Phantom Border: A Personal Reconnaissance of Contemporary Germany by ibidem Press

Kerstin Lange

PHANTOM BORDER A Personal Reconnaissance of Contemporary Germany

Kerstin Lange

PHANTOM BORDER A Personal Reconnaissance of Contemporary Germany

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. Cover pictures: Aerial View: © copyright 2003 by Klaus Leidorf (www.leidorf.de). Used with kind permission. Reunification Fountain in Duderstadt, by Karl-Henning Seemann. Photo by Kerstin Lange, 2017.

ISBN (Print): 978-3-8382-1951-6 ISBN (E-Book [PDF]): 978-3-8382-7951-0 © ibidem-Verlag, Hannover • Stuttgart 2024 Alle Rechte vorbehalten Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Dies gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und elektronische Speicherformen sowie die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

Printed in the EU

Praise for Phantom Border This book combines adventure, history, and a narrative of how people lived confronted with the post WWII environment in Germany. Lange explores consequences and lessons that continue to the present day. It tackles the larger issues, the importance of home, and its offshoot into conservation biology and ethics. With verve and clarity, it serves a rich fare for a wide readership. It is a great read. Bernd Heinrich, author (Mind of the Raven, The Trees in My Forest, The Snoring Bird, A Year in the Maine Woods, The Homing Instinct) Lange’s language is beautiful, poetic at just the right moments: a linguistic joy. The book is written with exactly the sensitivity that is needed in matters concerning East and West in today’s Germany. Lange’s own story provides one thread of the book, making for a captivating read and providing an important perspective. Andrea Mehrländer, PhD Executive Director, Academy of Transatlantic Academic Studies; Berlin, Germany Lange’s training in both anthropology and natural science has resulted in a valuable perspective on the recent history of Germany. Readers will be moved by insights the book provides into human experiences of both the present and the past along the now former border and will be captivated by the knowledge it offers into the unique biodiversity of the Green Belt. Making this text even more compelling are the many meaningful glimpses we gain from it into Lange’s own personal journey within a society that has undergone significant transformation over the course of her lifetime. Gerard A. Weber, PhD Associate Professor, Anthropology and Sociology, Bronx Community College of the City University of New York

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Phantom Border blends skilled storytelling, highly illustrative writing, and a kind of empathetic reportage that really makes me feel immersed in every scene. Satisfying for mind and heart. Phyllis Edgerly Ring, author (The Munich Girl, Snow Fence Road, Life at First Sight)

An anthropological perspective takes seriously what people say and do and tries to understand their sayings and doings in their own terms without judging their ‘truth’ or ‘falsity.’ This attitude does not imply that one has to surrender one’s own beliefs, but it does imply that one has to appreciate other perspectives. The anthropologist aims for empathy rather than sympathy. —Richard Antoun

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offense. Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, That wants it down. —Robert Frost

Table of Contents Praise for Phantom Border ................................................................... 5 Map 1: The Green Belt/The Former Border..................................... 11 Map 2: The Expedition ........................................................................ 12 Preface ................................................................................................... 13 Chapter 1: The Eastern Sea ................................................................. 19 Chapter 2: The Northern Flatlands ................................................... 39 Chapter 3: The City on the Lake ........................................................ 57 Chapter 4: Not a Sinking Ship ........................................................... 69 Chapter 5: The Fence Must Go! ......................................................... 83 Chapter 6: Heimat ............................................................................... 97 Chapter 7: The Village Republic ...................................................... 109 Chapter 8: Between the Worlds ....................................................... 125 Chapter 9: The Magic Mountains .................................................... 135 Chapter 10: When Fear Switched Sides .......................................... 151 Chapter 11: Heaven, Earth, and Hell .............................................. 171 Chapter 12: Changes in the Land .................................................... 183 Chapter 13: The Wall in Our Heads ................................................ 203 Chapter 14: Shifting Ground ............................................................ 219 Chapter 15: Visits in Kella, or: Heimat and Faith ......................... 233 Chapter 16: The Bakery Has Closed Forever ................................. 251 Chapter 17: Crossing an Ocean, Crossing the Phantom Border.. 261 Chapter 18: The Birds at the End of the World.............................. 273 Chapter 19: Working through History over Beer .......................... 291 Chapter 20: The Other End of the Border....................................... 309 Chapter 21: A Society of Others....................................................... 323 Afterword ........................................................................................... 337 GLOSSARY......................................................................................... 345 QR codes for videos and images ..................................................... 349 Bibliography ....................................................................................... 351 Acknowledgments............................................................................. 359 Index .................................................................................................... 361

Map 1: The Green Belt/The Former Border Baltic Sea

North Sea

SCHLESWIGHOLSTEIN

MECKLENBURG– WESTERN POMERANIA

Hamburg

Schwerin

LOWER SAXONY

Bremen

Elb

ive

Berlin

Hanover

Magdeburg

SAXONY– ANHALT

FORMER WEST GERMANY (FRG) HESSE

Leipzig

THURINGIA

FORMER EAST GERMANY (GDR) SAXONY

Neuendettelsau

BAVARIA

Munich

Map 1: The location of the Green Belt/the former border between East and West Germany. Base map by NordNordWest, September 15, 2014, with modifications by Lencer. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Germany_adm_location_map.svg License: Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 DE Modifications by David Scheuing and the author.

Map 2: The Expedition

Map 2: Places visited along the expedition. Base map by NordNordWest, September 15, 2014, with modifications by Lencer. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Germany_adm_location_map.svg License: Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 DE Modifications by David Scheuing and the author.

Preface I grew up in a divided country. On the mental map of my childhood, East Germany—the other Germany, from my western perspective—was a distant shadow, a blank shape behind the Iron Curtain, as unknown as Poland, Hungary, or Romania. When I moved to the northeastern US to be with my then-fiancé in 1986, East Germany became even more distant. It was not until November 9, 1989, that those other Germans became real to me. I had spent the summer months of 1989 not in the US, but in a remote region in Kenya, working among cattle- and camel-herding nomads1 on an anthropological research project. It was there, on the rare occasions when I could track down a newspaper, that I first picked up on unusual events in Eastern Europe. That June, Poland held its first free elections. In August, hundreds and eventually thousands of East German citizens crammed into the West German embassies in East Berlin, Budapest, and Prague, refusing to leave except to go to West Germany. On August 19, East German vacationers walked across the Iron Curtain from Hungary to Austria when it was opened for a cross-border picnic—in itself an unheardof event. On October 9, seventy thousand peaceful protesters marched in the East German city of Leipzig, chanting “We are the people!” The Berlin Wall fell one month later. With that, the 1,400kilometer-long militarized border that had separated the two German states lost its purpose as well. The events of that November day unleashed a wave of collective euphoria: If the world’s most fortified border could lose its deadly purpose overnight, what did this mean for other borders? If a peaceful revolution could bring the Cold War to an end, anything seemed possible. The subsequent abolition of border controls between most European nations2 seemed to prove the boundless optimism right. 1 2

The Turkana of Northwest Kenya. Defined in the Schengen Agreement, signed initially by France, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Belgium. The Schengen area was established by the European Economic Area (EEA, a forerunner organization of the European

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Contrary to the early hopes, however, the facts on the ground developed in a different direction: while only fifteen militarized borders existed in the world in 1989, that number increased to seventy over the next twenty-five years. The combination of global forces such as climate-related disasters, the unpredictable flow of capital and jobs, and related conflicts from local rebellions to fullscale wars added to the rapid increase in the world’s refugee population. At the same time, borders, identity, and questions of belonging became ever more prominent issues, along with opinions— voiced with increasing aggression and then violence—about who belonged and who did not. I was trying to process these developments from my adopted home in Vermont, where I myself had once arrived as a stranger and, over the years, found a sense of belonging. It had started with a love affair with “the woods” and soon came to include the people. Although I felt at home in the almost completely flat landscape of my childhood in northwestern Germany, the hills and forests of Vermont had exerted a magical attraction on me, had even given me refuge during a time when life had felt unmoored. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s words “In these woods we return to reason and faith” and Henry David Thoreau, through Walden and Walking, spoke to me like friends. My first anchoring to my new home state was a job as a ranger-naturalist along the Long Trail, Vermont’s “footpath in the wilderness”—the hiking trail that runs from Massachusetts to the Canadian border along the spine of the Green Mountains. It was as good a second Heimat—a place of belonging—as anyone could ask for. And yet, over the years Germany, too, called to me: my parents were getting older and frailer, and news reports from Germany often confounded me. The formation of an increasingly right-wing party3 signaled a shift in the political landscape

Union) to allow free movement of member states’ citizens within the EEA and later the EU. The agreement was signed in the town of Schengen, Luxembourg, in June 1985 and took effect in March 1995. Alternative for Germany (AfD). Initially founded in 2013 on an anti–European Union platform, the AfD has become increasingly nationalistic and anti-immigration. Though much of the AfD’s leadership hails from Western Germany, the party’s rise has been particularly strong in the East.

PREFACE

into nationalist territory; attacks against people perceived to be foreigners conjured specters of Germany’s darkest history. Occasionally there was talk about a new or continuing “wall in our heads.” My occasional visits back to Germany, I realized, were not enough to understand what was going on. I had been doubly removed from life in “the East” by my West German provenance and, since 1987, by my own life in the United States. For close to twenty years, the actual wall that had separated the two Germanys did not enter my mind. I did not wonder what was left of it, or where exactly it had run. It was gone, and that was a good thing. What was left of it, I learned as I listened to a German radio station on the internet one day, was a unique nature preserve called the Grünes Band or Green Belt.4 During the four decades of the Cold War, over a thousand threatened plant and animal species had found refuge in and near the border strip. Soon after the opening of the border, conservationists from East and West had resolved to preserve that narrow ribbon of land as both a nature preserve and a landscape of remembrance: a 1,400-kilometer-long, 50-to-200-meter-wide, bizarrely shaped biological corridor and living memorial in one. I was fascinated by the irony of history that had brought this about, and I wanted to see this Green Belt for myself. A first visit in 2010 only whetted my curiosity. What if I used the old border as my personal Long Trail, my path through Germany, the prism through which I would explore my reunited but unsettled home country? I began to sketch out a plan. If I wanted to talk to people, find out what the border had meant in their lives, and get a sense of the larger landscape, it would not do to strictly follow the border strip. The only part of it that would have lent itself to bike riding was the patrol track used by the East German border guards. But its concrete panels had a regular pattern of oblong holes that were treacherous for bike tires. Besides, long stretches of the patrol track had been removed after the border opened. 4

The literal translation would be Green Ribbon or Band, but Green Belt evolved as common usage in English.

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A recently published guidebook, the Deutsch-Deutscher Radweg5 (German-German Bike Route), seemed to fit my purposes well; it showed the border line but also suggested nearby bike paths, roads, villages, border museums, accommodations, and bike repair shops on both sides. In the summer of 2016, I embarked on the first section of a multi-year expedition by bicycle, on foot, and, for occasional side trips, by train and by car. Over the course of that journey, I heard about the exasperating restrictions of life in the border zone during the time of Germany’s division and about the high cost—arrest or death—paid by those who attempted escape. I met up with the “father of the Green Belt,” who, as an astute thirteen-year-old in the 1970s, had first documented the high incidence of rare bird species along the border strip. I sat around a table with former border guards from both sides, and I listened to people whose lives the Stasi (the East German secret police) had intruded upon in insidious ways. I also heard about the small and not so small ways in which people defied the system, the strong sense of community many of them had felt, and the hopes that had been fulfilled or dashed after the momentous events of 1989. Somewhere along the way, I came to think of my expedition as a sort of pilgrimage, and of my navigation strategy as “structured sauntering.” While the former border provided the geographical structure, my journey’s spirit came to be infused with the words of Thoreau, who described the word “sauntering” as derived from […] idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre, to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes a Sainte-Terrer,” a Saunterer, a HolyLander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering.6

5 6

Cramer 2015. Thoreau 1862.

PREFACE

While my journey was not aimed at the actual Holy Land, I was quite literally traveling on sacred ground: several hundred people died along this strip of land. A landscape of remembrance. Building on this central truth, I wanted to explore the land itself, the story of how it came to be and the stories of the living beings that came to be part of it. In particular, I wanted to find out how a dividing line drawn across the land had shaped the people and the land around it, and what echoes it had left. So in some way I would indeed be asking for charity: not for money or for food, but for people’s stories and memories. There was also the element of home in the second interpretation Thoreau cites: “sans terre, without land or a home.” This is a central question in the lives of those who have left their original home, whether by choice, necessity, or force. Can one ever find another home? Or is it possible to be equally at home everywhere, as Thoreau suggests? In the process of my sauntering, I came to see that the “German-German” border had not only left its own legacies in the land and in the people, but that it was itself an echo of much older borders, and perhaps even of older European landscapes: a phantom border. The timeline of my thinking expanded. *** While I was tracing the Green Belt to reconnect with my home country, hundreds of thousands of people from parts of the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America were leaving their homes to escape war, drought, and social upheaval.7 In Europe, borders that had been opened after the Cold War were closed again; the US border with Mexico was increasingly militarized. Hundreds of people were drowning in the Mediterranean and dying of heat stroke and dehydration in remote regions of Central America. On both continents, the response from not only parts of the population but also from high-level government figures was hostility and blanket

According to the United Nations, nearly 80 million people were forcibly displaced from their homes in 2019.

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condemnation of Muslims, refugees, and foreigners. At times, I felt desolate about the course of humanity, as if the weight of history along the phantom border were not tragicreason enough. As if we humans could not find lessons in that history. At least as often, I received inspiration and generosity from the people I encountered. Sometimes it was little things, like the retired border police chief who invited me in for coffee, or the innkeeper who poured me an extra-generous glass of wine when I arrived drenched from a day of riding in the rain. Sometimes it was people who were dedicating their free time to keeping the memory of the border alive or to making their community a better place. Every day, it was the surroundings of the Green Belt, an oasis of remarkable space and quiet in a fast-moving world. This book, then, is a love letter to the creatures, human and wild, of the German borderland.

Chapter 1: The Eastern Sea The barbed wire between the two German states always went straight through my heart —Wolf Biermann, singer-songwriter

I sensed the sea in the air before I could see it. The subtle hint of salt, the tangy whiff of seaweed and soggy beach silt. A smile spread over my face as I inhaled. This was what air was supposed to feel like. For a moment, the morning breeze transported me back to the North Sea coast, to the sea of my childhood. To the endless waters and beaches and dunes that gave my childhood a magical sense of freedom. Strictly speaking, the landscape of my childhood extended some eighty kilometers inland, to the edge of Bremen, the old Hanseatic city on the river Weser. Even more strictly speaking, most of my childhood unfolded in an urban setting, centered first on an apartment complex next to an Autobahn, then on a rented townhouse, and finally on the single-family home my parents had dreamed of and saved for all through my first thirteen years. But it was the landscapes of the North Sea coast and of the northwestern flatlands that imprinted themselves most strongly on my childhood brain. The air that filled my lungs that July morning belonged to Germany’s other sea, some 150 kilometers further east: the Baltic Sea, Ostsee in German—literally, the Eastern Sea. Steering my bicycle toward the Baltic coast, I could feel anticipation rising about this other, less familiar sea, and about my expedition along the border that had divided this coastline—and my home country, and the world—for forty years. More than a border between two nations, it was a Systemgrenze, a border that split the world into diametrically opposed social and economic systems. From 1949 to 1990, most of the Baltic Sea coast lay in East Germany, officially known as the German Democratic Republic, or the GDR—a mysterious country about which I knew almost nothing until it ceased to exist. As a child in the 1960s, I had little reason to wonder why there were two Germanys. It had been that way since 19

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before I was born. Occasionally there were news stories about hairraising escapes from that other Germany—like that of two families who managed to fly over the deadly border strip in a homemade hot air balloon the summer I turned fifteen. And I knew vaguely that my friend Ingeborg’s mother had fled from the Eastern zone— the Ostzone, as West Germans continued to refer to East Germany long after 1949, when both countries declared themselves sovereign states.8 Even as a child, I knew that this was not just a geographic reference: the word carried a sad, almost ominous undertone when adults talked about it, a sense of irreversible loss that my brain could not grasp. On this summer morning, I was glad that the air felt familiar. Glad, too, that this sturdy, black Bremen Bike—made in my hometown, as the red manufacturer’s decal announced—would be my companion on this border journey. A sensible bike, with mud guards and dynamo hub lights. I liked this bike, I could tell even from the short ride to the train station near my parents’ house that morning. It was actually not my own bicycle—I no longer had one in Germany—but my father’s. We both knew that he would have been a perfect travel companion on this expedition were it not for his failing eyesight. At seventy-nine, he was still in excellent physical shape, but more and more of his field of vision had vanished over the years. He had given up driving years ago, and then also the long bicycle trips he had loved, like the one along the entire Baltic Sea coast he had done with some friends a few years after Reunification.9 Now he only rode his bike close to home, on the quiet paths he had known for decades, away from car traffic. I knew he would

The two German states had no formal relations until the Foundational Agreement of 1972, and West Germany did not recognize East Germany as an independent state until the following year. As will become clear in the course of the book, Reunification is a complicated term. It was not the term used in the legal framework that was applied at the time, and the territories united on October 3, 1990 do not represent Germany in any earlier state. I use the term both because it is the most widely recognized term for those events and because, as Daphne Berdahl (1999) points out, the term does express the fact “that Germany was divided in 1945 for a reason.”

THE EASTERN SEA

miss it. In a way, at least, he might feel like part of him would be with me on this journey. I had left Bremen earlier in the morning on a train to Lübeck, whose city limits ran right up against the border with East Germany during the Cold War. Some years ago, when I first started thinking about the border, I had asked a friend from Lübeck what it was like to live so close to it. He said it was eerie and normal at the same time. “It sounds strange now that it’s gone,” he told me, “but somehow it became part of the landscape.”10 From Lübeck, it was a short ride on a local train to the seaside resort of Travemünde—at the mouth of the river Trave, as its name states. At the station, I retrieved my bike from the train’s designated bicycle car and pushed it along the platform. I had barely pedaled a half mile from the train station in that exhilarating sea air when my nose picked up another missive: the warm, slightly yeasty aroma of fresh Brötchen—breakfast rolls. In all my years living away from Germany, I never stopped missing this scent, the scent that meant that the world was still in Ordnung. Or that even if it wasn’t in order, I could at least take temporary refuge in that scent. Once, many years ago, in my bed in upstate New York, I woke up with a sense of that comforting smell and a feeling of deep contentment, and then realized, startled, that it had been part of a dream. Even in Vermont, where I had moved in the mid-nineties and which is blessed with good bakeries, I could never find fresh Brötchen. I had not exactly planned to make a stop so soon, but if my mission was to reconnect with Germany, I figured a bakery stop was almost mandatory. And this one clearly looked, and smelled, like a winner: the display case nearly burst with at least a dozen 10

Historian Robert Darnton described the same phenomenon for people on both sides of the Berlin Wall: “Soon after 1961…the million or so inhabitants on the Eastern side and the 2 million or so on the Western side began to lose contact. By 1989 a whole generation had come of age within the shadow of the Wall. Most of them never crossed it, even from West to East when that was allowed. They accepted the Wall as a fact of life, as something inexorable, built into the landscape—there when they were born and there when they died. They left it to tourists, took it for granted, forgot about it, or simply stopped seeing it” (Darnton 1991, p. 83).

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different kinds of Brötchen, from the plain Krosse (crisp one) to the hearty wholegrain Weltmeister (world champion) and a number of rolls with maritime names like Hanseat.11 The tinkly bell that pealed each time a customer entered sounded just like the one at my parents’ neighborhood bakery in Bremen. And just like at that bakery, the tinkling was followed by a “Moin,” the ubiquitous northern German greeting. Several tables seemed to be filled with regulars; the buzz of conversation mingled with the waft of the fresh Brötchen. I didn’t know anyone there, but the place pulled me in with a sense of the familiar, of home. I ordered a Weltmeister Brötchen with butter and jam and sat down at a table near the window. Maybe this bakery-café could help me think about home, or even Heimat. Some words have meanings that are easy to translate, but Heimat is not one of them. In the Middle Ages, it was a legal term that meant someone had the right to settle and follow their trade in a particular location. The word still has the meaning of home place, or the place a person is from.12 But most of the meaning of Heimat lies below the surface of this geographic fact, like the bulk of an iceberg. Heimat is inseparably tied to a person’s feelings about that physical place: a sense of belonging, of feeling understood, of connectedness with a particular landscape and familiar people, of not being a stranger, of one’s native habitat. And yet, there is a dark side to Heimat. Enveloped by the smells and the sounds around me, a corner of my mind opened a crack to a different connotation, to a meaning that connects Heimat with national identity and all too easily spills over into exclusion, even disdain for anyone “other.” The Nazis seized on this aspect of Heimat and almost managed to poison the term beyond repair. For decades after World War II, young Germans were embarrassed to

Named after the Hanseatic League, whose merchants had plied the waters of the Baltic Sea and the North Sea centuries ago. Some would translate it as “homeland,” but the word Heimat does not in itself refer to a country or a nation. In current American English usage, the term “homeland” for Heimat seems misleading, at least since the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002 and the spy thriller series Homeland (2011).

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use the word and avoided it like the plague, except in combined terms like Heimatstadt (home city) or Heimweh (missing one’s home). The rise of the postwar Heimatfilm movie genre, with its abundance of dirndls, bright green Bavarian mountain scenes, and kitschy storylines, did little to redeem the word. And now, as I recently learned from a magazine article, there was a Heimat club that artfully mixed anti-foreigner messages into announcements for harvest festivals and bicycle outings, and an initiative that called itself “Zukunft Heimat” (Heimat as future) that organized protests against refugee shelters. *** Fortified by my Brötchen, I stepped outside, unlocked the bicycle, and set out to find whatever was left of the German-German border’s northern end. The first step was to find the ferry to the Priwall peninsula, which was once cut in half by the border. During the Cold War, the only way to access the Priwall from West Germany was by ferry across the Trave. From the east, where the peninsula is attached to the mainland, only GDR border guards and officials of the Stasi— East Germany’s secret police—were allowed to set foot on it. For regular East German citizens, the Priwall was off-limits. Turning a corner, I spotted a sign pointing to the ferry dock at the end of a street lined with red brick buildings. This is what houses are supposed to look like. As a child, I used to think that all houses were built of red brick, until I realized that northern Germany’s plentiful clay was simply the most logical building material to use. I rode past store windows displaying beach toys and seasideresort souvenirs with maritime motifs: lighthouses, anchors, sailing ships, seashells. The faint scent of suntan lotion mingled with the brackish sea air. Children skipped along the sidewalk, carrying plastic pails and child-sized shovels, ready for a new day of beach adventures. On one of the clothing racks outside a store, dark blue fishermen’s shirts with white stripes were on display, exactly like the one I was wearing and that had become soft and thin over the years. Anywhere more than a hundred kilometers south of the

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coast, people would probably consider it slightly strange with its plain, angular cut, or simply think, “She’s from up north.” Maybe that’s why I took it with me on this expedition: a small piece of home. There in the Travemünde vacation bustle, no one paid attention to me or my shirt. The ferry ride to the peninsula took less than ten minutes and landed me on Mecklenburg Road, the main road east across the peninsula. Modest bungalows—vacation and weekend homes, by the look of it—arranged in rows and circles sat to the left of the road. The seashore had to be just beyond the gently undulating beach grass covering the dunes. *** During the Cold War, Mecklenburg Road had ended at the border—the Iron Curtain, as Winston Churchill had called it in his famous speech in March of 1946. My eyes scanned the sides of the road. I was not exactly sure what I was looking for—an old watchtower? A piece of the border fence? A faded black-red-gold border post with the East German hammer-and-compass emblem and the words “Deutsche Demokratische Republik”? I did not see any of these things. The first clue came when the even purr of smooth asphalt under my tires gave way to the quietly crunching sound of packed dirt. From the corner of my eye, I spotted a massive boulder to the left of the bike path. I turned around and pushed my bike back to read the inscription: Never again divided. Now I noticed that the last row of the vacation homes lined up perfectly with the boulder and the change in pavement. Lesson One: figuring out where exactly the border had been would require some detective work. Next to the boulder, an interpretive sign explained that at this particular location, the border was opened on February 3, 1990. An aerial black-and-white photo next to it showed throngs of people

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converging on the wintry beach from opposite directions. The photo was grainy, the people in it looked like indistinct ants. My eyes welled up. I leaned my bike against the side of the boulder and gazed east, past the almost imperceptible change in Mecklenburg Road’s pavement. The vacation homes were behind me now, an unruly miniature forest lined both sides of the road ahead. Wild rose bushes, small willows, poplars, white birches, some stunted white pine; the distinctive warm orange of sea buckthorn berries poked through the countless shades of green. No obvious features in the landscape that would have served as a natural boundary, like a mountain range or a river, though rivers did form part of the “German-German” border farther south. Not that a river or a mountain range ever had to be a border, or that a border had to be a wall.

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THE BORDER (1 km = 0.6 mi; 1m = 3.28 ft.) 1,265 km of expanded metal fencing 829 km of anti-vehicle ditches 1,339 km of patrol track 232 km of illuminated control strips 473 observation bunkers 578 observation towers

Figure 1. Schematic of the border strip’s spatial structure

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From May 1952 on, the GDR (East Germany) secured the border between the two German states with a variety of obstacles. In addition, it designated a 5 km wide restricted zone (Sperrgebiet) and a 500 m protective strip (Schutzstreifen). Nowhere did the border fence sit on the actual border line. The two-fold purpose of the outside sovereign territory was to pursue escapees and to access the outside of the fence for repairs or upgrades. The diagram in Figure 1 shows the general layout of the border strip. Looking east from the actual border line was the GDR’s “outside sovereign territory,” an open area of about 50 m, followed by the first of two fences. Next came the control track, a 6-meter strip of barren soil that was raked daily so that footprints of any escapees would be visible. The remaining area between the two fences contained light posts, a vehicle ditch, mine fields, watch towers, and dog runs. The eastern or hinterland fence was equipped with signal wire that, when touched, alerted the guards in the watchtower via an electronic signal. The exact makeup of the border strip varied somewhat along its length based on topography or other local conditions. This particular border was drawn up at a series of conferences during and shortly after World War II to define the Allied powers’ respective occupation zones. But the border’s history began with the German Wehrmacht’s13 invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. You could even say that it began before that, with Hitler’s seizure of power on January 30, 1933. Without the Nazi crimes and the unprovoked war, Germany would not have been partitioned or occupied. For the first few years, the border was merely a demarcation line between the Soviet zone and those occupied by the western Allies. The line only became a border in 1949 with the declaration of two separate nation states.14 For the first few years, it was still a

13 14

The German armed forces before and during WW II. Historian Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk points out that contemporary witnesses in 1949 considered the declaration of the two German states a provisional measure intended to be short-lived (Kowalczuk 2024).

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fairly benign border—you could cross it in both directions with proper identification for work, family visits, or to buy or sell things. All of this came to a grinding halt in 1952, when the Sovietbacked East German government issued a “directive for a special regime on the demarcation line”—a new legal framework that, over the years, transformed the border into a strip of land filled with ghastly obstacles (see Figure 1). From the eastern side, the strip was bordered by a signal fence—named for the wires that would send a silent signal to the guards in the watchtower at the slightest touch. There was a westward fence, too, set back some fifty meters from the border line. They thought of everything, I remember thinking when I first saw a model of the installations at a border museum. That fifty-meter strip, called the “outward sovereign territory,” allowed specially authorized border guards to make repairs to the western side of the fence. It also gave them a clear line of sight to follow—and shoot at—escapees. Gazing into the scraggly little forest along Mecklenburg Road, I was reminded of my first visit to the former border in March 2010 and the memorial I saw that damp, cold March day. It was a simple, weathered wooden cross that blended in with the surrounding Scotch pine stand, its surface reflecting a dark green sheen of lichen. An inscription on a small brass plaque read: Bernhard Simon 30. Juli 1945—28. Oktober 1963 Er wollte von Deutschland nach Deutschland. He wanted to go from Germany to Germany. My guide that day, a Green Belt volunteer named Jürgen Starck, explained that Bernhard had tried to escape together with his brother Siegfried that night in 1963 and stepped on a landmine. The detonation nearly tore off one of his legs. His brother managed to pull him onto West German soil and tie off the injured leg, then had to run nearly two miles to get help. Bernhard died on the way to the hospital.15 15

Research about the total number of people who died in the context of the border is ongoing, as are debates over who should be included in the count (only

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I cannot say how long I stared at the cross, feeling the weight of the border hit me like a fist to the stomach. From Germany to Germany. Bernhard had been only eighteen when his life so violently ended at the border, a year before I was born in the Germany he died trying to reach. Never had the border felt so personal as in that moment: only the geographic accident of my birth in the West had spared me from facing the decision Bernhard had made. At eighteen, I was preoccupied with the anxieties of preparing for my Abitur exams and figuring out the next step after that. None of that compared in the slightest to the decision with which Bernhard must have grappled: whether to leave his country, his mother (his father had already fled to West Germany years before), and his friends, knowing with near certainty that he would never see them again, and aware they would likely suffer serious repercussions as a result of his decision. The alternative was to live under the fist of a regime that had ruined the professional dreams of both brothers for expressing critical views. I looked at the aerial photo on the sign once more, at the tiny dots of people converging on the beach. Yes, it had reminded me of the heavy burden the border had imposed on people’s lives. But there was another layer to my tears. Shot through with the grief about the border was the memory of the electric joy at its unexpected demise. *** It was late afternoon in upstate New York on November 9, 1989, when a friend practically ordered me to turn the TV on because “something big is going on in Berlin.” And so I found myself staring at the screen, an ocean away from Germany, speechless, not comprehending what I was seeing. Throngs of people were crossing

people trying to cross the border? Border guards who died in the line of work? Border guards who committed suicide in the context of their work? People who died at the border but were not trying to cross?). The latest numbers for all of these categories, counting those at the Berlin Wall, the inner-German border, the Baltic Sea, and the borders of Eastern European countries add up to 943 (Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung 2023).

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through the Berlin Wall, even dancing on top of the forbidding edifice that, only that morning, had been part of the deadliest border regime in the world. If… if East Germans could simply walk into West Berlin, how would their government be able to keep up the rest of its high-security border system between East and West Germany? After all, the Wall had been built in 1961 to stop the massive outflow of East Germans from the Soviet sector of Berlin to the Allied-occupied sectors. What I was watching was history happening in real time, in the lives of real people. This seemed surprising. In school, I had gotten the impression that history was the realm of people who had been dead for hundreds of years, if they had ever really been alive at all. The events recounted in textbooks had always seemed inevitable, preordained, as if spooling from an old-fashioned movie reel. Later, I wondered whether the euphoric scenes in Berlin could possibly appear like that in the future. Would schoolkids in history class in, say, the year 2050, hear, “On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell” and not feel the boundless energy of that day? Would they know that the Berlin Wall did not just crumble, but was brought down by a peaceful revolution? That hundreds of thousands of East German citizens had risked their jobs and their lives to fight for basic civil rights, free elections, and the freedom to travel where they wanted? Along with the fall of the Berlin Wall, those future schoolkids would also learn that less than a year later—on October 3, 1990— the two Germanys became one country again. Would they assume that Reunification was the inevitable outcome?16 That that was the wish of the protesters? Granted, soon after November 9, 1989, the chants of “We are the people” had turned into “We are one people,” but no one could predict what would actually happen. Maybe the two German states would reunite, maybe not. Maybe they would continue to coexist, but now as friendly neighbors with a shared border as unremarkable as that between, say, Vermont and Massachusetts. Or maybe this was a historic chance to try something different altogether, to 16

Historian Konrad Jarausch calls this widespread view the “reunification teleology” (Jarausch 2010).

