Weimar, 1994 Difficulties with the Truth: Coping with the DDR’s Past in the New Eastern Classroom

Eight thirty A.M. Another school day, another school—this time the Schiller Gymnasium in the Thomas Mann Street. It’s a fine morning in late October. I greet Frau Losart, a German teacher, and Herr Gerrelov, a Russian teacher. They’re happy to talk to me about changes at the school since my visit during the dying days of the DDR in the fall of 1990, when it was still the Schiller EOS, the only EOS in Weimar. Weimar has witnessed many changes since then, especially in education, including the transformation of three POS into Gymnasien: the Goethe Gymnasium, the Hoffman von Fallersleben Gymnasium, and the Sophiengymnasium. The classical names reflect the importance of German culture in Weimar. Indeed, “Weimar— the Heart of German Culture,” runs the slogan in the official tourist brochure, which features, incongruously, both a picture of a young couple drinking Coca-Cola (the caption [in English]: “You can’t beat the feeling!”) and a pitch for a private bus tour line: “For more than a century,” says the ad, in stately German script, Weimar “has been a magnet for all those who revere German classicism. . . .” Or: those who mummify it. “Stadt der toten Dichter” (Dead Poets’ City), journalistic wags from the west have dubbed Weimar instead. But the eastern and western slogans do, ironically, somehow fit together. For certainly the city’s two biggest cultural drawing cards are its two greatest dead poets: Goethe and Schiller. Not the least of the city’s honors to the latter dead poet is the Schiller Gymnasium itself. Built in 1927, it was originally a Berufsschule (trade/vocational school) for girls; two years later, it became a coeducational Realschule. In 1936, the auditorium with its Nietzsche window was added, in honor of the city’s third great dead poet. In 1945, the school was used as an emergency hospital for soldiers wounded at the front. After the war, the Schiller Oberschule was the only school in Weimar to confer the Abitur; it became one of the first EOS in 1960 and a Gymnasium in 1991.

Weimar, 1991; Weimar/Röcken, 1994 Zarathustra as Educator? To the Nietzsche Archives

“Silberblick.” Bright moment, lucky chance. A sunny day in Weimar, November 1991. Hedwig, 38, waits solemnly for me in the town square still known as Karl Marx Platz (formerly Adolf Hitler Platz). A spirited, voluble woman, Hedwig has been eager to show me the cultural splendors of her hometown—the Goethehaus, the Schillerhaus, the Liszthaus, all lining the Frauenplan in the center of old Weimar. But today she is reluctant; today, warm morning rays beaming down upon us, Hedwig seems reserved as we stride along the Schillerstrasse toward the outskirts of town. Today our destination is Humboldtstrasse 36, the Villa Silberblick, home of the Nietzsche Archive, which opened in May to the public for the first time since 1945. Hedwig hands me a May issue of Die Zeit. “The Banished One Is Back!” blazons the headline: The reopening of the Archives has been the cultural event of the year in Weimar. As we walk, I muse on the significance of the return to eastern German life of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900): the author of notorious neologisms and catch phrases such as the Will to Power, the Übermensch (Superman), the Antichrist, master and slave morality, the blond beast, the free spirit, the last man, eternal recurrence, “God is dead,” “Live dangerously!” “Become hard!” “philosophize with a hammer,” and “beyond good and evil”; the writer who inspired thinkers such as Heidegger, artists such as Thomas Mann, and men of action such as Mussolini; the philosopher exalted by the Nazis and reviled by the communists. No discussion of eastern German education “after the Wall”—and the ongoing political re-education of eastern Germans—would be complete without reference to the return of the writer regarded as the most important educator in Germany during the first half of this century. Indeed, Nietzsche als Erzieher (Nietzsche as Educator) was the title of a popular book in Wilhelmine Germany written by Walter Hammer, a leader of the Wandervögel (birds of passage) youth movement.

