Berlin Wall and the Separation of Germany during the Cold War - Abby Meyer

My topic is about the Berlin Wall and the separation of Germany, focusing on peoples personal experiences about differences between the East and West, as well as escapes. I interviewed my grandmother Elfriede Meyer, who escaped East Germany just as the Cold War began, my mother Cindy Atman, who visited both West and East Germany in the late 1980’s, and Axel Roesler, who grew up in West Germany during the Cold War.

Interview with Axel Roesler

Abby: First to just set the stage, what side of the wall did you live on, and during what time period?

Axel: West Germany, I was born in 73, we lived in West Germany, we lived close to the Harz, which is this like smaller mountain range, through which the wall cuts right through, the fence right. So it is northern Germany, and the closest city is Gottingen, this is a big university town, this is where Max Planck got the Nobel Prize for physics, this is funny, basically in Gottingen all the scientists who worked on the atomic bombs, were trained in Gottingen, all of them received their PhDs there or were there for a while, so that’s just a side note, but we lived 40 minutes north in a small village, 600 people and um, yeah West Germany, but my dad’s parents, my dad is from Poland originally , and my dad’s family, his parents lived in east Germany, in Bortzen, east of Leipzig small town you know, and this is where his parents lived, so we always had this connection of receiving from the grandparents packages for Christmas and then when I was 4 years old I went to east Germany for the first time, through the border stations and all

Abby: so you could still cross over

Axel: yeah, yeah, we were able to go over any time, we just had to file a lot of paperwork, especially if you had family over there, they were always afraid that you would smuggle them out, so my dad had to file extensive paperwork and but we went over in 77 and usually went once a year, but his parents were not allowed to come over to the west.

Abby: because the westerners were allowed to cross over, but the easterners were not

Axel: exactly, only if they were retired, only after they were retired they could come over to visit us, so I remember my grandmother coming over in like 76 or so when I was very little

Abby: so that lead into my second question which was: do you know people on the other side of the wall? Besides your grandparents, were there any other connections that you couldn’t see or something because of the separation?

Axel: yeah you know interesting thing was in 1986 I think, there was a couple coming over from e Germany they were like 60 or 70, they chose to relocate to w. Germany at their retirement, and that was towards the end of the GRD right, and they were friends of my parents, same age and we hung out a lot, and they were from Eisenach , which was where martin Luther worked on…..but it turned later out that he had a little bit of political history with the GDR, he was a school teacher and obviously a party member, and it was really strange, whenever it would come to political discussions it would get very funky. In 94 I went over there, to e. Germany to study, in Halle to study design, and there I met lots of, 60% of the students were from east Germany, and my roommate, we lived in dorms, was from e Germany, and we talked a lot about growing up. Also my first girlfriend immigrated from the GDR I think in 87, no 88 and the basically had to give up everything, basically had to donate everything, and then they were allowed to leave e germ she was from e. Berlin, and we had lost of discussion of what it was like as a child.

Abby: So did you have any personal experiences with the Berlin wall in particular?

Axel: no, I never saw it while it was still up
Abby: so it was easy to avoid

Axel: yeah, because you had to go to Berlin, and going to Berlin was sort of a big deal because you had to go through e. Germany. I mean you would take the autobahn, and you could just drive so you never had to cross any boundaries, but I never knew how they did it, I mean the autobahn was going to e Berlin from w Germany, but there was no fence so I don’t know how they managed that. Often times I asked myself that as a child it’s kind of funny there is this border at e Germany and at e Berlin, but how do people get to Berlin? Um so you would take a train. I think getting out was the problem. I mean getting in was sort of easy but getting out right. But now I wasn’t in Berlin when the wall was up I was in Berlin late, the first time I was there was 95, 6 years after the reunion. But I was many times at the fence like the wall at border in the Hartz like when we did school tours and stuff we would go, we did once this school trip where we did cross country ski and we skied through the forest and then all of a sudden come to this little view point and down there was like this one mile wide death strip, it was literally called the death strip, the trees were all gone and in the middle is this fence, and it went on for miles, and it was very strange, and then you realize that something really strange happened.

