Ratan:
One Nation, One People: Not So Says a WESSI, when transplanted to OSSI nation.
Trial, tribulation and humor of MENDLING .
"To treat another culture as intrinsically inferior to yours is a form of
racism," he argued. "She speaks high German, and everyone else speaks
slang. She eats right, and everyone else eats wrong. She dresses well,
and everyone else looks like an idiot."
By ROGER COHEN
FRANKFURT AN DER ODER, Germany -- Four years ago,
Gabriela Mendling came here to Germany's "Far East." She trawled
streets with names like Salvador Allende and Karl Marx in search of a
home.
A physiotherapist, she searched vainly for a job. She observed, she
listened, in growing amazement. Finally she decided to write -- and the
storm broke.
Suddenly she was the most hated "Wessi," or westerner, in town. Her
car was sprayed with paint. Her husband's Mercedes was scratched.
Her son was taunted at school. Threatening phone calls poured in. "A
simple-minded racist," says Henry-Martin Klemt, a local writer. For
Peter Edelmann, the Deputy Mayor, "She is a liar."
The source of Ms. Mendling's notoriety is a book called "Neuland"
("New Land"), published this summer. Its subtitle is "Very Simple
Stories"; it is scarcely profound.
But its daily chronicle of the difficulties of a west German woman
adapting to the formerly Communist east does bring the problems of
German unity down to basics.
Such basics include lasagna -- poked at suspiciously by "Ossis," or
easterners, clearly new to the dish that Ms. Mendling has prepared. And
Christmas carols: there are none at the Christmas gala in the city hall.
And attitudes: Ms. Mendling finds she is treated with contempt as a
"Wessi" seeking a job while so many "Ossis" are unemployed.
When the Berlin wall came down a decade ago, east German
demonstrators quickly adjusted their chant from "We are the people" to
"We are one people."
an illusion.
While the economies of east and west have moved closer, a
psychological gulf has remained -- even widened.
More than 40 percent of west Germans have never traveled to the
former east, recent surveys indicate.
At the same time, "Ostalgie" -- nostalgia for the old East Germany -- has
spread among the former citizens of what was probably the most
spied-on state in history, with its 6 million state security files for 17 million
inhabitants.
The nostalgia is rarely so acute as to involve a desire for the return of
Germany's little police state, but equally it is seldom entirely absent.
Memory, of course, is selective, and what is remembered now is this:
there were jobs for everyone, even if they did not amount to much, time
for friendships and a sense of solidarity, of community, of a life beyond
"me."
Even the Communist bicycles (when available) were more solid, some
say. And the free day care centers were wonderful.
As for the state security service, known as the Stasi, with its 125 miles of
stacked-up files and its informers in just about every family, it has gone,
as completely as the "Anti-Fascist Protective Rampart," or wall. So it is
natural enough to dwell on the aggressivity of the "elbow society" in the
West, rather than the oppression of East German society.
"I have always felt I was the focus of every disappointment with the
West, right down to the better wheelbarrows they say they had before,"
said Ms. Mendling, a clear-eyed woman seemingly far too mild to have
emerged as the ogre on the Oder. "From the start I was a foreigner, and
intolerance of foreigners in the east is unbelievable."
That intolerance, expressed in the rise of far-right fringe movements,
appears rooted in a deep frustration. Unlike Poles or Hungarians, East
Germans were not able to reshape a post-Communist state themselves.
Rather, their country was taken over by West Germany -- "a second
Anschluss," as Gnter Grass, the winner of this year's Nobel Prize for
Literature, put it, recalling the annexation of Austria by Nazi troops in
1938.
That formulation is an extreme one. No army marched into East Berlin,
and there is nothing inherently sinister about a united Germany. But the
takeover -- of industry, of education, of the welfare system -- was
sweeping, leaving many east Germans today with the sense that whatever
was good about their society was tossed out with the bad.
"The notion of a 'third way,' of a better socialist society, got lost in all of
Helmut Kohl's euphoria about blooming landscapes in the east," said
Elmar Br„hler, a professor at Leipzig University. "Well, the blooms came
late if at all, and many east Germans simply found themselves feeling
inferior in an unfamiliar system."
Ms. Mendling decided to pack her bags and move from the Ruhr town
of Wuppertal in the west after her husband, a gynecologist, was offered a
top job at the hospital in this eastern town in 1995. Her
great-grandmother hailed from Prussia; the eastern part of Germany held
a strong appeal for her.
But as the experiences of her fictional alter ego, Frau Hitzig, illustrate, the
reception on the Polish border, in a town with few other "Wessis," is
scarcely heartwarming. The director of one physiotherapy center obliges
her to take a course "so you will adapt to our collective," but even then
she does not get a job.
