Euphoria & beyond
Wilpert, Czarina
LETTER FROM WEST BERLIN EUPHORIA & BEYOND NEW IMMIGRANTS & OLD It's almost time for some, the time has already come for sober second thoughts about the piercing of the Berlin wall. But first the...
...The Turks, once hopeful of equal status within the European community, see their position destabilized by the latest developments...
...Even before that, there were the Poles during the eighties the city's fastest growing population group...
...Some 800,000 East Berliners crowded into the center of West Berlin that weekend, free for the first time in twenty-eight years...
...Xenophobia and ethnic stratification already exist in the West, and may be intensified...
...But there was, of course, much more...
...A similar survey in West Germany discovered that 60 percent of those interviewed would favor reunification even at the cost of German neutrality...
...It was truly strange to see those cold stares turn to smiles...
...Museums, the aquarium, and the zoo welcomed East Berliners without charge...
...It doesn't have to be the case...
...In conversations, my West German colleagues have been quick to point out that "they" the Easterners will probably be more xenophobic than "we...
...Even on a television screen (we in West Berlin watched too), it was a remarkable sight...
...But first the moment must be savored...
...for the first time we listen to their once-stodgy radio news and TV talk shows...
...What will this mean for Berlin itself, for the country, and for Europe...
...The income and currency gaps between Poland and the Federal Republic are so vast that many Polish academics and qualified technicians are among the workers flocking into Germany...
...Developments have come with a rapidity beyond belief...
...The first arrivals were welcomed with flowers, champagne, coffee, cake, and schnapps, as though they were long-lost relatives or the unexpected survivors of a major catastrophe...
...In the euphoria of East-West solidarity, what is seen as a victory of capitalism over socialism might bring the decline or disintegration of the progressive, socially responsible left...
...Since the first exodus of thousands through Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the flow of information about the other Germany has been unrelenting...
...urban areas...
...Many West Berliners opened their homes to their "brothers and sisters" from the East...
...In East Germany, not even the opposition to the establishment is unanimous on this score, as is evident from a comment by Barbel Bohley, one of the founders of the opposition group, New Forum...
...Some looked to the future...
...And the people at least, the East Germans I met were well aware of all this...
...Meantime, Berliners feel they are living in the center of the world...
...As an American who moved to West Berlin in 1968,1 found it hard to understand how people could live in so repressive a society as East Germany's, with such great and obvious gaps between its proclaimed "socialist" democracy and its rigid, authoritarian, paramilitary structures...
...Such measures, and other social programs, were part of the the coalition agreements between the ruling Social Democrats and the Greens...
...One reason for relief was the housing shortage...
...Before the opening of the wall, West Berliners were engaged in serious debates over proposals to include the settled foreign worker population in a multicultural society...
...Some 20,000 are officially registered, but the number reaches 100,000 if one includes those who entered as ethnic Germans, as tourists, those seeking refugee status, and entrepreneurs...
...In the sixties and seventies it was seen alternately as the center of the extraparliamentary opposition and as the "showcase of the West" maintained as such, in pointed contrast to the drabness of East Berlin, by subsidies from the West German government...
...Though some have warned that public opinion polls in East Germany may not be scientific enough to be trusted, surveys have become more frequent, and the most recent found that 61 percent of respondents were favorable to reunification as a political objective...
...German politicians are aware of the sensitivities of their allies and neighbors to this issue, and everyone is bending over backwards to recognize that, while the two parts of Germany may belong together, their union can only be discussed in the context of general European development...
...News is a problem: there is too much to absorb...
...But the tremendous shortage of housing and the cost of supplying new units have compromised the coalition's ability to carry out their pledges...
...West Berlin is a "green city" with a population of two million...
...Questions rise...
...But only some 10,000 registered as immigrants...
...CZARINA WILPERT Czarina Wilpert is an American sociologist living in West Berlin...
...Welcoming migrants from East Germany and Eastern Europe is costly...
...Imagine what the German economy united with the East can offer Europe and the EEC," a German friend remarked...
...Tents were put up, churches opened, parts of airport buildings and the hallways of shopping centers were made available...
...It can't be," she said, "that we've lived forty years for nothing, and that the future holds no more for us than to become just another state of the Federal Republic of Germany...
...Given that conviction, nobody, East or West, talked much about German reunification...
...The great majority of their guests had gone back home, some crying, "See you next week...
...It was a weekend marathon...
...It's possible too, and something to worry about, that the new settlers from the East, fed up with communism and seeking their Germanic roots, will provide new potential for the far right "Republikaner" party...
...Daniel Barenboim and the Berlin Philharmonic offered a free afternoon conceit as did the German opera company...
...An American friend watching the hundreds of thousands rushing through the wall on November 10 was told by her German neighbor, "Now we can send those Poles back...
...Visitors from the East got free admission to events regular and special...
...Alongside an exotic subculture of alternative life styles and autonomous groups (the little Istanbul of Berlin's Turkish quarters, and more recently its controversial Polish markets), the wealth and luxury of the West German economy have grown pervasively visible...
...Rules were set aside, exceptions were made...
...There were laughter and tears, elation, joy, euphoria as the people of the two Berlins joined to celebrate a massive outdoor festival resembling New Year's Eve in Times Square...
