An essay in several parts I am currently writing for one smart Twitter user who asked me this question:
What was life like back under in communist East Germany, compared to now?
A nice old Jewish man once asked me at a party on the Upper East Side, What was life like under communism?
Without having to think much, I answered, 'It was paradise for children. However, you're only a child for 11, 12 years and nobody beyond that age wants to be treated like a child.'
He nodded, and replied, 'I once asked a Chinese woman, and she gave exactly the same answer!'
Yes. I really thought I was living in paradise; we were taught we were living in the best of all possible political systems.
Paradise started turning into hell when I was 11 and became more conscious. It slowly dawned to me that I was living in a prison, and that I would not be able to do any of the things I longed to do with my only life. Like travel and see the world. Speak English. Learn about great culture. Understand life, humans, other countries.
East Germany was tiny. Its longest distance from Kap Arkona to the Czech border was about 500 kilometers. I'd be allowed to maybe go see a few other socialist countries, none of which interested me that much.
People worked hard. There's this Soviet joke, 'We pretend to work, and you pretend to pay us.' East Germans don't have this Slavic mentality (I am half Slavic myself, Sorbian, to be precise, which is a small ethnic minority in East Germany). Germans do work hard. This engineering and designing thing must be genetic, the way Germans are punctual — that's in our blood. I only fully understood this after moving to New York. Soviets may have been more lazy, or disorganized; Germans work, and they get up insanely easy to go to work or to school, and Socialism didn't stop that. Some of my classes started at 5.30am. My mom always got up at 5.30am and started working at 7am.
However, this Protestant work ethic is wasted if you replace business owners incentives, private property, and common sense with bureaucracy, property of the people, and ideology. Resources were wasted, idealistic people full of initiative burnt out quickly, and discussions were fearful and dishonest in weird ways.
It was difficult to buy anything. The most common phrase any shop attendant would say was a shoddy 'Hammwanich' (Haben wir nicht — We don't have that). Children don't really care about toilet paper, but for parents to have to stand in line for bread or tomatoes, or for someone working in a store to have to see such misery every day is quite depressing.
Any kind of citrus fruit in winter was rare. East German currency wasn't worth anything in most of the world. So, oranges, bananas, melons, pineapples, coffee were hard to get. Cuba and Vietnam traded with East Germany. Any peaches or pineapples I got to see were canned ones from China, tiny portions, on very special occasions.
Vietnam, traditionally a country that grew tea, started growing coffee after the East German coffee crisis of 1977. That was actually a thing. Can you imagine what a northern, cold, dark, wet industrialized country would be like without coffee? (After the fall of the wall, the East German fascination for bananas became proverbial, a boring running joke.)
My first summer jobs was sorting fruit and vegetables for distribution among the stores (you couldn't call them supermarkets; there was nothing super about them) in my town, population 78.000. Most of the time, we were sitting around because there was nothing much to distribute. A few boxes with onions or apples. One day, a train arrived that had one car full of melons. Half of them were rotten because they had been broken by whoever had hastily unloaded them from the ship in Rostock — into a normal, uncooled train car in August. Transporting perishable groceries was a tricky thing in an economy where everything is planned by bureaucrats far removed from the actual scene. Well, anything planned by bureaucrats results in disasters, wasting of resources, and people either resorting to cynicism or giving in to depression.
After the fall of the wall, I learnt about all those fruit beyond apples, plums, and cherries. How do they taste, how to remove the peels, what part is edible.
People did not starve — at least not in the 1970s and 1980s. My grandparents, however, did have problems feeding their children, way into the 1960s. This is all the more idiotic since they lived in the countryside. Only under communism do people in the countryside go hungry despite working full time. My aunts and uncles are all skinny, and they all worked hard physically in their gardens after work to grow food, yet they all have diabetes, and I suspect that's because they starved when they were children. My grandma talked a lot about hunger, that's one of the things you don't forget. Born in 1929, to parents who had starved in the 1920s, she was hungry a lot, until the 1970s.
I cannot tell you how much I hate American College teachers just for indoctrinating students with Socialist crap. I especially like it when they lecture me about how there is a difference between Socialism and Communism. Maybe the same difference as between living in the Ice Age and life after death? Only which is which? Go live in Cuba or North Korea for a while before you talk about this.
While we are at this, dentistry under communism, or socialism, whatever you want to call it, did not involve anesthetics. I have no doubt it's still like that in North Korea.
While people weren't starving anymore by the 1970, nutritional deficiencies were common. Lack of vitamin C and B was a problem. I remember the corners of my mouth always being cracked and bleeding in winter. And I was prescribed iron supplements since I was always pale, had little energy, and would often faint in school.
At a time when allergies were very common in West Germany, they were practically unknown in East Germany. One reason might have been the lack of food additives. After the fall of the wall, allergies quickly rose to West German levels.
Since you couldn't just buy what you wanted, or often, what you needed, people got very good at making things. Not as good as you would get if you were capable of buying raw materials, though. You needed to know someone, bribe someone, or just be very lucky. People spent weeks of their lives just waiting in line.