After the Wall II: The Fall and Rise of an Educational System

In the fall of 1990, a hit movie comedy opened to packed houses in eastern German theaters. Go, Trabi, Go!—the producers gave the film an English title—celebrated with rollicking Weltschmerz the misadventures of Georg, a hapless baby-blue Trabant 601—whose jinxed capers make him the undeniable screen successor to Herbie, the Disney VW Beetle of the 1960s. Georg stalls pitifully on the Autobahn, is shorn of his bumper in Munich traffic, is robbed of all four tires by pranksters during a camping stop, and even gets mistaken for scrap near an auto junkyard, an obvious metaphor for the DDR running out of gas—as it lurches toward unity. Go, Trabi, Go! begins with DDR German teacher Udo Struutz deciding to fulfill a long-deferred dream: his first journey to the West will be to travel from his hellhole hometown of industrial Bitterfield, the dirtiest city in all of Eastern Europe, to balmy Naples, thereby tracing the footsteps of his beloved Goethe, whose Italian Journey recorded his own (less quixotic) southern pilgrimage from Weimar in the 1780s. Herr Struutz packs his wife and daughter into little Georg, a family member for 20 years whom Herr Struutz lovingly wipes down with his own washcloth. “See Naples and Die!” scrawls Herr Struutz on Georg’s trunk, recalling Goethe’s clarion call to self-actualization: “Sterbe und werde!” (“die and become!”). The adventure turns out to be a story of Innocent Ossis Abroad and their psychological collision with the West. Numerous scenes in Go, Trabi, Go! allude to the region’s plight: putt-putting along on the Autobahn, little Georg strains to do his maximum speed of 60 mph as contemptuous Mercedes-Benzes, Porsches, and BMWs fly by; broken-down in Bavaria, Georg costs the Struutz family a steep (an outrageously inflated) price for repair, which the intrepid socialist entrepreneurs earn by charging curious Bavarians DM 5 for a “Trabi Peep Show” and a five-minute joy ride in Georg. Reassuringly, the Struutz family eventually does reach its destination, albeit with the accident-prone but indomitable Georg—now minus his top—as a breezy convertible.

After the Wall: Pride before the Fall, 1961–89

East Berlin. August 13, 1961. As the sun peeks over the horizon on this beautiful Sunday morning, most East Berliners sleep on, but some rise for work; a few thousand of them are Grenzgänger, who cross town—quite legally—to work in the “other” Berlin, mostly as hotel and restaurant employees and in other service jobs made lucrative by the uneven exchange rate. Each day they make the trip to West Berlin—by foot, by bicycle, by S-Bahn and U-Bahn, showing their DDR identity cards and special work permits to the bored Grepos (Grenzpolizei, border police) stationed at the gates. But this morning the Grepos are not bored; today, as the would-be commuters discover as they reach streets and subway stations along the East Berlin border, no Grenzgänger will cross. “Die Grenze ist geschlossen!” people scream to each other in the early-morning stillness. “The border is closed!” No subway cars are running westward; Grepos guard the U-Bahn tunnels to prevent subway commuters from fleeing to the West on foot; Vopos turn back Grenzgänger at every checkpoint. The SED has apparently found a way to secure its future and halt the flight of DDR and skilled labor—by walling them in. WHO HAS THE YOUTH, HAS THE FUTURE! As the Grenzgänger stumble home and the DDR capital—“die Hauptstadt der DDR”—awakens to the nightmare, it is as if a tremendous howl—the anguished wail of cornered, trapped, desperate animals—has gone up throughout East Berlin— as it soon will over the DDR. For almost a decade, East Germany’s 600-mile border has been sealed by barbed wire and 12-foot electrified fencing; just inside the fence is a strip of land about 50 yards wide that is cleared of brush, dotted with mines, and covered by machine guns in high watchtowers. And so, most aspiring refugees make their way to East Berlin, where many of the streets and subway stations along the city border are guarded casually, if at all.

Marooned in the Workers’ Paradise: Cold War Catechetics, 1951–61

August 12, 1951. It’s a brilliant Sunday afternoon in the eastern sector of Berlin, the DDR’s capital, now an urban showplace of 1.7 million residents and proudly known on road signs as Berlin, Hauptstadt der DDR—a simple declaration of the SED’s ongoing claim to the entire city as DDR territory. The boulevards are clean and neat in Alexanderplatz, the downtown area of East Berlin. Windows are bedecked with flowers, and flags from every nation of the globe festoon the buildings, which are draped with tapestries displaying the goal of world socialism in dozens of languages: Friede, Pokoj, Paix, Beke, Pax, Pace, Peace. But a walk off the main drag casts doubt on whether there is much cause to preen: six years after the war’s close, block after block of row houses are still gutted. The decrepit trolley cars are slow-moving war survivors; postwar automobiles are nowhere to be seen, except for a few “official” vehicles of the government and People’s Police. Rubble lines every side street. The National Reconstruction Program, a much-publicized campaign to repair the DDR’s war-scarred cities, is not slated to begin until late fall. Economic reconstruction is barely under way. But ideological reconstruction is well advanced. Waves of Blueshirts, 100 abreast, pass at the rate of 30 ranks per minute in the gala marking the climax of the two-week World Festival of Youth and Students for Peace. Sponsored by the international Communist Youth Organization, this year’s festival dwarfs its predecessors in Prague (1947) and Budapest (1949), as well as the “Storm Berlin” Deutschlandtreffen (German rally) of 500,000 youth in May 1950. The theme for the 1951 festival is “Stalin’s Call to Arms for Peace.” The vast majority of the participants belong to the FDJ and JP, which together boast almost three million members. Down the treeless center parkway of Unter den Linden—the lime trees were cut down years ago—and from the side streets filled with debris sweep one million East Germans, along with 26,000 foreign guests from 104 countries.