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create a society that moved beyond the repressions of Eastern Blocstyle communism and the excesses of Western capitalism.17 *** On a crisp mid-December day one month later—I had just arrived at my parents’ house in Bremen for the Christmas holidays—some friends and I decided on a whim to see if we could cross into East Germany. We grabbed our passports, thinking we might have less than a fifty-fifty chance without a visa. In those early days, no one knew what the procedure was at any of the checkpoints; there had been no time yet to come up with a consistent protocol. My only previous experience crossing the border had been a trip with our sports club to West Berlin when I was thirteen. To drive to West Berlin, one had to travel across East Germany on one of four approved transit routes. I could sense the Beklemmung— trepidation—among the adults in the car as we approached the first of several stop signs and concrete barriers at the Marienborn border crossing. A young, gruff-looking border guard collected our identity papers, told us to wait at the next barricade, and disappeared into a drab concrete building. No one in the car spoke as we waited. Finally another stone-faced guard told us we could enter the German Democratic Republic, and exhorted us not to leave the transit route under any circumstances. We were lucky; none of the cars in our group had been disassembled. On a previous trip when returning from West Berlin to West Germany, my father had been ordered to open the engine compartment of his VW Beetle. He explained that the clasp was broken. Although the guards knew as well as he did that the only thing that could possibly fit into the engine compartment of a beetle was the engine, they kept repeating that “the inspection cannot be

See historian Dirk Philipsen’s 1991 book We Were the People: Voices from East Germany’s Revolutionary Autumn of 1989, which is based on in-depth interviews with East German activists about their visions for the future.

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completed,” gave him a crowbar, and ordered him to force the mechanism open.18 That day in December 1989, as my friends and I approached the guard booth, passports in hand, my heart raced. What happened next was a complete surprise: the border guard raised his arm and waved us through. We stared at him, we stared at each other—he did not even ask to see the passports! Was he actually smiling? It was unbelievable. Crossing into the GDR had taken less than five minutes. On the other side, we found ourselves on a much narrower road, deposited the car somewhere in the nearest town, and followed the sounds to where there seemed to be a public event of some kind. As it turned out, the event was an open-air welcome party put on by the people of the town for visiting westerners. Tables laden with baked goods and thermos bottles lined the streets; someone handed us steaming mugs of coffee and plates of homebaked cake; people laughed and cried and said, “Willkommen,” over and over again. I had never seen my fellow Germans expressing such unrestrained joy. The laughing and crying was contagious and I still, even now, remember the strange mix of familiarity and culture shock. The people here spoke German, though with an unfamiliar inflection that swallowed even more consonants than my supposedly High German northern pronunciation. Their offerings of coffee and cake felt as German as, well, coffee and cake. But there was something different about the town. The houses were tinged a sad-looking brown, the air smelled like sulfur,19 the cars were smaller and had a goofy toy-car look; the grocery stores were quaint-looking and called Konsum. On a whim we decided to go inside one Konsum, where we felt transported into a different world. The store was much smaller than

GDR border guards often disassembled Western cars at the checkpoint to familiarize themselves with possible hiding spots, then handed the owners a toolkit with orders to reassemble the car. From the predominant use of brown coal for heating.

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the ones we were used to, the goods and brands were ones we had hardly ever heard of, and there were far fewer choices. *** The fall of the Berlin Wall, the open-air welcome party, the simple memorial for Bernhard Simon: all of these moments now returned, triggered by that aerial photograph of the border opening on the beach. From Germany to Germany. It was sometime after I first read those words on Bernhard’s memorial, back in 2010, that the idea for this expedition had begun to stir in my mind. To use this 1,400-kilometer-long skinny ribbon of land as a compass for a reconnaissance in the reunited Germany, and to learn what traces it had left in the landscape and in society. In the time it took me to read the interpretive sign and figure out why the grainy photo moved me to tears, about a dozen cars had driven past, crossing from the western Bundesland (federal state) of Schleswig-Holstein to the eastern state of Mecklenburg– Western Pomerania. None of the cars stopped or even slowed down. Do those people know that they just crossed the former Iron Curtain? Perhaps they were locals who drove across it all the time. Or perhaps they were from other parts of Germany and hadn’t noticed the boulder and the inscription. But wouldn’t they want to know where the border was? Wouldn’t parents want to tell their children that a border had once cut through Germany, and that it had been right here? And that now there was a nature reserve in its place— the Grünes Band? *** What about the Green Belt? It had to be right here, since I had already figured out that the boulder marked the border line. I looked around again. Now it presented itself so clearly I almost had to laugh. From that unmarked line on, the miniature forest spread east in front of me. As I breathed in the warm scent of pine and salt, I realized that this little forest was growing in the once-barren border strip. This was the Green Belt? It did not look spectacular, and it was

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a far cry from the more mature forests I found so compelling. But I knew that biologists had documented rare plant species, like the small pasque flower and marsh gentian, here in the Priwall peninsula’s section of the Green Belt, along with rare species of birds, butterflies, insects, and amphibians. These were all species that had become rare in the larger landscape as agriculture intensified in the twentieth century. What did you expect—Yellowstone Park? Charismatic megafauna? This was going to be a more subtle kind of nature experience. Besides, are less flashy creatures less important? What if there were no insects to pollinate two thirds of all the food plants we humans depend on? A broad-based study of insect biomass had recently documented a drop of 76 percent between 1989 and 2016.20 Bird surveys published in subsequent years showed a similar decline, including in the population of the whinchat, the Green Belt’s unofficial signature bird.21

20 21

Bundesumweltministerium 2023. BUND 2017.

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THE GREEN BELT (1 km = 0.6 mi; 1m = 3.28 ft.; 1 ha = 2.47 acres) 1,393 km in length covers an area of 17,712 ha 146 different habitat types over 1,200 species on Germany’s Red List* of rare and endangered species 9 federal states border the Green Belt The Green Belt… * is anchored in Germany’s Federal Law on the Conservation of Nature (since 2009) * has been designated as a National Monument of Nature by 4 federal states (as of 2023) * is a candidate for the UNESCO World Heritage list * is part of the German federal government’s National Strategy for Biodiversity See Chapter 17 for the story of Kai Frobel, initiator of the Green Belt See QR codes for a video about Germany’s Green Belt and the BUND brochure “Traces of the Past Along the German Green Belt” on page 351 *The Red List is a comprehensive inventory of endangered species. First introduced at the global level by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in 1965, Red Lists are also used at the country level (see also Pieck 2023).

Whether I spotted any rare critters today or not, the thought was ironic: from here to the Czech border, this bizarrely shaped strip of land, once so hostile to humans, served as a place of refuge for over a thousand animal and plant species. No more ironic, really, than the biological richness that burst forth in places like the Verdun

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battlefield, the Korean DMZ, the landscape around the Chernobyl nuclear plant, and abandoned military sites in the United States. This was one of the questions that had brought me here: What kind of nature was this? And what do places like this have to tell us about what I call the “humans and nature” question? Can nature only thrive when we are kept at a safe distance? Good questions to investigate over the next 1,400 kilometers. But first, I wanted to lay eyes on this eastern sea and dip my toes in it to mark the beginning of my journey. *** The Baltic Sea is the smaller, tamer, less salty cousin of the North Sea. Surrounded by the Scandinavian and Baltic countries, it would be a large lake were it not for a few narrow waterways between Denmark and the southern tip of Sweden. Those channels let in just enough salt water to keep the Baltic Sea from turning into a giant freshwater basin. They also keep its waters comparatively calm, whereas the North Sea is wide open to the Atlantic Ocean and gets churned up by storms on a regular basis—and by the ocean tides, which lead to differences in sea level of six to ten feet twice a day. Ahead of me, where the road made a sharp right turn inland, a wooden boardwalk led to the left, in the direction of the sea. I locked my bike against a bicycle rack and started walking. In the aerial photo of the border opening, the watchtower had stood a short distance to my right. There was no trace of it now. There was, however, another interpretive sign. A man and a woman, perhaps in their early sixties, were reading it while holding on to their bicycles. “Moin,” I greeted them. “Guten Morgen,” they responded, letting on that they were from farther south. “Where are you from?” I asked, and “are you here to follow the border, too?” “We’re from Cologne,”22 the woman told me. “We’ve been coming to Travemünde on vacation for years. We bring our bikes and then we go on day trips. The border? Ach, it’s strange how long

A city in far western Germany.

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ago that seems now. It really didn’t affect our lives, but it’s a good thing that’s gone.” I was not entirely surprised the border had seemed remote to them. Cologne was even farther west than Bremen. For West Germans who had no relatives in the GDR, there was little occasion to think of that other Germany. By contrast, many East Germans watched Western TV stations and yearned for Western cars or simply for the freedom to travel to the West. I wished the couple an enjoyable ride and continued up the boardwalk through the dunes. As I cleared the small rise, a scene from childhood enveloped me like a piece of home: the white sand, the pale-green beach grass, the deep blue of the sea, the feel of the fresh, slightly salty breeze on my skin. I took off my sandals and jogged down to the water’s edge, feeling the old thrill of the wet, firm silt squeezing through my toes. Scanning the sea, the beach, and the dunes in a 360-degree turn, my eyes could not detect a single trace of the border: not the faintest GDR boundary post, no remains of barricades or warning signs. Here, several kilometers from the vacation bustle of Travemünde, the beach was nearly empty. With a mild start, I noticed that the few people I saw here were nude. Not an uncommon sight on a German beach, I reminded my Americanized sensibilities. And in East Germany, nude bathing had been even more common than in the West. A small freedom in the midst of all the restrictions on individual choices. I walked east for a bit, then abandoned the wet silt to walk up to the dunes again. Sitting down in a shallow depression to look out at the sea, I tried to visualize what I might have seen from here during the time of the Cold War. Watchtowers for sure, and I knew from my friend Axel, who had spent vacations here, that border guards had walked around among the sunbathers, making sure that no one dared to go into the water with a boat or even an air mattress. It would have been too easy to paddle out into the Ostsee in hopes of getting picked up by a West German or Danish boat, and that would have constituted the East German crime of Republikflucht—fleeing from the republic.

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In the distance on the western horizon, I could make out a thin band of white sand: the part of former West Germany that stretches north from Travemünde, almost forming a bay around the Priwall peninsula. What was it like, I wondered, to watch the huge Baltic Sea ferries go by without any hope of being able to board one of them? To know, like Axel did, that trying to get across the bay to the other Germany meant to risk not merely drowning, but getting captured, imprisoned, or shot? Quite a different order from the dangers I had been warned of as a child. I had learned never to walk out onto the wet portion of the North Sea’s beaches without first checking the tide chart. I had shuddered at the stories of people caught on sandbars by the rising tide, or sucked out to sea with the retreating tide. Those dangers were forces of nature. The dangers here had come in the form of one’s own fellow citizens, representatives of a government that had declared leaving the country a crime. I looked at my watch. It was time to move on if I wanted to reach Ratzeburg, my planned overnight spot. There I was to meet up with Klarissa, a friend from Sweden who was in Germany on her own personal East-West history quest. I walked back to the boardwalk to retrieve my bike and began pedaling south, on the eastern side of the former border.

Chapter 2: The Northern Flatlands Now that which belongs together will grow together again. —Willy Brandt, West German chancellor 1969–74, November 10, 1989 Germany, Germany is one again, only I, I am still torn apart. —Wolf Biermann, 1999

Mecklenburg Road led me south past the tiny village of Pötenitz, the closest on the eastern side on this stretch of the former border. For the next few kilometers, I skirted Pötenitz Bay, which extends inland some eight kilometers from the mouth of the river Trave. At least I knew from the map that there was a bay; it was hidden from view behind the thin band of forest that separated me from the water—the Green Belt. On the map, the line that separates the federal states of Schleswig-Holstein and Mecklenburg–Western Pomerania runs right along the eastern edge of the cove. So the shore was East German territory, but the water lapping up to it was, technically, West German water. Unfortunate for the people from both sides. How tempting the deserted eastern shore must have looked to West German boaters: a perfect place for a picnic, a secluded getaway. And yet, who would risk trespassing on East German soil? The border guards were under orders to shoot if they suspected someone of fleeing, and how were they supposed to know who was an escapee from the republic and who a western vacationer? The guards were not even allowed to walk down to the shoreline for a closer look, presumably because it would have been too tempting for them to leap into the West German water and head for the other shore themselves. The breeze carried a medley of chirping, quacking, and honking sounds from the bay. I couldn’t see them, but I knew that wild geese, rose-finches, bank swallows, shelducks, and ringed plovers were plentiful here. As dangerous as it had been for humans, at least for these wild creatures the shoreline had provided a safe haven. After Reunification, the nearby town of Dassow wanted at one point to convert the old patrol track along the bay into a bike path. 39

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I bet the birds are better off the way things are now, with bikes and humans at a distance. And wouldn’t it make sense to leave the few remnants of the border installations in place? How else would people who never saw the border be able to picture it, or even figure out where it was? My gaze swept over the fields and meadows to my left, a pleasing flat expanse of green and ochre dotted here and there with grazing Holstein cows. I did not know anyone within a hundred miles of here, but something about this land felt like home. Maybe one has to grow up in a flat landscape to love this kind of terrain. To trust that its gray and brown tones will transform, after interminable snowless winters, into the almost shocking burst of greens in late April. It was in this kind of landscape that I first learned to ride a bicycle. I must have been around five when my parents announced one day that it was time for me to ride my bike without training wheels. I doubted this, but agreed to give it a try and wobbled after my father on my children’s bike, out to the meadows on the other side of the Autobahn from our red brick apartment building. He stopped on one of the little-used agricultural roads and unfastened my bike’s training wheels. I stood there straddling the bike, feeling off-balance without the steadying side wheels. “Don’t worry, the forward momentum will keep you from falling. Trust me.” My father placed a hand on my back and started walking next to me, slowly at first but gradually picking up speed. “Gut so! Treten, treten!” (That’s good! Pedal, pedal!), he called out. Gradually, it seemed like this could work. With this essential new skill, my world expanded. The glorious flatland summers now became the backdrop for family bicycle outings. Besides weekends, there was June 17, a day that was practically synonymous with bike excursions. I knew even then that June 17 was a holiday, but the story behind it only crept up on me in bits and pieces over the years, as did the fact that it had a special name: Day of German Unity. This, I gathered, had to do with the other Germany, but June 17 was a holiday only in the Germany we

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lived in, the BRD.23 Eventually I came to understand what the holiday was about, and that “German Unity” was only an aspiration, not a fact: it was to commemorate an uprising in East Germany on June 17, 1953, one that Soviet troops had brutally beaten down. Afterwards, West Germany declared June 17 the “Day of German Unity,” to remind its citizens of their brothers and sisters in the DDR—and of the clause in the West German Basic Law24 that set forth the goal of reunification. Pedaling along Mecklenburg Road, the split reality of the former holiday hit me with new force. On all those June 17s when I enjoyed the summer breeze, a picnic, perhaps a game of badminton, East Germans not only had a regular workday but also retained the memories of what had happened on that day in 1953—how they had seen their hopes for better living conditions and for basic democratic rights dashed by their own government. A few days before the uprising, the East German government had raised production goals for factories across the country, effectively cutting the workers’ pay. The unrest began on the morning of June 16, when workers at a factory in East Berlin demanded the change in production goals be reversed. Within moments of these workers starting their protest, they were joined by office workers, tram drivers, farmers, students, and professors. People from all sectors of society dropped their work and expressed their frustration with the abysmal economic conditions. Soon they also demanded free elections and other democratic rights. I wished I could ask an older person from around here how they had experienced June 17 and its aftermath. Had they participated in a protest? Had they known any of the dead or injured people? Had they believed up to that day in the ideals of socialism? Had they then given up hope that their young country with its promising name “German Democratic Republic” could cultivate a socialist society without oppression?

Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Federal Republic of Germany/FRG; the formal name both for former West Germany and for the reunited Germany). West Germany’s constitution, named “Basic Law” to indicate its provisional status.

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But there was no one to ask. I had seen very few people since the couple from Cologne near the beach. This was not a densely populated area, and the reason lay close at hand: the East German government had not wanted many people living close to the border, especially any it did not deem reliable citizens. In two largescale operations titled, respectively, “Vermin” (1952) and “Cornflower” (1961), it expelled a total of 11,000 people from the border zone. For now, my mind was on the uprising of June 17. With not another person in sight, I decided to ask my parents what they remembered of that day. How strange that I never asked them this before, given that one of my favorite things as a child was to beg them to tell me about früher—“way back,” by which I meant the mysterious time before my arrival in their lives in 1964. I pulled my bike over at a bench along Mecklenburg Road and dug my cell phone out of the handlebar pouch. My father answered. I caught him up on my journey so far and told him I was thinking about June 17, wondering what he had heard at the time about the events in East Germany. “It was awful,” he said. “I must have been fifteen. I don’t know where I watched the news that evening, because we didn’t have a TV—very few people did. I remember seeing Soviet tanks, and throngs of people trying to block them. The tanks didn’t stop, and soldiers were shooting. There were dead people lying in the streets. I will never forget those pictures.” “What about afterwards, when West Germany instituted the holiday and called it the Day of German Unity?” I asked. “Do you think June 17 reminded West Germans to think about reunification?”25 “Not much, from what I remember. In the first few years after the war, there were so many immediate needs. So much housing had been destroyed, so many refugees were coming in from the

Quite likely, the West German government’s intention in declaring the holiday was also to keep rubbing in the memory of the East German government’s brutal response to the uprising, backed by Soviet tanks and soldiers.

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East,26 and so many men were missing—killed in the war, taken prisoner, missing in action. The economy was in shambles; the infrastructure had to be rebuilt. By 1953, things were starting to look up here in the West, but there was still a lot of work to do. And conditions were much harder in the GDR.” Even though the Eastern zone had been affected somewhat less severely overall by bombing and war damage than the Western zones,27 its industrial base was subject to Soviet reparation demands, which translated into the dismantling and removal of entire factories and rail lines. At the same time, East Germany did not benefit from the considerable financial shot in the arm of the Marshall Plan. The plan was rejected by the Soviet Union because it had been designed on the basis of a market economy rather than a state-controlled system. I thanked my father for sharing his memories, and he wished me a good journey onward. We didn’t mention the fact that his bike was with me on this journey, but he was not. *** Our conversation reminded me of a cartoon I had seen in a book about the time of the division. In three frames labeled “1945,” “1955,” and “1965,” two figures representing an East German and a West German face each other. In the first frame, the two reach for each other with outstretched arms across a low barbed-wire fence; a thought bubble has both saying, “Dear brother, I miss you so.” In the second one, the fence is higher and two figures are sitting at a desk, each writing “Dear cousin!” The third shows the two facing

From East Germany, but also from regions farther east that had been German before World War II but had been given to the Soviet Union and Poland at the end of the war. An estimated 12 to 14 million were expelled from those prewar German territories in Eastern Europe and streamed into the remaining, much smaller and then divided Germany, with little but the clothes they were wearing. Fulbrook 2014, p. 131.

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away from each other—and from the fence—with the thought bubble saying, “Right, don’t we have a distant relative abroad?”28 By the 1970s life in East Germany had gotten somewhat easier. The economy had stabilized and the government was able to institute a number of social programs, like generous paid leave for new mothers and subsidized group vacation homes. Also in the 1970s, under West German chancellor Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik, the two German states began to take steps toward improving relations in the frigid Cold War climate. Most importantly for the citizens of both Germanys, they worked out a limited visa program—limited to West Germans traveling to East Germany, that is. The only East Germans allowed to travel to “capitalist foreign countries” like West Germany were retirees over the age of sixty-five. Still, for the first time since the border’s militarization in 1952, divided families were able to reunite at least temporarily. The rapprochement also helped East Germany’s international standing: it was recognized as a sovereign state by, among other countries, the United States. For a short time in the early 1970s, it even seemed as though Erich Honecker, East Germany’s new head of state, might ease the restrictions on cultural expression imposed by his predecessor, Walter Ulbricht. But a mere generation after the brutal events of 1953, any new hopes were dashed: in late 1976, the singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann—whose music was well-known in West Germany—was stripped of his East German citizenship while on a concert tour in Cologne. Wolf Biermann, the gentle, deeply human, harassed-to-thebones but unbowed poet with the guitar, was kept from returning to his chosen home country. It was ironic: the GDR had expelled someone who could have been its perfect poster child. Biermann was born in Hamburg, West Germany, but became a committed communist at a young age and moved to East Germany when he was sixteen. The defining experience of his life had taken place when he was six: his father, a Jew and a communist, was murdered 28

I only learned recently that this cartoon was first published in 1949 (Haus der Geschichte 2006).

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by the Nazis in Auschwitz. The wound that will not heal, he called it in his autobiography. A wound deep enough to condemn any life to bleakness, one might think. But this searing experience made every subsequent experience exceedingly clear, personal, and alive; perhaps it made Wolf Biermann immune to ideological dogma of any kind. While many of his fellow East German citizens yearned for the West or risked their lives to get there, Biermann tried to make the GDR a better place, a truly socialist and democratic state. But he was not willing to think or express himself along party lines, and he consistently challenged the Party’s29 leadership in his songs and poems. That, however, was not the kind of citizen the GDR wanted. “With his hostile comportment vis-à-vis the German Democratic Republic he himself has removed any grounds for continued citizenship to be granted,” the official statement said. In 1976, my then-twelve-year-old West German self hardly understood the politics or grasped the drama of what was happening, but even then Biermann’s name was familiar to me. He had already been banned for years from performing or recording in the GDR, but had made recordings in his living room and gotten them smuggled out to produce albums in the West—which then also made the rounds in East Germany via clandestine person-to-person networks. Many on the cultural scene were surprised that he was granted an exit visa in response to a West German labor union invitation. Perhaps this was part of the supposed “no taboos”30 policy of greater artistic freedom that Honecker had announced? Others suspected that the GDR government had planned all along to get rid of Biermann, in whom it could see only a troublemaker. Whatever the intention behind his expulsion, it probably was not to introduce Biermann to a broader East German audience. But that was exactly what happened. A day after the official announcement—which shocked both the singer himself and the cultural scene both East and West, a major West German TV station

Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei, SED), the GDR’s ruling and, for all practical purposes, sole party. Goldstein 2017.

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broadcast the entire Cologne concert, complete with Biermann’s critical remarks about East Germany. Countless East Germans watched eagerly,31 many learning about Biermann for the first time. What they heard, among other songs, was one titled “Ermutigung”—encouragement: My friend, don’t let yourself be scared in these scary times. That’s what they want to achieve, that we lay down our arms even before the great struggle.

If one thing was clear after Biermann’s expulsion, it was that the “no taboos” policy for cultural life had been a lie. For my East German friend Axel, who was fourteen years old at the time, the Biermann expulsion was the crystallizing moment: “That’s when I realized: different opinions are not tolerated here.” Many of the GDR’s most well-known artists and writers protested the expulsion, the protest itself a “crime” for which many of them suffered years of repression. Axel himself focused on his remaining schoolwork, served his eighteen months of mandatory training in the National People’s Army (NVA), and took up doctoral studies in physics. He had good friends and no plans to leave his life or his family in East Germany. And he probably would not have done so, had it not been for a chance encounter with a young American woman on a brief trip to Prague in 1987. Prospects for a cross–Iron Curtain romance were dim, but the two managed to arrange several visits in East Berlin. In 1988, Axel crammed himself into the trunk of an escape helper’s car in East Berlin. I shuddered when he told me this part of the story. I had seen escape cars at the Checkpoint Charlie Museum in Berlin: the tiny spaces where a human body could fit were enough to induce panic attacks. Axel was fortunate: the car was not searched and he emerged safely in West Berlin, heart beating wildly but otherwise unscathed. 31

Watching Western TV was frowned upon by the East German government but not prohibited.

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Michelle and Axel now have two grown daughters and live in Vermont. A happy ending, one could say. And still, Axel left his family and friends assuming he would never see them again, and without saying goodbye. “I knew they would get into unspeakable trouble if they were suspected of helping me or not preventing the escape,” he had told me. “Especially my father. He was a hohes Tier [a high-ranking official] in the NVA.” “How did he take the news of your Republikflucht?” I asked him. “Very badly. He was livid. He said he no longer had a son.” “Did he ever forgive you, after the Wende32 (literally, “the turnaround;” the term encompasses the fall of the Peaceful Revolution, the dissolution of the GDR, and Reunification)?” “Not really. He was too steeped in Party ideology. He never got over the GDR’s downfall, either. But he did come along when my mother came to visit us in late 1989, after the fall of the Wall.” Though Axel had said this matter-of-factly, I sensed that he had not taken the rift lightly. *** The bike path along Mecklenburg Road veered closer to Dassow Lake now, the lower portion of the expansive bay I had been tracing. As I searched eagerly to catch a view of the bay, my eyes landed on a tall, square, forlorn-looking structure: one of the few watchtowers still standing. The design was beyond basic; the thing consisted of three or four square, stacked elements of grayish concrete and an uppermost element in a drab brown. A thin railing ran

The term “Wende” was first used by Egon Krenz, who became the general secretary of the SED party (and therefore the GDR’s last head of state) after Erich Honecker was deposed in the course of the protests leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Krenz used “Wende” to promise a political turnaround under the continued existence of a socialist East German state. While this is not what happened, there is some disagreement over whether the term should be used. I have decided to use it both because its meaning has expanded beyond what Krenz intended (Krenz certainly did not mean to reference the Peaceful Revolution and Reunification) and because, like “Reunification,” it is a widely used term.

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around the top layer. From up there, the view of the bay and the surrounding landscape must have been glorious. Were any of the guards interested in birds? That would at least have offered an antidote to the exasperating pressures of the job— the long periods of boredom when nothing happened, punctuated by intense activity when a signal wire set off an alarm, and the pressure to shoot fellow citizens trying to flee.33 I turned onto the spur trail that led to the tower, leaned my bike along its base, and climbed up the concrete steps to the door. It was locked. No view from the top for me, but chances were I would come across other watchtowers. A short distance later I was finally rewarded with a glimpse of Dassow Lake’s gleaming blue expanse, rimmed with the lush green legacy of the GDR’s “outside sovereign territory”—the roughly fifty-meter-wide strip of land between the border line and the western fence. A dozen or so gulls drew invisible lines in the cobalt blue sky with their elegant white bodies, their sharp cries carrying across the lake like a dramatic story only they could understand. A look at the map told me that, after the loop around the Priwall Peninsula and the bay, my route had led me close to Lübeck again. I made the second impromptu change in plans for the day, and decided to find Lübeck’s “Unity of the Nation” plaque. Like the earlier Brötchen stop, a ceremonial visit to the plaque felt essential to properly begin this border expedition. The border, after all, was only my guiding structure, not a closely-timed itinerary. I’d been to Lübeck just once before, but something about its streets enveloped me with a warm familiarity, just like the luminous flat landscape I had been traversing. Here it was the medieval red brick facades of the houses and churches and the tall, steep-gabled warehouses where the maritime merchants of the Hanseatic League once stored their goods. Ships laden with salt34 fanned out from here to ports all over the Baltic and the North Sea and returned

At least one border guard did, and even contributed his findings to an ornithological publication (Eckert 2019, p. 175). Essential not only for nutrition but to preserve meat, fish, butter, and cheese.

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with fur, lumber, cod, and herring from the northern ports; with wine and fine wool and linen cloth from the south. Cities like Lübeck, Hamburg, Bremen, and Rostock built ties with trading partners as far away as Novgorod, Lisbon, and Venice. In the process, they built up considerable wealth. The trading network declined more than three centuries ago, but its echoes live on in cities all over northern Europe. In some, even the license plates speak of the pride their citizens take in the past glory: in Bremen, they start with “HB,” for Hansestadt Bremen; most of the plates around me here in Lübeck began with “HL.” The Unity of the Nation plaque was under a bricked archway near St. Mary’s Church. I set the bike against a nearby bench and noticed that the plaque consisted of two parts. The first was dated 1975, placed there to remind West Germans of the passage in the Basic Law regarding reunification: The Berlin Wall of August 13, 1961, divides the nation, but the Basic Law obligates. The entirety of the German people is charged to complete Germany’s freedom and unity in a process of free self-determination. After Reunification, Lübeck’s city council had added the second part: The goal has been reached. October 3, 1990 I looked around, half surprised that I was the only person pondering the plaque. The matter-of-fact statement was certainly true in a formal way: Germany did indeed become one country again on October 3, 1990—the new Day of German Unity that replaced June 17. And in the days following the fall of the Berlin Wall, Germans everywhere seemed united in the euphoric realization that the border was history. Former West German chancellor Willy Brandt captured the collective mood in a speech shortly afterwards when he said, “Now that which belongs together will grow together again.” Has it? Have the two Germanys grown back together?

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I took the daypack from my bike, sat down on the bench, and pulled out the lunch bag I had prepared at my parents’ home. Slowly chewing the Schwarzbrot (dark rye bread)-and-cheese sandwich, I thought back to that in-between time, the eleven months between the fall of the Berlin Wall and Reunification. The feeling of life I remembered—from my Christmas 1989 visit, phone calls with family and friends, and the few times I could get my hands on German newspapers—was one of joyful chaos, of relief mixed with boundless optimism. Time seemed to have slowed down, or maybe the whole country—still formally two countries—had been tossed into a different time zone altogether. Everything seemed possible, the old frames of reference were gone, and for once no one seemed to mind that life was messy and the future uncertain. At least that was how it seemed from my life an ocean away. In reality time had not slowed down, of course, and there were burning questions to be addressed. The GDR’s government was under intense pressure, the economy was in dire straits, and no one knew what would happen in the Soviet Union: Would Mikhail Gorbachev35 be able to remain in office, and if not, would the old guard try to re-impose its iron grip on East Germany? Would East German opposition groups like New Forum and Democracy Now be able to come up with a way to build truly democratic structures? Was there enough time? That spring of 1990, for the first—and only—time in its fortyyear existence, East Germany held a free election with confidential voting and multiple parties to choose from. The result was as clear as it was surprising—at least in light of the pre-election polls that had projected a win for the Social Democratic Party. When the votes were counted, a clear majority of voters supported the conservative Alliance for Germany instead, which had campaigned on a fast track to Reunification. With that, the end of the GDR as a separate state was sealed. In August of the same year, the democratically elected Volkskammer (the East German parliament) voted in favor of acceding to West 35

The progressive Soviet head of state from 1985 to 1991, who had signaled tacit approval of democracy movements in the Soviet satellite states.

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Germany, following the provision in the Basic Law. On October 3, 1990, the GDR ceased to exist and its territory became part of the Federal Republic. *** Only much later did I begin to see how quickly the euphoria over the fall of the Berlin Wall wore thin. How soon after the Wende, East and West Germans both felt a need for special, unkind names to designate the respective other: Ossi (easterner) and Wessi (westerner). There were also grumblings about Besserwessis (western know-it-alls) and Jammerossis (whining easterners). Perhaps this was not surprising: the East German economy, already in precarious shape by 1989, now had to adapt to a market economy and compete with western products. Integrating the two economies was a massive undertaking that required experience with a market system—which East Germans, by virtue of having lived in a state-run economy, naturally did not possess. West German managers were dispatched to help, and often seemed to have little interest in or respect for anything East German workers had done in the previous forty years. I had also heard about the massive unemployment that swept eastern Germany in the wake of Reunification—three million people had lost their jobs by 1992, out of a total population of under seventeen million. By 1993, 1.4 million eastern Germans had moved to the west. At the same time, westerners felt that they were sinking astronomical sums of money into the East German infrastructure, while their own roads remained full of potholes. Gazing at the Unity of the Nation plaque, I conceded that I could not reasonably expect it to capture the complexity of the process. Nor was I disputing the fact of Reunification or wishing for a return of the country’s division. But I remembered another of Wolf Biermann’s songs, written in 1999: I do not fear for Germany Trust unity will go its course … Germany, Germany is one again, only I, I am still torn apart.

PHANTOM BORDER The German wound is still not healed Streams of pain where the scar gapes open Only now the black juice No longer runs out but deep, deep inside. … The future will be decided, you know, In the dispute about the past.

The national question has been solved; what is left now is internal division, he seemed to be saying. But the black juice? Then I knew what he meant. I forced myself to remember a string of events in the early 1990s. Like a nightmarish counter image to the euphoric scenes of the Mauerfall, TV images one warm summer night in 1992 showed scenes of raw mob violence, directed at asylum-seekers housed in the Central Refugee Shelter in the Lichtenhagen district of Rostock. A crowd of several hundred people threw objects, including Molotov cocktails, at the building, eventually setting it on fire. By some miracle, no one died. Over the next few days, a crowd of several thousand onlookers gathered, shouting things like “Germany for the Germans” and “foreigners out.” The small contingent of police officers that had responded to the scene was attacked by the mob and ended up withdrawing. The scenes were difficult to process. The word pogrom flashed through my mind. This cannot happen. Not in Germany. Has this country forgotten everything it learned from its past? Did the GDR, with its clear anti-fascist stance, do such a poor job of teaching about the black juice of racist hate? As shocking as the events in Rostock-Lichtenhagen were, I would learn later that they were not isolated incidents. Over the following years, there were more attacks directed at people who looked “foreign,” and they were not limited to eastern Germany. I would hear news of them in piecemeal fashion: in the time before the internet, instant news from faraway places was still a thing of the future. Gradually, it became easier to stay in touch with developments in my home country. By the mid-1990s, one could dial up a connection to some news outlets’ websites over a phone line, listen for small eternities to a staticky electronic sound, and read information posted that day.

