Living where the wall was:

...The Wall Nevertheless, asked how the opening of the Wall has affectis no longer there...

...our own environmental and moral contamination...

...Thanks to huge West German trans- the pages of COMMONWEAL, fer payments to the East-on the order of a hundred billion marks knowing that they will find there a year-the social and economic misery of unemployment and industrial decline has largely been offset by welfare payments, a vigorously intelligent and culturally unemployment compensation, and other safety-net measures...

...considered too old to train for new jobs and too young to be While this kind of help is no doubt genuinely necessary to cogiven early retirement and pensions...

...Derogatory words like Meanwhile, all East Germans in key positions, from proBesserwessis (a play on the words better and Wessi, implying fessors to sanitation engineers, have been subjected to rigorWesterners who think they know it all and are far superior to ous scrutiny to determine the extent of their collaboration with their Ossi cousins) and Jammerossis (a play on the words whine the Communist regime...

...Their ideal is the clean white teeth and Ten issues for $10 smooth cheeks of a toothpaste commercial...

...Today her baby is a toddler...

...symbolic order that governed our world for half a century...

...without moving...

...They don't interest me at all...

...other way round-East Germans tend to perceive it as a kind The extent and ferocity of the hatred between East and West of colonialism...

...The Wall Museum in the House at Checkpoint say that traffic has increased, that they are worried about crime Charlie is still there, though Checkpoint Charlie itself is long and drugs and their children, and that a woman can't go out alone since gone...

...Meant ironically, it also revealed the extent of discomfort with rapid change...

...But it's not the same any more...

...particular wanted it...

...Where would the Korec (now a cardinal), like most of the Slovak bishops, has country be without the likes of them...

...The spine-tingling evil just isn't there...

...One of my more bit- I City, State, Zip: ter East German acquaintances suggested that what had hap- L 9124/93 Commonweal 24 September 1993: 17 pened to Rohwedder might well-and indeed should-happen and Ossi, implying Easterners who are constantly complaining to other West German officials...

...I heard that phrase several times during my stay...

...A great many East Germans feel worse off as a result of German unification, and that East Germany that their country has been colonized and exploited by the West...

...These are bright, committed people...

...One woman in my street ordinate the infrastructure in both parts of Germany-after all, declared that for her, life was over: "Not a single good thing it was East Germany that joined West Germany, and not the has come to me as a result of German unification," she said...

...t is now quite clear that in spite of their professed con- A poll published while I was in Germany showed that, even cern for East Germany and desire for German reunifi- three years after unification, most young West Germans still cation, West German authorities were as caught off guard have not had any personal contact with East Germans...

...With the collapse of the Wall and German economic reunification on July 1, 1990, East German companies were forced to compete on an equal playing field with their West German competitors...

...The opening of the Berlin full of trash and burned-out automobiles...

...Berlin is now stripped of its most potent symbol...

...The play's opening scene is a dramatic rendering of Rohwedder's assassination...

...Although the Wall and stay in touch with developments itself no longer exists, the vast, empty spaces through which it in religion, politics, and the arts...

...The real as the emptiness that secret behind German unification, I suspect, is that no one in carries us away...

...The church in Slovakia Many now believe that the Czech revolution has not really has even tried to resurrect the Nazi collaborator Monsignor happened, and that when the real one does come it will be Jozef Tiso as some sort of Slovak national hero...

...I interviewed the Jesuit, Jan Korec, den crucifix was exposed...

...in the along a river that searches East, grit and bitterness...

...Most important, the Wall, like any other national border, had been an economic barrier protecting East Germany from West German competition...

...Berlin was for four decades the front line Now, with the Wall gone, there is a grassy but unkempt park of the cold war...

...Germans surprised and troubled me...

...01-9: $10 each [] Bulk orders (10 or more): $7 apiece While I was in East Berlin, the most popular best seller in the former German Democratic Republic was a play called Wessis Name: in Weimar by the controversial playwright Rolf Hochhuth (au- Address: thor of The Deputy...

...As a result, there STEPHEN BROCKMANN is assistant professor of German studies at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh...

...Bits of the Wall have been preserved for graffiti of my street respond in a rather j aded and undramatic way...

...She shortly after the revolution...

...It still shocks me and gives danced and sang not so much in West Berlin or East Berlin me a feeling of deep satisfaction, after so many years of abas in No Man's Land, on the Wall itself...

...turned out to be an ardent nationalist...

...We expected that behind their fancy automobiles and their beauti- Ten issues for $7 ful clothes there must be fascinating, beautiful, lovable people...

...Particularly hard- "hardship posts" in the East for a year or two to help realign hit have been women and people in their late forties and fifties, the East German bureaucracy according to Western standards...

...Given that wrapped in a cloth far coarser than velvet...

...While by 1989 as anyone else...

...Berlin had been chosen Sky as the collecting point for Europe's gays this year-the city of covers everything...

...literate expression of But the extremely rapid transformation in the economy and in an American Catholic faith...

...Guard towers, barbed wire, searchlights, German shepherds, machine guns-they are all commemorated here and there...

...had been a schism in Berlin's gay community...

...0 LIVING WHERE STEPHEN BROCKMANN THE WALL WAS WHAT STILL DIVIDES THE GERMANS it s the divided capital of a divided country, had been no traffic, and the street had been very quiet...

...In the good old days...

...Such people are completely without inner depth and warmth...

...They artists and tourists...

...social structures has been and continues to be wrenching...

...Earth is sectioned, "Europride," as the organizers called it-and so gays and lesparceled except where the trees shag the loops bians streamed in from London and Paris, only to find that there and runs of the water...

...and viewing everything negatively) have been in circulation for quite some time, but the reality behind them is disturbing...