As a "Wessi" in a town with an 18.6 percent unemployment rate, she
soon concludes that she should not expect work. After all, as she is
repeatedly told, an electronics plant that once provided state-of-the-art
components to Communist Bulgaria has been closed with the loss of
almost 8,000 jobs.
The book hammers away at people with funny accents -- they all say
"ick" instead of "ich" (pronounced ISCH) for "I" and pronounce "g" as if
it were "j" -- and at the funny things they seem to do, like half-fixing a
toilet before leaving a bucket to serve until the repair is completed three
weeks later.
Still, Frau Hitzig tries to get involved in the community. Preparing a party,
she goes to buy wine, but finds only sweet Bulgarian or Hungarian plonk
and is met with incredulity when she requests a dry French wine. "You're
the first customer to ask for it," says a shopkeeper who apparently hopes
she will also be the last.
A pre-Christmas party for spouses of doctors at her husband's hospital
turns into a fiasco. Until the last moment, invitations for a meal at a
pizzeria are not answered. Then nobody seems to know what to order,
until Frau Hitzig asks for a vegeterian pizza and all the guests, sheep-like,
follow suit as if vegeterian pizza were the new official doctrine.
When conversation does strike up at last, it turns unpleasant as one
woman, a doctor herself, says she could never bring herself to harass
privately insured patients to pay their bills, as "they do in the west without
batting an eye."
Frau Hitzig cannot restrain herself: "Do you really think everyone in the
west is an unscrupulous exploiter?"
Ms. Mendling says everything related in the book is true. Indeed, it
began as a series of letters relating her experiences to a friend in
Wuppertal. "When I realized Ossis and Wessis were growing further
apart, I had to illustrate that," she said.
The book, published with a modest first printing of 1,500 copies, caused
little stir until two local writers -- Hans-Joachim Nauschutz and Klemt --
came across it and were outraged. Nauschutz called for a boycott of the
book, and Klemt published a poem in a local paper parodying Ms.
Mendling's view of the primitive "Ossi."
The poem begins:
I am a strange hard Eastman. I smoke on the toilet, I eat with a
hammer and sickle and drive a convertible made from a Russian
tank and an old MIG. I am a strange hard Eastman, I have a dirty
look. It continues:
I am a strange hard Eastman. I wear a bear skin and play the
balalaika until the first morning light. Then I go hunting for Wessis,
and if you come close to me -- I am a strange hard Eastman -- you'll
die in the Taiga.
After the poem appeared, the anti-Mendling campaign began in earnest.
Her 12-year-old son was regularly mocked at school as a "Wessi-idiot."
Neighbors refused to look at her.
A pamphlet was circulated at her husband's hospital advertising "a basic
course on the use of knives and forks for beginners offered by the
wonderful Gabriela Mendling (specially imported from the West)."
Klemt said the problem with the book was that it was stupid and racist.
"To treat another culture as intrinsically inferior to yours is a form of
racism," he argued. "She speaks high German, and everyone else speaks
slang. She eats right, and everyone else eats wrong. She dresses well,
and everyone else looks like an idiot."
What Ms. Mendling failed to grasp or illustrate, he said, were the roots
of the attitudes in a place like Frankfurt an der Oder. Of course, jobs
were lost. But what was lost was more than jobs, because in East
Germany employment also brought free theater tickets, a vacation spot,
social events -- indeed the entire framework of the Communist good life.
So people feel lost, faced suddenly with responsibilities they were not
educated to assume, exposed to newcomers jetting in to buy up things or
run them before jetting out again for the weekend, unable to orient
themselves in a society based on risk and achievement rather than
security and conformity.
"And people with narrow horizons who cannot solve their problems look
for their Jew, or their Turk -- or their Wessi," Klemt said. "That is
stupidity, and Ms. Mendling has been a victim of it in these attacks on
family. I am against these attacks, of course, but I also loathe her dumb
superiority."
The furor over the book, featured recently on German television, has
boosted sales, and it is now in its fifth printing. Ms. Mendling, who used
the pseudonym of Luise Endlich for "Neuland," says the spraying of her
car and taunting of her son only confirmed that "this is a place with many
primitive attitudes."
The author intends to stay to see if this town on the Oder will change and
whether the new buildings now sprouting are accompanied "by the more
critical changes in people's heads."
But perhaps part of Germany's problem is that the changes westerners
expect are not necessarily those that easterners want.
"I am not against unity," Klemt said, "but the cost was high. I still have the
dream of a new solution, a different way, with social justice. Today I
have freedom and a nice apartment, but I work too much, sleep too little
and feel that a slower life is more in tune with our basic human instincts." |