Berlin, 1991 Dialectical Dilemmas in the Universities: West Side Story, East Side Story

Western Berlin, October 3, 1991. Tag der Einheit: “Unity Day.” The first anniversary celebrating German reunification. Or perhaps “marking” reunification is a more accurate term. No jubilant talk of a New Germany, no flag-waving nearby. My forehead pressed against the cool glass of the third-storey living-room window, I watch a half-dozen skinheads swagger in the street below. “Asylanten Raus!” (“Asylum Seekers Out!”) they chant. “Deutschland den Deutschen!” (“Germany for the Germans!”). Black jeans, jackboots, bomber jackets stabbed with Waffen SS insignias. Dirty blond hair clipped close on the sides, Hitler-style, with a single long forelock. Punk turned political with a vengeance. Waving swastikas, shouting the inevitable yet overwhelming “Sieg Heil!” they’re heading toward the Breitscheidplatz, West Berlin’s central square. Behind me, the Thursday evening news. The sparkle of holiday fireworks gives way to the explosion of terror sweeping across the country. Shelters for asylum seekers torched in Karlsruhe in the southwest and Dusseldorf in the northwest. On the island of Rügen, in the Baltic, a dormitory for refugees razed and incinerated; two Lebanese children severely burned. A hostel for foreigners firebombed in Bremen. “. . . at least 16 racist assaults within 48 hours, bringing the number of attacks to 1,387 since the beginning of the year: the worst outbreak of violence since Hitler’s Germany.” The right-wing German People’s Party, which has just captured an alarming six seats in Bremen’s local elections, does not denounce the violence; its spokesman instead urges immediate restrictions on immigration. A conservative minister pitches Prime Minister Kohl’s proposal to push through a constitutional amendment curbing Germany’s liberal provisions for asylum, which have already opened the doors to more than 1.3 million foreigners since 1989. An interview with historian Golo Mann: “It’s 1933 again.” But dinner is ready. Wolfgang, 44, a wissenschaftlicher Assistent (lecturer) in sociology at the Free University of Berlin, joins me at the window. He takes a long drag of his cigarette. “The Hitler Youth of the ’90s,” Wolfgang says. “German Unity!?! Who knows what this ‘new Germany’ will lead to?” He turns his back on the receding parade of young faschos.

Leipzig, 1990 Karl Marx-Universität, RIP: Postmortems on the God that Failed

What was it like to be a junior faculty member and longtime SED supporter under the Honecker regime? “I had a place secured, a paved road before me,” came the answer, as if from a great distance. “You—you’ve spent your whole life competing. We haven’t. My career track was clear—Dozent, then Professor, then Ordinarius. In time, if I were reasonably productive, it would have all been there. Now, no university in Germany will have me. Probably I’ll have to emigrate. That’s the only way to escape everyone forever asking me what I did in the Party and why I did it.” On a cold, drizzling, smoggy Leipzig afternoon in December 1990, Jürgen, a wissenschaftlicher Assistent (lecturer) in political science, sits in a dingy, secondfloor cafe a few blocks from the Karl-Marx Universität, telling me in a low voice about his life as a Party activist and organizer at the University. Authorities have just announced that several departments—among them law, political science, journalism, and M-L, will soon be shut down; Jürgen expects to be released in six months. He has spent the last 10 years at the oldest university in eastern Germany, widely regarded as the second-leading DDR university after Humboldt University of East Berlin. Talk has been buzzing that Humboldt could soon be closed down altogether, since united Berlin doesn’t need a rival to the Free University—and since old Cold Warriors at the FU have hardly forgotten being driven from Humboldt in the late ’40s. Such a scenario would leave the Karl-Marx Universität the top university in the east. But Jürgen’s mind is elsewhere. Academic politics holds little interest for him now; it all seems curiously irrelevant. Abwicklung is the order of the day in Leipzig, a city of 560,000, the second largest in eastern Germany. Those who served the Karl-Marx Universität in “ideologically burdened” departments, or who held Party offices, or who had contact with the Stasi, will probably not retain their positions.