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*** There were moments of hope, too. Like the summer day in 2010 when I was crossing on a ferry to one of the North Sea islands for a vacation and noticed an adhesive sticker on a fellow traveler’s suitcase. The sticker was in the shape of the reunited Germany and in the colors of the German flag—black, red, and gold. I tilted my head to make out the words that were printed across it: “We Are One People.” For a split second, two responses battled inside me: one, the aversion to any hint of national pride; the other, a smile. The former was based on the terrible abuse national symbols had suffered under the Nazis. The smile came from memories of my own visits to eastern Germany: the chance to discover places like Eisenach and Leipzig, to walk in the footsteps of Johann Sebastian Bach and Martin Luther, and to connect with contemporary eastern Germans. My life had felt enriched by the other Germany. The owner of the suitcase turned out to be a middle-aged woman from a small town in eastern Germany. She was returning to her job cleaning rooms at a hotel on the island. Not a well-paying job, I suspected, thinking back of my very first summer job as a teenager. But she loved the island, and her face lit up when I asked her about the sticker. “The Wende, that was a miracle!” She shared that her family had been split in two by the border. For a moment, our eyes locked in a smile; then the crowd of passengers surged forward to step off the ferry and we were separated. *** In October 2014, news came from the eastern city of Dresden about protest marches of people who referred to themselves as Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West (PEGIDA). One of their chants was “We are the people!”: the chant of the Peaceful Revolution, but now the “we” referred to ethnic Germans in distinction to people from other countries, rather than to an oppressive government. Black juice. I remembered a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, along with a feeling of indignation that these

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protesters would misuse the chant of the Peaceful Revolution—as if it had been my revolution. Clearly, I had missed something.36 I strapped my daypack onto the panniers again, gave the Unity of the Nation plaque a last look, and thought about Wolf Biermann as I guided my bicycle through the narrow streets of Lübeck’s old town. Germany, Germany is one again, only I, I am still torn apart. The gaping wound. Some of his lyrics would sound crushingly heavy from almost anyone else. And yet, he also sings of encouragement. He is able to see a larger picture. And he has Zuversicht: a sense of possibility. I decided to take the words on the plaque and Wolf Biermann’s song with me on my expedition as questions to investigate. How was German Unity faring? What traces of the border and the division would I find? And where would I find Zuversicht? *** I turned my bicycle toward the Bundesstrasse (federal road) to find my way to Ratzeburg. From the map I knew that in this area, the border strip had led through a forested area along the river Wakenitz. I felt ready for some time in the woods. I had just left the busy-ness of the Bundesstrasse behind me and pedaled through a quiet village when my ears picked up the roar of even more traffic traveling at much higher speed. Indeed, not far ahead a long embankment cut across the fields: this had to be the A-20, the Autobahn that was built after Reunification to connect northeastern and northwestern Germany. An underpass led to the other side. I tried to tell myself that the infernal howl of traffic was a reasonable price to pay for reconnecting the severed parts of my home country. And yet, I could not get away from it fast enough. At least I could see the forest from here. A few minutes later, my lungs inhaled deep breaths of moist air as I rode deeper and deeper into a realm of green stillness. The

The chant was also used in the protests against cuts in social welfare (Hartz IV) in 2004.

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high, melodic song of a thrush filtered down from somewhere far above me. I slowed down to get a sense of the forest around me. What kinds of woods are here, and how did they come to be the way they are now? I could start by figuring out some of the tree species. The bark of some of the larger trees belonged to a kind of ash, to tell by the diamond-shaped pattern in the bark and the compound leaves. Some of the mid-size ones looked like alder, with their darker, slightly fissured bark and the clusters of small cone-like catkins— the tree’s female flowers. Both species told me that this was an area of wet soils, as did the luscious fingery ferns that covered much of the ground. The white papery bark of scattered birch trees shone through the foliage. I had not expected to find an untrammeled wilderness here, but these woods looked more like a natural mixed forest than the monotonous pine plantations that passed for forests in other parts of the country. I spotted an interpretive sign and pushed my bike closer to read it. Quite a story, I thought. It was twelfth-century Lübeckers, I learned, who had turned this area into an extensive swamp. On a quest for an energy source to power mills, they had built a dam to harness the plentiful waters of the Wakenitz River on its way from Ratzeburg Lake to the Baltic Sea. As a ripple effect, the mill dam created a landscape dotted with lakes, swamps, and bogs with peat moss layers several yards thick. No wonder people around here called it the Amazon of the North. I took some deep breaths of the damp forest air and started pedaling again. Like most of the Green Belt, this watery haven was not untouched wilderness. It was not even in the former border strip. This was the Wakenitz nature preserve, one of many protected areas that interlace with the actual Green Belt. This network was what made the Green Belt so valuable beyond its own skinny shape: a system of corridors and larger patches of land that ensured genetic exchange and regeneration for wildlife and plants. Regeneration for humans, too. I could feel my spirits rebounding from the day’s encounters with German history and from the deafening noise of the Autobahn.

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It was not long until the glimmering surface of Ratzeburg Lake shone through the trees, now mostly pines on a dry hillside sloping gently down on my right. Could those red tile roofs and brick buildings in the distance belong to the city and monastery of Ratzeburg? I had not been there before, but I was already taken with it: What better location for a city than on an island in a lake?

Chapter 3: The City on the Lake True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation. One’s inner voices become audible… In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives. —Wendell Berry

Surrounded by forest again, I sailed along on a wide dirt path, my lungs filling with air filtered through layers of beech leaves and pine tufts. Occasionally, the glittering blue of Ratzeburg Lake shone through the trees to my right. Then the red brick buildings came into view again in the distance. The invisible borderline had veered east again; by crossing it, I had “returned” to the west. The massive building with the light-green copper roof and the chunky spire had to be Ratzeburg’s twelfth-century cathedral. Once upon a time a fortress had stood nearby, built a hundred years earlier, whose name still echoes in the city’s name: Races Burg, named after the Slavic prince Ratibor. Thick forest would have covered the island when Ratibor first set foot on it. He and his entourage must have had encounters with the few people who lived on the land then. They would have been German farmers who moved east in the twelfth century, into regions that were either unpopulated or had been settled earlier by Slavic people. The presence of “Race’s fortress” gave a hint that in this case, the encounter had been marked by conflict. Set loose by the exhilarating forest breeze, my mind began a free-flowing train of thought that led me from the airy woods around me to a marble-halled museum in the middle of Berlin. The German Historical Museum, it had turned out on my very first visit years ago, was a very good place to think about the way we humans have moved around the face of the earth. A good place, too, to think about borders. For my first twenty-five years, the museum had sat on the eastern side of the Berlin Wall. Of all the exhibits, what stayed with me the most from that first visit was a ten-minute video near the top of the museum’s grand staircase.

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A few other visitors were already sitting on benches facing a large screen showing the shape of Europe. Shades of green and brown indicated mountain ranges and flatlands. The North Sea and the Baltic Sea, the Mediterranean and the Atlantic appeared in shades of blue—lighter near the coastlines, darker out at sea. Except for the coastlines, the only lines were rivers. No borders on the whole continent. A time marker indicated the year 2,000 B.C. I took a seat on a bench as the timeline began to move. As the centuries on the time marker scrolled along, names appeared on the map: Frisians, Burgundians, Bavarians, Goths, Prussians, Saxons, Franks, Thuringians, Alemanni, and Slavs. The labels moved around the map; some faded away. When the timeline reached the ninth century, a white line appeared, encircling an area labeled East Frankish Empire. This remnant of Charlemagne’s dominion morphed into the Holy Roman Empire, a label that remained on the map for most of the next six centuries, the contours of the white line expanding and contracting in continuous motion. Wasn’t it strange that for so many centuries, there had been an entity with the fantastical name Holy Roman Empire of the German nation? Granted, that had little to do with the concept of the nation state, which is a product of modern times. Besides, the “HRE” had never been a centralized operation; its governing structure was held together by a system of frequently shifting power relationships and loyalties. As for the people, the “Germanness” that bound them together was not based on anything inherent but on linguistic and cultural similarities. A label for German Empire appeared only in 1871, and included the Baltic coast all the way to Lithuania. The labels on the map began to resemble today’s Europe: France, Spain, Italy, Sweden, the United Kingdom. At the 1949 time mark, something in the shape of today’s Germany appeared on the map, with a white line indicating the division. Two thousand years of history in ten minutes. A realization began to form in my mind that day in the museum’s light-flooded spaces: for all the talk of Germanness, of blood and soil, there did not seem to be a lot of actual Germanness on the ground. Granted, there are Saxons, Bavarians, Franks, and Thuringians in today’s

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Germany. But none of these groups stayed put in the regions where they first showed up on the map, and today’s entities by these names have nothing to do with the historic tribes.37 At times, bloody conflicts divided them, including a thirty-year-long war in the seventeenth century. The process by which they came to think of themselves as Germans was one of fits and starts and took centuries. A bump on the path reeled my mind back to the present moment and to the city in the lake. The Slavs were the first to arrive at this site in the middle of the ninth century, but were pushed aside by Saxons a few decades later. Over the next century and a half, the budding island city changed hands two more times until the Saxon king Henry the Lion prevailed and proceeded to Christianize the entire region. It was he who had commissioned the massive cathedral whose green copper roof and red brick walls I glimpsed between the trees. *** Ahead of me, the trail forked. There was no signpost and therefore none of the bicycle logos that had marked my route sporadically. Had I somehow gotten off track? Was this enchanted forest trail not my route after all? I pulled the guidebook from my handlebar bag and opened the mapping app on my outdated phone, which was not smart enough to accommodate the GPS track offered as a download by the guidebook. No reason for concern, I told myself. Ratibor and Henry the Lion would not have had GPS tracking to chart their course, nor would anyone else much before my journey. Besides, as some wise person said, detours increase one’s local knowledge. I decided on the trail to the right, the one that led closer to the lake and seemed to coincide with the one suggested by the 37

Today’s Saxons, for example, are only called that because of a name transfer when Henry the Lion had to give up all his titles. The Lower Saxons are the actual “heirs” of the historical Saxons. The Slavic inhabitants of these areas played a major role in the formation of today’s Saxons, Bavarians, Franks, and Thuringians (Jens Schneeweiß, personal communication).

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mapping app’s bicycle function. It was a fine trail—until it ended in a stubbly field ten minutes later. The spacious forest had transitioned to a shrubby thicket on both sides of the path behind me. Turning back did not seem like a good option; it would take close to an hour to go around the forest I had been savoring. The field before me stretched about the length of a soccer field; the stubble and the ruts from the harvester were thrown into stark relief by the sun that still beat down as though it were midday. The clock on the odometer showed almost 7 p.m. It was July, so there would still be about three hours of daylight. I hoped I would not need all of them. I called Klarissa, the Swedish friend waiting for me in Ratzeburg, to tell her I would be late, then began to drag my bike across the ruts and stubble. I mustered a tired smile when I realized that the ruts had been sunbaked into a miniature relief of the Alps. They made the concrete slabs of the patrol track with their oblong holes seem like the most desirable of bike paths. Sweaty and dusty, I emerged from the stubbly brush half an hour later, relieved to find myself on a paved road with a sign pointing to Ratzeburg, albeit without a bike lane. The odometer showed seventy-four kilometers for today’s trip so far. A reasonable distance for the mostly flat northern plain, but my sauntering side trips—one intentional, to Lübeck and the plaque of unity; one unintentional as I wandered off the route in the sun-dappled forest—nearly pushed me to my limits on this first day of the expedition. *** Since Ratibor’s time, Ratzeburg had grown beyond the island in the lake and expanded up the hillside to the east. Gasthof Lauterbach sat on that hill, far enough up to drench me in another layer of sweat before I rang the doorbell at close to 8 p.m. The door opened and I stood facing an ancient-looking man with a grizzled beard and wavy gray hair swept back from his face. We exchanged a Guten Abend and I explained that Klarissa had reserved a room for me earlier. He stared at me for a long moment, then motioned me to

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follow him to a small reception desk. “Your address?” Something about the brief interaction at the door led me to give him my parents’ address in Bremen rather than bog him down with my Vermont address. Still, he sternly asked me to repeat the words several times. As he slowly filled out the registration form, I glanced around the small foyer and noticed a map on the wall. It showed the surroundings, with the German–German border indicated in a pale pink, a reminder that Ratzeburg had been less than two miles from East Germany. I waited for Herr Lauterbach to finish writing, then asked him what it was like to live so close to the border, how it had affected life in Ratzeburg. Again he looked at me sternly, then barked: “The border? That was an international border. The GDR was a separate state.” Why is he telling me this? “People get the government they deserve,” he went on, still glaring at me. “Those who got in trouble with the authorities brought it on themselves.” Maybe he didn’t understand my question. He proceeded to tell me that he had visited the GDR several times to attend scientific congresses as a mathematician—the Gasthof came later, his retirement project—as if to imply that that made him an expert on the country and its citizens. I was puzzled. Any East Germans he met at international congresses would have been thoroughly vetted by the Stasi, and probably spied on. They would not have been able to speak freely, but I wondered whether Herr Lauterbach had any interest in learning about their lives to begin with. I decided not to press the old man further. He showed me to my room, which had all the charm and yellowed hue of the 1980s. Thankfully, it also had a working shower. Reenergized, I put on a clean set of clothes and met Klarissa downstairs. Conversation came easily as we walked down the hill together, even though neither of us could remember the last time we had seen each other in person. Knowing she would understand my

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fascination, I told her about Ratibor and the fortress, the Slavs and the Benedictines, the video map of Europe with the shifting borders in the Berlin museum. “Just like in the early 1990s, when we first met,” Klarissa commented. “Remember how maps of Europe became outdated almost as soon as they were published?” I did remember. The people of the Baltic States had just won independence from the Soviet Union, after Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians formed a human chain between their three capitals. “And the peaceful split of Czechoslovakia into the Czech and Slovak Republics in 1993,” Klarissa added. “It’s so rare that such things happen without bloodshed.” “And then Yugoslavia fell apart,” I said. We fell silent, remembering the shock that crept over Europe as the Yugoslav tragedy unfolded: shock at the realization that after fifty years of peace on the continent, atrocities fueled by ethnic hate could flare up again. Over two million people fled to other countries, many to Germany, Sweden, and the United States—people whose lives had, until then, revolved around work, family, and everyday life, just like mine. It must have been during those years that our “no more borders” euphoria received its first blow. New borders and nation states were being established by monstrous violence. At the same time, Germany tightened its asylum law, and the Schengen agreement created a “fortress Europe” with outside borders every bit as forbidding as the Iron Curtain—the dark side of the European Union’s origins as a peace project to transcend the continent’s centuries of war and conflict. The initial phase was about economic integration,38 with later enhancements like a common market, the abolition of internal border controls, and the introduction of cultural and educational exchange programs. Klarissa herself had been a beneficiary of the Erasmus program and attended university in Spain. “Remember how not so long ago—in 2011—people across the Middle East and North Africa were so hopeful about change in their 38

With the founding of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951.

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countries. And we were talking about how the Arab Spring reminded us of the Peaceful Revolution in Germany,” Klarissa asked. I did. “I really thought those oppressive governments would topple.” But things had turned into a nightmare, first for Syrians when their own government brutally beat the protests down. Conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Sudan prompted thousands to flee their homes. The situation in Syria worsened dramatically in 2015, adding to an already unprecedented number of refugees seeking safety in neighboring countries and as far as northern Europe. The human tragedy of the situation slammed into public awareness on August 28 of that year, when seventy-one Iraqis and Syrians were found dead—suffocated—in an abandoned food truck in Austria. Less than a week later came the picture of a Syrian toddler’s dead body, washed up on a Turkish beach after the boat on which human smugglers had put him and his family had sunk. That same year, as the combined human misery in the Middle East led one million people to embark on a grueling overland trek, walking thousands of miles across Europe, a parallel movement took place across the Atlantic, where tens of thousands fled gang violence and grinding poverty in Central and South America, hoping for safety in the United States. I thought of the video map again. “It seems like a never-ending story with us humans,” I said to Klarissa. “It’s certainly been a big part of the human story,” she agreed. “And to think that so many people never intended to leave their Heimat.” I smiled, pleased that she remembered the German word. “And how long such uprootings reverberate through people’s lives,” I reflected and told her about Ulf, one of my parents’ friends who was a small boy when Germans were expelled from the eastern regions near the end of World War II and his family had to flee from the Red Army. “When he saw those pictures on TV in 2015, he felt like he was reliving the trauma of his childhood. It’s been the same for many people who are in their eighties now.”

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We were nearing the end of the causeway that connected the neighborhood on the hillside with the old city on the island. Clouds had built up overhead while we walked and the leaves on the poplars that formed a roof over our heads were starting to rustle with impending rain. Just off the causeway, a restaurant’s patio overlooked the southern segment of the lake. We chose a table with an umbrella, hoping the rain would hold off. Klarissa had driven to Ratzeburg from Dresden that day, the proud city that had gained sad fame near the end of World War II through its near-total demolition by Allied bombing. She’d been visiting the city to look for traces of her German grandparents’ lives. Now she pulled out a stack of papers held together by a ribbon. “These are from my grandfather’s journal.” “The one persecuted by the Nazis for his communist leanings?” I asked. She nodded, and continued, “I found out that he was held in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, and sent on a death march along with some thirty thousand other prisoners in April 1945. When they were rescued by soldiers from the US and the Soviet Union, many of them had not had any food in ten days. Many were very sick. My grandfather had pneumonia. He was in a hospital for several months—it was not far from here, in Schwerin—and eventually he was brought to Sweden.” The waiter approached, gently set down our glasses of wine, and tightened the umbrella. “You might get lucky,” he said, holding a hand into the breeze. “So far, so good!” I replied, then turned to Klarissa again and asked about her grandmother. “She was already in Sweden. She had managed to flee Germany along with her two children—one of whom was my father.” “Since your grandparents are buried in Dresden, that must mean they returned to Germany after the war, to the Ostzone?” Klarissa nodded. “They wanted to live in Germany and help build a socialist society. At least my grandfather did. He had been

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a prisoner of war in Russia in World War I, and he was shaped by a love for the socialist ideals.” Neither of them lived to see the Peaceful Revolution. “They probably would have been shocked to see the GDR crumble,” Klarissa mused. She tied the ribbon around her grandfather’s journal again and returned the packet to her canvas bag. Klarissa herself had experienced the GDR once, in 1986. “I was on a trip to West Germany, and I decided to go to Leipzig,” she told me. “I had exchanged some letters with a young woman there—we had been put in touch by an international youth organization and I thought it would be nice to meet her in person. For some reason I wasn’t able to get an East German visa in time, but I decided to go anyway.” “That was gutsy.” “Or stupid.” Klarissa shook her head at the thought of her younger self. “As soon as the interzonal train crossed the border, East German guards came into the compartment and demanded travel documents. When I could not produce a visa, they pulled me off the train, took my bag, and put me in a holding cell at the border station.” She had been held there for close to eight hours and then put on a train back to West Germany. Based on other stories I had heard, she had been lucky. “The worst thing was that the letter from my pen pal in Leipzig was missing when the guards returned my bag,” Klarissa continued. “I never heard from her again. I worried for years that she got into trouble with the Stasi because she had contact with a westerner.” A chill traveled down my spine. By the time we finished dinner, a steady rain had settled in. By then, the day’s travels and history had combined into a leaden fatigue that neither of us could fend off much longer. Rather than sit out the rain, we donned our rain gear to make our way back to Gasthof Lauterbach. ***

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Bright sunlight filtered in through the checkered curtains in my room. Downstairs, Klarissa had already reserved a table for us on the patio. A modest breakfast buffet in the dining room featured Brötchen, jam, sliced cheese and cold cuts. A dozen or so guests sat at tables around the room, and quiet threads of conversation and the aroma of fresh coffee combined into a relaxed, vacation-like atmosphere. Then a single voice began to dominate the room. It took me a moment to figure out that it was Mr. Lauterbach’s. He stood at a small desk in the middle of the room, gesturing enthusiastically and speaking into a phone. I offered a Guten Morgen into the room and picked up a plate. While I caught the breakfast server’s eye to ask for tea, Mr. Lauterbach’s phone conversation took on a different quality. He was speaking loudly, as if he wanted every last one of his guests to hear. “Bad news,” he belted out. “Merkel is still chancellor. The good news is that all of this will help us in the polls. We really need to get the Muslims out.” I felt my stomach tighten. Was this becoming normal everywhere now, for people to casually denounce entire faith groups? Thankfully, the breakfast server arrived with my tea. Everything is more bearable with tea. I joined Klarissa at the table outside and tried to relate what I had just heard. Almost exactly a year earlier—on August 31, 2015—Angela Merkel had uttered her now famous words “Wir schaffen das” (We’ll manage this) in a press conference about the massive influx of refugees from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. In the following days and weeks, Germans from all walks of life showed a level of humanitarian response for newly arriving refugees that seemed to surprise the welcomers as much as those they welcomed. Internationally, fans of long German words could now add Willkommenskultur (culture of welcome) to their vocabulary. Over the following months, while volunteers continued to help refugees with paperwork, clothing, and the German language, anti-foreigner sentiments were aired with increasing noise and frequency. Often, these were aimed at Muslims. “I think he likes the AfD—the Alternative for Germany,” I said.

THE CITY ON THE LAKE

Klarissa nodded. “And their anti-immigrant platform.” “Some of their early members have actually quit because the party is becoming too radical for them,” I told her. The far-right political party had started out in 2013 on an antiEuro platform. Their initial voters consisted mostly of small- and medium-sized business owners who chafed against EU regulations. The anti-immigrant language seemed to attract a new clientele. I went on, “Earlier this year, the party’s deputy leader suggested that refugees who try to cross into Germany outside of official border crossings should be shot. Later she clarified that she meant this to include women and children. And the Thuringian AfD state chair said that he would like the state capital, Erfurt, to stay ‘nice and German.’” “Are they connected with PEGIDA?” Klarissa asked. “I’ve been hearing about them in the news.” “Not across the board, but in Dresden they have close ties.” PEGIDA had started its Monday marches in Dresden, carrying signs with slogans like “Deutschland den Deutschen” (Germany for the Germans) and “Refugees NOT welcome.” As I poured another cup of tea, I began to make connections. “What Mr. Lauterbach said about benefiting in the polls, that must mean he’s an organizer for the AfD. He was also talking about arrangements for a meeting and who would need to be there. And the polls . . .” My stomach sank as I told Klarissa about how, the previous week, the AfD had been all over social media saying the perpetrators of a shooting in Munich and an axe attack on train passengers were refugees. “You think the AfD is hoping that these attacks will help them get voters?” Klarissa asked. “I do, from what Mr. Lauterbach said.” I stared at my Brötchen and decided to wrap it up in a paper napkin for later. After an hour on the bike, my appetite would be certain to return. Klarissa looked at her watch and held her wrist out to me. We looked at each other and nodded in agreement. It was time for her to start the long journey back to Stockholm, and for me to make my way south to the River Elbe. For now, each of us would have to sort through history and the morning’s events on her own.

Chapter 4: Not a Sinking Ship The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past. —William Faulkner All this happened, there’s no going back. And yet there is beauty all around me still. —Hans Carlson

My destination for the day was Boizenburg, a town of some eleven thousand people on the eastern side of the River Elbe. Like most of the towns and villages I would visit, I had never heard of it until I began to map out the first segment of my expedition. If the pictures of the B&B I had booked there had not looked quite so inviting, I might have listened to my tired muscles and shortened the day’s route. But the wildly romantic flower garden with its sitting nooks, the red brick house with its mullioned windows, the verandas framed by peasant roses—that was where my aching muscles wanted to rest. I told myself that a good workout would help me process Herr Lauterbach’s anti-Muslim, anti-Merkel tirade. And it did, starting with the steep hill I had coasted down from the plateau of the sun-dappled forest last night, the hill I now needed to climb up in order to re-join the German-German Bikeway route. There, where the tamped-down trail disappeared into the foliage at the forest’s edge, its steep rise promised an excellent workout indeed. The lake was now to my left—the west, its surface sparkling in the morning sun. From here, I could see only its southern, rounded portion, but on the map its shape was long and narrow. The map showed other long, skinny lakes nearby. Like the Finger Lakes in upstate New York. I smiled to myself at this clue. Ratzeburg Lake was a glacial lake, too. I had probably heard this back in my school days. How the ice masses had crept down from Scandinavia and covered much of Northern Europe for over one hundred thousand years. How they had scraped out the fingery basins that later filled with meltwater. I pulled out my phone and searched for a map of the last Central European glaciation. The ice had stretched over the entire Baltic

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Sea, part of the North Sea, and northeastern Germany. At its greatest extent around twenty thousand years ago, its edge ran from north of present-day Travemünde, past Lübeck and Ratzeburg— roughly the line I had traced on my journey so far. My leg muscles strained, but I did not mind. Puzzling out the story of this landscape provided a welcome antidote to the echoes of Mr. Lauterbach’s rants. Eventually, the backward pull of gravity became too strong and my front wheel began to move in snake-like motion, ever more slowly, from side to side. I stepped off and pushed the bike, picturing in front of my inner eye how high the gigantic ice masses must have piled up over what was now Ratzeburg Lake, shimmering below the embankment to my left. When the climate warmed again around thirteen thousand years ago, the retreating ice masses left long mounds of glacial debris along what had been its edges—the rocks and boulders the ice had swept up and ground into an unfathomable mass of gravel. The long-ago glacier’s lateral moraine was the topography that had made me break out in sweat. These northern flatlands were not as flat as I had pictured them in my mind. The day promised to be hot; I was too far inland now for cooling breezes from the Baltic Sea. But the moraine eventually leveled out and, not far from the top of the climb, revealed a view toward another, smaller lake, almost hidden behind a long row of gnarled trees. I had just passed the tiny village of Mechow, the -ow ending pointing to its beginnings as an ancient Slavic settlement. The small lake had to be Mechow Lake, which had been in East Germany during the time of the border, right up to the narrow road along its western shore—the one I was traveling on now. To my left, farm fields stretched to the horizon. The whole scene had a lonely feel to it, as if the road were still at the edge of two worlds, rarely visited by humans. But the farm fields provided proof of a human presence, as did the row of trees along the road —poplars, to judge by the rough, furrowed bark and the heart-shaped leaves. Their trunks were massive, strangely out of proportion to the small, leafy crowns—a sign of pollarding, a pruning system used in Europe at least since medieval times. The new growth on these trees had been cut repeatedly

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at a height of about six feet every few years, probably to promote the growth of foliage as animal fodder. Or, with a longer cutting cycle, the new shoots might have grown into slim poles to use for fencing. The dense foliage obscured any branches above the enormous tree trunks, so it was hard to tell the purpose of the pollarding. For a moment, I caught a view of a few rooftops on the other side of the lake. They must have been part of Schlagsdorf. The houses of this small town on Mechow Lake’s eastern shore had a direct view of the lakeshore, but any thought of swimming or boating was verboten (forbidden) when the border still skirted the lake: it would have been too easy to step ashore on the West German side. Just as I wondered how I would have dealt with this Verbot, on top of all the other restrictions of life in the “protective strip” of the security zone, the Schutzstreifen, a long, gentle whooshing sound somewhere above me diverted my attention. My eyes were barely able to focus on the large bird’s shape before it disappeared over the line of trees toward the lake. A white-tailed eagle! Its enormous size, the striking white tail, and the way it moved through the air, stiff as a board, without flapping its wings, made it an easy ID. My first rare bird sighting in the Green Belt. In the 1960s, the population of white-tailed eagles in West Germany was estimated at only four breeding pairs; around sixty roamed the skies over East Germany. Thanks to protective measures—in particular the outlawing of the insecticide DDT—the number of breeding pairs in the reunited country was now estimated at over six hundred. The road made a turn along Mechow Lake’s northwestern corner. Unruly thickets of shrub lined the single-lane asphalt track on both sides now, and my ears once again alerted me to a change in the surface beneath my tires: the pavement had ended. Something shiny reflected sunlight through the packed sand just ahead: a flat steel bar inlaid across the road ahead, with a string of capital letters embossed in it. I slowed down to read the word they formed: GRENZLINIE—border line. A white rectangular sign poked out from a nearby tangle of leaves. It bore a quote from the late journalist Marion Countess Dönhoff: “Nowhere else in the world does

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there exist a border separating such different worlds; nowhere else does it matter this much whether you are born one hundred meters to the left or right of it.” Except for the one between North and South Korea. But Dönhoff was undoubtedly aware of that. The violent shifts in borders provoked by the Nazi regime had profoundly shaped Dönhoff’s life: her home in East Prussia became part of a prohibited military zone under the Soviet Union following the war that destroyed her family’s estate. “A lost world . . . a terribly beautiful place,” she had once described it.39 Remarkably, in light of her great personal loss, she was an early voice in favor of Germany giving up all claims on its prewar eastern territories in order to build peaceful relations with neighboring Poland.40 Mechow Lake, according to an interpretive sign, was home to several breeding pairs of white-tailed eagles. It also served as a critical resting place for some three thousand tufted ducks during their annual molting phase, when for a three-to six-week period the birds are unable to fly. For the ducks, too, the buffer of the Green Belt was a lifeline. Another sign told of land reform in the early nineteenth century that required farmers to delineate their fields with hedgerows. This measure turned out to be beneficial in more ways than one: the hedgerows broke the wind and kept the soil in place, while also producing wood and keeping livestock contained. By the early twentieth century, a dense network of hedgerows surrounded Schlagsdorf. But human designs changed the landscape again in the 1960s. Most of the hedgerows were removed in the course of the trend toward ever larger farm fields in East Germany (a trend that West Germany would follow some years later);41 the hedges would only have slowed down the large machines that were intended to increase production. That row of pollarded poplars on the western part of

39 40

Dönhoff 1990. The matter continued to cause considerable anxiety until it was settled for good in the legal framework of Reunification. See more on this in Pieck 2023.

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Mechow Lake must have been part of the once-dense network of wall hedges. The lonely road continued for another quarter mile before leading straight into Schlagsdorf and to a red brick building, once the tiny town’s schoolhouse and now a border museum. I decided on a quick visit and leaned my bicycle against the otherwise empty bike rack. No cars stood in the marked-off spaces either. Was I the only visitor? “Is it always this quiet?” I asked the man at the ticket desk. “No, it’s just a quiet moment,” he replied. “We have twenty thousand visitors a year. Sometimes we have school classes, and people come from all over—in fact, we just had some visitors from the Netherlands.” I walked into the first room. One exhibit honored the memory of the nearby hamlet of Lankow—one of the razed villages. A photo showed an overgrown meadow: the site where one Schlagsdorf family’s house used to stand. The only hints of a long-ago human presence were some old fruit trees and elderberry bushes. A small note informed visitors that the people who lived here, a mother and her two young sons, were awakened by border police at 5 a.m. one summer morning in 1952 and told to pack their belongings on a truck. In another room I learned that the forest I had traveled through yesterday, right up to Ratzeburg, was originally part of the Soviet occupation zone. But the chain of lakes that extended east and south from Mechow Lake would have made it difficult for the British to patrol their side of the border, and so they proposed a territorial exchange to the Soviets. As a result, one November day in 1945, the people of Lassahn, a small village west of the original demarcation line, all at once found themselves in the Ostzone. That same day, after being under Soviet occupation for five months, the people of Mechow and two other small villages near Ratzeburg became residents of the British sector. I had only pedaled a short distance from the museum when I noticed a reconstructed section of border strip. Surrounded by lush green grass now, the fences, watchtower, vehicle ditches, and mock-up minefields looked deceptively harmless. Interpretive

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signs provided the chilling meaning. Inwardly, I thanked the villagers for letting this land be part of the Erinnerungslandschaft, the landscape of remembrance. The villagers? I had not seen anyone besides the museum attendant. Maybe they were at work, but where? Some had to be farmers; others probably commuted to Ratzeburg— no more than a fifteen-minute drive now that the world no longer ended at the border. But still, how remote this borderland felt. I thought of the phantom houses again, of the people missing from this landscape. Leaving Schlagsdorf behind, my bike moved effortlessly for a few miles until the smooth, nearly flat bike path merged with a packed dirt track. My route now led along the series of lakes that extended east and south from Mechow Lake. The border had cut across the center of the largest of them—Lake Schaalsee—which meant I now had to decide which way to go around it. I chose the eastern side of the lake, though I cannot claim that my decision was the result of conscious discernment. Perhaps it was to spite the guidebook, which suggested the western route, though the border fortifications had, of course, been on the East German side. However my choice came to be, it propelled me straight into the heart of this borderland. The bike path trailed off. There were no more signs, and several dirt paths led through an area of low shrubs in a gently rolling dune landscape. I found myself in an almost otherworldly realm of wide-open space and profound quiet. Here I was in the center of Germany, a country with 82.542 million people and a dense network of roads and railways, and the only sounds were the rustle of leaves and the occasional screech of kingfishers darting along the shore. The terrain rolled in gentle waves toward the lake; patches of forest alternated with expanses of fields and meadows. If I expected lake views or a walk by the shoreline, that hope was for the most part dashed. The reason revealed itself in the peculiar logic of the borderland.