I am good at DIY. My husband is amazed at my household skills, which are pretty unusual in America. Woodworking, fixing things, cooking, gardening, canning, sewing. You couldn't just buy jeans, so I learnt how to sew my own. Blouses. Bags. I liked that white scarf and hat Sophie Marceau was wearing in the movie La Boum (yes, I secretly watched West German TV, which was illegal, but since East German TV sets had six buttons, and East Germany only had two TV broadcasting stations, what were you supposed to do with those other buttons?), so I learnt how to knit, and made my own. I can fix stuff. My little brother taught me how to solder the lose contact in my tape recorder. (Here's a spoiler: Fast forward two decades — one of the coolest things I did in my life was to work in a computer repair shop in downtown Manhattan and fix the laptops of a science fiction author, the very irritating desktop computer of a Rykers Island prison guard, etc. I liked doing that precisely because this seemed so horribly unthinkable and out of reach for people in East Germany). I couldn't buy the nail polish I liked, so I mixed my own. My parents were good at making toys for my brother and me.
I remember seeing instructions on how to make a Rubik's cube out of wood, in a popular magazine 'Praktiker' dedicated to DIY projects. A cheap plastic toy that can easily be mass produced, invented by a man who lived under communism, and people spent countless hours creating it from wood, because a planted economy is so damn inefficient that it can't afford to buy oil for plastics!
Anything made from plastics was rare and expensive. Can you imagine the 1980s with hardly any plastics? Well, I lived there. Plastic shopping bags from crappy West German supermarkets like Aldi were fanciful status symbols under communism.
In the mid-80s, I copied books by hand. Pretty much the way medieval monks would copy books by hand. If I got hold of a book from the West that was in English, I sat down and copied it by hand, writing with a fountain pen in a composition book. I remember copying a Beatles song book (I copied the sheet music note by note), a Rolling Stones songbook, a few books about David Bowie, Orwell's Animal Farm.
This sounds like, 'Oh, back in my day, we had to walk to school, 30 miles, in five feet deep snow, uphill both ways, without any shoes at all'. We are talking about the late 1980s here. Xerox machines had been invented. Photography had been around for a century. Yet a high school student spends weeks doing nothing but copying books by hand since she has zero hopes of ever living under conditions where she can just go buy a certain book. She doesn't just take photos of the pages either, since she doesn't trust the photo lab staff to let her get away with her avoiding censorship like that. This kind of hopelessness and lonely working in secrecy was typical of what socialism does to the human character.
I don't think any of my classmates copied books. There was maybe one other girl who was enough of a loner to harbor such secrets, but she was pretty frank about wanting to become a doctor, and she didn't seem intellectual at all. Coping books was not a typical hobby for East Germans. It just demonstrates a certain level of hopelessness.
Yes, there were thousands of libraries in East Germany, but, well, most of them were filled with Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and myriads of lesser known communists. A few very good classics. Engineering and Science. Just not fun things that I was interested in. I joined a youth club that was all about solidarity with Latin America. Meeting injured Nicaraguan Sandinistas who were being treated in our town for their injuries sustained fighting US-financed Contras was the was the closest I could get to America. Because that's what I was interested in, America.
Most topics were not openly discussed. You just figured it out on your own. There were lots of horrible secrets to discover. By the time I was 14, I took crazy things for granted. I had learnt that if you wanted to buy a car, you could get your name on a waiting list. So that was one of the first thing East Germans did upon turning 18, getting their names on the waiting list hoping they'd be allowed to buy a car 12, 15 years later. My dad wrote long applications explaining why his family was asking to be assigned a bigger apartment. Bigger than the two bedrooms my parents, my brother and I lived in.
I had started learning English on my own when I was 8. I had found my dad's text books from university. He had studied navigation in Rostock and worked as a radio officer on a merchant marine ship, so he actually saw quite a bit of the world outside of East Germany. He would send postcards from Hong Kong and Singapore and Venezuela and Cuba. Maybe that's why I assumed people would be free to go where they wanted to go. I looked at those postcards and actually believed I would go see these places one day. I don't remember when it dawned to me that people in East Germany are actually locked up. This was not actually discussed in school or in the media. We all heard and repeated those phrases about the antifascist protection wall. I did not talk much to other people because there is not much of a point in talking to anybody in a country that has no freedom of speech, is there? I read a lot. I read everything I could find and tried to make sense of it.
Also telling were the things that astonished me after the fall of the wall. That people could own a forest. Or a big ship. A house, or an entire harbor. When my grandma told me that her father had owned a tiny forest, I was flabbergasted. Yes, Sorbians were always poor, but apparently they, or anybody else, was never as poor as they were under communism, when kids cannot even conceive of somebody owning and taking care of a few hundred trees.
That was one of the big projects socialist society seemed obsessed with: Creating better human beings. Without first taking the time to understand human nature in the first place. After all, that's what Marx and Engels supposedly had figured out, that the human becomes human through work. My classmates and I used to joke about how the goal of our socialist education was to turn us into well-rounded, perfect socialist personalities. We suspected that the result of socialism might always be a depressed creature, but our main outlet was satire. The "Eulenspiegel", a popular satire magazine, addressed lots of ills of socialist reality. I bet politicians read that, to get an idea of what was going on in the real world. The news certainly did not address reality.
(Satire, by the way, is still the way Germans are dealing with the lack of freedom of speech in Germany in 2016. Merkel might be making one of the worst mistakes of her entire career right now by having a comedian who insulted the Turkish dictator Ergodan prosecuted for "Insulting of a foreign majesty" — I kid you not. If you deny people not only the right to speak, but also the right to helplessly crack jokes while under the yoke, next up can only be violence.)
Almost everything under communism violated human nature. At the same time, there was an agenda to change human nature to make humans more social. Which is crazy, the same way a scientist who studied everything but physics, but tries to mess with nuclear power would be crazy.
However, there were a few things that even those crazy socialist social engineers did not touch.