan Heym and rock singer Tamara Danz.12 Artist Barbel Bohley, called the “mother of revolution” at the time of the collapse of the East German regime, did not join the committee but still protested: “For a half century we have not been allowed to decide for ourselves what we want. In the old days whenever we asked why things had to be done a certain way, we were told ‘Because that’s the way they are done in the glorious Soviet state.’ Now, since reunification, we’re told that we have to do everything the way it was done in West Germany.”13

East Germans who clambered over the wall in the heady days of 1989 now stay in East Berlin in the neighborhoods where the Western bistros and boutiques have not yet signed leases. There the old working class bars and groceries remain largely unchanged, except for the gambling machines near the doors and the too expensive Western goods that are gradually driving cheaper local products off the shelves. As has happened elsewhere in the land of McWorld where the expansion of the private sector has drained political support for the public sector, public monies are not available for projects of real reunification. The great empty space at Potsdamerplatz that once anchored the Wall and its shooting zones near the Brandenburger Tor has been turned over to private multinationals like Sony and Mercedes-Benz for purely commercial exploitation and development, public uses shoved aside. Taxi drivers talk about a new “Mauer im Kopf” (a wall inside people’s heads) that divides East and West more effectively (because without any visible coercion) than the physical wall ever did. Smug westerners boast they can “spot a former East German just by his or her gait,” and are buying up old two-cycle Trabent cars that look like toys for their nostalgia collections.14

Nostalgia—renamed “ostalgia” (nostalgia for the East)—has made a provocative comeback in the eastern part of Germany, as is evident in Frank Georgi’s nutty plan for an East German theme park (“Ossipark”). Many East Germans are feeling a kind of nationalist sentimentality about local goods, however shoddy when compared to their western counterparts; 80 percent claim to prefer traditional products. Beverages from Communist times like Club Cola and “Beer from Here” are taking on the products of McWorld’s behemoths, their ads proclaiming, “Hurrah, I’m still alive. Club Cola: Our Cola!” Shops in the East are featuring German Democratic “East-made” cigarettes (F-6’s) that retain their earlier packaging and taste formulas.15 Ironically, however, F-6 is owned by Philip Morris, one of McWorld’s giants anxious to compensate for the declining American market in tobacco. In a marketing memo for F-6 permeated by the commodification of identity politics, Philip Morris executives remind their employees that the brand is “a piece of East German cultural history and constitutes a meaningful part of the formation of identity.”16

Even the “Jugendweihe” has made a comeback: this anticlerical rite of passage ceremony by which young Communist pioneers once celebrated their coming of age has been revived by popular demand. In the first half of 1994 over seventeen thousand fourteen-year-olds participated in the confirmation process. Against the trends elsewhere that permit Hollywood to drive local fare off the screens, East German movies like the 1973 Legend of Paul and Paula are being shown again. Much of this revivalist mentality represents a reaction to perceived Western arrogance akin to the resentment typical of Jihad’s angry tribes. A market research firm warned that “the picture that East Germans have of West Germans is so negative that the word disapproval really doesn’t describe it. Hatred would be more like it.”17 Is it really any surprise that in 1991 when