In 2016. https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/2861/umfrage/entwi cklung-der-gesamtbevoelkerung-deutschlands/.

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For a moment, I imagined myself as a young white-tailed eagle scouting the area for a nest site in the spring. From my eagle perspective, the shoreline was a maze of bays and peninsulas. Its dense woods provided a fine selection of tall trees sturdy enough to hold my nest, and the shimmering water contained a smorgasbord of fish and waterfowl. That red-crested pochard down there looks injured, I doubt it will give me much trouble despite its size. And those orioles and barn swallows that migrated here to breed will make for tasty snacks. My mind switched to the perspective of the border official charged with putting in place the template for the border strip along this stretch of the Iron Curtain: outward sovereign territory, outer fence, control strip, vehicle ditch, minefield, hinterland fence. No way can I keep the outer fence at an even distance from the borderline. The lake shore is far too convoluted. We don’t have the manpower to cut a swath to that kind of shape. Plus I’m already pushing the envelope with the budget. We’ll just have to run the fence in a straight line, far enough inland from the bays to fulfill the minimum requirement. And so the outward sovereign territory of the GDR along the lake had turned into a broad belt of forest around the meandering shoreline, untouched for decades. A biological and ecological heaven on earth that was at risk of being loved to death when the border opened in 1989. Only fifty kilometers from Lübeck and seventy from Hamburg, the eastern side of the Schaalsee quickly became an attractive destination for West Germans to explore. Village mayors and councils recognized the opportunity to bring in tourism revenue, not to mention end the region’s decades-long isolation. They issued permits for pleasure boats, which in turn required docks, roads, and parking lots, and began drawing up plans for lakeview building lots. Like everywhere else across the GDR, western real estate speculators scouted the area for lucrative investments. A development initiative accused conservationists of wanting to impose new restrictions on the long-suffering local population. Conservationists tried to explain the overarching value of biodiversity and that their intent was not to restrict locals but to stave off uncontrolled human impact in the form of outside city slickers.

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While the arguments went on, the consequences of such impact became clear that very first spring: in May 1990, the two breeding pairs of white-tailed eagles known to nest on the eastern shore had abandoned their nests.43 The eastern shore of the lake is now designated as a Biosphere Reserve, which added UNESCO protection to this portion of the Green Belt. But this happened only in 2000. What actually made this possible was the dedicated work of East German conservationists and parliamentarians during the brief existence of the GDR’s one and only freely elected government, namely in the seven months from March 19 to October 2, 1990. During this time period, they managed to draw up and pass a highly ambitious conservation program that consisted of five national parks, six biosphere reserves, three nature preserves, and several other areas slated for protection under other categories.44 Just as impressive was the on-the-ground work done by biologists—many of them volunteers—mapping the habitats to be protected. At no time and in neither German state had conservationists accomplished as much as in 1990.

Lake Schaalsee Biosphere Reserve The 310-square-kilometer Schaalsee Biosphere Reserve, which forms part of the Green Belt’s extended network here, was designated by UNESCO in January 2000 as one of close to 700 such reserves worldwide. The designation specifically addresses the interplay of nature and culture and is therefore not meant to exclude human use. In fact, it explicitly requires the acceptance of residents. Within biosphere reserves, designated core zones have the highest protection status, development zones cover towns and villages, and care zones allow for lighter human activity. The forested shoreline became the Bioreserve’s core zone, and the fields and meadows were part of the care zone. While farmers would be understandably reluctant to take good soils out of production, they are eligible for compensation for any loss in productivity. In areas of intensive agriculture, which means half of Germany’s land area, runoff from fertilizer overloads wetlands and waterways with nutrients or chemical pollutants. In the Bioreserve, the fields that are farmed without fertilizers or herbicides can act as a buffer for the sensitive lakeshore habitat

43 44

Eckert 2019, p. 190. Ibid., p.192.

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Pedaling on to the southern tip of Lake Schaalsee, I realized that most of the area that was now the biosphere reserve had been part of the territorial exchange in late 1945. Without the exchange, this magical place would not have ended up in the East German borderland. Instead, hotels and vacation homes might have lined the Schaalsee’s shores by the 1970s and 1980s, and the wild creatures would not have found refuge. Or should vacation homes line the lake’s shores? Wouldn’t vacationers provide a much-needed infusion of income to this neglected region? But human-centered activities already covered the lion’s share of the area’s land use: 65 percent of the reserve’s land area was in the development zone (towns and villages) and 29 percent in the care zone, while only 6 percent was set aside for the core zone, the one with limited human access. Perhaps the Schaalsee region combined the best of both worlds. On the southern and western shores of the lake, towns and vacation resorts have access for boating and swimming. The lake’s southern portion lies in Mecklenburg–Western Pomerania, so the income from tourism benefits the “east” as well as “the west.” The Reserve’s visitor center, too, which receives thirty-five thousand guests a year, is in Zarrentin, Mecklenburg–Western Pomerania. I pedaled along, quietly contemplating all of this, when I noticed a section of stretched-metal border fence and a large display sign a short distance from the path. The display held a black-andwhite picture of a young man with a neatly trimmed beard. Actually, there were two pictures, though part of me wished I had never looked at the second one. The first showed the young man’s face, gazing directly at the viewer. A friendly, sympathisch face. The other picture showed the same young man lying on his back, his face lifeless, streaked with bands of dried blood. The text explained that his name was Harry Weltzin and that he was the last victim of the SM70, the automatic scatter mines the GDR had installed along 273 miles of the border in the 1970s. I had seen an SM-70 close-up in a border museum once. The dreadful thing looked like a narrow metal cone set on its side, about fifteen centimeters long with an opening of about six centimeters. These devices had been installed, along sections of the border, on

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the inner side of the western fence at three levels, each with a trigger wire that would release a blast of shrapnel parallel to the fence when touched. From the display board I learned that Harry Weltzin was twenty-eight years old when he tried to dig a tunnel underneath the fence at this spot in September 1983 and accidentally touched the trigger wire. Was he aware of the risk he was taking? How had he even managed to get this far, all the way to the westernmost fence? “If you were merely traveling on a train in the direction of the border, you were questioned,” my friend Ulla once told me. She had worked near the border on the eastern side of the Harz Mountains in the 1980s. “There were no maps or directional signs to orient you. And of course, you could not cross into the Sperrgebiet at the checkpoints if you did not have a permit or a stamp on your ID card.” Harry must have bushwhacked in order to avoid roads and checkpoints. Maybe he had found a spot just far enough from the nearest watchtower to avoid the border guards’ notice. Maybe the hinterland fence—the first, inner fence—had no signal wire. Maybe there were no dog runs and minefields along this section of border. But there were the SM-70’s, likely installed in this area because of the dense vegetation in the unusually wide section of outside sovereign territory, which made it hard for the border guards to see the fence from any distance. And what about the soldiers who had installed the SM-70s, here and at other sections of the border? Did they feel they had no choice? Did they believe they were serving their country well by preventing escapes by any means, or that people who tried to flee deserved to die?45 Did they secretly dream about being bookkeepers, or farmers, or architects? What had this border done to people’s lives? Lost in dark thoughts, I continued south along the lonely road until I passed the yellow municipality sign for Lassahn, one of the villages that was traded from the British to the Soviet occupation 45

The sign noted that after the end of the GDR, the soldier who had installed the SM-70s in this area had been put on trial but was acquitted because the court was unable to prove that he had intentionally caused the death of Harry Weltzin and dozens of other refugees.

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zone in November 1945. The Lassahners were given two weeks to decide whether they wanted to stay in the village or move west across the demarcation line. Ninety percent of the residents had chosen to move west, even though that decision meant leaving behind homesteads that had been in their families for generations. Their abandoned houses were given to refugees from the east, ethnic Germans who had been expelled from their homes in East Prussia and Czechoslovakia. My heart sank again at the thought of all the invisible grief and turmoil this land had seen. And all because eight decades ago, people in this country—my country—allowed a demagogue to exploit their fears and their basest instincts. After it was all over, an estimated sixteen million people had been murdered, including six million European Jews. Worldwide, an estimated sixty to seventy million people were dead, many of them civilians. And, of course, it was not all over. Much of the continent was a wasteland; those who died were still dead. Many never had a chance to have their own families. A bipolar world order arose with the divided Germany at its center. At least in this outcome there lay a certain logic and a justification, a case of karmic cause and effect. And still, what about Harry Weltzin and Bernhard Simon and all the others whose lives were bent and derailed and cut short by a government that imprisoned its own citizens? I felt niedergeschlagen from it all—beaten down. And still, I could not think of a better place to feel this way than in the stillness of this achingly beautiful corner of the earth. This was what Kai Frobel meant by a landscape of remembrance. A landscape in which to honor the memory of those who died and suffered, to actually feel the losses. A refuge for humans and wild creatures alike. Saved by beauty. I’ve felt this in the presence of great works of art, and I felt it here. This was not merely picture-postcard beauty, or a matter of individual taste. This was the eagle and the kingfisher, the sparkling water and the untouched forest in the Schaalsee borderland; the trees and the shrubs and the flowers breathing out oxygen, that oxygen entering the air sacs of the whitetailed eagles, of the kingfishers, of my own lungs; the cycle of the carbon dioxide we breathe out and the plants breathe in. Of all living beings turning to soil again. This was not just mechanics, even

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if the diagrams in textbooks made it look that way. It was the current that keeps life on earth going, even in the face of overwhelming bleakness. To my right, I caught occasional glimpses of the Schaalsee’s azure blue surface sparkling in the sunlight. To receive time, the Irish poet, priest, and philosopher John O’Donohue had once said about a time of immersion in a landscape close to his heart. Perhaps that’s what this was: I was receiving time in this unfathomable realm of heaven and hell. Receiving gratitude, too, for the eagle, the kingfisher, and for the hundreds of other creatures whose breath and very substance mingled with mine. *** Lassahn consisted mostly of a few houses strung along the Dorfstrasse, the road that led me here. The village was quiet and would have looked abandoned except for the well-kept flowerbeds and the occasional car in a driveway. Besides farming, there was probably not much work here, either. People must commute north to Ratzeburg or south to Zarrentin. It was early evening now, and I was probably still two hours from Boizenburg. I could power through. But my stomach was beginning to feel empty, and I still had a sandwich from my mother’s care package. A row of tall trees came into view, behind a low wall made of field stones. It looked like an inviting spot for an Abendbrot (evening meal) break. As I leaned my bike against the stone wall, I noticed a building beyond the trees: a church. Parts of its walls were built from field stones, but the entire western facade consisted of a timber frame, the squares between the strong wooden beams filled with red brickwork. Fachwerk. The gable wall under the church’s spire consisted of wooden planks, like the board-and-batten siding of a New England barn. Tall poplars formed a ring all the way around the church, and through the spaces between them I could see the shimmering surface of Lake Schaalsee. The Fachwerk church, the breeze from the lake, the sweeping view across its blue waters

NOT A SINKING SHIP

and scattered islands: something about the scene felt comforting. Another place to receive time. I sat on the stone wall, took a swig from my water bottle, and unwrapped the sandwich. How come even the simplest food tastes like a feast to a bone-tired body? Why does it restore contentment even to a beaten-down soul? My phone rang. “Hello, Kerstin, this is Stefan, from Boizenburg.” His voice sounded kind. “Susi and I are going to the grocery store, so I wanted to check in about your arrival time. Do you want us to bring anything for you from the store?” I told him I estimated a couple more hours, and that a bottle each of beer and sparkling water would be great. The brief conversation and the simple Abendbrot reenergized me. Maybe it was time to touch base with the outside world and listen to some news while I tackled the remaining distance. I pulled my iPod out of my handlebar pouch and tried to find a station on the radio dial. There—Deutschlandradio!46 The evening news summary was winding up; the radio host announced an interview with German President47 Joachim Gauck. The host began by noting new indications that refugees were involved in three of the previous week’s four violent attacks. Did Gauck think Chancellor Merkel was mistaken with her now famous remark “Wir schaffen das”? Gauck replied with a question: “What if Merkel had said ‘We cannot handle this’? Is that the country I want to live in?” “Of course, the influx of so many people was a huge challenge,” he continued, “but it is important to look closely at each situation before we draw conclusions.” He noted that the young shooter in the Munich attack that killed nine people was not a refugee and had all the characteristics of a school shooter: bullying, social isolation, mental disturbance. An added element in the case of this young man, Gauck said, was his infatuation with Nazi ideology. The closing of borders would do nothing to address these

Deutschlandradio is one of several German public radio stations, but the only one with national programming. It was formed after Unification out of RIAS (Radio in the American Sector) Berlin and the East Berlin station DS Kultur. While the president of Germany is the official head of state, the office is largely ceremonial and the executive functions lie with the chancellor. However, the president can offer direction in important societal matters.

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risk factors. Gauck concluded by saying, “German society is being shaken up by strong gusts, but it is not a sinking ship.” The maritime metaphor was a reminder that, like me, Gauck had grown up near the coast. Unlike me, he was from Rostock, in East Germany, on the Baltic Sea. His life had been marked profoundly by the consequences of this geographic and political difference: his father disappeared into a Soviet gulag when Gauck was eleven years old; his own children were denied access to university studies because of his close association with the church—Gauck was a Lutheran pastor for most of his professional life—and three of them fled to West Germany to follow their own professional dreams.48 His words in the interview did not minimize the horrific attacks or the way they were politicized so quickly, but they restored some Zuversicht in me: a sense that reason and faith could prevail and that Germany could manage this, too. I cringed at the thought of how, as teenagers in West Germany, my friends and I had made cocky remarks when certain politicians had talked of freedom. In our black-and-white world, those were conservatives, the kinds of people who said “Dann geh doch rüber!” (Why don’t you go over there!) whenever someone had something positive to say about East Germany, or something negative about West Germany. Daylight was fading as I rode into Boizenburg, but there was enough of it left to notice the Fachwerk city hall in the center of the marketplace. At the edge of town, Stefan and Susi’s house turned out to be just as compelling as in the pictures; the garden looked even more enchanted in the twilight. If my hosts were bothered by my late arrival, they did not let it show. They refused to take money for the beverages they placed on a side table in the airy bedroom that was mine for the night. As I washed the sweat off my skin and felt my muscles relax, I thought to myself that maybe I, too, was being shaken by gusts on this expedition. And that I, too, was not a sinking ship.

During the Peaceful Revolution, Gauck co-founded the New Forum opposition group, and after Reunification he became the first director of the Stasi Records Agency (the federal agency charged with preserving the archives of the GDR’s state security apparatus and investigating the past actions of the Stasi).

Chapter 5: The Fence Must Go! . . . a ditch somewhere— or a creek, meadows, woodlot, or marsh . . . These are places of initiation, where the borders between ourselves and other creatures break down, where the earth gets under our nails and a sense of place gets under our skin. . . Everybody has a ditch, or ought to. For only the ditches and the fields, the woods, the ravines—can teach us to care enough for all the land. —Robert Michael Pyle

The River Elbe was my steadfast companion all morning, along with a gentle rain. Comfortably dry in the rain suit I had borrowed from my mother, I let my thoughts travel ahead to my visit in Strachau, a tiny village a few hours’ ride up the Elbe. The response from artist Silke Kowalski to my inquiry had come quickly: not only could I see her paintings, but I should join her and her daughter for lunch. An old watchtower came into view right next to the levee. I stopped to read the sign on the door. In the years after the Wende, I learned, a conservation group from Boizenburg had rescued it from demolition and repurposed it as a bird observation tower. The view from the top over the Elbe floodplain must be spectacular on a clear day. The door was locked, and it was not a clear day, so I was content to take in the long list of resident and migratory birdlife listed on the sign. Among the more charismatic species were the white stork, osprey, and white-tailed eagle. One of the less well-known species on the bird tower’s list was the black stork. It was rarer still than the white stork, and even that is on Germany’s endangered species list. These shy creatures prefer secluded patches of undergrowth near water, not the open stretch of floodplain I could see from the levee. I had never seen a black stork, but resolved then to look out for places where they might feel safe. Albia, meaning simply “the river,” is what the old Germanic tribes had named what came to be called the Elbe. By the conventions of river-naming, it should more properly have been named

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the Moldau:49 up to the point where the two rivers converge in the Bohemian forest thirty miles north of Prague, the Moldau is the longer river. Had the Slavic tribes—precursors to today’s Czechs— been the first to settle there, perhaps Dresden and Hamburg would sit on the Moldau today instead of on the Elbe. Still, in the aftermath of World War I, a small piece of Hamburg did come to sit on the Moldau, or more specifically, on the Moldau port. Among the territories the Treaty of Versailles required the German Empire to give up were two seaports it had to cede to Czechoslovakia, one of which was a section of the port of Hamburg that ever since has been called the Moldauhafen—the Moldau port. Elbe or Moldau: this central section of the river, too, was part of the phantom border, long before the twentieth-century one that divided East and West Germany. In 804,50 Charlemagne had established it as the eastern boundary of his empire. King Henry I (876– 936)51 pushed the boundary east by conquering Slavic areas, essentially setting them up as buffer zones. Over the course of a thousand years, then, this boundary has been ideological (in the twentieth century), dynastic (in the latter centuries of the Holy Roman Empire), and ethnic (in the early Middle Ages). But only the twentieth century border was a hermetically sealed militarized death zone. These days, the Elbe is simply a river. Small ferries cross back and forth all day between the two shores every couple of dozen kilometers, most of them just large enough to fit a few cars in addition to pedestrians and bicyclists. I crossed the Elbe on every single one, for no particular reason other than that I could: none of these ferry connections existed during the time of the division. Along with the Elbe came human company. Throughout the morning, I had seen people on bicycles traveling the levee in both directions. Some were solo, some in pairs, others with children either on their own small bikes or in tent-like trailers. I was riding on 49

50 51

And even more properly, the Vltava, its Czech name. The name Moldau became more widely known through Bedřich Smetana’s symphonic work Die Moldau. At the conclusion of the Saxon Wars. Henry I was also known as Henry the Fowler. His son Otto would be the first German emperor.

THE FENCE MUST GO!

the Elbe Bike Route now, one of Germany’s—and Europe’s—most popular long-distance bike routes. Each year, thousands cycle between the mouth of the Elbe on the North Sea coast and its source in the Czech Republic, a distance of eight hundred miles. Back on my bike after one of the ferry crossings, I noticed a blond woman on a sharp-looking wine-red bike heading toward the levee. We both said Moin—she is from northern Germany too—and fell into pace next to each other. If we were going to find out more about each other, we would have to sort through a brainteaser of German social convention quickly and decide on what form of address to use: the formal Sie or the informal du. Since we seemed to be roughly the same age and similarly engaged in a bicycle adventure, the formal Sie would feel, well, very formal. With an older person or one of apparent higher social standing, I would have had to start out with Sie. Louisa was a few days into the Elbe Bikeway and, I learned, on leave from her job at a Waldkindergarten—a forest preschool. I was instantly captivated. The mere idea of taking children outside would never have occurred to the proper, urban matrons of the indoor preschool I had attended. The place my childhood friend Ingeborg and I had called Wäldchen (little forest) was a narrow sliver of scraggly shrubs wedged between our apartment building and the Autobahn, as far a cry from a real forest as the muddy little ditch that ran along it was from the Elbe. But we had no other forest or stream for comparison. To us the Wäldchen was a veritable wilderness because there were no adults and no rules, only the narrow tunnels our small bodies had burrowed through the spindly greenery. The steady roar of the Autobahn hardly seeped into our awareness. Listening to Louisa, I pictured ruddy-faced, confident children who knew the names of the trees and bird calls around them, kids who did not squeal “Ew!” at the sight of a spider or complain about bad weather on a rainy day. I told Louisa about my own oxygen-deprived preschool experience and how I came to connect with the Vermont forests. She immediately resonated with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s words “In these woods, we return to reason and faith” and noted that he knew this two centuries before scientists

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began to investigate the health benefits of spending time in forests.52 “And they had to study those benefits, of course, because children—everyone—have been spending so much less time in nature with increasing urbanization,” she remarked. “The extinction of experience,” ecologist Robert Michael Pyle once called that phenomenon—the absence of contact with nature. The place where Pyle himself had connected with nature as a child was more similar to my scraggly Wäldchen than to any grand wilderness: he had grown up in an urban setting near Denver, Colorado. But a canal ran through his neighborhood, and along it grew a little forest of willows and chokecherries in which Pyle learned to observe creatures like vesper sparrows, red-shafted flickers, and close to a dozen butterfly species: a miniature ecosystem where he found a world of wonders. “What about you?” Louisa asked. “Are you doing the Elbe Bike Route, too?” I told her about my border expedition and explained that I was hoping it would help me better understand the new, reunited Germany. On a whim, I mentioned my experience at Gasthof Lauterbach, and asked if she had any contact with AfD people. She said no, the AfD didn’t seem to have a foothold in her town. “How about refugees,” I asked, “have you seen any, or had contact with any?” There were some in her small town, she replied, though she was not sure how many. Her encounters so far, though brief, had been positive. “They bring the city center back to life,” she remarked. She, too, was concerned about the backlash in the wake of reports that foreigners seemed to be involved in some of the recent attacks. We rode together for a while. From the levee we could see far across the land on both sides of the river. And there was a lot of land: fields and meadows as far as the eye could see, with small villages, an occasional solitary farmstead, and patches of woods scattered throughout. In the misty haze to the northeast, a dark green band lined the horizon: the forested edge of the Elbe’s ancient 52

An overview can be found in Williams 2017.

THE FENCE MUST GO!

glacial riverbed. Meltwater from the glacier had once collected in a broad channel and drained northwest, past Hamburg and into the North Sea. The border installations along the Elbe were built up in the 1970s. After that, like any village within five hundred meters of the border, the villages on the eastern shore of the Elbe were caught between the border fence to the west and a checkpoint to the east, placed there to keep unauthorized GDR citizens from entering the high-security zone—the Schutzstreifen. With true German thoroughness, residents of the protected zone had their identity cards checked for the proper residents’ stamp each time they crossed in or out of it, and again at the checkpoint for the five-kilometer-wide Sperrgebiet. Near the edge of one small village, we noticed an empty lot between two houses and, attached to the garden fence, a small white sign with a black-and-white photo of a half-timbered house. The text informed us that this land had belonged to the Meissner family from the year 1707 until their expulsion in 1952: apparently the Party had not considered them sufficiently reliable GDR citizens to let them live so close to the border. Soon after that the house had been razed. We scanned the vacant lot for a trace of the family’s home but found nothing. The absence was almost palpable, like a phantom pain. It would have been easy to miss the tiny village of Strachau had I not been on the lookout: some two dozen red brick houses clumped together in twos or threes hugged the levee in a loose, curved line. As it came into view, I filled Louisa in about my appointment with Silke Kowalski and thanked her for her company. Frau Kowalski’s house sat near the beginning of the line of brick houses, no more than a hundred yards from the levee. I liked the house as soon as I spotted it: a sensible, sturdy brick house with a red tiled roof and a dormer over the front door. A home for generations. The door opened. Silke Kowalski looked sensible too, with a dark blue long-sleeved shirt over a comfortable sweater, her silverblond hair in a long braid. From what I knew about her, she had to be in her mid-seventies, about the same age as my mother.

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We shook hands and followed a hallway into the living room. Gemütlich, I thought to myself—in a comfortable, lived-in way, not intentionally styled. Two heavy bookcases filled one corner of the room: books seemed to be important in this house. A large table occupied the center, part of it covered with charcoal drawings, the other part set up with three place settings, a heavy skillet, and a breadbasket. A broad sofa was set against the long wall. The gray sky gave off diffuse light through a large window. Frau Kowalski followed my gaze to the levee. “Yes, that was where the fence stood; right there on top of the levee. Britta, my oldest daughter, was ten in 1974 when it was built. When the construction started, Britta asked the officer in charge: ‘Why are you doing this?’ And he told her, ‘To make the village prettier.’ That evening, when the kids were telling me about their day, Britta was very upset. ‘This is not making the village prettier—this is terrible! Now we can no longer play by the Elbe!’ And then she took the initiative and wrote up flyers saying, ‘The fence must go!’ and put them up on the fence and all over the village.” A woman with long, chestnut-red-brown hair had stepped into the living room with a steaming pot of coffee. “I made a lot of them!” she added with a laugh. “I had no idea what I was unleashing.” Britta seemed to be about my age. I tried to remember the kinds of pranks I committed when I was ten, but I knew for a fact that protesting an international border fence was not one of them. There had been no fence to protest, nor a river to play by. The closest I could come in conjuring up a parallel to Britta’s outrage was to imagine that the tunnel that led underneath the Autobahn near our apartment had been permanently closed. Without it, the fields and meadows of my childhood would have been unreachable. Where would my father have taught me to ride a bicycle? Where would I have encountered cows and horses? Britta poured us coffee and lifted the cover off the heavy skillet, releasing a waft of heavenly smells. Scrambled eggs, hash browns, vegetables, bacon—a Bauernfrühstück, which despite its name (farmer’s breakfast) can be eaten for lunch or dinner as well as breakfast. A welcome—and unexpected—saunterer’s feast.

THE FENCE MUST GO!

I helped myself to a generous portion. “What did you unleash? Did the officer think a ten-year-old child had political motives?” Silke Kowalski picked up the story. “That didn’t matter. You just didn’t mess with the GDR’s Staatsgrenze West [western border] no matter who you were. A few days after Britta’s flyer operation, we could tell that there was a meeting of some kind in the house next door. There were cars from outside the village, so we knew it was something big. Later we found out that the meeting was about us, because of Britta’s posters. Charges had been filed against us. We were going to be expelled from the Sperrgebiet. Strangely enough, it was the ABV53—the police liaison for this section of the border—who spoke up for us and said, ‘The Kowalskis should stay. They are a little crazy, but they would never put their kids in danger. They won’t go rüber [across the Elbe to escape to West Germany].’ Then apparently a Stasi agent, of all people, said that at least here, in the protective zone, they could keep a better eye on us. And that’s what they did. We noticed that very clearly. Whenever we weren’t home, they’d be in here. All of this felt quite oppressive, of course.” “What was it like to live in such a small community under these circumstances? Were you worried about spies in the village?” “You knew those you could rely on,” Frau Kowalski said. “It was a good community. But many young people moved away from the Sperrgebiet when the border was fortified. Mostly old people remained. Several people were expelled. On this end of the street, three houses were razed. The oak beams of one of them smoldered for days. I still remember the sight of the black beams. It is very sad, really terrible when such a house gets demolished.” I had seen a print of a painting she had made of one of those houses before it was razed, a fiery deep orange shape behind stark black tree trunks. It was part of a series she had called Sterbendes Land—dying land. I thought of the empty lot Louisa and I had passed earlier. 53

Abschnittsbevollmächtigter (a police officer overseeing a village or a section of the border).

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Frau Kowalski got up from the sofa and pulled out a sheet from the pile of drawings on the table next to her. It was a pencil drawing of a younger version of herself, with a serious, downcast expression. “This self-portrait is from that time, too. I was feeling very badly, and that kind of thing always shows up in my work. “At the time I was in art school in Schwerin. My fellow students didn’t know anything about the border or the Sperrgebiet. First the fence was built, then the dog runs came, then the watchtowers. I got more and more upset and would talk about it in the seminars: ‘How can you all still sit here so calmly!’ But they didn’t want to hear about it. Maybe that was a kind of protective mechanism. “That’s why it is so absurd, too, when people said later, ‘Those who lived in the Sperrgebiet, they were all Stasi people,’” added Britta. She had remained on the Stasi’s radar after her flyer protest, and, later54 found out that she had not one, but two files: one from her childhood and one from her time at the university in Rostock. “But apparently those two files were never connected.” After Reunification she gained access to the latter file. Whoever had informed on her during her university years had only reported innocuous observations. “That I was close to my family and things like that. I think that person was trying to protect me.” Nevertheless, she believed that the first file had initially barred her from pursuing higher education. After being rejected by the university, she worked at an LPG55 (agricultural cooperative); then, a year later, reapplied as a cooperative farmer. This apparently helped her standing vis-à-vis the worker-and-peasant state, and she was accepted. Her mother pulled out several more drawings from the stack on the table. Even across the table, I could see that the charcoal lines had been applied with considerable force. I walked around to look at the drawings.

The Stasi files were made accessible beginning in 1992, regulated through the Stasi Records Act. Landwirtschaftliche Produktionsgenossenschaft.

THE FENCE MUST GO!

“This is Hamlet,” she explained. “To be or not to be? Where do I go now? Something is rotten in this state.” Silke Kowalski, too, had worked for the LPG, and for many years the regional art council had promoted her art as the work of an LPG farmer. But the angry Hamlet drawings, created in 1988 and ’89, had apparently been too much. “Frau Kowalski,” she was told, “your work is getting blacker and blacker.” She had felt that she was taken down, removed from the realm of public culture. “You were not supposed to have your own thoughts,” she said, exasperatedly. She also recalled how once, when she had been invited to give a talk, a party official had handed her a finished script and said, “We already wrote up a talk for you.” She pulled out another sheet from the pile. “This is Ivan, from [Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel] The Master and Margarita,” she explained. “In the book, Ivan wants to warn the world of evil forces; he walks through the city in striped pajamas, carrying a lantern.” Inwardly, I wondered how many more books were present on East German bookshelves that I had never heard of. But even without knowing the novel, I could see how forcefully Ivan moved across the page, leaving no doubt that he was on a mission. I didn’t need to know the book—a satire on Soviet society that had previously been banned in the Soviet Union—to know that the culture watchdogs of the Socialist Unity Party were not thrilled. But the times were about to change. “After the Wende,” Frau Kowalski said, “Ivan helped get my work noticed in the West. With the Ivan series, I managed to accomplish what art is supposed to do: there must be an edge, a humorous edge—that’s what reaches people. Then people start questioning.” She stood and opened the door to a neighboring room, about twice the size of the living room, inviting me to see her more recent work. Paintings and drawings were everywhere, hung on the walls, leaning on easels. The contrast with the Ivan and Hamlet and Dying Land drawings was remarkable: in this room—Kowalski’s studio and art gallery in one—I had stepped into a sea of color. The flashes of red, orange, and yellow sorted themselves around shapes of

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blue, green, and black, sometimes before a background of gold that almost gave them a sacred aura, like medieval church icons. There were flowers, animals, child-like figures, angels—many angels. Some of them seemed to float, some had black wings, one sailed upside down, another spoke to a raven, yet another cried black tears. Some of the images had a dreamlike quality, with fantastical figures to whom the rules of gravity seemed not to apply. Aside from the angels and the expanses of gold, nothing about these paintings evoked a medieval church atmosphere. Silke Kowalski’s post-border work might be more colorful and she herself no longer imprisoned in her country, but that did not mean the world was now in Ordnung. She drew my attention to a sturdy black figure holding a black pitchfork, striding with visible determination across a flaming orange-yellow background, its long hair streaming behind. It was dated 2017. “That’s my angry angel with the pitchfork. An angel must always be on the alert, still today. This one is my symbolic challenge against stupidity, ignorance, and violence.” Next to this painting was one with two clown-like figures, both with dark drops under their eyes that looked like black tears. “This one is called The Last Performance,” she explained. “The clown and his partner say farewell. I painted it last year when my husband was already very sick. He died four months ago. I couldn’t bring myself to paint a Realist style picture of us. Sometimes you can express grief and hopelessness best through a clown.” I stood very still. If I was a saunterer, a sainte-terrer, roving about the country looking for charity, I had truly found it here. These two women, in their time of grief, had invited me, a complete stranger, into their home, fed me, and shared memories from difficult times in their lives. We sat down in the living room again. “My husband and I were drawn to each other not least because both our fathers died in World War II. And that was also why we both had our critical attitudes. We each started asking ‘Why?’ very early in life. And so we could never just accept things we were told to accept, things that were simply wrong.