...He was hardly the first to think about reunification...
...it could mean the reduction or elimination of programs planned for the education of women and of foreigners who have been here for more than two decades...
...But there will be more permanent immigrants, and other changes difficult to foresee...
...Extra subway and elevated trains were put into motion, running more frequently and for longer hours than usual...
...Another question may have larger implications: Will mono-culturalism and national pride again dominate German politics...
...That is a stunner not just for Germany but in all of Europe and beyond...
...Among the initiatives discussed were municipal voting rights for foreign residents and dual citizenship for the German-born children of foreigners...
...Evidently, much else lies ahead before the last word will have been spoken...
...on the following weekend nearly one-and-a-half million Easterners came to West Berlin...
...Experienced firsthand, it was stunning...
...Migration is changing all that...
...The suddenness of the event created a spontaneity and flexibility unknown in Berlin...
...they show disdain for their 150,000 Vietnamese "guest workers...
...The media, totally controlled, were channels of pure propaganda and blatant hypocrisy...
...In the social hierarchy Turkish workers and their families stand near the bottom, just above refugees from the third world...
...Our local paper has been carrying four extra pages daily about East Germany...
...But in the past decade remarkable changes have taken place...
...This momentum first became visible to the rest of the world after Hungary opened its borders to the West in September...
...How many Germans feel like the author of the graffiti scrawled on the Berlin wall: "Foreigners, please don't leave us alone with the Germans...
...Similar reactions are of concern to the 150,000 Turks living in Berlin...
...Strangers talked to strangers in a city where people don't look one another in the eye...
...East and West rock bands organized an all-night concert in the Deutschlandhalle, one of the city's largest indoor arenas.The local economy boomed, fueled by the 100-mark gift presented to each East Berliner on presentation of an identity card...
...Indeed, on the Monday morning after that first weekend, many West Berliners were relieved to find life had returned to normal...
...But since 1987 the flow of Germans from East Germany and ethnic Germans from Central Europe has steadily mounted...
...On November 10, Willy Brandt, former mayor of Berlin and onetime chancellor of West Germany, speaking from Berlin's city hall, said, "We are now in a situation where that which belongs together may grow together...
...But the future is not that easy to see, except that the euphoria will not last forever...
...She has engaged in research on labor migration between West Germany and Turkey and in the comparative study of new ethnic minorities in Europe...
...banks, post offices, and shopping centers opened without regard for the union-negotiated, government-enforced official schedules...
...But many foreigners here perceive this as a looming danger...
...Even before November the city's hotels, pensions, and emergency housing facilities were already jammed, this because of the numbers of East German settlers,"Ubersiedler," who had entered in previous weeks via Hungary and Czechoslovakia along with the ethnic German "Aussiedler" who have come within the past year from Poland, Rumania, and the Soviet Union, hi this situation, housing had to be improvised for the weekend visitors...
...They are already seen as second-class citizens...
...A detail: Some describe that first night (November 9) as the time when the Volkspolizei (the East German "people's police") learned to smile...
...Before the wall opened many thousands of Poles came on weekends to sell food, vodka, cigarettes, and baby clothes purchased at home at subsidized prices at the unlicensed Polish market...
...Now, it's an inevitable topic in both Germanys, one that has gained greater legitimacy since the Leipzig demonstrators of November 20 waved the banner reading "Germany: a single fatherland...
...Will the standard of living begin to polarize here as in U.S...
...A Polish judge is employed as a cleaning woman...
...Ranking above them are not only settlers from East Germany and the ethnic Germans from other Soviet bloc states, who have an automatic right to West German citizenship on entering the country, but also migrants from European-community countries and the Polish-Poles, whose irregular status has been largely ignored...
...As indeed they were...
...It pays to commute for one day's work...
...of the eight million visitors arriving here and elsewhere in West Germany since the borders were opened, only one-half of 1 percent expressed an intention to settle permanently...
...In this period it was a city of students and the aged, largely dependent on foreign workers, and plagued by capital flight...
...Will the numbers of homeless people keep on growing...
...Engineers paint houses and work on construction...
...We hear the names of people and groups we had never heard of before...
...It escalated with the masses who marched the streets of Leipzig, Dresden, and East Berlin, chanting "Wir sind das Volk" "We are the people" and again on the day Erich Honecker was replaced by Egon Krenz...
...The labor market has been flooded with thousands of illegal Polish workers willing to work long hours, day and night, without insurance and health benefits, for half the wages of a registered laborer...
...Yet the structures appeared to be so fixed, police control so rigid and pervasive, that as recently as a year ago we thought that change in the German Democratic Republic was still far off, not to be seen in our lifetime...
...Well into the eighties, nevertheless, West Berlin remained the city in Germany and in Europe where urban life was comfortable, uncrowded, decentralized, and rich in cultural diversity...
...Another Polish woman takes the train from Wroclaw (Breslau) in the morning and returns the same night, to do one day's cleaning in the offices of a therapist who practices in my neighborhood...
...And they did...
...Will East Berliners' new freedom to visit as often as they like, and perhaps to moonlight on the labor black market at low wages, create a permanent high unemployment rate...
Vol. 116 • December 1989 • No. 22