Abby: how has the Berlin wall or the separation of Germany affected your life now?

Axel: I think it was the most poignant display of injustice I have encountered early on as a child. You know, I mean it was just so, it was a level of violence and just the existence of it and you know you would read in the newspaper that people would die trying to cross the border basically every month every week, and when I grew up, east German television was very important to us because we could receive it as we were at the border and they have a different television system there, you can only watch it in black and white and they had wonderful children’s programs, the whole day they would play children’s programs because they were much more child friendly than west Germany

Abby: really?

Axel: yeah because it had something to do with, in a socialist system they have better child care because women are expected to work just like men, so that’s much more quality between the genders so they would take care much more of the children than west Germany which was still sort of traditional man goes to work wife stay home you know. But the funny part with the television was that with every socialist country you have to focus on the children, preparing the children already with socialist values, they have their youth pioneers, or young pioneers, the children’s organizations. There were a lot of parallels, it sounds kind of harsh, to the Hitler youth, having the children wearing flags, and they had to go to a defense, military kind of camps where they would go shooting with wooden guns in the forest. It’s like a 400 blows, where the little French boys play war in the forest, and they did this with the kids, where they had to wear uniforms and they wore flags and when there was political parade the kids had to go, so as little children we didn’t understand all this political content in the shows you know, they would go to summer camp, but their summer camp was political, and I was keeping asking my parents like what’s going on, why do they have to swear on their president and why they have to wear flags you know and they were like well its political brain wash, they want to get the kids in the party.

Abby: so then the kids TV shows had a communist under theme

Axel: very mild, but very pronounced. Like values, you have to stand up for your friends, you can’t be an individual, you can’t be an innovator, you have to be a sports guy you know, like all the stuff you find in totalitarian regimes, it’s what they did with their kids, athletics was important, and I think the most prominent thing for the Olympic games, the GDR and the Russians and the Chinese, it’s still the same, the get all the medals, they pick them already as children and put them in these sports camps so that was that, and the other thing was that when I was four I went out with my dad on the train, and the train would stop and the border patrol would run with dogs into the apartments and they would be very rude to the passengers and I was just not used to that in w. Germany. They were like ‘oh get your coat off, what do you have in your pockets’ and I was four years old and my dad always recalls these stories of you were young enough to say what you though, I said ‘dad what are these evil men doing, why do they have dogs on top of the train, why does this men treat you like that’ you know this sort of confrontation with violence in the form of authority. And as a kid you totally pick up to that, your dad is being treated like that. Then of course the fact that they would kill people when they tried to flee, we saw this on television, like. I have to say the way all of this was presented on television had a political coating as well. So they would have these shows, I was like 6, 7 years old and they would show these shooting machines they had on the fence, like had these trap wires, and then you stepped on them they would shoot stuff at you with these shooting machines. And that’s one thing I remember from the wall that struck me as particularly disturbing

Abby: and this was on the East German television

Axel: it was all on e. German side. The West German side was not guarded, but on the e German side there was a 35 mile strip before the border where you could only go in with special permission. Oh coming back to your context with East Germany, later when I started in Halle, lots of contacts to sort of engineering people in East Germany, and lots of them had tried to flee, one of them was my professor for construction and technical drawing, and he and his friends they built a plane and they wanted to flee and they built it in an underground facility on their farm. So they put this plane together, and they wanted to flee, but then they didn’t, like all these stories of wanting to flee. Like my girlfriends parents, her dad had friends, he was actually part of their plan, they wanted to flee with surf boards. From the Baltic Sea across the Danish free open waters to the west waters. So they wanted to flee, and you know the earliest story of fleeing, as a child I always connected fleeing from this county that was locked up and it was very brutal. But I think in 1980 or 1981, this family flew, fled the East German part on this hot air balloon. And there was a big American film, and that was the first encounter where I asked my parents well why did they do that.
Abby: Clarification: was the TV that showed the shooting things East German or west German?
Axel: West German, East Germany never talked about the fence; they never officially acknowledged that people were dying. They never showed pictures of the fence, they said there is not a fence, there is a border that protects us from and invasion of the fascist countries, from the imperialists. They didn’t say fascist, they said imperialist. But there was never coverage in East Germany about the wall. And only in the very end in the 80’s 89 when the demonstrations started was there public discussion about what the wall was all about, that’s when all the east Germans fled to Hungary, when the Hungarian border was opened.