THE FENCE MUST GO!

“So we sat here, behind the fence, and in [East] Berlin56 those old Betonköpfe [concrete-heads] did not seem capable of passing the reins to younger people with new ideas. “And then Gorbachev came. We were all so happy. Finally there was a fresh breeze. New ideas were coming into socialism. Because you know, we were not opposed to socialism from the beginning, we believed for years that there could be a just world, and our thinking and our actions were based on that. Until it became clear that the party had become a dictatorship and that people who had no clue about the economy had their fingers in everything. So Gorbachev was our great hope. My husband had a Gorbachev patch on his jacket.” Britta interjected, “And there were Gorbachev T-shirts at the university. This was not well received by the party. So all at once we discovered German–Soviet friendship. I even sewed a hammer and sickle onto a red T-shirt. And they—the Party—couldn’t do anything! Because that was what they had promoted for years. Just not like this!” Her mother continued. “And then came Tiananmen Square.” In the summer of 1989, Chinese students had protested for democratic rights in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square until their government had sent tanks to beat the protests down. The scenes I watched on TV seemed eerily like those my dad had described from the uprising in the GDR on June 17, 1953. Soldiers, tanks, and injured and dead protesters everywhere. “And our disgusting government made a great show of its friendship with China. That’s when the young people started to run to Hungary—just raus [out of here]. And that’s when we knew that there was no hope left. With these people in power, nothing would change. “My husband and I started going to Schwerin each Monday to the protests, even though I was not in good health at the time. We carried posters saying, ‘The fence must go!’” The same words that Britta had written on her protest signs fifteen years earlier.

The GDR’s capital.

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“Each time you went to a protest, you had to pass the checkpoints, right? Did the guards know where you were going?” I asked her. “They did, for sure,” she replied, “and still some people said, ‘The fence doesn’t bother me.’” In fact, she said, when she and her husband had first moved to Strachau, the border had not bothered them much either. That was before the fence was built right outside their house, and before all the military installations. At first, she said with a dismissive hand gesture, there was “just a little barbed wire back there somewhere, and the border guards were from around here, and sometimes we villagers invited them in for meals or events.”57 Still, restrictions on who could visit the Sperrgebiet were already in place when Silke and Wolfgang Kowalski married, and therefore none of their West German relatives were allowed to attend the wedding. From the rest of the GDR, outside the Sperrgebiet, only the closest relatives were ever allowed in—if they were granted permits. It was time for me to leave the Kowalskis, but I was curious how their little village had fared after Reunification and whether they felt any tensions between east and west in today’s Germany. “There are only three of the ‘Ureinwohner’ (native) families left now. Everyone else moved here from the west,” Frau Kowalski told me. “Most of them are artists or work in the cultural sector. At first there were some moments of friction. Both sides had some prejudices about the other. But that all wore off pretty quickly. Now we have a good community: everybody helps everybody else, but they

Initially after the founding of the GDR, border patrol was the responsibility of the (East) German Border Police, which was housed in the Ministry for State Security (the Stasi) until the 1953 uprising and then directly under the Ministry of the Interior. From 1961 on, the border guards were no longer members of the Border Police but recruits of the National People’s Army (NVA). The young draftees were always sent to a segment far from their home so they would not pass information to family members that could aid in an escape. The GDR’s intent to rotate NVA soldiers through the border assignments—and to keep them isolated from the local population—did not always pan out: I met several former border guards who had come to the Grenzgebiet as young draftees and married local women.

THE FENCE MUST GO!

don’t sit on top of each other. They are all individualists, but if you need them, they are there for you.” I asked her what she thought about east–west relations in general. “We overestimated the West Germans, and they underestimated us. There’s really nothing more that needs to be said about that.” I was not surprised to hear this. Daphne Berdahl, an American anthropologist who spent two years immediately after Reunification in Kella, a border village farther south, had described encounters in which East Germans had felt belittled by West Germans or treated as if they were lazy, incompetent, or behind the times. Ulla once told me that even now, close to thirty years after the Wende, she sometimes hesitated to tell people she grew up in East Germany because of the prejudices she has experienced, sometimes unsubtle enough that she felt like a second-class citizen. But, Ulla had added candidly, “prejudices exist in both directions.” After working in the west for several years after Reunification, she found herself the target of anti-western sentiments when she returned to the east. Ever the linguistic talent, she had picked up the Swabian accent so well that her eastern co-workers had perceived her as a Wessi. We humans are so complicated, I thought to myself with a sigh. Were these instances a sign of unrealistic expectations, of people underestimating the time it would take for a divided country to grow back together after four decades? Of West Germans expecting East Germans simply to throw a switch and smoothly blend in with West German norms of behavior? I thought back on the legal basis for Reunification: the article in the West German constitution that provided for East Germany to “accede” to the BRD’s territory. Apparently, this was how it had felt to many East Germans: like an adoption by a rich uncle who then called the shots. No wonder easterners felt exasperated. Is this the whole story, I mused—westerners being arrogant, easterners feeling belittled, and everyone having unrealistic expectations? Or was there a deeper layer, a more widespread human tendency to draw boundaries, a kind of mental-emotional need to

PHANTOM BORDER

see the world in terms of people who are like us and people who are different? I had not said any of this out loud, but Frau Kowalski picked up the thread seamlessly. “The way I see it, the line does not run between east and west, but between tolerance and intolerance,” she said. “Sometimes I feel it when I go somewhere else, that there is still a problem. But here in Strachau there isn’t, not at all. Hier bist Du Mensch (here, you are a human being). “You are just the person you are. And that is really the point, isn’t it?”

Chapter 6: Heimat Heimat is not a scientific term; it describes the emotional relationship between humans and their surroundings. —Hansjörg Küster (1956–2024)

Over coffee with the Kowalskis, I asked the two women what they associated with the word Heimat. “Heimat, for me,” Frau Kowalski said, “begins with the view of the hills on the other side of the Elbe. I have never been away for long from the surroundings of my childhood, but seeing this blue ridgeline when I return from a trip makes me happy.” I had seen that ridgeline across the Elbe earlier in the day: another legacy of the glacier that had shaped this landscape. For Silke Kowalski, who had seen the border fence come and go during her lifetime, the western side of the Elbe had always remained part of her Heimat, even though she was not allowed to cross the river for forty years. “I love the smell of the Elbe and the resiny scent of the woods,” Frau Kowalski continued, gazing out the window. I could almost smell it myself. “The juicy green of the meadows in the floodplain gives me joy, along with the cries of the gray and silver herons, the swans and wild geese, the playful twittering of the swallows. My birthplace is between the Elbe’s ancient glacial valley and the Rens, a pine forest that stretches over a large area. In August, tall grasses flower in the clearings; when there is wind they undulate like a red sea. Now and then you come across dunes that formed during the ice age. In places, reindeer lichens and dune grasses have taken hold on them. It feels wonderful to walk on them barefoot; they scratch your feet so pleasantly, and there’s a light rustle.” I smiled, my own soles tingling with the memory of the dune grasses on Juist, the North Sea island of my childhood. “In summer, the dunes warm up in the places the wind has swept clear,” Frau Kowalski continued. “I have often sat in the warm sand, letting the fine, white crystals that have been there for millions of years trickle through my fingers. This gave me a feeling 97

PHANTOM BORDER

of infinity and at the same time a sense of the finiteness of our human existence.” I had heard about the Elbe dunes Frau Kowalski described so lovingly, and how, after the massive glacier had retreated, they had formed and shifted with the winds that blew sand across the glacial valley, until trees regained a foothold in this region. And how the dunes had begun to wander again after humans settled here and used the forests for livestock grazing and firewood. Maps from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries show treeless dunes, and this was a problem for agriculture: fields kept getting covered with layers of sand when trees no longer anchored it. Around 1860 a pineplanting program stabilized the dunes. The downside was that very little habitat was left for plants and animals dependent on open sandy soils. But here, too, the Cold War made an inadvertent ecological adjustment. During those four decades, border patrol vehicles kept the dunes from overgrowing. As a result, rare butterflies like Weaver’s fritillary58 have been documented in the sand dunes again. They are among the species that cannot survive in intensively used agricultural landscapes: the heavy use of fertilizer throws the mix of soil nutrients into chaos, making it inhospitable for the flowers these butterflies feed on. They need nutrient-poor, flower-rich meadows through the end of July to drop their eggs. The shift in agriculture to earlier and more frequent mowing of fields disrupts their reproductive cycles, as it does those of many bird species.59 I had noticed a small flock of sheep earlier from the levee, and remembered that sheep herding is mentioned in a Green Belt management manual for nutrient-poor biotopes. Perhaps it was sheep, too, that kept the dunes from overgrowing now. Sheep like to nibble on pine seedlings, and their droppings introduce far fewer nutrients than fertilizer would. I mentioned this to Frau Kowalski. She nodded.

58 59

Clossiana (syn. Boloria) dia (German: Magerrasen-Perlmuttfalter). Köhler and Müller 2021; Andreas Lange, personal communication

HEIMAT

“That’s right. Now the sheep maintain the landscape of my childhood.” She took another sip of coffee. “The thing I liked best was the thought that my forebears once walked the same paths, breathed in the same smells, were surrounded by the same bird life, and saw the ridges of those blue hills. The traces of their existence were all around me. The trees they had planted, the gardens they had brought to life. The handles of rakes, pitchforks, and hoes—they all were worn smooth from their hands’ work over many years. I reverently admired each door, each cupboard, each sewing kit as if I had been told, ‘Your father built this.’ My father, whom I never knew because the war took him away from me. And still I had a feeling that I was close to him. I grew up under the roof of the house that my parents had built together. For all this, I am grateful.” I struggled to imagine what it would be like to have only a few handmade things as a link with my father. “My husband, Wolfgang, was less fortunate,” Frau Kowalski continued. “His father, too, had died in the Second World War. And at the age of four, he had to leave his birthplace in Pomerania,60 together with his mother and grandmother. “As a child, for many years, he felt out of place in the town they settled in. At fifteen he began his vocational training, in yet another town. At nineteen Wolfgang found employment in the area of my Heimat. He felt rootless then. He called himself a heimatloser Geselle, a wanderer without a home or a place of belonging.” I was reminded of the way the philosopher Günther Anders, who had to flee from the Nazis, described the experience of being a refugee in a letter to a friend: Our lives are marked by a splitting process...which means that the second life sticks out at an angle from the first, and the third again from the second, and that each time, there was a turn in the road that makes retrospection impossible.... In other words, our fate was to be ripped out of each world that we had landed in, and to be chased into yet another one, and that we 60

An area in what is now Poland, from which the ethnic German population either fled or was expelled after World War II when the German–Polish border was shifted west.

100 PHANTOM BORDER had to saturate ourselves with new knowledge, knowledge that did not correspond with the prior worlds, so that the times we spent in the various worlds stood at angles. And at each bend, the piece of life that had come before became invisible.61

For Wolfgang Kowalski, the “splitting process” abated when he met his wife Silke. “This only changed gradually over the years, as we built our own little world and saw our children grow up,” Frau Kowalski continued. “My Heimat became his. He planted trees, he built things and worked tirelessly. The traces of his handiwork will still be there for coming generations to see and experience, as long as another senseless war does not destroy everything that is good and beautiful for so many people.” She poured us all some more water. I turned to her daughter. “I always wanted to travel and see the world,” Britta began. “This does not seem an unusual thing to wish for—except for the fact that I was born in 1964 in the GDR, and here was the fence, and the installations on the inner German border.” So Britta was exactly my age. I shared the same desire to travel when I was growing up and my schoolfriends’ families were going on vacations in Spain. The island of Majorca, in the Mediterranean, was the epitome of West German vacation dreams. Guaranteed sun and warm temperatures. My parents were working hard towards their dream of a house, so every extra penny went toward that. I traveled outside of Germany exactly twice before I moved out of my parents’ house. Once, a friend’s parents took me along on a trip to Austria, which in my youthful eyes barely qualified as a foreign country because the people there spoke German; in my last year of high school, our English teacher took us on a bike trip to England. But even these relatively un-exotic destinations were off-limits to Britta then, as they were to almost everyone else in East Germany. Britta’s desire to travel had impelled her to learn languages early. From fifth grade she and her peers learned Russian in school, and from seventh grade on, English. Britta, however, took an extra 61

Anders 1962/2022, p. 14, translation mine.

HEIMAT 101 step: every Saturday morning she installed herself in front of the TV for a Spanish course that a West German station aired. “Studying agricultural sciences in Rostock opened up the minute possibility of research abroad,” she explained. “I graduated early to attend an intensive Spanish-language course at the university. I learned laboratory techniques and prepared plant material in-vitro, hundreds of test tubes with small potato plantlets growing in them. My eyes were fixed only on the distance, as if I were wearing blinders. Sometimes I even held my breath.” I was impressed with her dedication and told her so. She smiled. “Yes, in retrospect I’m impressed too. And finally I was able to get on an Interflug62 plane and plant my feet in the white sand of a Caribbean beach. I still remember the warm air like an embrace, the unlikely blue of the sea in front of me, above me the wild red-orange blossoming of the tulip tree, and the rustling of the palm fronds. And I thought, I’ll just stay. From here, I’ll never go away again.” Britta closed her eyes. A smile moved across her face. “But the moment that thought passed through my mind, I already knew that it was completely wrong. That I would always return to my family, to this house, which was held together with love alone since building materials were so scarce, to my little village, where everyone knew each other, to this lonely landscape in the Elbe’s glacial valley, cut in half by the border fence. That border fence: I never got used to its sight, not a day of the twenty years that the thing stood.” She paused. “And then the border opened, and my little village was no longer at the end of the world, but in the middle of Germany. GDR citizens could finally travel. I worked and researched in Ireland, Chile, Peru, South Africa, Angola, Ethiopia. And I always came back home. The idea of staying somewhere else never crossed my mind again. And at last, finally, I did not want to travel anymore.” I realized I had been holding my breath as I listened to her. To come full circle like that. She has truly returned home. A profound 62

East Germany’s national airline.

102 PHANTOM BORDER Bodenständigkeit spoke from her words, and from her mother’s—a deep sense of connectedness with the land, of belonging to that land. Everything the two women had told me rang profoundly true, and yet their lives had unfolded so differently from mine. I was grateful that they could talk about their Heimat without pointing out that I was a Wessi whose life had been unencumbered by the border or the GDR. Their sense of belonging here was so obviously stronger than any of this. I had intentionally not asked them what role Germany or national identity played in their sense of Heimat. Clearly, it was not the first thing they connected with the word. What did matter was the landscape, the river, the people, the sensations, and the smells of familiar places. Somehow I felt comforted by this, relieved that these meanings of Heimat were still alive and well at a time when Heimatvereine63 railed against foreigners. *** The rain had cleared when I pushed my bike back up the levee to the Elbe bike path. I could viscerally feel the rage Britta had felt all those years ago when, from one day to the next, the ominous fence had blocked her path to the river and her floodplain meadows. Now the view to the Elbe was clear; there was no trace of that ugly barrier. A warm breeze stroked my bare arms. The breeze, the absence of the fence, the visit with the Kowalskis: right this moment, the world was in Ordnung. Riding along the Elbe, my mind went to the writer and journalist Hatice Akyün. Akyün was three years old when, in the early 1970s, her family moved from Turkey to the Ruhr region in far western Germany, where her father had taken a job in the coal mining industry. An interview with Akyün had jumped out at me from the pages of a magazine64 at the enchanted B&B in Boizenburg. Asked by the interviewer what Heimat meant to her, Akyün went 63

Heimatvereine were community clubs of citizens dedicated to preserving local or regional traditions SPIEGEL Wissen 2016.

HEIMAT 103 into loving detail describing the gritty mine workers’ neighborhood in Duisburg where she had spent her childhood and youth. Becoming part of her German surroundings had been easy for her: “I had great neighbors, an outstanding teacher, wonderful German friends.” Her friends’ parents helped her with homework and invited her over at Christmas; nobody thought about who was Turkish or German or what religion anyone followed. All the men in the neighborhood worked in the mines; everything else grew from that common bond. Perhaps because of these early experiences, Akyün was later able to write with a light touch, even humor, about the challenges of living in Germany as a person with Turkish roots. For many others with her ethnic background, or any background that comes with dark eyes and hair and a darker skin tone than that of ethnic Germans, humor was probably not the first approach that came to mind. Even now, almost forty years later, I remember vividly the moment I got my first glimpse into what looking “different” could mean in a largely homogeneous society. I was riding my bicycle home from school with my friend Javad, whose father was Iranian, when some teenagers in the street first yelled Kümmeltürke at him (using “Turk” as a slur and at the same time reducing the people thus labeled to a spice—caraway seed). Their voices were dripping with disdain, their demeanor felt aggressive, and they pretended to come after us. I no longer remember whether we yelled anything back at them. Stopping did not seem like a good idea. What I did remember all these years later was the feeling of my stomach dropping down to my knees. These scraggly-faced teens had formed a split-second opinion about someone they did not know and had never spoken to. To them, Javad was merely an Other, not an individual person, and that was enough to bring out open hostility. Javad and I lost touch after graduation. Though I never encountered the kind of aggression Javad had experienced, I thought of him sometimes when I was reminded of my own Otherness after I had moved to the United States. In terms of appearance, I could easily blend in with the white Anglo-Saxon majority, but as soon as

104 PHANTOM BORDER I opened my mouth around people I hadn’t met before, it was apparent I was not a native English speaker. The reactions were generally benign; often people would ask, “Where’s your accent from?” or “What brings you here?” Had I asked the questioners why they were asking, I have no doubt they would have said it was out of interest, certainly not out of any unkind intent. That if I felt offended, I was simply being too sensitive. Maybe I was, but then everyone else I know who sounds or looks “different” was being too sensitive, too. What these questions conveyed to us, ever so subtly, was that our otherness was the most important thing about us to that person. That before the questioner could have a conversation with us, even about the weather, this interesting thing about us had to be cleared up. Sometimes it felt as if the stranger had yanked away the fabric of our everyday lives and expected a neat explanation for the kaleidoscope of experiences that had led us to our second Heimat. Most days, I could gloss over the moment of disruption with a congenial “Oh, that’s a long story,” or briefly state that the company I had worked for in Germany went bankrupt, or that there was a man involved. On other days, the question would trigger a full-blown case of the between-the-worlds feeling, a reminder that maybe my otherness meant that I really did not belong. Maybe this life I was living was not my real life. Had I stepped into the wrong life, like one might walk into the wrong movie theater? All these years later, on this bike path next to the River Elbe, it occurred to me that I had never asked Javad about these things, whether he felt between-the-worlds or what it was like to leave his first Heimat. All I knew was that his family had to leave Iran after the Islamic Revolution of 1979 or risk persecution for their Baha’i faith. He spoke fluent German and seemed well adjusted in school; we had similar tastes in music and enjoyed riding our bikes together. It simply did not occur to me to ask about the life he had left behind. Nor did I think much about the Turks with whom those rowdies had mixed him up. By the late 1970s, 1.5 million Turks lived in West Germany, out of a total of some 2 million so-called guest workers. Beginning in 1955, the West German government had invited these Gastarbeiter

HEIMAT 105 to help keep the burgeoning economy running.65 For the first few years, the supposed guests were hardly visible in public life; they were mostly working in industrial centers or in construction, and many were living in group accommodations. East Germany, too, had a program to hire foreign workers, whom it needed due in part to the vast numbers of people escaping to West Germany until the construction of the Berlin Wall. Called Vertragsarbeiter—contract workers—their total number was close to one hundred thousand. In contrast to the West German Gastarbeiter, they were housed in separate apartment complexes and had little interaction with the general population, even after years of living and working in the GDR.66 West Germany’s guest worker program officially ended in 1973. By then, unemployment was rising and the “guests” were expected to return to their countries of origin. But by then, some of the guest workers had brought their families to West Germany as well. Others were starting families there. For many, Germany was becoming a second Heimat; for their children, it often was their first. People who did not “look German” were becoming more visible in society. For Hatice Akyün, the Gastarbeiter child-turned-journalist, there was no question that her Heimat was Germany. In the magazine interview, she reflected on the summer of 2006, when enthusiastic support for the German national soccer team during the World Cup turned the whole country into a Sommermärchen,67 a summer fairy tale: “I loved this World Cup. The atmosphere was amazing. I walked along the fan miles and thought: What a great country. This is my country.” I knew exactly what she meant. Coincidentally, I had been in Germany during that World Cup and remembered feeling the

Guest worker treaties were also signed with the governments of Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Tunisia, and the former Yugoslavia. With Reunification, their residency permits became invalid and their residential accommodations were cancelled. They were often seen as competitors in a tight job market and subject to racist attacks. See, for example, Angelika Nguyen’s 1991 documentary “Bruderland ist abgebrannt.” The name of a documentary about the 2006 Soccer World Cup.

106 PHANTOM BORDER exhilaration in the air. For the first time in my conscious memory, I had watched fellow Germans wave flags without my insides recoiling from the specter of the Nazi past. Even though my own excitement about soccer is limited and I felt no need to wave a flag of my own, what I sensed in public spaces was a new feeling of life that went beyond soccer. Sixteen years after Reunification, here was something that all Germans could be happy about, no matter which side of the Iron Curtain had shaped their lives. Something that allowed them—us?—to have a shared experience almost like the euphoria at the fall of the Berlin Wall. German media portrayed the World Cup as the summer we became a nation. *** Now, ten years later, with the exhilarating Elbe breeze roughing up my hair, that carefree, new Germanness still struck me as a fairy tale. Only now I was coming to view the feeling of that summer as an illusion. The cheerful flag waving had glossed over something that mainstream German society seemed not to have fully noticed: the experiences of people who found their sense of belonging in Germany called into question. The Ausgrenzung—literally “outbordering”—of those who did not fit traditional conceptions of Germanness. The difficulty of finding an apartment when your name was Özturk or Al-Hassan rather than Müller or Schmidt, no matter how many generations of your family had lived in Germany. The teachers who shunted children with such names onto lower-status and non-academic vocational paths. Sometime in the years that followed the 2006 Sommermärchen, while I was trying to keep up with the new Germany from afar, Hatice Akyün had lost faith in the fairy tale, too. When a wellknown politician and author claimed, in 2010, that Duisburg’s Turkish migrant population was to blame for the city’s dire financial situation, the local audience responded enthusiastically. In Duisburg, where Akyün’s father lost an arm in a mine accident and where so many coal and steel workers she knew—the Gastarbeiter—sacrificed their health and sometimes their lives in the industries that formed the city’s economic backbone. In Duisburg,

HEIMAT 107 the city Akyün considered her hometown, where she herself had held readings in front of packed houses and made people relax and laugh with her about cultural differences. Life for immigrants had changed, and not only in Duisburg. After TV or radio appearances, Akyün began to receive emails unlike any she had gotten before: chastising her if she dared to say anything critical about Germany, comments suggesting she did not belong in this country. One man wrote that had it not been for Germany, Akyün would be stuck in Anatolia, herding sheep. These emails were not from extremists, she noted, but from regular Germans. The man who made the sheepherding comment had signed with his full name and contact information. Increasingly, Akyün found herself referred to as an Ausländerin—a foreigner, or in the literal meaning of the word, an outlander. She lost her sense of humor, Akyün said, and that made it hard for her to live in her beloved Germany, the place that meant Heimat for her. By the 2011 interview, she seriously considered moving to Turkey, even though she had not lived there since she was three years old. Would she have felt at home there? Can those who have left ever fit in again? So far, Akyün has stayed in Germany. For several years, she wrote a weekly column called “Meine Heimat” for the Berlin-based newspaper Der Tagesspiegel. These days, she facilitates panel discussions and gives presentations on migration and integration, and still writes occasional columns. I thought of the dark side of Heimat again, of what was glossed over in the fairy-tale summer of 2006: that below the straightforward meanings of Heimat, there are feelings about national identity and patriotism that all too easily spill over into exclusion, disdain for anyone “other,” or violence. If the summer fairy tale of 2006 provided an infusion of Zuversicht, the dark side burst out into the open again in late 2011. As the public learned in November of that year, a trio of neo-Nazis had brutally killed nine people of Turkish and Greek descent between 2000 and 2006. The three (Uwe Mundlos, Uwe Böhnhardt, and Beate Zschäpe) were aided in their murderous pursuits by an

108 PHANTOM BORDER estimated 100–150 members of a neo-Nazi organization that called itself the NSU, for National Socialist Underground. And that was not the end. Earlier in 2016, not long before I began my expedition, there was an arson attack on an about-to-beopened refugee shelter in the eastern city of Bautzen. Similar scenes took place in 2015 in Freital and Heidenau. In nearby Clausnitz in early 2016, a group of about a hundred people shouting anti-foreigner insults besieged a bus bringing refugees to a different shelter. Was right-wing extremism worse in eastern Germany? If so, why? All three NSU perpetrators were from the eastern state of Thuringia. PEGIDA was founded (in 2014) in Dresden. The AfD has consistently polled higher in eastern federal states compared to western ones. The dark side of Heimat would not be so easy to untangle. An amorphous sense of gloom and resistance tightened in my stomach. I had known about all this before I returned to Germany. Was it only my “looking German” that had granted me a reprieve from this reality? Ahead of me, the Elbe made a wide turn to the right, the southwest. In the distance some red-tiled roofs appeared between the levee and the edge of a wooded area. That must be Rüterberg, the little village that declared itself an independent republic the day before the Berlin Wall fell, which surprised them as much as it did the rest of the world.

Chapter 7: The Village Republic People say, what is the sense of our small effort? They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time. A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. Each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that. No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There is too much work to do. —Dorothy Day

The levee, and with it the bike path, curved away from the Elbe. Between the river and the levee, the surfaces of two smaller, crescent-shaped bodies of water sparkled in the afternoon sun. Their shape told their story: these were oxbows—older riverbeds no longer connected to the main river. Five or six storks trudged around the watery meadow on their long, bright-red legs, occasionally driving their long bills, dagger-like, down to nab an unsuspecting smaller creature. Their white and black bodies, their red bills and legs, the shimmering green marshy vegetation, the warm breeze: the scene felt profoundly still and vibrantly alive at the same time. A memory rose from long-ago bicycle excursions in the rural area near the apartment building where my father’s mother lived. One of my favorite things on these outings was to scan the ridgelines of the thatched farmhouse roofs until my gaze landed on a mass of twigs and branches piled high over the rim of a carriage wheel that had been placed there horizontally by the farm family for that very purpose. If we were really lucky, we might see a stork flying in, its bill full of nest construction material, or, even better, a pair of storks standing in their nest, throwing their heads back and breaking into a loud, unmelodic bill-clacking duet. My Oma seemed to have a mental map of all the farmhouses with stork nests within a few kilometers of her apartment. From her I knew that storks return to the same nest over decades from their wintering grounds in Africa, fixing them up and adding material year after year. The immense distance of their annual journey filled me with awe. They had come here to the Elbe River every spring for at least the last ten thousand years—sometime after the last continental glacier cleared

109

110 PHANTOM BORDER northern Europe some twelve thousand years ago. There was something wild and unfathomable about the storks. And still, they seek out human habitations for their nesting sites. Over the last few centuries they have adapted their nesting behavior around barns and farmhouses. “Culture followers,” ornithologists call them. From the storks’ perspective, it makes sense: living near humans affords them easy access to freshly mowed hayfields, where they have to expend less effort to find worms and insects than in wild landscapes or forests. Here, the Elbe floodplain in close proximity to farmland gives them an even richer buffet. A glance at my handlebar map showed that I was about to cross back into the federal state of Mecklenburg–Western Pomerania. Cross from where? Hadn’t I been in Meck-Pomm—as its residents call it—all day already? I squinted at the map. Apparently I had spent the last 24 hours in Lower Saxony without knowing it. I was confused. Lower Saxony was the large federal state that surrounded my city-state hometown of Bremen and whose eastern edge, I had always assumed, was the river Elbe. What was the western state of Lower Saxony doing over here on the eastern side of the Elbe, in what used to be the GDR? Didn’t the entire eastern shore around here belong to Mecklenburg–Western Pomerania? I pulled out my phone in search of a quick geography lesson. On one level, the answer was straightforward: a stretch of land east of the Elbe belonged to the District of Lüneburg. The seat of the district—the city of Lüneburg—was, and had been for centuries, on the western side of the river. When the Allied Powers drew up their post-World War II occupation zones, they based the demarcation line on the historical border of the District of Lüneburg. But this left the British with ninety-two square miles of their occupation zone on the eastern side of the Elbe, in an area without a bridge. After a brief period of negotiation, the British ceded the area, called Amt Neuhaus, to the Soviets, which meant that, when the two German states were founded in 1949, its inhabitants—like Silke Kowalski and her family and neighbors in Strachau—became GDR citizens. After Reunification, the residents of Amt Neuhaus declared their wish to be part of the District of Lüneburg again, and in June 1993 “left” (formerly East German) Mecklenburg–Western

THE VILLAGE REPUBLIC 111 Pomerania and joined (formerly West German) Lower Saxony. That, too, was not too hard to follow. What I was beginning to realize, though, was that the story of Amt Neuhaus provided just one small glimpse into one of the more bizarre aspects of German history: the constantly moving jigsaw puzzle of duchies, kingdoms, and principalities—pieces of land that only came to form a country called Germany in 1871. Until then, every time a member of a ruling family married, land changed hands and boundaries were redrawn. As for Amt Neuhaus, it had belonged to the Duchy of SaxeLauenburg since at least the early seventeenth century. The Duchy ceased to exist in 1689; Amt Neuhaus then successively became part of the Electorate of Brunswick-Lüneburg, the Kingdom of Hanover, and finally the Prussian Province of Hanover, which then became part of Lower Saxony. And this was only one small puzzle piece in northern Germany. My head began to hurt, as it had in school when there was talk of dukes, electors, the Wittelsbachers, the Hohenzollerns, and various other long, important-sounding names. I mused about what this meant for people who lived during those times. For one, it affected the practicalities of travel: every time you crossed from one territory to another, you had to pay customs, use different coins, and get used to different ways of measuring distance and weight. At least the language was, roughly, the same. Did people then even think of themselves as Germans? When Johann Sebastian Bach was born in Eisenach in 1685, the small city belonged to the duchy of Saxe-Eisenach, but by the time he died in 1750, it had passed to the duchy of Saxe-Weimar. The poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, revered like no other as “the” German poet, was born in the Free City of Frankfurt. He had to cross multiple territorial borders to go almost anywhere, including Weimar, where he spent much of his adult life.68 68

The Goethe biographer Nicholas Boyle uses quotation marks around “Germany” in describing the bewildering conglomeration of entities that made up the political picture during the poet’s life: ‘Germany’ in the eighteenth century was not even a geographical, at most it was a linguistic expression. No natural boundaries, and certainly no single

112 PHANTOM BORDER It was only with the first German Unification—the founding of the German Empire in 1871—that the jigsaw puzzle settled into a somewhat stable arrangement. More than once on my journey I would happen upon weathered border markers of kingdoms and principalities that had joined together to form a country called Germany. And had then been torn apart again only seventy-four years later, in 1945. And then put back together in 1990, minus several pieces in the east.69 Glancing back and forth between the map of today’s Amt Neuhaus in the guidebook and the historical maps on the screen of my phone, it finally dawned on me that history and geography are like the two lenses on a pair of binoculars. If history is the attempt to comprehend human affairs over time, it would hardly be comprehensible without the dimension of space. I glanced back at the storks down by the oxbow. Their lives, too, were governed by space and time. Just then, a few red brick houses came into view in the distance as the bike path and the river curved to the right. These must belong to Rüterberg, my next stop, and a likely home to some stork pairs, as well. Around the bend, next to the bike path, a tall rectangle of expanded metal appeared, clearly a remnant of the old border fence. A smaller rectangle with hinges connected to the surrounding section of fence tipped me off that this was a gate. In front of it was a red-and-white barrier, on one side of it a boulder with an inscription, and above it, a small round sign with an icon-like image of a kneeling soldier aiming his gun. I pushed my bike closer to read the inscription:

political structure, enclosed all the speakers of the various dialects of the German tongue, scattered in every degree of concentration from Alsace to the Volga and what is now Romania […] and from the Gulf of Finland to the Swiss Alps and the Adriatic. (Boyle 1991, p. 8) The formerly German regions east of the Oder-Neisse line that today are part of Poland and Russia, respectively.