Berlin, 1994: Bridge over Broken Glass? A Journey to Germany’s Sole Jewish High School

In the beginning was the memory. “I’m still hesitant even to mention it,” the young woman says in a low voice. We huddle closer together. “East Berlin was, after all, the capital of our ‘anti-fascist’ state.” She pauses. “And I’m even more anxious talking about it here—in this Oberschule.” She pauses again, then sets her shoulders and shakes her head impatiently. “But, on the other hand, it is my family history—I can’t do anything about that,” she continues. “I don’t believe in hiding it or repressing it—there’s been too much of that down through the years. And so I do tell people about it. Because it’s precisely my determination to confront my history that has brought me here.” Here: where—in a visceral, sometimes gut-wrenching way—past meets present, native meets foreigner, East meets West, Jew meets Gentile. And, above all, here: where—with as much good will and naturalness (and even a semblance of normalcy) as such an encounter can occur—Jew meets German. For we are sitting in the first—and still only—Jewish Oberschule in Germany in more than 50 years. We are talking in a corner in Room 212, the cramped teacher’s conference room through which her colleagues pass as they leave to teach their classes. Frau Ulla Berhau, 33, has the morning free and is willing to talk to me. A slight woman with short black hair cut in a close crop, Frau Berhau speaks in even tones and in a sharp Saxon accent about her past. Like many eastern German women, she wears no makeup, but her face lights up with animated expression as she tells her story, whose newest chapter has much to do with the historical challenges facing the Jewish Oberschule at Great Hamburg Street 27 in eastern Berlin. “To build a school is hard,” says Frau Berhau, “especially here in this street, especially for . . . us.” She gestures toward the center of Room 212 and her colleagues as she pauses, then shakes her head again.

Plauen, 1990/1992/1994 From Schoolmarm to Revolutionary: Annaliese Saupe, Old “New Teacher” and Local Heroine

“Oma der Revolution,” a neighborhood child calls her. “Grandmother of the Revolution.” And that she is: a revolutionary in love with the past, a revolutionary in love with a bygone Germany. When I first met Annaliese Saupe in 1987, I had no idea that she had been such a hell-raiser: blacklisted by the Nazis, vocal critic of SED educational policies, fired for insubordination by SED school authorities. Nor could I have guessed what would lay ahead for her only two years in the future, when she would be lionized by neighbors for her derring-do against the SED during the Revolution of the Candles. With her hair coiled into a huge white bun on top of her head, her large brown eyes and quick smile, her slight limp and walking cane, her encyclopedic knowledge of grocery prices past and present, her antiquarian’s passion for the history of her native region, her enduring love affair with Goethe and Schiller: Annaliese Saupe seems much like a Hausfrau and history schoolmarm—which is also just what she has been. I met Frau Saupe in 1987 at a Goethe Institute talk near Freiburg, where she gave a presentation on Goethe’s daily routine in Weimar. Struck by Frau Saupe’s vibrance and energy, I struck up an acquaintance with her. Already 75 years old, she was a dynamo who could easily pass for a woman in her early 60s. She invited me to visit her in her hometown of Plauen, a small Saxony city of 85,000 in the old German region of Vogtland. But the paperwork for my tourist visa to East Germany dragged on beyond my six-week visit in West Germany, and I returned to the United States disappointed. Nonetheless, we wrote each other, and in early December 1990, during the week of the first free elections in eastern Germany since 1933—in which Frau Saupe voted, now as then, for the Social Democrats—I finally had an opportunity to visit Plauen. “Please don’t leave Germany this time without coming to see me!” she had written me.

From Brown to Red: The Fall and Rise of an Educational System, 1945–51

October 1945. It is a testament to the determination of Soviet and German education officials that the schools and universities east of the Elbe have opened at all this fall. Just as in the western occupation zones of the Americans, French, and British, school staff in the SBZ labor under appalling conditions. Although the SBZ is better off in some ways than the western zones—it has more food, coal, newsprint—its major cities, such as Dresden and Leipzig, sustained greater physical damage during the war. And now the eastern zone is suffering massive Soviet dismantling of its factories and railroads. In several cities, devastated by heavy bombing, some school buildings are partially or totally destroyed. Only 20 of Leipzig’s 105 schools have been spared; 95 percent of the school buildings in Frankfurt an der Oder are in ruins. Even in the undamaged schools, central heating is impossible: there is no fuel. And virtually no books, no pencils, no crayons, no paper. But there are children everywhere, 100 or more per classroom in some urban school districts, huddled together on the floor for warmth. For while there are many fewer schools open, there are many more children to educate. The SBZ is overflowing with more than three million refugees who have fled before the advances of the Red Army or have been forcibly expelled from German-speaking areas of eastern Europe. Month after month for the last year the DPs (Displaced Persons) have been pouring into the SBZ. And still they come: the SBZ contains 500,0000 more children in 1945 than in 1939; an additional 319,000 will come in 1946. Far worse, hundreds of thousands of children are orphaned and literally starving. In Berlin alone, the emergency relief program Rescue the Children will distribute food, clothing, shoes, and other articles to 364,000 children in the coming harsh winter of 1945/ 46. The University of Jena is also open, and the other five universities of the SBZ—in Berlin, Leipzig, Halle, Greifswald, and Rostock—will reopen in the winter.