Abby: Finally, what are your feelings on the destruction of the wall, and the bringing down of the border?

Axel: most amazing thing that nobody thought would become possible to ever happen. I remember watching on TV that night and um when the east Germans crossed the border, um , and then since we were pretty close to the border, we were only like 35 miles away from the border, of course we saw the …. rolling on the streets, and of course all the East Germans came over and went shopping you know. The earliest thing was I did a bus tour through East Germany with my school, because obviously as the wall came down there was a lot of sort of emphasis on getting this into the classroom of what just happened. There were seminars, political seminars, and I was eleventh grade then so it was actually pretty intense already in terms of talking about the political repercussion and the organizations and so forth, so in 90 we did a trip over to East Germany and we crossed the border several times just to deal with it, you know the west German thing, the east German thing. And then saw some of the housing projects because you couldn’t just go to east Germany and do like sightseeing, you could only go to east Germany if you had family there and you had to fill out paperwork to visit someone, and actually everybody who went over to east Germany was sort of spied on while they were in east Germany, within families even, even in my family, I think my dad’s brothers wife was in the court, working at the court so she was on the current surveillance for ….., and sort of spying on my dad and what he bought there. And then they would go through his luggage when we would go back to west Germany, and he had to pay in west German currency again for the purchases he made while in east Germany and they had all these funky things, like when I heard this later on from many Americans who went to east Germany, so they would go to Berlin and they would go over checkpoint Charlie, and they had to exchange like a ridiculous amount of currency, dollars against east German currency and basically east German currency was worth nothing, but they made them exchange one to one and it was actually was like 100 to one ratio, one dollar was worth 100 east German marks.

Abby: so it was very expensive to travel

Axel: yeah, totally ridiculous, and then they would harass them at the border crossing, like they would put you in these endless lines when you had little kids and they would not tend to you and it was really horrible

Abby: so it’s just meant to discourage from you wanting to come at all

Axel: yeah and then they had the East German money, they couldn’t change the East German money back when they went over, it was prohibited to change it back and it was prohibited to bring east German currency out of the country, you would be arrested for that. So you would go into East Germany and you would have this 1000 German marks and you couldn’t buy anything because all the goods were so low quality, so they just pulled over a guy in the street and said here do you want this money you know, and they gave it to him and the guy was like I can take this you are probably being shadowed right now by secret police.

Abby: anything else you want to add, any final thoughts? Anything that would be pertinent?

Axel: um, well think about the fence between Mexico and Arizona, think about the fence between Palestine and Israel, think about the wall between North Korea and South Korea. You know history has told us nothing, and with the war, it sort of get forgotten, because the people died that were directly affected by it, um, in my case my parents had me when they were 46 so they were, they went through WWII and they saw all this mess and they had the experience with the separation of Germany. When something exists for 40 years, it leaves its mark in families and in generations right? It really creates hardship, and I think when I was studying in East Germany with the East Germans, we both had to deal with the wall and with the Germany history and so forth, and you realize after 40 years, of separation this other Germany was completely different. Like its incredible the power political indoctrination has on people’s lives. And how you can really sort of undermine then and change them, and there is no way back. I mean I talk to my friends from East Germany and what are the biggest differences and I think I have to say I haven’t been in contact with them in the last 10 years so much, but I have to say the biggest thing is that they took out the self consciousness and the pride, and they took out the competitiveness or the idea of like you have to be hard working and you have to be competitive and you have to be and individual, and you have to be able to identify the weak links in your organization and get rid of them, like fire them. You have a competitive hiring system. And that was for the longest time the biggest problem of the East German industries, they couldn’t get rid of the people who weren’t productive. And everything was corrupt, because that is the next thing you find in a totalitarian regime, on the surface everything is equal right, you have these community owned things and so forth, but there still is a reward system, in the background, like all these nations weren’t really communist, they were socialist, and socialist means no ownership, but there is special compensation for the people in charge, it pays off to be the leader, that’s why they have these strong leaderships systems