THE VILLAGE REPUBLIC 113 Für die Opfer der Unmenschlichkeit— For the victims of inhumanity This had to be Rüterberg’s memorial to its unique status during the time of the border: in contrast to other villages in the “protective zone,” Rüterberg not only had a fence to the West and checkpoints to the east, but was isolated from the rest of East Germany by an additional fence. The Rüterbergers had thus been doubly fenced in, held prisoner not only in their own country, but also in their tiny village. In the first few years after the Wende, Rüterberg became something of a tourist attraction because, the day before the Berlin Wall fell, its residents had rebelled against their isolation and declared their village a republic. Intrigued by the villagers’ act of rebellion in 1989, I tracked down the phone number of the man who had been Rüterberg’s mayor at the time. He sounded friendly and agreed to a meeting. Twenty-six years later, the stream of tourists had slowed, and Rüterberg’s few streets were quiet. Several of the houses looked fairly new; they had to have been built since Reunification. New or old, they all had red brick siding and roofs of red clay tile. The street I was looking for was called Klinkerstrasse—Brick Street, a clear tipoff to little Rüterberg’s decades-long economic foundation: two clay pits that had supplied big cities like Berlin and Hamburg with highquality red bricks. Meinhard Schmechel looked to be around seventy, stout, in a checkered shirt and jeans. Even while we were shaking hands, something about him made me think Gemütsmensch—a low-drama person, someone who does not lose his calm easily. Probably a good disposition for putting up with a fence around one’s village, and, on top of that, being mayor of that village and having to deal with border and Stasi officials. He led me to the living room of his red-brick house and introduced me to his wife, who was just shaking off a bad cold and resting on the sofa. Coffee cups and a bowl of cookies were already on the table.

114 PHANTOM BORDER Where there is Kaffeetrinken, I thought, the world is still in Ordnung. Drinking coffee is, of course, not limited to Germans, but I still think of the afternoon ritual of taking time to sit together and have a conversation over coffee and pastry, at a table set with “real” cups and plates, as a little German secret. “So that gate I just rode by, the one by the levee—is that the original gate where you had to have your IDs checked to enter the rest of the GDR? Was that the main access to Rüterberg?” I asked. “No, the main gate was on the other side of Rüterberg, next to what is now Federal Route B 195,” he said. “That was the only place we residents could leave or enter the village during GDR times. Over by the levee, there was just a small gate, only for border guards.” “Why was only Rüterberg fenced in like that,” I asked, “when there were so many other villages in the Grenzstreifen?” “Take a look at a map,” he said. “Rüterberg sits in a special location: The Elbe makes this big bend here; we basically had ‘the West’ surrounding us on three sides.” I thought of Strachau, the Kowalskis’ village, which also sat on the edge of a riverbend. But Rüterberg’s riverbend was more pronounced, producing almost a peninsula. And I was beginning to learn that the border regime had not been consistent along the entire 1,400 kilometers. Still, it seemed that the Rüterbergers had suffered disproportionately because of their village’s location. “What was that like in everyday life, being fenced in?” “It was bad,” Herr Schmechel said, in his matter-of-fact way. “The gate was locked from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. If someone from the village forgot their ID, that was a catastrophe. If you left home without money, that was no big deal—at the gas station and at the Konsum they would just write down what you owed. But if you didn’t have your ID, you couldn’t get in or out of the village. You couldn’t get to work that day, because the bus couldn’t wait for you to go back and get your ID.” “What if someone needed a doctor during the night?” I asked. “Nothing you could do. The doctor could not get in and we could not get out. When my daughter’s birth came close, I kept a

THE VILLAGE REPUBLIC 115 pair of wire cutters in my car just in case. I would have cut the fence open if it had come to that.” Being unable to leave my village to get to the rest of the country was not a situation I had ever had to face. All I could think was that being locked in like that would have made me want to leave that country even if I otherwise had no desire to leave. “Did anyone ever escape from here?” I asked Mr. Schmechel. “Oh yes, there was a young man who wanted to be a sailor. As a schoolboy, he had gotten a poor grade in civics class, so the Party decided he was not trustworthy and they put an end to that dream. So he went rüber [“across,” to the West]. That was in 1972. His father had been a commander with the border troops;70 he was fired immediately even though he did not know of his son’s plan to escape. Shortly after that, the whole family was expelled from the border area.” He paused, then grinned. “Oh, and a cow swam rüber once. That made a big splash in the media.” I smiled, glad about the moment of levity. Then I asked, “How did the young man get across?” “He waited until the border guards had gone past, and then he got down to the river and waited for a West German customs boat to come back from its daily patrol. If you lived here, you knew the rhythm of when the border guards made their rounds and when the boats on the Elbe passed by. He got their attention and they picked him up.” “And nobody saw it?” After a pause, he said, “Some people did, but they closed their doors quickly. Of course, we were supposed to report anything like that, but it was better not to know anything. The Stasi made a huge fuss about it of course.” “Did he ever find out what happened to his family?” I asked.

From 1946 to 1961 the German Border Police (Deutsche Grenzpolizei, DGP) was the organization responsible for patrolling the Soviet occupation zone’s demarcation line and then the GDR’s borders. The DGP was transformed into the Border Troops of the GDR (Grenztruppen der DDR) and reorganized as part of the National People’s Army (NVA) in 1961.

116 PHANTOM BORDER “He did. It was very difficult for him, and of course for them. I don’t think they ever spoke to each other again. He also found out that the Stasi had spied on him for four years in the West after his escape.” I felt the heaviness descend on me again. The constant risk that a careless word or someone else’s escape could put your life into a tailspin. Could those who did escape ever feel as though they were truly starting a new life in the West? Herr Schmechel glanced over to his wife. “Should I tell her about the time we committed a border violation?” “You did what?!” I asked, disbelieving. “We didn’t actually violate the border itself, only the fence.” Herr Schmechel said. From all I had learned about the GDR’s border regime so far, I didn’t think its enforcers cared about such finer points. “We were walking home together with our ABV—the village policeman—from a dinner in the village. The cop lived near the fence, and when we got near there, all at once we heard screams. You know, when somebody screams for their life, it makes your hair stand on end. It was coming from the other side of the fence, right near the small gate. We could hear water sloshing. It was dark and we couldn’t see anything, but we knew there was a small water hole on the other side. Just then the border guards came by on their patrol walk, so we said ‘Open the gate so we can get this guy out!’ And the border guards said ‘No, we’re not opening the gate,’ and they left. So the police officer ran to his house to get a crowbar, and we broke the lock on the gate open with that. “We got him out, and he could barely walk. We took his clothes off—” “It was January! He was almost frozen in his wet clothes,” Frau Schmechel called from the sofa. Herr Schmechel took over the story again. “We brought him to the ABV’s house and put some warm blankets on him,” When he finally could talk, it turned out he was Czech. We had to communicate using hands and feet and finally figured out that he had fallen off a river barge. They had been drinking, and he went overboard.

THE VILLAGE REPUBLIC 117 He drifted ashore here and stumbled into the water hole in the dark.” He sighed. When he continued, his voice took on a tone of frustration. “And then the border guards came and formed a ring around the house. There must have been thirty of them. The guards who had seen us at the gate had reported it up the chain right away. And they tried to take the guy, but my wife said ‘He’s not going anywhere until a doctor has looked at him.’” I looked over at Frau Schmechel, impressed. That must have taken some guts, to talk back to a border guard like that. But the guards did call a doctor. “A few days later they—the Party—wanted to fire the ABV because he had violated the border. No word about him, or us, saving a life,” Herr Schmechel said. Or about the border guards showing complete disregard for the drowning man’s life. “So I told them it had been only us—my wife and me—who went through the gate to get him. And they told us we were Grenzverletzer—border violators. They knew as well as we did that that was still GDR soil on the other side of the fence—” “The outside sovereign territory,” I said. “Exactly,” he continued. “But they weren’t interested in that. In the end, though, they didn’t do anything to us.” I had noticed the broad North German accent when Herr Schmechel spoke, like the way people spoke along the coast. And indeed, he told me that he had grown up on an island in the Baltic Sea. He had come to Rüterberg as a young border guard for his mandatory army training in 1966. Not long after that, he had fallen in love with a local woman—Gisela, his wife of close to fifty years now. “Becoming a Rüterberger was not easy, even after we were married and had kids,” he said. “The ties among the people here are very strong. But once you’re accepted, you’re in for the rest of your life.” “What about the Stasi? Didn’t that ruin any trust, knowing anyone could be an informant?” I asked.

118 PHANTOM BORDER “They pretty much knew everything about us, but the good thing in retrospect is, we found nothing in the Stasi files about spying among us villagers. We had an amazing Zusammenhalt (sense of community). We didn’t really talk about the GDR and all that nonsense, maybe with very close friends, but you never knew…” His voice trailed off. “Half the village was either volunteer police or border assistants. Many were forced into that. Ja, things weren’t always easy.” What an understatement, I thought. Even for a Gemütsmensch, the stress must have been a constant undercurrent. “We were basically this little pile of people, doing everything together, and we felt like we were trying to create something together, too. Yes, that kind of sticking together is rare. I don’t think we’ll have that again.” I had heard this from other people who had grown up in the GDR, too, that they missed the sense of community they had experienced. For West Germans, this may be one of the hardest things to comprehend about their fellow citizens from the former GDR: that there could have been anything to appreciate in a life lived under the shadow of constant surveillance. Ever so slowly, I was beginning to get glimpses of that possibility. Perhaps it required a special frame of mind. “The test of a firstrate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in 1936. The GDR did not yet exist then, but the more stories of oppression and creativity, of surveillance and Zusammenhalt I heard along my expedition, the more I thought about Fitzgerald’s words. Rüterberg had three hundred residents when the GDR drew up the legislation governing the border in 1952. By 1989 only 140 were left. Some had died, but twenty-two families had been forcibly evicted. “My in-laws were on the list, too, but they got wind of the plans and went to the party chair,” Herr Schmechel said. “For some reason, they were then allowed to stay—maybe because they didn’t try to escape.”

THE VILLAGE REPUBLIC 119 Like the Kowalskis. They had suffered from the repression, too, but they were too rooted to their home place to leave. I winced at the thought of how close they had come to being evicted. Despite their isolation from the rest of East Germany, the Rüterbergers were well aware of the rising discontent that was spreading across the country in 1989: “We had Western TV, after all,” Mr. Schmechel commented. Resentment ratcheted up, too, when a construction crew came to fortify the fences around Rüterberg in 1988. “You’ve heard the name Hans Rasenberger, right?” Herr Schmechel asked. “The one who called the community meeting?” “That’s right,” Herr Schmechel said, “That was highly emotional. You have to imagine that all the higher-ups were there, the district supervisor for the Department of the Interior, the border patrol supervisor, the district police commander…We Rüterberg residents asked them to get rid of the gate. And they said no, we are not doing that. And some people were getting really upset. When I saw the police commander later, he said to me that he had been afraid things would spin out of control.” It dawned on me only now that the Rüterbergers’ demand that evening had not even been directed at the border between East and West Germany. All they had asked for was permission to access the rest of East Germany freely, without border controls. Still, for the “higher-ups” that was asking too much. “And that’s when Hans stood up and said, ‘Let’s declare Rüterberg a village republic. That way we can make our own laws. Everyone in agreement, raise your hand.’ Everyone from the village raised their hand, including our village policeman. Hans was retired, and because of that, he had been allowed to travel abroad. He had been to Switzerland and was impressed with local governance there. That’s where he got the idea that we could make our own laws here in Rüterberg, since we were already cut off from the rest of the GDR. “We really didn’t know what would happen to us after that. The next day we were waiting to see whether they would come and pick us up. Someone did call from Berlin— the whole thing had

120 PHANTOM BORDER gone up to the highest levels right away, and they asked if we were standing by our village republic. I said yes, we are.” Again, that matter-of-fact tone of voice, full of determination and resigned to the consequences. I didn’t know whether I was more impressed by Herr Schmechel’s steadfastness or surprised that anyone in the East German government had even had time to think about Rüterberg on November 9, 1989. “Didn’t they have their hands full in Berlin?” I exclaimed. At that time, the whole GDR was in turmoil. On November 8, the entire Politburo had stepped down. Four days before that, a million people had gathered on Berlin’s Alexanderplatz and voiced their protest against the government. “You would think so,” Herr Schmechel replied. “Of course, they couldn’t do anything in the end. Later that evening, the Berlin Wall fell, as you know. Not that we knew it then. Nobody did. And you know what was crazy? “The guards at the village gate continued to check papers for several more days. Even though the border between East and West Germany had become meaningless, GDR citizens from outside the border zone still could not come to Rüterberg, and we still could not step into the remainder of East Germany.” “That was crazy,” I agreed. Was it a work ethic gone haywire, tethered by years of indoctrination? A mental habit on autopilot? Herr Schmechel continued to serve as mayor of Rüterberg until 2004, when the village was incorporated into the next larger town, Dömitz. The stamina he had developed during GDR times seemed to serve him well in the new Germany. “Some things have not changed at all in terms of trying to get things done for the village. Often you’re dealing with the same people. If I file for a permit for something, they first try to tell me what I want to do can’t be done.” Hardly a special feature of the GDR, I thought to myself. I had encountered the same bureaucratic attitude many times in West Germany. “But like in the GDR,” Herr Schmechel continued, “if you get kicked out the front door, you go back in through the back door to get done what you want to do. Like when we needed to build some houses. Twenty-two houses were razed in the name of border

THE VILLAGE REPUBLIC 121 security, but the regional development authority in Schwerin only gave us permits to build three. I said, ‘You need to look at the big picture here,’ and they said, ‘No, we’re not interested in that.’” Mayor Schmechel had then quietly drafted a development plan to allow the village to grow back to its previous number of houses. The three houses had been permitted for the street on which the Schmechels’ house stood. “So we built those three permitted houses, but we started from the far end of the street. Then they had to issue permits to build the rest, or there would have been a big gap.” I laughed, and thought back of the Schmechels’ supposed border infraction. There was that refreshing mix of obstinacy, community spirit, and creative thinking again. Rüterberg’s population had climbed to two hundred since Reunification, including some old Rüterbergers who had moved back, as well as several transplants from western Germany. Had it not been for Mayor Schmechel’s stoic efforts, they would not have been able to find housing. No doubt he had many more stories to tell, but it was time to move on. I thanked him and his wife for their hospitality and stories. *** Twenty minutes later, about a half mile before Dömitz, the bike path crossed Federal Road B-195, which had once paralleled the fence that cut Rüterberg off from the rest of the GDR. Here, closer to Dömitz, it turned west across the Elbe. The old bridge had been destroyed in World War II; the new one that now supported the Bundesstrasse had been completed two years after Reunification— incredibly fast for such a major work of infrastructure. For the fortyseven years before that, there had been no need for a bridge between the two Germanys. Moments after I crossed the Bundesstrasse, a sweeping view into the Elbe valley opened up. What lay before me had something of a surrealist painting about it. Against the glimmering blue band of the Elbe and the lush green of the broad floodplain, the dark steel

122 PHANTOM BORDER arches of a railroad bridge seemed to float above the landscape like a filigree paper ornament. Or rather, like an ornament torn in half, for the arches stopped mid-way across the valley, before they reached the river’s shore. Like the road bridge I had just crossed, the Dömitz railroad bridge had been bombed by the Allies only three weeks before the end of World War II. The scattered debris in the river had been cleared to free passage for the merchant boats, and GDR border guards had used the bridgehead on the eastern shore for a few years before it was taken down. Several kilometers of railway embankment on the eastern side had been removed, as if to make a statement that this route would never be needed again. But even the remains of the Dömitz railroad bridge were impressive. Extending more than a kilometer, it had been Germany’s longest bridge when it was built in 1873. The destroyed bridge sits almost exactly midway between Hamburg and Berlin, two cities connected in the reunited Germany by constant streams of people and goods. Today, Intercity Express trains connecting the two cities whiz by fifteen kilometers north of the old bridge. The train shaves off more than an hour of the three hours it takes a car to travel the same distance. From the times I’d taken that train, I remembered fellow travelers for whom it seemed to be a weekly commute. Comfortably relaxed in their train seats, they would leaf through manila folders or type on a laptop, a cup of coffee or a glass of beer in front of them, occasionally taking in the landscape through the panorama windows. The quiet, congenial atmosphere, the even sound of the train: this, too, was Heimat, something I missed about Germany when I was away. And yet, here I stood gazing at the ruins of the old railroad bridge, which had become part of the landscape of remembrance. How starkly this spot illustrated the cause-and-effect workings of human action: the Nazi crimes, the bombing of the bridge, the border that had cut across this landscape for forty years. The unintended refuge for wild creatures. And so on, tragedy and, very occasionally, silver linings, across all the lives that had been tossed around wherever the dominoes fell.

THE VILLAGE REPUBLIC 123 Was it normal to feel this swirl of love and grief for one’s Heimat? Would I rather have a different Heimat? At times I must have wished for that, for I remember wanting to blend in when I first came to the U.S., hoping that my Germanness would be erased in this ostensible melting pot. Years later I came to conclude that not only was that unlikely to happen, but that I no longer wanted to be relieved of being German. Being German, it seemed, made it harder to avoid looking at the dark chapters of history, the abysses of the human mind. Hannah Arendt, in covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust, found him a rather bland bureaucrat, someone who, although he clearly subscribed to Nazi ideology, struck her as “terrifyingly normal”—not the clear personification of evil she had expected. Arendt’s description of Eichmann was interpreted by some as trivializing the horrors of the Holocaust, but what she was pointing to was the human capacity to disconnect from one’s own ability to think and from the effects of one’s own acts. In Arendt’s view, this makes it possible to do evil without understanding it as evil, and without seeing the humanness of whomever one has designated as “other.” As she described Eichmann: What he said was always the same, expressed in the same words. The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else.71

Among the long, depressing list of human atrocities, the Nazi crimes stand out for their scale and industrial nature. As historian James Waller notes, the first step towards genocide is to designate the Other as not human.72 Wherever this kind of thinking, or “not thinking,” becomes widespread, society risks losing its humanity. Maybe it is not surprising that we humans, who are capable of causing destruction on such a massive scale, also destroy the very life systems on which we depend? And maybe that is why we need landscapes of

71 72

Arendt 1994 Waller 2007.

124 PHANTOM BORDER remembrance, places where we can remember and contemplate the richness of life. Landscapes of refuge, too, where we can imagine, for brief moments, flying across boundaries like the storks. All of this from looking at a ruined bridge, I thought when I realized that I was still standing on the new Elbe bridge, leaning on my bike and gazing over the floodplain. I took in the view of the tornin-half ornament for a moment longer and mounted my bike again.

Chapter 8: Between the Worlds Help us to be the always hopeful gardeners of the spirit who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth as without light nothing flowers. —May Sarton

I woke up at the first morning light, my body filled with the kind of contentment that comes only from deep rest. I had not had much of that on this expedition, sleeping in a different bed almost every night. Where was I, to have gotten this kind of sleep? I looked around and recognized my pleasingly sparse room at the Fahrrad hostel in Dömitz, equipped with a table and chair by the window and—the luxury—a private bathroom with a tub. Clearly, the hostel owners knew what their bicycling guests needed. After relaxing my tired muscles in luxuriously foamy hot water last night, I had spread out the map on the extra bed to review today’s route. This last day along the Elbe would take me to the easternmost point of the old West Germany, a tiny town called Schnackenburg. There I would cross the Elbe one last time and then follow the old border where it departed from the river and formed a triangle around a pocket of Lower Saxony. Within that triangle lay a region known as the Wendland—a remote outpost in West Germany’s zonal borderland73 during the Cold War. After breakfast at the hostel I retraced my path to the Dömitz road bridge, whose graceful frame gleamed bright red and slate blue in the morning sun. As much as I liked the ferries, there was something uplifting about crossing by bike high up in the air. For a moment I assumed my eagle persona again and took in the grand vista of the Elbe valley and the woods and fields beyond. The river looked much smaller from up here; the border fence would have 73

The Zonenrandgebiet, a 40-km-wide area along the West German side of the border. See Eckert 2019, for an in-depth treatment of the economic challenges faced by the zonal borderland as well as its significance to West German state formation and environmental policy.

125

126 PHANTOM BORDER been all but invisible except to an eagle’s eye. Not that the fences were ever an obstacle to the eagles. The bridge’s arc continued over several oxbows, then rejoined firm ground on the western shore. I turned onto the bike path on the levee and took in the view back east across the Elbe. Only a few of Dömitz’s red roofs and a spire were visible between the dense foliage of trees, along with glimpses of the massive fortress I had circled last night on my way to the hostel. The “Pentagon on the Elbe,” I’d heard it called—a bit of a stretch in terms of the complex’s size, though accurate with regard to the shape. What sets it apart from its famous sibling on the Potomac, besides its age, was its building material: red brick. I was still clearly in the North German Plain. “Is that fortress from the time of the Slavic-Saxon clashes, too?” I had asked the innkeeper when he showed me my room last night. No, he told me, though there had actually been an older and smaller Slavic castle nearby. “The one you saw dates only from the sixteenth century and was built by the Duke of Mecklenburg. And there was yet another version in between those times, rooted in disputes between the counts of Dannenberg and troops from Lübeck.” Yet more layers to this borderland. I asked the innkeeper whether he had lived in Dömitz during the Cold War. “No, I grew up across the river, in the West” he replied, “but my family is from here. My father fled across the frozen Elbe one winter as a young man; my brother and I were born drüben. But my father always missed his Heimat. So when it was finally possible for him to come back after the Wende, we all moved back.” “Your father was lucky to make it across that winter,” I told him. “For sure,” the innkeeper agreed. ”If he had broken through the ice, or if the border guards had caught him, my brother and I wouldn’t be here either.” ***

BETWEEN THE WORLDS 127 I was still contemplating the centuries of phantom borders this river had seen when ahead of me on the bike path, a tunnel came into view. A tunnel, on top of the levee? Then I noticed the structure around it: a squat base of fieldstone, an equally squat but taller upper story of red brick. The whole thing looked like a small fortress, complete with a row of brick battlements. It extended out toward the Elbe, and I realized that this was the bridgehead of the destroyed railroad bridge. Its arches reached toward the other side but ended abruptly before the river. From up close, the massive girders no longer looked like a filigree paper ornament but like a stranded colossus of stone and steel. *** Several kilometers on, a thatched roof peeked over the crown of the levee. As I rode closer, the house’s timber frame came into view, its squares filled with neatly laid red bricks. A tall yellow X formed by two wooden boards leaned against a tall window: a visual clue that I was in the Wendland now, and that the house must be part of Gorleben. Like me, few people had ever heard of the little village until one day in 1977, when governor Ernst Albrecht of Lower Saxony announced plans to locate a nuclear waste reprocessing center and final repository in an abandoned salt mine nearby. Within days, bright yellow-painted X-shaped crosses sprang up all over the Wendland as a sign of protest, meant to symbolize the day when the first train loads of nuclear waste would arrive: Day X. Despite West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt’s concerns over Gorleben’s proximity to the Iron Curtain and the GDR, he eventually consented to the choice. In the context of the oil price shock of 1973, the major political parties all agreed that nuclear power was going to be a major component of West Germany’s energy supply. Within that framework, the Gorleben site was considered crucial for the country’s energy future. For that same reason, it came to serve as a magnet and a symbol for the entire West German anti-nuclear movement. Given the region’s track record as conservative-leaning, governor Albrecht was as surprised as the rest of the country that a broad coalition of farmers and academics,

128 PHANTOM BORDER young and old, hippies and staid middle-class people gelled into a formidable opposition. Apparently they were not convinced by Albrecht’s argument that the facility would bring much-needed industrial jobs to this section of the economically challenged zonal borderland. In fact, the governor’s emphasis on the economic benefits created the suspicion that these had taken precedence over geological and seismic considerations. *** Up ahead, I took a spur trail off the levee to ride through the village. With its sturdy timber-framed houses and occasional tractors rumbling down the street, Gorleben could be mistaken for any other North German village, were it not for the omni-present yellow Xs and Atomkraft nein danke! (Nuclear power, no thanks!) stickers. Until last night, the protests had been my only association with the name Gorleben. Leafing through Uwe Rada’s book on the Elbe in my fortuitous bubble bath at the Fahrrad hostel, a chapter about the “battle of Gorleben” grabbed my attention. Expecting to read about the anti-nuclear protests, I learned instead about an earlier dispute that had had similar potential for a disastrous outcome. The battle of wills in that case was directly rooted in the Cold War, and it provided yet another piece of the puzzle regarding little Rüterberg’s fate as a doubly fenced-in enclave in the GDR border zone. That standoff had taken place in 1966, a decade before Gorleben became a household word. The GDR had never accepted the border as a line parallel to the river’s eastern shore, as set forth in the Allied Powers’ 1944 London Protocol. The GDR’s claim was that the line ran either along the middle of the river or along the Talweg, the deepest channel of the Elbe. Somehow, this disagreement had not been a problem during the first seventeen years of the two German states’ uneasy coexistence: West German boats had charted and marked the waterway once a year for all boat traffic, including ships from Warsaw Pact states like the GDR and Czechoslovakia. And all of these boats, as well as the border patrol boats

BETWEEN THE WORLDS 129 of both sides, had used the entire width of the Elbe, depending on water levels. Things first became uncivil in 1965, when GDR border guards opened fire on the West German surveying boat for supposedly crossing the border line in the center of the Elbe. Other tense situations followed, until the British occupation forces decided to put an end to the “communist blockade.” On October 18, 1966, NVA boats again blocked the West German surveying vessel that had set out from Gorleben that day. This time, a West German flotilla including speedboats with British officers on board moved in, British tanks lined up on the Elbe’s western levee, and helicopters flew overhead, creating massive waves on the river that helped push the East German boats between two jetties on the eastern shore. No shots were fired, but the highest-ranking British officer later commented that the situation “could have easily triggered a third World War.” Reading this in my luxurious bubble bath, I had breathed a retrospective sigh of relief that cooler heads had prevailed. Being all of two years old at the time, I had been blissfully unaware of the dramatic events on the Elbe. But reading about them all these years later reminded me how much of a subtext the Cold War had been during my childhood and youth. By our teenage years, my friends and I were well aware, as one is aware of the weather, that Germany would be Ground Zero if the superpowers were to come to blows. After the 1966 Gorleben incident, the GDR did not challenge the location of the borderline again. The eastern shore it was. As to little Rüterberg twelve miles downstream, one now only needed to get down to the shore of the Elbe to step into West German water— as at least one man had done. In the GDR’s worldview, a second fence around the village must have seemed the only logical solution to the problem of Republikflucht. *** The levee and the bike path meandered inland for a bit, then the path became more and more uneven as it led through a narrow floodplain forest at the base of a steep hill. The map marked it as the Höhbeck, a glacial moraine on whose relatively flat top

130 PHANTOM BORDER archaeologists found the remains of Charlemagne’s westernmost fortress.74 Even in the early Middle Ages, this was a place “between the worlds,” in the words of archaeologist Jens Schneeweiß: The Vikings dominated Europe’s North, Charlemagne’s Empire the West, and Slavic people the East.75 I emerged from the shade of the floodplain forest onto a single lane that led down to the ferry dock. A young couple was already waiting for the ferry, their bikes laden with panniers and handlebar bags. I overheard them talking about Gorleben, which they must have passed a few minutes ahead of me. “Can you believe,” the man said, grinning, “the police couldn’t even get to the project site one time because the protesters turned around all the directional signs within several kilometers of Gorleben?” I had to laugh. I hadn’t heard that story, but it was a reminder that not only did the activists come from all over West Germany, police officers were recruited from anywhere between the North Sea and the Alps. Although the activists had committed early on to nonviolent action, the protests often resulted in intense encounters with police. I remembered news stories about protesters who had chained themselves to train tracks or sawed out sections of track and formed them into an X. “All of this because some two hundred million years ago, northern Germany was covered by a salt-laden sea,” I mused out loud. Now it was their turn to laugh. The sound of the ferry’s puttering motor came closer; the steel deck lowered onto the landing with a clunk. A few cars and bikes rolled off and the three of us pushed our bikes on. As the ferry made its way to the Elbe’s eastern shore, an old GDR watchtower came into view just upriver, the empty windows in the former guards’ lookout framing patches of clear blue sky. A pale orange buoy bobbed on the Elbe’s iridescent surface, marking the beginning of a

The exact location of the fortress remained a mystery for centuries. Though the Höhbeck was considered the likely site, it was not until 2008 that new excavations and new dating methods provided evidence (Schneeweiß 2011). Schneeweiß 2020.

BETWEEN THE WORLDS 131 small inlet. The river itself disappeared around a broad bend, its sparkly blue melting into the forested shore. The scene looked like a watercolor come to life. The Elbe is Germany’s only major waterway that still flows freely, unencumbered by dams76 over a stretch of six hundred kilometers. Here, in the Northern Lowland, it meanders across a broad floodplain on its way to the North Sea. Like so many other rivers, it has been subject to human intervention in the form of the levees I’ve been riding on and the jetties that jut out at regular intervals from the banks into the river. Constructed over centuries in order to deepen the river channel and make it navigable, these measures have had the unintended side effect of lowering groundwater levels and disconnecting floodplain forests—among the most biodiverse forest habitats of central Europe—from the river. The result is not only the loss of these habitats, but also the loss of an intact alluvial plain’s ability to absorb floodwaters. I was making this particular river crossing to see the Elbe Floodplain Project, Germany’s largest river restoration project. A scraping sound and another clunk signaled the ferry’s arrival on the eastern shore. Past the watchtower, a single-lane road led towards the small town of Lenzen. Because it is located only 1.5 kilometers from the Elbe, Lenzen should have been part of the Sperrgebiet during the German division. But like several other popular vacation spots near the border, it was exempted. With the Elbe off limits for swimming and boating, a lake on the other side of Lenzen offered a substitute.77 These days, Lenzen is also home to a BUND78 visitor center, housed in a Slavic castle from the thirteenth century.79 My visit was timed so I could join a bicycle excursion with a BUND ranger to the floodplain restoration project—and see the room-filling diorama of 76

77 78

While West Germany undertook major engineering projects to regulate its rivers, East Germany did not have the financial means for alterations on that scale (Blackbourn 2006). Cornelius 2012, p. 96. The German affiliate of Friends of the Earth, the organization that coordinates conservation of the Green Belt. The castle was expropriated by the GDR but the previous owner was able to reclaim it after Reunification. His daughter later donated it to BUND.

132 PHANTOM BORDER the Battle of Lenzen, when the army of King Henry I had pushed out the Slavic settlers in this area in 929. Sabine, the ranger, gathered her little group outside the castle and began by holding up a laminated, hand-drawn map of the area. “This is from the late 18th century,” she said. All along the river, broad swaths of land were colored green, indicating nearly contiguous floodplain forests. Then she showed a contemporary map, which showed only a few patches of forest. “The last of those forests were cut down about two hundred years ago. Only about twenty percent of the floodplain remains. In the rest of the country, that percentage is even lower. That has consequences not just for the floodplain forests, but also for the human population. You probably all remember the pictures from the flood of 2002, when even Dresden was under water.” I could tell by the nods in the group that everyone did. “That flood nearly breached the old levee. The Bundeswehr— the German military—brought in two million sandbags to shore it up.” She held up the recent map again and pointed out two lines.“ This line shows the old levee—right next to the river channel. As part of the restoration project, it has been slit in six places to allow floodwater to reach the alluvial plain again. The other line shows the new levee. It was set back over a kilometer to give the river access to its former alluvial plain again. The project area extends over 420 hectares and sixteen kilometers.” Leading us along the bike path, she stopped periodically to point out where native tree seedlings had been planted to give natural succession a boost: willow and poplar in the softwood floodplain immediately adjacent to the river; oak, elm, and aspen for the hardwood forest next to that. From another stop we could see a small group of horses, “a semi-wild breed, a cross of Norwegian Fjord horses and Polish Konik horses,” Sabine explained. “The idea is to restore this landscape to a point where it is self-sustaining and doesn’t need constant human intervention.” What made a project of this scale possible, she said, was that this land had been in the GDR. The smaller property sizes in West Germany would have required negotiations with many different

BETWEEN THE WORLDS 133 landowners; here the director of the former LPG was the primary point person and he supported the project. He had experienced the flood of 2002 firsthand and had feared for his livestock.80 “There was resistance, too,” she said when I asked. “Landowners who were expropriated by the GDR can be very sensitive to anything that restricts their freedom to do as they see fit with their property—especially here along the border.”81 I nodded. Knowing what I had learned so far about the restrictions in the Sperrgebiet, I would probably have felt the same way. “But in 2013 we had an even worse flood,” Sabine went on. “By then, the floodplain had been restored and it functioned exactly the way we had hoped. The new dike held up beautifully. That helped a lot to convince those who had been critical. “All of this”—Sabine described a wide arc with one arm—“is part of the Flusslandschaft Elbe (Elbe River Landscape) Biosphere Reserve. It encompasses almost 300,000 hectares in parts of five federal states—Brandenburg, Saxony-Anhalt, and Saxony in the East and Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony in the West.” This, too, had been part of the impressive work of the Central Round Table82 and the last GDR government.83 Our last stop was a sharp river bend known as Böser Ort (evil place). From a wooden lookout, we could see a sharp bend in the river. “Right there, the river bed narrows to less than half its width,” Sabine explained. “So the water would hit the old levee full force, making this area particularly prone to flooding.”