...Reading COMMONWEAL is an One of the first surprises for me on my arrival in Berlin was excellent way to gain new insights the extent to which, in spite of the Wall's demise, West and East Berlin very much continue to exist as separate geograph- on contemporary issues ic, sociological, and even spiritual entities...

...What he was referring to was the fact that by the most severe postwar recession Germany has experienced, most of the key bureaucratic and governmental positions in with unemployment levels in East Germany significantly sur- East Germany are now occupied by Westerners who come to passing the levels of the Great Depression...

...While I was in Berlin this summer, after a three-year absence, I lived in an apartment building in the "East," in a district between the former Soviet and American sectors...

...16: 24 September 1993 Commonweal at night any more the way she used to "in the good old days...

...your-face gays marched through the former Jewish ghetto and Cars glint along a levee, campaigned against xenophobia and anti-Semitism...

...Many East Germans feel that such scrutiny too often degenerates into exaggerated denunciations of all East Germans for the crime of being East German...

...We are the new niggers," suggested one actor during a conWhat happened instead was a short-lived boom in the West versation in an East Berlin theater, "and the West Germans are as a result of pent-up East German consumer demand, followed the colonial lords...

...used to cut its swath continue to testify to the city's long division...

...The disillusion- Class orders of more than 10, ment with the West, albeit somewhat cliched, was deep...

...The split and the but of airplane shadow far within Berlin's gay community seemed to reflect precisely the below fans and contracts split within the city itself: in the West, glitz and glitter...

...The Wall used to run right beneath my apartment building...

...Anne E. Patrick, SNJM For the most part, East Berliners continue to do most of their Professor of Religion, Carleton College business in East Berlin, while West Berliners do theirs in West Past President, Berlin...

...From my apartment Wall on November 9, 1989, marked both building, you can now walk out the door and across the park, the culmination and the end of a powerful and in thirty seconds you have traveled from East to West Berlin...

...What to do in Berlin without the Wall...

...In In the morning, you can buy your fresh breakfast rolls and newsimages transmitted immediately around the world, Berliners papers in either East or West Berlin...

...In Just as in the times of communism, it is hard to engage in 1990 Chancellor Kohl had foolishly declared that a new German any kind of conversation in East Germany without quickly comeconomic miracle was around the corner, that no one would be ing to the political situation...

...The only really admirable people in the West are the ones COMMONWEAL in the RAF," suggested one friend, referring to the terrorist group, 1.5 Dutch Street, New York, NY 10038 the Red Army Faction, which in April 1991, claimed responsibility for the assassination of Detlev Rohwedder, the chief of Number of orders: the trustee agency responsible for privatizing East Germany's state-owned industries...

...The real story in as the horizon, perfect Germany is German animosity toward one another...

...In flea markets at the Brandenburg Gate you can still buy Soviet and East German army paraphernalia, as well as Communist buttons, badges, and orders...

...For the most part, neither Easterners nor Westerners want SPECIAL OFFER FOR much to do with each other...

...The church in Slovakia has I remember my friend's bone-deep blush when her hidbeen frozen in the fifties...

...normality, that it is now possible to do such things...

...But the only thing that's interesting about them is what they drive and what they wear...

...The results were economic collapse and massive unemployment...

...No other country in the former "I take great pleasure in Communist bloc was forced to move so rapidly and radically encouraging my students to peruse to a free-market economy...

...They knew very little about most East Germans had by now had personal contact with West the country to their east and failed to recognize the ex- Germans, a great many viewed those contacts negatively...

...After the first excitement of freedom in November 1989, the further consequences of that open border have long since become clear...

...would soon become a blossoming landscape...

...One sees tourists wandering aimlessly around where the Wall used to be, not quite sure of themselves...

...Yet even time...

...In the West, the more nonpolitical, consumer-oriented gays marched down Not sea, not earth, its steel Kurfurstendamm, West Berlin's equivalent of Fifth Avenue, slices one field and spills celebrating gay lifestyles...

...However that may kind of example, it is no wonder that many Slovak Catholics be, what happens as the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe are disillusioned, and even more Czechs, with their predomi- struggle for political and economic order, social integrity, and nately humanistic bent, are less than inspired by a Christian spiritual renewal could be crucial for all of us, a way out of alternative...

...Of course there are still reminders of what ed them, many residents on both the western and eastern sides used to be...

...finds In spite of the continuing high levels of violence against forwithout losing, all the way eigners in Germany, I could not get over the feeling that the very generalized concept "foreigners" was being used all over to the edge of the visible, the political spectrum as a way of distracting attention from yellow as the field, bright Germany's very serious problems with itself...

...His sacrifices tamination they now see little chance of righting in their lifeunder totalitarianism were deep and impressive...

...in the East, the more politicized, ininto another so it burns in sun...

...One particularly poignant example of the divisions between Michael Cadnum East and West came at the end of June, when gays and lesbians Flying over a River in Berlin celebrated Stonewall Day, the traditional Gay Pride Day in the United States and Europe...

...The 18: 24 September 1993 Commonweal...

...After forty years of separation, the Germans had grown completely estranged, and the process of unification has intensified rather than alleviated that estrangement...

...tent of the problems associated with German reunification...

...They are all plastic people," was TEACHERS & STUDENTS: the typical comment of one East German friend of mine...

...The doorbell at his Bratislava apart- and her husband want nothing more than to emigrate and ment still flashed a table lamp instead of ringing, so that spy- raise their daughter outside the environmental and moral coning neighbors would not know he had visitors...

...People on my side of the street continue to view them- Catholic Theological Society of America selves as Easterners, while the people in the apartments on the other side of the street continue to view themselves as Westerners...