Abby: is that what it’s supposed to be, or is that what it becomes in practice?

Axel: that’s what it becomes in practice

Abby: so that’s not actually the definition of socialism…

Axel:… that’s what happens right. I think the official thing is that there is no ownership, but there is compensation for services, the people who take on more responsibilities have some form of reward. And they become respected members, and that means not everyone is equal. Do I get this right? It’s been a while. And that’s where it didn’t work out, where it became a totalitarian regime, where one party had total control. The overarching thing was the Cold War right, and this thing, well this happened to Germany, why did it happen? It happened because of the coalition between the allied forces and Russia during WWII bringing down Hitler, and how that agreement broke up completely. In 48 the Russians were basically isolating Berlin, and the Americans had the air bridge that flew into Berlin, and would bring in food and saved lives. And then there was no wall for the longest time, the wall was put up in 61, and I think in 58, it had something to do with a big uproar, was it in 1969 or 59 when the Russian tanks came to Berlin, that was an interesting turning point, so that was the big uproar, and then the Russian army moved into Berlin and set up a temporary fence and then the permanent fence in 61. Right and then the Prague spring revolution in 68 or 66, and then the interesting central thing at the end of all of this was the solidarity movement in Poland, and that is an incredible story all by itself. In Poland, that’s where to whole foundation for the fall of the Soviet Union more or less.
(recording runs out, more notes to come)