See also https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/wenn-menschen-deiche-ver setzen-100.html. Pieck (2023, p. 147) points out that West Germans who filled management positions in conservation after the Wende were often viewed with suspicion or perceived as Besserwessis. The Central Round Table was founded in December 1989 as a forum in which members of GDR government-aligned organizations met with representatives of the new citizens’ movements to discuss reforms and serve as a parliament until free elections could be held in March 1990. See also Chapter 4 and Eckert 2019.

134 PHANTOM BORDER She pointed in the other direction, to the floodplain we had just traced on the levee. “See that flood channel? That is one of the places the water now gets in through an opening in the old levee,” she explained. “Before the slits were made, there were only three species of fish in the floodplain’s waters. At last count, there were twenty-six.” From the evil place, I continued upstream on the bike path to the next ferry crossing, while Sabine and her students-for-the-day turned back to Lenzen Castle. This was my last day along the Elbe. I had not known this river well before my expedition, but in these few days, it had given me a deeper glimpse into the borderland than I could have imagined. The next ferry crossing, from Lütkenwisch to Schnackenburg, would be my last one: there, the border had departed from the Elbe, so I would travel inland, too.

Chapter 9: The Magic Mountains Humans should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of their lives, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul . . . and, if possible, speak a few sensible words. —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

From a distance, north-central Germany’s highest mountain range makes a self-effacing appearance. Unlike the Alps to the south, it does not reach upward with two-thousand-meter skyscraper peaks. Its highest mountain, the Brocken, measures 1,141 meters in elevation and rises from the surrounding landscape like a broad, gently rounded dome. But elevation is not everything, nor is there much meaning in comparison alone. For that would miss the Harz Mountains’ very own world of wonders. Dense forests, deep valleys, rugged cliffs, mysterious bogs, and dramatic weather have given rise to numerous myths and sagas from the time of the earliest settlers. For centuries, some of Germany’s most famous poets and artists have been drawn to the Harz’s wild landscapes. The timber-framed towns, medieval castles and monasteries, and skiing and hiking trails only add to the Harz’s appeal for exhausted city folk in need of a respite. I left the trusty Bremen Bike behind for this segment of my journey, for the Harz Mountains are better explored on foot. And explore them I must, because the border cut right through them. Approaching on the Autobahn from the northwest, a sign points to the city of Goslar and the Rammelsberg Mine, which once harbored the world’s most famous deposits of copper, lead, and zinc. Geologically speaking, central Europe is a mash-up of one of the greatest varieties of different rock types anywhere in the world, and within central Europe, the same again can be said of the Harz region. For most of the Cold War, the Brocken’s summit was a restricted military zone. It was closed to the public until, soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall, hikers from both sides joined forces to

135

136 PHANTOM BORDER demand access. Now the Brocken, and almost one hundred square miles around it, is part of the Harz National Park. The story of the park is itself a unification story. Its first chapter was written in September 1990 by East Germany’s sole democratically elected government, three weeks before official Reunification. As part of its ambitious conservation program, it designated a national park around the Brocken, right next to the GDR’s stillexisting Staatsgrenze West.84 Four years later, the reunited country’s government established an adjoining national park in Lower Saxony. The new cross-boundary Harz National Park—now straddling the line between the federal states of Saxony-Anhalt (east) and Lower Saxony (west)—serves as one of the core ecological reserves of the Green Belt. I thought back to my first visit to the Harz Mountains, in the late 1990s, for a day trip for cross-country skiing. By then, I had gotten over my surprise that most of Vermont’s Long Trail did not traverse wilderness85 but mostly second-or third-generation forests criss-crossed by stone walls and cellar holes.86 I also knew that most of the European landscape had undergone much longer and more intensive land use than the Americas. But the Harz’s aura of mystery and awe and Natur pur must have planted in my mind an expectation of something close to a wilderness. I was surprised, then, to find myself skiing through stands of spruce that looked more like a plantation than a forest. How could this be, here in the Harz, where the very idea of sustainable forest management had been born and practiced for more than three hundred years? My next visit, a few years later, helped answer that question— in particular, a walk and talk with Michael Rudolph of Lower Saxony State Forests.

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Eckert 2019, p. 192. 49 miles of the Long Trail traverse federally designated wilderness areas (Dave Hardy, personal communication, 01/07/2016. Left behind by the westward migration of farmers after the invention of the steel plow in 1837, which made it easier to till the tough prairie soils than the rocky soils of New England.

THE MAGIC MOUNTAINS 137 Like most bright ideas, he explained, the one that led to the concept of sustainability did not arise out of thin air but from the need to solve a pressing problem—in this case, the beating the forests had taken from the mining industry. Mining became the driving force of the region’s economy already in the Middle Ages. Removing materials from the earth requires enormous amounts of energy. The then-extensive forests covering the Harz Mountains were the logical source. By the seventeenth century, vast stretches of the Harz Mountains had been deforested, at times bringing the mining industry to a nearly complete standstill. In 1713, a mining administrator, Hans Carl von Carlowitz, came up with the idea of sustainable yield forestry. “But why, then, do the forests still look like plantations all these years later?” I asked. “I know, it seems counterintuitive,” Rudolph replied. At first, he explained, the concept of sustainability was based only on economic considerations: fast-growing species like Norway spruce were planted with industrial efficiency—plantation-style and without regard to native vegetation or elevation. “But forestry evolved. Now forests are being gradually ‘rebuilt’ with species more appropriate to region and elevation. This makes the forests more resilient against heat, drought, and diseases resulting from the changing climate. For the mid-elevations of the Harz Mountains, for example, that means allowing beech to return rather than planting spruce.” Now, for my border expedition visit, I had arranged to meet up with Dr. Friedhart Knolle for a dose of natural history. Knolle is a geologist by training, all-round naturalist by passion, and chairs the regional BUND association. In his day job he serves as press officer for the Harz National Park.87 With his hiking boots, windbreaker, and black beret over his short, grayish brown hair and beard, he looked ready to spend some time away from his office. In the car on the way to our first stop, he described himself as “a child of the Grenze,” having grown up some ten miles west of the 87

Knolle has since retired from his position at the National Park.

138 PHANTOM BORDER border, in Goslar. His father, an avid naturalist himself, had known the Harz region before the border, and then found himself cut off from friends and colleagues on the eastern side. “For my generation, the border was just a fact of life,” Knolle said. “But eventually I got curious because of the secrecy that surrounded it. When twenty-four-hour visas were made available88 I began to accompany my father on day trips to the GDR. “With our interest in caves and everything underground, it was inevitable that we would occasionally visit mines and caves— and therefore just as inevitable that we’d land on the Stasi’s radar. After Reunification, we found that they had compiled voluminous files about our activities—and also about our contacts with East Germans.” Knolle slowed down and pointed ahead. “This used to be a border crossing.” All I could see in the direction he indicated was that the road we were on led through a narrow band of poplars and birches. “Those trees must be part of the Green Belt.” I commented. He nodded and pointed to a wheat field just beyond. “See the farm fields on the other side? Sometimes when my Dad and I crossed into the GDR here, we could see armed border guards watching the farmers, to make sure they didn’t try to go rüber.” Then he shifted the conversation to the Green Belt. “It was really only in agricultural areas like this that the border strip became a refuge for rare and threatened species. In forested areas, the clear-cutting had overwhelmingly destructive effects, like erosion and habitat fragmentation.” I had seen photos of such places. West German photographer Jürgen Ritter made it his mission during the division to document the border. One of his pictures shows the denuded border strip near Görsdorf, in the Thuringian Mountains—a wide swath of exposed

Limited visas (known as Kleiner Grenzverkehr) were made available to West Germans from the border region in the early 1970s. For the GDR, this arrangement served as one of several sources of hard currency: it required a 25 DM (Deutsche Mark) minimum exchange that could not be changed back.

THE MAGIC MOUNTAINS 139 soil and rock, as if a runway for Boeing 747s was being built in the midst of a vast forest. “Still,” Knolle said, “even places where the border cut through forest can contribute to biodiversity in certain situations. In the higher reaches of the Harz Mountains, upland meadows harbor some rare plant species that require more light than dense forest cover would allow for. Even the alpine emerald has been documented there—that’s a rare dragonfly that only occurs in a very few other places in Germany, mostly in the Alps.” I thought of all the ways in which the border had changed the landscape. The destructive and visually striking ones like the clearcuts, and the more subtle ones like the upland meadows. But also the land beyond the border strip, where the low density of human residents had given storks and cranes space to recover their populations. Transboundary natures, historian Astrid Eckert calls the kind of nature the border regime has engendered, because “they transcend[ed] a politically and socially constructed barrier.” In addition, the term captures not only “the fact that a border runs through a landscape, but the consequences of the border for landscape.”89 Knolle motioned me back to the car. “For contrast, let me show you a mystery wetland.” A few minutes later, he pulled over near the large brown rectangular sign that informs travelers they are about to cross the former border. He pointed away from the road to a grassy meadow. “This is the floodplain of the Oker River. Until 1990, this stretch of the Oker served as the German–German border.” We walked until we could see the river, a narrow stream that traverses a grassy area before curving away from the road toward a forested area. A few steps from a remnant of the old border fence, Knolle pointed out some unassuming pink flowers. “These are Haller’s grass carnation [Armeria halleri]—that’s a very rare plant, an indicator of heavy metal grasslands.” Heavy metal? Would the border installations have left heavy metal in the soil?

Eckert 2019, p. 161.

140 PHANTOM BORDER Apparently my mind was too conditioned by thoughts about the recent past. Knolle helpfully offered a more expansive view. “The traces of heavy metal in the soil here are a legacy of mining from several centuries ago. The Oker drains a mining area upstream from here and the river carries heavy metals from the slag piles.90 The heavy metals get into the floodplain, which makes the soils toxic to many plants. So the flora that has developed here is very specialized. From a conservation standpoint, these sites serve as substitute habitat for species that are threatened by habitat loss in the rest of the landscape.” Knolle pointed to a long, narrow depression in the ground parallel to an old section of border fence. I noticed rectangles of concrete leaning against both sides. “That used to be the vehicle trench,” Knolle explained. “The concrete slabs were designed to break upon impact, to make extra sure a vehicle would get stuck.” “I can’t picture either a Trabant or a Wartburg91 making it across that trench, with or without a concrete slab,” I remarked. Knolle nodded. “They probably had tractors in mind. I know of at least one case where a farmer drove close to the fence with his tractor, climbed up, and jumped across. That was before the ditches were installed. These days, amphibians love the trenches. Water accumulates in them in the spring; it’s the perfect habitat for frogs and salamanders.” I thanked Knolle for the walk and talk and told him it would be an excellent foundation for my hike up the Brocken the next day. *** As a starting point for my hike up the Brocken, I chose Torfhaus, a tiny village that started out as a settlement for forestry workers several hundred years ago. Today it is home to the Harz National Park’s visitor center. In December 1777, it was the starting point for Goethe’s first hike up the Brocken—a daring undertaking in winter at a time when no trails had yet been cut. Goethe had come to the

90 91

In particular, cadmium, zinc, lead, nickel, and copper (Steffen 2009). The two brands of car manufactured in the GDR.

THE MAGIC MOUNTAINS 141 rugged mountains to find respite during a personal crisis, though the official reason for his journey to the mountain was a research trip. For Goethe was not only an astonishingly productive writer and poet, already famous at the time of his first Harz journey at the age of twenty-eight, but also a geologist and a high-ranking employee at the court at Weimar, with mining as one of his responsibilities. The winding road to Torfhaus gave me flashbacks to the roads that twist and turn across Vermont’s Green Mountains uphill and down, forested slopes on both sides. Vermont’s geological map, too, like that of the Harz Mountains, holds an astonishing palette of colors depicting all the different rock types. And in fact, the two mountain ranges are related geologically. Both started out as sediments that accumulated, over hundreds of millions of years, at the bottom of ancient oceans. For a brief period, geologically speaking, they were something akin to neighbors. Some three hundred million years ago, at the end of the Carboniferous Period, their respective layers of sediment pressed and folded together when the continental plates they sat on collided. The force of that collision created the supercontinent Pangaea—meaning literally “all lands.” The most visible legacies of the massive pile-up are the mountain ranges, like the Variscan Mountains that, at least for a moment in geologic time, formed the rocky spine of Europe and included the Harz. The Appalachian Mountains, and with them the Green Mountains of today’s Vermont, were their neighbors then. It would take another one hundred million years for Pangaea to break up, eventually leaving the Appalachians and the Harz Mountains on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Still, no human time traveler from the present would have recognized that ancient landscape or any of its living creatures. In the Harz region, the Brocken—an immense blob of cooled volcanic material called a pluton—remained buried underground for more than two hundred million years while another ancient ocean spread, depositing more sediments and scattering enormous salt pockets. It was only some eighty million years ago, toward the end of the Cretaceous Period—the time of the dinosaurs and the

142 PHANTOM BORDER appearance of flowering plants—that the area of today’s Harz Mountains lifted up from the surrounding landscape, during the same collision of continental plates that also folded up the Alps. Along with the Harz Mountains, some two kilometers of sediment that still covered them were also lifted up. Not until these layers of silt and sand had eroded were the Harz Mountains exposed again. Still later, the glaciers that shaped the North German flatlands reached into the northern foothills of the Harz, leaving moraines and meltwater deposits behind. All of this movement below the surface of the earth, over vast oceans of time, produced materials that turned out to be of great value to humans, once humans arrived on the scene. The 3,500year-long story of that relationship can be traced at the Rammelsberg Mine, where some thirty million tons of ore were brought to daylight. Its silver, copper, and lead made nearby Goslar a wealthy town and a favorite residence of German kings and emperors. Even this far inland, the trade in metals led to the town’s membership in the Hanseatic League, connecting it with cities like Hamburg, Bremen, Lübeck, and beyond. *** The next morning, the tiny hamlet of Torfhaus appeared around a bend in the winding road. I pulled into the park visitor center and decided to stop in. Apparently, I was the first visitor of the day. My lucky moment, to have the park ranger’s attention to myself, I thought. She was a young woman, and I was curious how she felt about the former border. Her already friendly face lit up. “I drive across it every day—I live in Wernigerode, on the eastern edge of the Harz Mountains. It is still special for me every time I cross it; I am very aware that my parents were not able to do that for the longest time.” As so often in conversations concerning the border, I felt compelled to ask her age. Twenty-seven, she told me. “I was born in 1988, the year before the border opened.” “What is your favorite thing about working here?” Again she beamed. “When kids from big cities come here and I get to take them into the forest. I love seeing how it opens their

THE MAGIC MOUNTAINS 143 eyes to nature, how they go from being afraid and not knowing anything about forests to getting curious and enjoying spending time in one. And when I talk to them about the border and the Grünes Band. ‘What border?’ many of them ask. ‘Here, in the middle of Germany?’” I was not entirely surprised to hear that many children don’t know about the border. These kids are lucky to hear about it from this young ranger—and to get to know the forest as part of the deal. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed an elderly couple, probably in their mid-seventies, entering the visitor center. I thanked the ranger and introduced myself to the couple. They looked a little surprised, reminding me that compared to Americans, Germans are much less likely to strike up spontaneous conversations with strangers. But after a moment their faces lit up. “The border? It is still an erhebendes Gefühl”—an uplifting feeling—“to cross between East and West,” the man said. “You know,” he continued, “we were there at Augustusplatz in 1989.” I felt goosebumps. Here are two of the courageous people who marched in Leipzig on October 9, 1989, not knowing whether their government would issue an order to shoot at the protesters. That march had brought the protests into public awareness and galvanized the Peaceful Revolution. “And when the border opened a month later, the next morning we got in the car at 6 a.m. to visit relatives in the west. It took us until midnight to drive the two hundred kilometers—the roads were so jammed.” They told me they’ve been coming to the Harz Mountains on their vacations for decades, even before the border was militarized and the Brocken closed to the public in 1961. “After that, we could only vacation in the eastern Harz region, until the Wende,” the woman said. “This is a real gift, to explore the entire, borderless Harz again.” This chance meeting became its own gift, as our short conversation grew into a lasting bond, with holiday cards and visits, meetups for Kaffeetrinken and small gifts.

144 PHANTOM BORDER I said goodbye to the two and stepped outside to orient myself for my hike. The morning air was still fresh. The sky was cloudy, but patches of blue shone through here and there. A wooden sign pointed to the Goethe Trail. Goethe. In high school, I had almost written him off because of his roundabout language. I did not know then about his multifaceted life and personality, or the way he processed life by writing and by spending time in nature. His Brocken expedition inspired a key scene in his drama Faust that only added to the Harz Mountains’ aura of mystery and enchantment in the public imagination. Goethe’s actual route up to the summit from Torfhaus has long been lost to snow and wind; the trail that now bears his name was constructed much later. It happens to be the most direct way to the Grenzweg, the trail along the roughly one hundred kilometers of the former border that once crossed and divided the Harz Mountains. The Goethe trail led through a small spruce stand that soon opened up to a vast peat bog. I took a deep breath of the clean, slightly tangy air and stepped onto the boardwalk that skirted the edge of the bog. Dead plants, water, and lots of time: nature’s not-so-secret recipe for bogs. Up here on the higher elevations of the Harz, organic material has accumulated undisturbed for thousands of years. The dwarf birch, rosemary heath, and mud sedge that grow on its surface are relics of the glacial period that would not be able to survive in the lower elevations. How come this bog did not get mined for peat? It must have been too remote to be worth the cutting and drying and transporting that transformed the bogs of the North German Plain into a landscape of meadows and pastures. The landscape of my childhood. There, the bogs had been colonized beginning in the seventeenth century. Peat was often the only available heating material, but it was also sold far and wide along a sprawling network of peat canals.

THE MAGIC MOUNTAINS 145 The same condensed plant energy that made peat such a valuable heating material also gives undisturbed bogs an outsized role in global climate protection. Because the plants that accumulate in them never completely decompose, bogs are highly effective carbon storage facilities. Although peat bogs occupy only three percent of the earth’s land mass, they store twice as much carbon as all of the world’s forests. Besides their ecological significance, the bogs also loom large in the mythical dimension of the Harz Mountains. The Brocken, in particular, was believed over centuries to be a gathering place of ghosts, witches, and magicians. This was what inspired Goethe’s scene about Walpurgisnacht, an ancient Christian festival with pagan roots, in Faust. According to legend, on this night the witches hold ribald celebrations with magicians to chase out winter and welcome spring. Mysterious flames and ghostly lights appear, like those reported by countless hikers who have been lured by them and lost their way in the bogs. Others have told of encounters with a huge shadowy figure that was sometimes surrounded by glowing rings and rainbows—the Brocken Spectre. More recently, these phenomena have been explained by a quirk of the human brain. When sunlight projects a hiker’s shadow onto mist, it is reflected by each individual droplet. The brain is not able to perceive this shadow stereoscopically and vastly overestimates its size. When the air and mist move, the shadow also moves—even when the hiker stands still. Good thing Goethe, despite his hunger for scientific explanations, did not come up with this explanation himself. The Walpurgis scene would have been much less colorful. Ahead of me on the boardwalk, a man crouched over the side of the boardwalk with an expensive-looking camera. I tiptoed around him; then I saw what he was training his lens on: a magnificent sundew—that fascinating plant of the bogs that procures its life-sustaining nutrients by trapping and eating insects. Beyond the edge of the bog, a band of dark forest stretched to where the Brocken’s dome-like shape rose. From its center sprouted an impossibly tall red-and-white tower whose top reached into the low-hanging clouds. During the Cold War, the tower, plus a

146 PHANTOM BORDER number of other buildings, housed an East German TV station as well as powerful listening devices for the Stasi and Soviet military intelligence. What I did not know until my stop at the visitor center is that the Brocken had initially been occupied by the U.S. Army in 1945 and was traded to the Soviet occupation force as part of a territorial exchange two years later. Although East Germany and the Warsaw Pact ended up with the highest of the Harz mountains, NATO members spied on them in turn—from their own towers on the next-highest mountaintops in West German territory. The path veered away from the bog into the forest, then continued parallel to a ditch. What was this forest like when Goethe was here? Sustainable forestry had already been introduced several decades before his hike. So there probably was forest, but it may well have been a spruce plantation. To my relief, it did not look like a plantation now: the forest here was a lush, uneven-aged mix of spruce and beech. A clear sign that ecological processes, rather than human management, have been the dominant forces at work here for at least a few decades. Half an hour later and a few hundred feet higher in elevation, the trail traversed what looked like a ghost forest—an expanse of dead spruce. A closer look revealed some spruce that were clearly still alive, as well as mountain ash saplings. An interpretive sign explained what had happened here: the area was struck by a bark beetle attack a few years ago. The saplings hint at a future forest much more typical of this elevation: ecological succession is indeed unfolding. From my trail map, I knew I was getting close to the Grenzweg now. Under foot, I could feel the grid of concrete, overgrown but clearly recognizable as two parallel tracks. The Kolonnenweg. Near a tall wooden sign, two men and two women sat at a picnic table, engaged in conversation over thermos bottles and homemade sandwiches). They looked to be in their seventies. “Mahlzeit!” I greeted them, then remembered the Butterbrot in my backpack. On a whim, I asked the picnickers if I might share their table and if they would mind sharing their thoughts about the border.

THE MAGIC MOUNTAINS 147 Any qualms about interrupting their conversation dissolved almost instantly. They invited me to sit, introduced themselves, and asked about the emblem of the Long Trail on my baseball cap, along with “Green Mountain Club” and “Vermont.” “The four of us are members of the Harzklub,” one of the women explained. “That’s our hiking club here in the Harz Mountains. We’re doing an impromptu hike today, but almost every week there are organized hikes or work outings to maintain the trails.” All four lived on the western side of the Harz, though three of them had close connections with the GDR. One of the women moved west after the Wende to marry her husband, who had escaped from East Germany with his parents as a child. “That was hard,” he said. “I missed my grandparents a lot.” “Did you ever see them again?” I asked. “Only one more time, after they retired and got a permit to travel to West Germany. They both died before Reunification.” The other man grew up in the west, but his family, too, had been separated by the border. “I had an aunt in the east whom I’d never met, my mother’s sister. We visited her the day after the border opened. She died two weeks later. That was very tough for my mother, but she was glad that they at least had that one reunion.” Both couples remembered a news story, many years ago, about a nine-year-old boy who had run after a ball into the GDR’s outward sovereign territory and had been shot by East German border guards. Whether the guards overreacted or blindly followed the Schiessbefehl—the order to shoot at escapees—they did not know. I thanked the four for sharing their memories and stepped back onto the concrete-grid track. A few hundred meters on, it curved before leading steadily uphill. Several other hikers were making their way up the Brocken now, mostly in groups of twos and threes. A solo hiker stopped to tie his shoelace. A perfect opportunity to ask him about the border and the GDR, too. Though from a western city quite far from the border, he had traveled to the GDR several times over the years, mostly during the mid-to-late 1980s when he was around twenty. Young West Germans, he told me, could request an invitation from an East German

148 PHANTOM BORDER state-owned tourism company and go on guided tours. “That’s how I visited cities like Dresden, Weimar, and Potsdam.” “Were you allowed to interact with young East Germans?” “Only with the approved guides and some members of the FDJ (the GDR’s official youth organization). The tours were billed as youth exchanges, but as you might guess, the exchange only went in one direction—young West Germans could travel to East Germany, but not the other way round. Even so, those trips gave me valuable experiences. In the mid-to-late eighties, it was clear to me that the houses and infrastructure, and therefore the East German economy, were crumbling.” On his last visit before the Wende, in 1988, he had stayed at the youth hostel in Torfhaus. “That was the first time I saw the border,” he recalled. “It was shocking. Like an ugly scar that ran across the mountains.” The Brocken was off-limits because most of it was a restricted military area. The hike today was his first time back. As we talked, we climbed higher and the vegetation around us changed. The only trees at this altitude were spruce, stunted and oddly shaped from exposure to the forceful winds that often batter the Brocken summit. Krummholz, a word I learned in Vermont for the forest right below treeline. Just below the Brocken’s broad summit, an inscription on a large boulder announced: “Brocken free again! Border wall opened here on 12/3/1989. The Harzklub.” The wall in question was the twelve-foot-tall enclosure around the former military exclusion zone, which had encircled the entire summit. Its opening was forced that December day in 1989 by a group of hikers from east and west. Goose bumps spread over my skin for the second time that day. I bade farewell to my conversation partner, who had lunch plans at the Brocken cafeteria, and walked the path along the former wall enclosure around the summit. Below the layer of clouds, a vista opened over the Harz’s northern foothills and the flatlands beyond. In the other directions, waves of wooded hillsides. Behind me, the gigantic red-and-white TV tower reached for the clouds. Nearby, two rock formations rose: the Devil’s Pulpit and the Witches’ Altar. On a stormy late winter night, amid wafting mist

THE MAGIC MOUNTAINS 149 and fog, one would be hard-pressed not to see supernatural beings here. Passing the big boulder with the “Free Brocken” inscription on my way back to the Grenzweg, I pictured that day in December 1989 when the hikers had demanded the opening of the Brocken wall. The word my conversation partner had used earlier at the visitor center came back to me: It must have been erhebend to be among the first civilians to set foot on the Brocken’s summit that crisp winter day, and to have made the ascent together with people from the “other side.” But what was it like for the East German guards and the Soviet soldiers? They must have known that their lives were about to change dramatically, and that the jobs that had felt so secure would disappear.92 That night, I dreamed of Iceland. I was standing at the edge of a cliff overlooking a water-streaked plain. Between shreds of fog, another escarpment some distance away came in and out of view. Then I was walking along the bottom of the cliff, holding a piece of porous rock in each hand. Even in the dream, I knew that the path I was walking on was part of the graben93 where the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates drift apart ever so slowly—on average about two centimeters [three-quarters of an inch] per year. The North-Atlantic Ridge.94 My two home continents. The two pieces of rock I was holding in my hands came from opposite sides of the ridge. They had the same volcanic look, porous and sharp-edged, but one was reddish and the other gray. The rocks were real; they sit on the window sill in my study in Vermont even now. I woke up relaxed, the otherworldly vista of Thingvellir still lingering in front of my inner eye.

93 94

Shortly after Reunification, the governments of Germany and the Soviet Union negotiated a treaty for the departure of all Soviet army personnel from Germany by 1994. Geological term for rift or trough. Though much of the ridge is more than 7000 m below sea level, the eruptive material has accumulated to form an island roughly the size of Kentucky, making Iceland one of only two places on earth where an ocean ridge can be observed on dry land.

Chapter 10: When Fear Switched Sides “Causes are not to be assumed – in history, politics, or any other field. Instead, they must be searched for and discovered. And in searching, we must not fall prey to the bias of hindsight, the assumption that what happened had to happen.” —Mary E. Sarotte

Relaxing in a comfortable window seat, I glided on a smooth Intercity train toward Leipzig. Geographically, an expedition along the former border did not require a visit to the city, as it sits some 150 kilometers east of the phantom border, well inside the phantom country that used to be the GDR. But for an understanding of how that border became superfluous, Leipzig is a place of immense importance. This is where the Peaceful Revolution began, and an auspicious chain of events brought me into contact with one of its heroes: Siegbert (Siggi) Schefke, without whom the events of the fall of 1989 might have unfolded differently. He agreed to meet me at the public broadcasting station where he worked. The train whizzed past farm fields, then slowed to a gentle stop at the Leipzig-Halle Airport. In between airplanes displaying Lufthansa, SAS, LOT, and Ryanair logos, a number of buttercupyellow planes moved to and from an enormous terminal of the same color. In bright red, the letters “DHL” stretched across the front half of each. Leipzig is the worldwide shipping company’s European air freight hub. The doors of the train closed with a gentle thud and the engine purred into motion again. A moment later, a futuristic-looking edifice appeared in the distance. If I hadn’t known it was Porsche Leipzig’s showroom and event center, I would have suspected that a space station shaped like an oversized spinning top had descended on a pasture. Porsche opened its doors in 2002 and DHL in 2008—twelve and eighteen years after Reunification, respectively. In the meantime, all the coal-mining operations and several industrial plants around Leipzig had shut down, resulting in much improved air and water quality but the loss of countless jobs. Following a severe population crash in the first few years after Reunification, the city recovered and began to thrive. The flourishing did not 151

152 PHANTOM BORDER happen overnight, but Leipzig has done well overall since the Wende. The train slowed down almost imperceptibly; it traversed a grittier cityscape as it approached Leipzig’s main station, Europe’s largest. Between the train platforms and the station’s vaulted entrance hall is a three-story shopping center complete with a spacious bookstore-café. I reminded myself why I was here and strode past it out to the ring—the broad road that encircles the city center and that, on the night of October 9, 1989, was filled with tens of thousands of people. That night, two guerrilla journalists—Siggi and his friend Aram Radomski—secretly filmed the largest protest march in the history of the GDR, knowing full well they were already on the Stasi’s radar as “hostile-negative elements.” The two were thirty years old in the fall of 1989. They had met working underground in the GDR’s small but dedicated opposition movement. The partition of Germany had marked Siggi’s life from the beginning: his father’s parents and siblings had gone rüber when Siggi was one year old, in 1960. He never met the grandfather who had gone west, and was not able to visit his “western Oma” (grandmother) until twenty-nine years later, after the fall of the Berlin Wall. I exited the train station, surrounded by people rushing to catch the green light that held four busy lanes of traffic at bay. To my right I saw the spire of the Reformed Church—Siggi and Aram had used its tower for their secret video mission almost three decades ago. I checked my watch: I still had time to retrace the route of the October 9 protesters. I turned right, toward the church and crossed the ring to the city center side for a better view. It is not a particularly large church, but with its side alcoves, multiple miniature towers, and the intricate stonework on the gable facing the ring, it could be an edifice in a Harry Potter movie. My eyes traveled up the steep spire to the platform where Siggi and Aram crouched that October night. I had seen their video. Its grainy, dark images show the enormous boulevard filled with a sea of people marching. At the time Siggi estimated the crowd at seventy thousand, and the number has stuck. The sound of all those voices chanting in unison is

WHEN FEAR SWITCHED SIDES 153 surprisingly clear: “We are the people!” “No violence!” A tingling sensation rose in me, as if the tension and courage of that night were being channeled directly into my body. Along with the tension and the courage, I could feel the fear. Those people on the street, like their hidden videographers, had every reason to believe that police and military units would intervene. Even those too young to remember June 17, 1953, knew their government had supported the crushing of similar insurgencies in neighboring countries: in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. As recently as June 1989, Erich Honecker, the East German head of state, had praised the Chinese government for deploying tanks and assault rifles against the peaceful protesters (a “counterrevolutionary uprising”) in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. And East German security forces had used violence against peaceful protesters in the run-up to October 9. On October 7, the GDR leadership observed its fortieth anniversary with an elaborate parade and invited foreign dignitaries, including Chinese leader Yao Yilin and Soviet head of state Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev tried to offer a hint to the calcified East German leadership. “I believe danger awaits those who do not react to the real world. If you pick up on the currents moving the real world, moving society, if you use them to shape your policies, then you have no reason to fear difficulties.” All to no avail. The official ceremony had barely ended, and Gorbachev been whisked away to the airport, when security forces descended on the protesters in the streets of East Berlin—who were yelling “Freedom! Democracy! Gorbi, help us!”—and brutally beat them. The same thing had happened in Leipzig five days earlier, when twenty thousand participants in the Monday peace prayer had marched in the streets. Did the October 9 marchers know about the brutality? Certainly not from official GDR media, but in interviews with historian Mary Sarotte,95 several Leipzigers said that they had heard about the police brutality by word of mouth. For many, this was what

Sarotte 2014.

