The German Lesson
SHANOR, DONALD R.
The German Lesson Behind the Berlin Wall By Steven Kelman Houghton Mifflin. 327 pp. $6.95. Reviewed by Donald R. Shanor Former East European correspondent; Associate Professor, Columbia School...
...The East Germans, however, were not up to the challenge...
...It was maddening," he declares at one point, struck by the high prices and poor quality of tape recorders, transistor radios, and other high-priority youth goods...
...I was a better and a worse reporter the first time, for the same reasons...
...Menacing they undoubtedly seemed: The impeccable Doktor Waack, with his Western suede jacket and suspicious academic credentials, refusing to discuss any model of Socialism to the right of the Soviet...
...They'd have to allow at least one country to continue to be free, so that they could have some progress to imitate...
...and the insistent Herr Bach, proposing a "research project" for Kelman to do in the West that bore every mark of espionage...
...He imagined that he was being followed by the secret police...
...Kelman tells us all this, as well as what he thinks about it, in the informal open language of the rap session...
...Since he was a contemporary, young East Germans were willing to talk freely with him about their problems in school, their conflicts with the authorities, their hopes of traveling to the West, their cynicism, even their sex lives...
...and he spun out at far too great length the rather routine difficulties with visas experienced by all travelers in Eastern Europe...
...Associate Professor, Columbia School of Journalism "As a young kid," Steven Kelman wrote the editor of the New Yorker, "I would have much more opportunity to talk with ordinary people than would an older, official journalist...
...The workers here get paid no more than in Japan...
...In many ways, in fact, they are of far greater value than the more scientific studies of older writers who list all the changes in the Politburos, but neglect to tell us what the place looks like or what the ordinary citizens have to say about their rulers...
...Curse the bastards...
...A constant undertone of tension and fear runs through his account, although surely it would have been a simple matter for him to cross into West Berlin any time his East German hosts became too menacing...
...There they keep up with the latest...
...The magazine liked the idea, and not only the piece but this book describing how he went about doing it resulted...
...My own first visit to East Germany was made at roughly his age, my most recent one 20 years later...
...To the people back home who curse progress and say technology is oppressive, have the people here become any freer or better because they don't have progress and improvement...
...What if the whole world were Communist, could you imagine that...
...As a traveler on crowded East German trains or trams, as a conversationalist in cafes and public squares, and as a snooper and interviewer, Kelman is tireless...
...The book's weaknesses...
...Kelman was 23 and a year out of college in the summer of 1971, when he gathered the material, and Behind the Berlin Wall shows both the strengths and weaknesses of his youthful viewpoint...
...Once it gets to anything involving modern technology, they are hopelessly behind...
...Granted that his visit to East Germany was made on somewhat false pretenses, since he did not travel as a journalist, Kelman exhibits a tendency to overdramatize his plight...
...But take anything designed for people .. . have they ever started anything...
...They are not only worse off materially, they are also more oppressed...
...There wouldn't be any sources of new ideas for the Communist countries to cop...
...When Kelman suggested that Socialism should give workers the opportunity to choose their hours, pay, and vacations, his guide was horrified: "We can't go around letting workers in some factories have shorter hours or more vacations, because we must produce more and more so as to increase the economic and military strength of the state...
...he set traps for those he believed would go through his luggage (they didn't...
...Everywhere except, of course, military technology...
...With half an hour to spare while waiting for his heavy-handed official guides, he will enter an ice cream parlor and return with anecdotes, insights, and budding friendships...
...With five minutes to kill, he will go into stores or apartment houses and bring back price data or delightful touches like the official ban against beach umbrellas on apartment balconies ("it does not correspond to the level expected of the center of town in a modern Socialist city...
...Kelman was proposing an article on East Germany...
...A further advantage of Kelman's youth was that he began with fewer preconceptions about good capitalism or bad Communism than an older visitor would have...
...Kelman did make it back to the West safely, of course, and his notes of his conversations, his descriptions, his thoughts will be illuminating for anyone trying to understand how a Communist society functions...
Vol. 56 • January 1973 • No. 2