Interview with Elfriede Meyer (Oma)
Abby: What side of the wall did you live on and in what time period?
Oma: Well I lived in East Germany, which was Russian occupied, from 1945 to the end on 1947. In 1945 when the war ended, there was well, um somewhere in the end of March, they came into our region, the Americans came in first and then by the end of 1945 when the meeting was, they decided which country got which part of Germany. We fell under the Russian occupation, and then the American troops went out and the Russians came in, and even since there was Russian occupation ‘til 1989 I think it was. And that’s when the wall, in Berlin, fell, and that’s when Germany got reunited again.
Abby: So, did you know people on the other side of Germany that you lost contact with?
Oma: Oh yes, all my relations on my father’s side lived where the American occupation was, in the Rhine, in the south of Germany near Heinsberg. There were a few aunts and uncles and cousins, we lost all contact with them, and we couldn’t contact them anymore. We could write, yeah but we couldn’t visit them.
Abby: Were any East Germans allowed to leave at all?
Oma: Not really, it was really very difficult, I think old people they probably let out, but the young people, no they didn’t. If you wanted to visit, the first time I visited East Germany was oh, in probably 1972. I must clarify, in 1947 I met your grandfather, and we got married and went over to West Germany, and we lived in West Germany until 1953. We went over the border, because there was a border between the countries. We left East Germany for West Germany in 1947, round about December.
Abby: Can you explain that story? How did you cross the border?
Oma: Well, we took a train to a town, which was called Ilmenau, this is in the Hart mountains and it was in wintertime. There was a woman at border there, at the train station, and she said to us ‘did you want to go over the border’ and we said ‘yes’. She said ‘well I’ll take you’ because on this station it was a border station and there were guards there watching out for people who wanted to get from East Germany to West Germany. And this woman, she has a little cart, she said put your stuff there, I will say you are my niece and nephew, that’s how we got out of the station. And she gets us there for the day and during the nighttime she says she knows a few guards, we had to buy some cigarettes and a bit of money to bribe them and then we went over to West Germany. And there was a little river flowing through, which was called the Isla river, and through that water we had to go, she said the water is not very high because they, they closed the locks upstream, well when we got there, first of all it was winter, damp cold and snow, heavy snow. We were sitting there in a ditch, and we saw the Russian trucks going by, so my heart was really pumping (laughs). Well anyhow we got to the river and we passed through the river but it was higher than we expected. I had big ankle, no, knee boots on and the water went into my boots. Well anyhow we got over and once we were over well or course we had to change shoes and that sort of thing and of course we didn’t know which way to go so we just walked and then suddenly we were on the border again, where they uh what will you call that now, where they lift sort of a beam for the cars to go through, oh god, so we turned around quickly and wandered the other side and eventually we came to an English sort of a post, and they took us in and from there we went to, oh what’s that town called now, I don’t remember. That’s where we stayed overnight and the next day we had a job in Oldenburg, we were both watchmakers, we had a job there at a jewelers store, and there we, we had accommodations, and there was still rationing there. The food was still rationed, not as bad as in East Germany but it was still rationed, so we got those rationing, well we said we fled from East Germany and they accepted us, and there was meat and sugar and that sort of stuff was rationed, but clothing was free you could buy all that. From there, we stayed there for a while, and then we went to Bremen, and lived there for a while, and I also stayed in Kiel for a few months. And eventually in 1953 we left from Bremerhaven for Australia. That was must have been round about June. We arrived in Fremantle on the 7th of July in 1953. Ever since I lived here. And the first time I went back to Germany, oh must have been about 72 I think.
Abby: And you were able to go back to East Germany?
Oma: Yeah I was, I went back to see my sister, Tante Erie. I knew were going to go to East Germany, and that was a real, well, performance. I had to have a visa to get into East Germany so I had to write out papers to get in and I had to pay something, I think about twenty-five dollars or something to get the visa. We drove my car through the border to where Tante Erie lived, and on the border they took my passport away, and it went on a sort of running band and from there it went to a little house what was there and then they inspected it and I got it back alright, but I had to pay again to get into there, and there was another customs house where we had to go in and change some money, for every day you were in East Germany you had to spend twenty-five mark, so you had to change twenty-five west mark for twenty-five east mark. But their money wasn’t worth as much as the west mark was. And the worst part about it was I was very, very shocked because everything was in disrepair and dirty and I just didn’t feel right, it was horrible. But the money we couldn’t spend because there was nothing we could buy, absolutely nothing you could buy. My brother was going to buy me something that was in the window, like a bathrobe, and we went in there and said we would like to have a bathrobe and oh she said, we haven’t got one. So my brother said look it’s my sister, she came from Australia, I would like to buy her something, you got one in the window, oh she said we can’t take that out, its decoration. So he couldn’t buy it for me, and anything that was for sale we were not allowed to take out, we were only to take out handicraft stuff like wooden articles or plaques on the wall or some hand woven things, that was all we could take out, so they money we left with my brother because we couldn’t spend it and they didn’t exchange it again. Oh, with those papers that I had to fill in, we had to go to the police station and they had they papers there to say that we are here; they know that we are in the country. We weren’t allowed any farther than a radius of about 10 kilometers, and when we left East Germany again, we had to go to the police station and say we are leaving, so it was very, very controlled.
Abby: so they were basically trying to make it so difficult that no one would want to go?
Oma: exactly, very difficult. And everything was, well, they had a store which was called H.O. You could buy things there but well yes and no, it wasn’t really what we were used to in West Germany. Some of the stores you needed western money to buy things. They had everything, the Russians had everything, and ordinary people didn’t. The markets like when you go to your fresh markets, that stuff what came in I would feed to a dog, they had a green grocer, all what they had was potatoes, and carrots and onions. And there were some oranges in the window, and I said to my sister surely they won’t sell those oranges, they look absolutely horrible, and she said they sell them, so well, you know. There was another instance, there were lots of people standing in line, and I said to my brother, what are they standing in line for, what’s all that for? Oh there’s bananas in and like a wildfire around so people come and stand and wait for the bananas, so that’s what the situation was because you could not buy things when you wanted to, and there were always people in town. I said why are there so many people in town? Well you know they buy as things come in they buy for a birthday or for Christmas in advance because when they wanted it, it wasn’t there. The situation was really not very nice. Well anyway it survived and people survived and it ended in 1989 when the wall fell. And then of course things improved, the roads got better and they got everything they wanted, they could buy. So that’s about my story.
Abby: Did you ever have any personal experiences with the Berlin Wall?
Oma: Oh I did. Not that I was in Berlin itself, but I was actually in America, I visited a girlfriend of mine; she lived in Florida in one of those beaches where the naval base is there. And her husband was home and he said Inga, Inga come quickly, the wall is falling and we were only talking before and I had said that wall will never fall; Germany will never be reunited so we actually saw it on television, so what did we do? We got a bottle of wine, and tears were rolling down our cheeks because it was very exciting Abby, very exciting for us, you know. That’s how I experienced the wall, or the fall of the wall.
Abby: How has the separation of Germany affected your life now?
Oma: Well it didn’t affect me actually a great deal. It made me happy that Germany was reunited again, but for me it had no other meaning, just that I was united because I lived too far away. I was not in contact, well I was in contact with my sister sure, but you know the actual scenes of reuniting I can’t explain. I know there were people later on who were very unhappy because West Germany put so much money into East Germany because of the condition that it was in, and all the buildings and what they were and all were really dilapidated, some people were not very happy. And even on the Eastern side some people didn’t like it either because for years they were brainwashed from the Russians, you know more proletarian than democratic. Otherwise it didn’t affect me a great deal Abby.
Abby: Anything else you want to add, anything that would be pertinent to my topic?
Oma: I don’t think there is anything else I can add to it except that many people were unhappy in East Germany after the wall because it was very difficult to buy things and they really brainwashed the young people, well you know they had all those youth organizations and they all had to work, not that they did a great deal, but they all had to work whether you are a woman or a man, no matter what age you ah to work, and they didn’t get very much money, so people were restricted in many things, even in the schools, the teachers were told what to teach and overlook children who couldn’t, say, cope with the curriculum at the school, they just had to drag them along, they should have just been stayed behind a year, but teachers were obliged to take them up to the next level. So they were all very much restricted and very much under pressure. And well of course you didn’t say anything about the West Germany, you weren’t allowed to, when you came from West Germany to East Germany, you weren’t allowed to bring in any magazines or any newspapers, if they caught you on the border with it, they took it away from you. So they didn’t want to see anything like that. Television was only on their side; anything what came from the western part was blocked so they couldn’t see any western stations at all. They were very much under military pressure. That’s about all I have to say.

Interview with Cindy Atman (mom)
Abby: When did you visit Germany and where?
Cindy: I first visited Germany in 1983, on a backpacking trip through Europe, but I was only in West Germany, I went to Hamburg, Munich and Kempton. And then in 1987 I went to Berlin with my then boyfriend Mats and we went to a conference we was going to in West Berlin, and then went over to East Germany. We were in West Germany for about a week and we went to East Germany twice, I went over twice, once with Mats and once on my own.
Abby: What were your feelings upon seeing the wall in Berlin?
Cindy: Well I had heard, of course growing up, the wall was in existence my whole life and so I had of course heard about the wall, I had studied the war. So, I was sort of anxious to see it and then seeing it was pretty freaky actually, um we went over to East Berlin, and we went through Checkpoint Charlie, which I had of course heard all about. On the underground going over there, there were stops that you just went past, but you saw armed guards and there were people with guns. I went to a museum about the wall on the West Berlin side, an art exhibit that was very freaky and scary.
Abby: What was it like visiting the East?
Cindy: So we went over to the East and we were, you have to spend all the money that you are given, you have to change a certain amount of money and you have to spend the money that you have over there, and its actually really hard to spend the money because there’s not even really stores, and bad food. And we were in the part of the town where you know, you get off and you see all of the museumy sort of stuff, actually there weren’t museums, and then a young woman about our age came up to us and started talking to us and asked if we wanted to see other parts of Berlin and so of course we said yes, although maybe it wasn’t the wisest thing to do and she took us to other parts of town which weren’t the parts where normal tourists go, and we spent the entire day with her and there are three parts of the day that I will always remember. One was when we went to some kind of a park kind of place, but it wasn’t really a park, it was just concrete. There was like a concrete ping-pong table with no paddles or balls but we actually had a lot of fun playing imaginary ping-pong. When we were done with that we looked up and it was the 750th anniversary for Berlin so there were celebrations everywhere on the western side. She looked up and she could see this big huge Ferris wheel, and it was going on the west side and she just said in such a sad voice in her broken English, ‘see, you can look but you cannot go’ and it just was heartbreaking. Then later in the afternoon we were heading back to where we had to go and we had all this money we didn’t spend and we were going to just like give it to her, and then she asked us if we would change some money for her and we were going like oh gosh what are we going to do, and we were sitting on this bench right outside the Russian Embassy, and I’m like going how stupid can we be? We actually went ahead and changed the money and then we went back, and I arranged to meet her, Mats had to go to a conference the next day, I arranged to meet her, I don’t know if it was the next day or two days later, and when I went to meet her, there was this person who started following me actually in the west, and followed me and it was very scary so I went circuitously to the place where I was going to meet her and by the time I got there it was late and she was gone. Then actually that night I went back and we went to a concert at the Brandenburg Gate on the west side, and Tangerine Dream was playing and it was this laser show, which was big in the eighties. So there was this big rock and roll concert to celebrate Berlin’s birthday and we could see past the gate, you could see no mans land, and you could see the guards on the East German side who were standing there clearly listening to the music, they got to listen but they couldn’t go, it was just, it was really very scary and sad because all those people couldn’t leave, and it wasn’t their fault they couldn’t leave.
Abby: Can you highlight a few key differences you noticed between life in the East and the West?
Cindy: The east was grey, the buildings were grey, the people were sad, and um it wasn’t lifelike. We think of having a range of emotions, it was just like a monotone. And in the west it was this big huge celebration. There were parties and bars and I was young in those days, and we enjoyed the West Berlin life. Anyway, in the west it seemed to be a regular happy life, and in the east there were people with guns.
Abby: Could you tell that the East was starting to rebel at this point, were there any signs of rebellion, because that was around the beginning of when communism started to fall apart.
Cindy: Well I thought, so the girl who was talking to us, we clearly weren’t the first people she had done that to, my suspicion was she would have, it would have been much nicer for her if I wasn’t there and she could have tried to strike up a relationship with Mats, um you know, perhaps it was easier for her to that at that point than it would have been years before that. But no, I was only there two days, the second day when I when I was going to meet the girl, and I just spent the day sort of wandering around. I remember the reflection of this old beautiful church reflected in the windows of this god awful ugly Berlin building, they were all like square. But anyways I went to this bar to have lunch and I sat at the bar and started talking to the guy next to me who talked more openly that I would have thought, and at the end I showed him some after eight dinner mints in my bag which I brought to give to the woman, and I said I don’t know if you can take these but I would love to give them to you, and he knew them but couldn’t take them because he didn’t know who was watching. I felt terrible that I even offered. I had never been in a place where people weren’t free before.
Abby: Soon after you were there, the wall fall and how did that feel?
Cindy: Oh it felt fabulous, jubilation. I was thinking oh thank goodness because I had met someone from behind the wall and I was hoping that she was happy and able to have more freedom. And of course all the visuals of people slamming sledgehammers into the wall was just amazing. I’ve seen pieces of the wall all over the world and it still makes you feel the same way.