154 PHANTOM BORDER made their anger boil over and prompted them to participate in the larger march one week later. A motor coach passed in front of the church, triggering another memory: my bus driver friend Olli had told me about the days leading up to the big march. He was nineteen then, a draftee in the National People’s Army, and had received orders to stand on alert in Leipzig that day with his regiment. “The thought made me sick,” Olli had said, “that I might have to shoot at my fellow citizens, and probably friends and family members. But what if I said no, I’m not doing that? Chances were, I would disappear into a Stasi prison.” In the end, he decided to speak to his superior, knowing full well he might be labeled an enemy of the state. To Olli’s profound relief, the man had sympathy for his situation and assigned him elsewhere on October 9. Back in the present, I saw how the ring road curved left and skirted the building of the former regional Stasi headquarters, the Runde Ecke (Round Corner). This had been a critical point in the October 9 march: if police and army units did not intervene here, they were unlikely to use force at all. The relief was palpable when the mass of protesters cleared the corner without incident. The march concluded without a single shot fired, nor a single rock thrown. Even today, that event stands out for many as “the miracle of Leipzig.” After the Wende, the Runde Ecke became a Stasi museum, maintained by the Citizens’ Committee of Leipzig. On a whim, I decided to go in and found myself in a long hallway, its walls tiled in a bleak institutional green. The air was filled with a biting antiseptic odor. Is this even air? It seems hostile to human life. An overwhelming sense of desolation gripped me.96 This is quite a start. I have not even gotten to an actual exhibit. I stepped into one of the rooms off the hallway. Nondescript white wallpaper replaced the cold tiles, but the sharp smell filled that room, too. Along the walls, long tables were covered with letters and envelopes; rectangular pans sat on lower workbenches. A 96

Only much later did I find out that the biting smell came from Wofasept, a cleaning agent used in public buildings in the GDR (Zimmer 1990).

WHEN FEAR SWITCHED SIDES 155 set of razor knives and glue hinted at the trade practiced here: the opening and re-sealing of private mail. Many East Germans who accessed their Stasi files after Reunification found copies of even the most personal letters in them, along with observation reports and grainy, out-of-focus photos of themselves. The next room housed more tools of the secret service trade: miniature cameras hidden in everyday items like pens, lipsticks, or pieces of clothing; listening devices disguised in lamps or electrical outlets, or hidden in walls; briefcases containing wigs, sunglasses, and false beards. The creepiest was a row of shelves full of neatly labeled jars containing pieces of cloth, in which Stasi agents had preserved scent samples of hostile-negative elements—fellow citizens suspected of subversive activities, or even thoughts. If such an element tried to go into hiding, the Stasi would send one of its specially trained dogs on the person’s trail. The labels on the jars gave a hint of the bureaucratic effort that went into the scent archive. Besides the name and twelve-digit ID number of the person whose scent it contained, each label included the date, time, and location indicating when and where the sample was collected, and the regional office responsible for the sample. The next room brought all of the previous insidiousness to a sharp point. Using Wolf Biermann as an example (the singer-songwriter who voluntarily moved to East Germany), a display explains in depressing detail the Stasi way of silencing critics by means of operative psychology. The prime method was known, in Stasi speak, as Zersetzung (corrosion), or the systematic psychological and social disintegration and ultimate destruction of the targeted person. An effective way to disintegrate a personality, Stasi psychologists found, was to sow doubt and loss of trust, even in a person’s own perceptions. To accomplish this, operatives planted rumors or fake correspondence to destroy personal relationships, engineered professional failures, induced false medical treatment, or threatened to take away the children of people it sought to zersetzen. How could anyone not disintegrate? Biermann, on whom the Stasi amassed a dossier of forty thousand pages, somehow survived his Zersetzung with his creative spirit intact. He even wrote a satirical song about it, “Stasi Ballad”:

156 PHANTOM BORDER Brothers from state security—you alone Know all my troubles. […] Words which otherwise would be lost, Are captured firmly on your tapes, And—I’m sure of it—now and again You sing my songs in bed. I sing my gratitude to you.

As I walked back into the bleak green hallway, I tried to picture a Stasi agent quietly singing a Wolf Biermann song in bed at night. Would it have been possible to even contemplate Biermann’s words—so full of life and free of dogma—while spending one’s days serving the GDR’s dogmatic state ideology, at a job that required a cold view that anyone who thought differently was an enemy? What made it possible for Biermann to withstand the Stasi’s efforts to destroy him? Rabenschwarze Zuversicht, he said once in an interview. Ravenblack Zuversicht. Not a tepid it’ll-all-work-out optimism, but a will to believe in humanity, to work for its highest potential. I left the museum and stepped outside into the sunshine, inhaling deeply. The sight of the steep roof and the back of St. Thomas Church, a few hundred feet farther down the ring, brightened my spirits. I walked around it and smiled up at the J. S. Bach statue. A bronze music roll in hand, the long-ago church cantor’s bronze face looks out over the cobblestone churchyard from its stone pedestal. I stepped through the tall, thick, wooden church doors. A few other people were inside. Some sat in the wooden pews, some walked around quietly, gazing at the stained-glass windows that face the churchyard or at the bronze plate covering Bach’s final resting place. The quiet felt congenial, the cool, slightly dank air familiar, like a soothing balm. My eyes rose to the red-painted wooden ribs that support the white ceiling like an intricate web. Something about the lines of history in that place perked me up. The thought that Bach played the organ there, and honed the voices of the St. Thomas Boys Choir from 1723 until his death twenty-seven years later. That generations of choristers had sung there for four hundred years before that. I walked slowly toward

WHEN FEAR SWITCHED SIDES 157 the sanctuary and noticed several fresh long-stemmed roses spread across the bronze plate. My thoughts turned to the Leipzigers who came for the Monday peace prayer on October 9, 1989. St. Nicholas had filled to capacity long before 5 p.m. The pastors of several churches had offered to open for the protesters, those of St. Thomas and the Reformed Church included. How many of them came for religious reasons, no one knows for sure. For anyone critical of the state, the Protestant churches of the GDR offered the only shelter, as the Stasi itself acknowledged in a May 1989 report. The seeds for this development were planted a decade earlier, when peace prayers formed in response to the socalled NATO dual-track accord of 1979. This attempt at recalibrating the balance of terror between the Cold War superpowers involved the initial stationing of more nuclear missiles along both sides of the Iron Curtain before a subsequent scale-down, and it sparked peace movements in both Germanys. People on both sides worried that the two superpowers, in their fight over Europe, would come to blows in Europe, making Germany the front line in a nuclear war. Cruise missiles. Pershing II. SS-20. Although I was too young at the time to take in the full weight of the situation, I still remember the constant buzz of these new words, along with news segments about gigantic protests in Bonn and other West German cities. The people in the other Germany had no such outlet. Instead, they initiated peace prayers as a subtler form of protest. The East German regime saw nothing wrong with protests against NATO, a stance it came to regret when participants also began to criticize the Soviet arms buildup. In historian Mary Sarotte’s words, “It was acceptable to oppose the enemy’s missiles, but not the ones inside East Germany.” Over the next few years, the relative safety of the church— Leipzig’s St. Nicholas and Berlin’s Zion Church in particular—became a venue for other, more openly political grievances. By early fall 1989, the Monday peace prayers had begun to spill out into the surrounding streets.

158 PHANTOM BORDER Leaving the church, I turned left onto Leipzig’s central pedestrian boulevard, toward St. Nicholas Church and Augustus Square, where I would catch the tram to meet Siggi. And where the crowd had gathered before beginning the march around the Ring that long-ago October 9. Bach must have walked between the two churches almost daily, since he was responsible for the music in both. A mere fifteen years after Bach’s death in 1750, a young Goethe walked here, too. Just past the market square and off the pedestrian street, in a highceilinged side passage, I glimpsed the bronze figure of Faust that, together with Mephistopheles, beckons visitors down the stairs to Goethe’s favorite wine cellar, Auerbachs Keller. The storefronts on both sides of the boulevard would be unrecognizable to both Goethe and Bach today, but the passageways that lead through the buildings would be familiar. Over hundreds of years, the passages harbored exhibition stalls during Leipzig’s trade fairs. Eventually the fairs outgrew the passages, and vast fairgrounds were built on the edge of town. These days, instead of examining samples at the exhibition stalls, people leisurely stroll along clothing stores, booksellers, and cafés. I entered a passage I remembered as a shortcut to St. Nicholas and pictured Bach traversing it almost three hundred years before me, the white tresses of his wig lifting off his shoulders from his hurried pace. Stepping out, I craned my neck to take in St. Nicholas’s ochre sandstone facade across the narrow street. A simple sign at the door announced “Nikolaikirche. Offen für alle”—open to all. The words took on special meaning on October 9, 1989, when around a thousand SED party members arrived hours early, intending to crowd out the peace prayer participants and smother the march. The plan backfired, both because many more marchers were able to assemble outside, and because Christian Führer, the St. Nicholas pastor, handled the situation with great thoughtfulness. He welcomed the party members and then announced that he would reserve some pews for “workers and a few Christians” since “the working proletariat can only arrive, at the earliest, at 4 p.m.”

WHEN FEAR SWITCHED SIDES 159 Inside the light-filled, airy space with its distinctive white pillars topped by pale green stucco palm fronds, a few dozen people milled around, others sat in the wooden pews. I joined the sitters for a few minutes, trying to tune in to all the expressions of human yearning this space has accommodated over the centuries. The peace prayers and the volatile energy of October 9. Bach cantatas and organ recitals, sermons and liturgy, weddings and funerals, the upheaval of the Reformation, all the way back to the twelfth century. I wasn’t there for any of that, and yet, something of it reached through time. A two-minute walk from the church brought me to Augustus Square (formerly Karl Marx Platz), the enormous plaza between the Leipzig Opera House and the Gewandhaus where people gathered for the march around the Ring. A picture I found online showed a sea of people filling every last square meter. “That must be a Stasi photo,” Siggi had said matter-of-factly when I asked him about it on the phone, knowing he and Aram couldn’t have seen the square from their hideout. Of course. The GDR leadership, naturally, had no intention of publicizing the march. The only cameras allowed near the route of the march were those of Stasi agents, and their photos were intended to help identify enemies of the state. In particular, foreign journalists were banned from Leipzig altogether on the day of the march. The day I was there, the square bustled with trams and buses, people on foot and people on bicycles. Cars disappeared into an underground parking garage. My tram approached and I hopped on. After a few stops I recognized the gleaming glass tower that houses the MDR broadcasting studios: my stop. A tall man with unruly shoulder-length hair waited outside the glass doors. I recognized Siggi right away from the pictures I had seen. Even in the old, blurry Stasi surveillance photos, he had the same hairstyle. He looked so young, so innocent. Which of course he was, notwithstanding his government’s view of him as a criminal element. His long hair alone would have made the GDR leadership suspicious. By the fall of 1989, his subversive activities had earned him his own team

160 PHANTOM BORDER of full-time Stasi observers. He later learned from his Stasi file that they had chosen Satan for his operative name. We took the elevator to the top floor. Siggi pointed to a small sitting area in one corner and took a seat against the glass front that faced the city center. Behind him I saw Leipzig’s landmarks: the tall “open book” building on Augustus Square that used to house the university’s library and is now owned by Merrill Lynch; to its right the spire of St. Nicholas Church, a little farther back the Reformed Church and St. Thomas. “Where do you want to start?” Siggi asked. “How about the morning of October 9. You were living in Berlin then, right? How did you even get out of your apartment that day? I mean, with Stasi watching the house and following you around?” “Right. They had started that on October 7,” Siggi began. “Remember, that whole summer and fall was a very intense time, with the embassy refugees and all the other people who had already left across the Hungarian border to Austria. There was a lot of pressure on the government to keep things under control.” I told him how I had been working in a remote region of northwest Kenya in the summer of 1989, and of how, from the few times I had been able to get my hands on a newspaper, I had found no indication the East German government would loosen its iron grip on power. Siggi nodded. “The closer the GDR’s 40th anniversary [on October 7] came, the more desperately the government needed happy socialist citizens, not negative elements like Aram and me or refugees from the republic.” With no viable alternatives and only days before the anniversary, the GDR leadership agreed to send the embassy refugees to West Germany by train, under the condition that the trains travel through East German territory. The condition was meant as a face-saving measure but only made the situation worse: police and military personnel brutally beat anyone who tried to jump up on a train or even wave to those on board.97

According to historian Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, the GDR also wanted to record the identities of the embassy refugees (Kowalczuk 2019).

WHEN FEAR SWITCHED SIDES 161 “Of course that brutality only increased the anger in the rest of the population,” Siggi told me. “The Stasi in turn tightened its measures against people like me. They positioned themselves outside the building and in the courtyard. Anywhere I went, they followed me—to the bakery, to my girlfriend’s place, to the environmental library,” he remembered. “I knew I had to shake them off somehow if I wanted to get to Leipzig on October 9. So I set up electrical timers for a floor lamp and for my TV, to make it look like I was home. And then I climbed up to the top of the building and ran along the roofs of several houses, climbed back down, and met up with Aram. He was waiting with my Trabi [Trabant] on the next street over. But after a few minutes we noticed we were being followed. We had to abandon the car. Fortunately, we were able to borrow our friend Stephan’s car.” “Wait, how did you do that?” I asked. “You couldn’t just drive to Stephan’s house with the car the Stasi was looking for, and you couldn’t call him—could you?” There were no cell phones in 1989, few East German households had landlines, and the existing ones were often bugged by the Stasi. “No, we were lucky. We jumped on a tram that was about to leave, and the Stasi guys lost us. So we got out of Berlin and on the road to Leipzig,” Siggi continued. “We saw several police convoys going in the same direction. We could guess what they were going to Leipzig for, and we both got very quiet for the rest of the ride.” Fear spread through Leipzig and across the entire GDR. “For many people, that day was a day of decision. Some people told me afterwards that they could not have looked themselves, or their children, in the eye had they not stood up for what they believed in that day.” Meanwhile, Siggi and Aram had to find a vantage point with an unobstructed view of the Ring. “Today it would be so easy to get aerial footage with a drone,” Siggi laughed, shaking his head, “but that was 1989. So we had to find a spot high up above the crowd, one where we couldn’t be seen. The first place we tried, the janitor told us that Stasi agents would be all over the building to observe the march from there. The second was an apartment building. A couple we spoke to there

162 PHANTOM BORDER would have let us film from their living room window, but they had small kids and we felt it was too much of a risk for them.” Eventually, the pastor of the Reformed Church let them climb up the church’s tower. “The platform has a great view of the Ring, but it was not a comfortable place to spend time,” Siggi remembered. “We were basically crouching in piles of pigeon droppings, trying to stay out of view from the high-rise down the street. We knew that building was crawling with Stasi. “And then we heard the crowd approaching. And that was really an amazing feeling, to hear all these voices chanting, ‘We are the people,’ ‘We aren’t rowdies,’ and then to see that sea of people.” “Rowdies? What was that about?” I asked. “That was because after the previous marches, even the one the week before with twenty thousand people, the state media claimed that only a few rowdies were disturbing the public peace.” After the marchers passed the Reformed Church, Siggi and Aram waited a long time to make sure no more police or army personnel were patrolling the streets. Earlier that afternoon, they had run into a West German journalist they knew. Despite the ban on foreign media, Ulli Schwarz from Der Spiegel had managed to get to Leipzig by train. Siggi and Aram made their way to the hotel where Schwarz was waiting, discreetly handed him the videotape in the hotel entry’s revolving door, and returned to East Berlin in their borrowed Trabant. “We dropped Ulli off at the Schönefeld Airport, where he had stashed his car. He crossed to West Berlin and delivered the tape straight to Roland Jahn.” Before the fall of 1989, the only time I’d ever heard of East German dissidents was when they were expelled to the west, like Wolf Biermann in 1976, or the economics-student-turned-transportworker-turned-journalist Roland Jahn in 1983. By expelling Jahn, the East German government placed him in a perfect position to literally broadcast the GDR’s shortcomings and aid in its demise. It was Jahn who got the video camera and countless other supplies across the Berlin Wall to Siggi and Aram. Jahn later became the federal commissioner for the Stasi Records.

WHEN FEAR SWITCHED SIDES 163 “And the next evening,” Siggi continued, “we saw our images on ARD [a major West German TV station], knowing that millions of people in the east and west were watching them too. It was an amazing feeling.” With that imperfect video, it was clear to everyone, from East German citizens to their government to the rest of the world, that the momentum could not be reversed. And there was massive relief: not a single shot had been fired. For the first time since the GDR’s brutal response to the 1953 uprising, there was reason to hope that change was possible. A wave of Zuversicht flooded the country. In the following days and weeks, people across East Germany took to the streets. On November 4, a million people gathered in East Berlin’s Alexander Square; five days later, throngs of East Germans walked west through openings in the Berlin Wall. “How did the march remain peaceful, with so much police and military all over the city?” I asked Siggi. “In the end, it was a local decision. The Party district officer had called the Politburo in Berlin, but couldn’t reach anyone. So he and the rest of the local leadership decided they did not want to be responsible for a bloodbath. Also, throughout that day, prominent Leipzigers, including Kurt Masur and three SED secretaries, got on the radio to implore their fellow citizens to remain peaceful. And a small group of peace activists printed leaflets—in secret, of course. But it was the people themselves who took that message to heart. They kept chanting Keine Gewalt—no violence. They were very intentional about not giving in to fear or provocation.” “How did you deal with your own fear?” I asked. “That day and all those other times you committed subversive acts? You must have been afraid too.” “Sure,” he said. “It was probably a good thing we didn’t know then that the Stasi had a hundred thousand full-time employees and even more IMs—informelle Mitarbeiter or informal collaborators—or I would have been even more afraid. But I guess at some point I realized they were even more afraid than I was. I also guessed they did not want to lock me up too soon, because they wanted to find out who was in my network, how I was able to get

164 PHANTOM BORDER cameras and batteries and things from the West, and who was taking film and tapes back across the Wall. “Of course it was stressful, and so I actively sought out kindred spirits and islands of sanity, like the environmental library and my favorite pub in Prenzlauer Berg.” The environmental library, housed in Berlin’s Zion Church, was a collection of literature forbidden in East Germany. The pub is where Siggi and Aram met up four weeks after their secret video mission in Leipzig and heard the astonishing news of a new travel policy allowing East Germans to travel anywhere they wanted, including to the West. The evening of November 9, 1989, the East German government held a news conference that left the assembled journalists practically speechless. Earlier that day, the GDR’s yet-again-reconstituted politburo had drawn up a new travel law, but in the breakneck tempo of the day had not had time to properly brief its speaker, Günter Schabowski. Just before 7 p.m., reading from a hand-scribbled note that had been handed to him moments before the evening’s news conference, Schabowski announced in bureaucratic language that the new law would “make it possible for each citizen to travel abroad via GDR border stations.” When an Italian journalist asked when this law would go into effect, Schabowski stared at the piece of paper in his hand and stammered, “To my knowledge that goes into effect . . . immediately, without delay.” This was not exactly what the politburo had decided, but the words were out. Within minutes, headlines like “East Germany Opens Borders with the West” were broadcast on several Western radio and TV stations. Even with all the protests of recent weeks, no one had expected the GDR’s deadly border system to simply be declared null and void. Thousands of East Berliners grabbed their personal identity cards and made their way to the nearest checkpoint. The border guards had not received any briefing about a new travel law, nor had their superiors. After twenty-eight years of daily instruction not to let anyone cross to West Berlin without a proper exit visa, and to stop anyone who tried by deadly force if necessary, no one

WHEN FEAR SWITCHED SIDES 165 knew how they would react to throngs of fellow citizens demanding to be let through the barricades. For a while, they did their best to follow regular procedure, not letting anyone cross. When the crowd grew ever larger and the mood ever more tense, the commanding officer at Bornholmer Strasse, the largest of the checkpoints between East and West Berlin, received instructions from an off-site superior to select a few of the most aggressive people in the crowd and let them through. The idea was that with these people gone, the rest of the crowd would calm down and eventually go home. “Aram and I were among the first to be selected, because we were so insistent in demanding passage to West Berlin. Around 8:30 p.m., a border guard checked our identity papers, stamped them, and waved us towards the bridge that led across the death strip.” On the other side, they hailed a cab to a West Berlin bar, partied for days, and, for the first time, met Roland Jahn face to face after years of speaking to him only in clandestine phone calls. Then Siggi took a train to Recklinghausen to visit his western Oma for the first time. Meanwhile, at the border crossings, word that some people were allowed to pass circulated, leading the crowd at Bornholmer Strasse to swell to several thousand. By 11:30 p.m., the commanding officer, Harald Jäger, felt the situation was out of control. For the first time in his Stasi career, he made an executive decision. He informed his superior that he would open the gate. A few kilometers away, Tom Brokaw broadcast live from a platform the NBC crew had built across the Berlin Wall from the Brandenburg Gate two days earlier, on little more than a hunch that newsworthy events were in the air. The gate stood in the barren strip between the two walls; there was no border crossing there. But that’s where crowds gathered as soon as word spread about the throngs of East Germans crossing west at Bornholmer Strasse. By the time a friend got me to turn on my TV five thousand miles away in upstate New York, euphoric Berliners had climbed up on the Wall. Even had they known what was coming, the NBC crew could not have picked a better spot for their broadcast: the Berlin Wall, lit up by NBC’s powerful spotlights, with people

166 PHANTOM BORDER dancing on top, behind it the iconic Brandenburg Gate against the black night sky. “Do you think the Wall would have come down without your and Aram’s secret video mission on October 9?” I asked Siggi that day in Leipzig. “I do,” he replies. “We probably sped it up by about two weeks. It ended up taking exactly a month—October 9 to November 9—and by then, the GDR was a total loss. We chalked that up as a success.” “It sounds like your goal was not to make the GDR a better, more democratic place, like other dissidents wanted, those in Democracy Now, New Forum, Initiative for Peace and Human Rights, and the other groups that formed in the late 1980s.” “No. Better socialism was never my thing. Mauer weg—away with the Wall. Freedom of travel, that was my goal. I didn’t want two German states. It always felt wrong to have my family split between two countries.” “And how do you think about the way Reunification happened? Do you understand why some people experienced it as a takeover?” “Of course it wasn’t perfect, and for those over, say, forty it was really hard—it’s harder to learn a new system from scratch. But remember, too, that a clear majority of East Germans voted for Kohl, for the D-Mark, and for quick reunification. Few people thought about what all this would mean for the East German economy or what would be involved in transforming it into a market economy.” “Speaking of the economy,” I changed topics. “Can you tell me about your job here at MDR, how you came to work here?” “You could say that that was an auspicious outcome of my dissident career. Soon after Reunification, I was invited to work on a documentary about Marianne Birthler98. The film was broadcast by the newly founded MDR network. One of the department heads

An East German activist and member of the opposition group Initiative for Peace and Human Rights. She served as Commissioner for the Stasi Records from 2000 to 2011.

WHEN FEAR SWITCHED SIDES 167 knew that I had made the October 9 video and invited me to apply for a job opening. One of the first questions she asked me during the interview was whether I had a university or technical college degree, which I did—in civil engineering. So I said yes, and that was that.” “And how were you able to get that degree?” I ask. “I thought the GDR didn’t allow ‘negative elements’ like you to pursue higher education.” “Right, and I was already suspect because of my family ties in the west. So I did an apprenticeship as a bricklayer, in hopes that this might later open a door to architectural studies. That almost worked, but then the admissions officer presented a deal: I could go on to study architecture in return for committing to a three-year term with the National People’s Army. This was double the eighteen-month term of mandatory service, and I knew full well that I might get stationed along the German–German border.” Even at nineteen, Siggi had figured out that the real purpose of the “anti-fascist protection wall” was to keep East Germans from fleeing west. He also knew that, as far as the East German government was concerned, the people on the other side of the border were enemies. “I could not stomach the thought of serving along the border that split my family between the two Germanys. So I told the officer no, I could not agree to that deal.” “Knowing full well that that would mean the end of your dream of studying architecture,” I added. He nodded. “After that, the only course of study they allowed me to pursue was civil engineering.” Siggi adjusted to this, too. But in his second year, he ran afoul of the authorities again. It was 1982, and the two superpowers were negotiating the NATO dual track accord. Two days after signing a petition demanding the removal of all missiles on both sides, Siggi was informed that he was being expelled from the university. “So how did you finish your degree?” I asked. “I had to prove myself in ‘socialist production,’” he told me. “That was a pathway to redemption that the GDR offered negative elements like me. For the next six months, they put me to work as a roofer.” He paused. “Another interesting experience.”

168 PHANTOM BORDER After a year of construction work, Siggi finished his studies in civil engineering. He got a job inspecting Plattenbauten (prefab apartment buildings), which gave him enough flexibility—not to mention an office phone and a Trabant—to pursue his subversive activities on the side. I laughed out loud, impressed by his resilience. “I can see that you were never going to become a model GDR citizen. But all of this must have been terribly anstrengend (exasperating). Why did you stay? Apart from the fact that trying to flee would have meant risking your life?” “I suppose I told myself that this artificial country—the GDR—was not only the country of the Stasi, of the comrades and the Bonzen [high-ranking party officials]. This little country was my country, too. I was born here, kissed my first girlfriend here; my parents built a house here. So why should I leave? I didn’t want to make it too easy for them. And at some point, I realized that fear had switched sides. It was no longer us, the dissidents, who were afraid; it was them.” Besides the October 9 video, Siggi had filmed documentaries about other issues the East German leadership did not want exposed, like toxic waste dumps and crumbling infrastructure. As far as the MDR department head was concerned, this experience and the October 9 video were far more relevant than his degree. But the degree was a necessary formality, and without the roofer stint, he would not have gotten it. “It’s certainly not a career path anyone could have planned,” I told him. “Right,” he replied, “but at least it’s one I can look back on without being ashamed of myself.” *** After we said our goodbyes, I hopped on the tram back toward the Ring, back to Augustusplatz. There was still some time before my train left, time enough for Kaffeetrinken at my favorite café. Halfway between the churches of St. Nicholas and St. Thomas, my ears picked up the sounds of a string quartet.

WHEN FEAR SWITCHED SIDES 169 The musicians were young, maybe in their early twenties. The piece ended and the cellist began Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1. From the first deep, rich note, the melody climbed higher, seeming to reach for something, then touched back down with an earlier theme. The cellist was entirely absorbed in his playing. I was vaguely aware of other people, fellow listeners. The bow traveled upward through the last few measures and ended on a note that magically pulled together darkness and light. This music comes from someone who knows about dark places. Bach’s parents had both died by the time he turned ten. He lost his first wife, and ten of his twenty children died at young ages. But Bach was surrounded by music from his earliest childhood, and he had a deep and abiding faith. Leonard Bernstein said about him once, “For Bach, music was religion. To compose was his credo, to play music was his way of worshiping.” And his way of working through grief, evidently, all the way to joy. I placed all the Euro coins I had into the cello case and continued following Bach’s footsteps toward St. Thomas Church until I veered off across the churchyard to the café. Over a piece of Bachtorte and a steaming cup of coffee, I let my gaze wander across the church and thought about Siggi’s story and the changeable paths of history. How easily his plan with Aram could have gone awry. Had Siggi not been able to leave his apartment in Berlin unnoticed, had he and Aram not caught that tram, had they been stopped on the way to Leipzig, had they been arrested walking around with the video camera barely concealed in a plastic bag…. How little of that was predictable, how many moments had to go “right” for him and Aram to get that video. How many people had to overcome their fear until the fear switched sides. I dedicated my Kaffeetrinken ceremony to the Peaceful Revolution, this chapter of light in my home country’s confounding past.

Chapter 11: Heaven, Earth, and Hell Identity is real not because it is an actual, genuine thing—like a drop of blood or an essence—but because it has real impacts on all of our lives. —Mithu Sanyal

The southern foothills of the Harz Mountains came into view through the train windows on my left, to the east. The train whizzed past picturesque small towns and villages, interspersed with farm fields and patches of forest. The name of one town, Bad Lauterbach, sounded familiar. I remembered hearing about it in childhood as a popular health and rehab resort. I deduced that the train had not yet crossed into Thuringia, since the people I knew as a child would not have traveled to East Germany for spa treatments. The Bremen Bike was secured to the train car’s bicycle hold, ready for the second leg of my expedition. A congenial murmur filled the space around me. From their looks and the bits of conversation I picked up—a mix of German and, I was guessing, Turkish— my fellow passengers seemed to be a mix of schoolkids, families, and people commuting to work. After a few months back in Vermont, I had returned to Germany, again using my parents’ house as a staging area, packing up my father’s bicycle with panniers, a small daypack, and my handlebar bag. As a special bonus before resuming my expedition, I had joined my parents, my sister, and her two children for four glorious days on a North Sea island. Conversations over tea at our favorite gemütlich café, walks on the beach, the ever-present breeze tugging at our clothing and hair: all of this offered a welcome return to the basics, to family and the landscape of my childhood. My father’s eyesight had continued to deteriorate; one eye was now completely blind and his field of vision in the other was gradually shrinking. Nevertheless, he worked his way through the daily newspaper— an undertaking that took up more and more of the morning—and rarely missed the evening news on TV. A backdrop to our conversations was the upcoming federal election. Opinion polls, AfD and PEGIDA rallies, and posts on 171

172 PHANTOM BORDER social media channels signaled that Germany’s political landscape was shifting not just to the right, but into nationalist, extremist territory. There was a very real possibility that the AfD would not only gain votes in several state elections but also enter the Bundestag, the German parliament. We noticed, too, the party’s adeptness at appealing to eastern voters with slogans such as Vollende die Wende (Complete the Wende). The closer the September 24, 2017 election day—came, the louder the AfD presented itself as the protector of all things German. Near the end of August, one statement in particular stood out in its animosity toward those deemed not to be German. The utterance came from Alexander Gauland, the AfD’s party leader and top candidate, who, at a campaign event in Thuringia, suggested that Aydan Özuguz, the federal government’s representative for migration, refugees, and integration, should be “disposed of in Anatolia.”99 All I knew about Özuguz was that she had been born and raised in Hamburg, was a member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), and that her parents were Turkish immigrants. Curious what exactly had prompted Gauland’s outburst, I found that in May 2017, Özuguz had written in a newspaper article that “beyond language, a specifically German culture is not discernible.” The article made me wonder about her conception of culture. Did she view culture as limited to language across the board, or only German culture? Did she think of Germany as too regionally varied to have an overarching culture? Either way, the piece probably would have made few waves had it not been amplified by Alexander Gauland. Özuguz’s remark about German culture had provided a perfect foil for the AfD’s views of who was German and who was not, and Gauland pounced on it.

https://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/bundestagswahl/afd-alexander-gaulan d-traeumt-von-entsorgung-aydan-oezoguz-15171141.html. Six months later, Gauland compared the Holocaust to a “Vogelschiss” (bird shit) in German history.

HEAVEN, EARTH, AND HELL 173 “This is a Turkish-German who says this! Why don’t we invite her to the Eichsfeld [a region in Thuringia100] and show her what specifically German culture is. Then she’ll never come back here and we can dispose of her [entsorgen] in Anatolia, thank God.” Dispose of her. No matter what Özoguz had meant with her statement about German culture, no matter whether the Eichsfeld was really home to “specifically German” culture, no matter how one felt about Angela Merkel’s welcoming stance towards refugees in 2015, the term “dispose of” conjured a direct link to the darkest time in German history, when a well-oiled, barbaric human machinery had actually disposed of people it defined as not German. A time whose traces I was about to encounter in the landscape as I resumed my border expedition. *** The train slowed to a stop at a small train station where a few more people got on. I glanced at the satellite map on my phone. Ellrich must be the next stop. I had picked the small town as the starting point for this segment of my journey because of its location on the southern edges of the Harz mountains. From there on, I figured the terrain would make for relatively easy biking. Relative to riding in the Harz Mountains, that is. As it turned out, the remaining seven hundred kilometers of the former border still contained a series of respectable challenges. I glanced at the blue dot on the phone map. Its progress toward a thin white line told me we were about to cross from Lower Saxony into Thuringia. On the right side of the train, a sheer face of nearly white rock came into view. It was my first glimpse of a unique geological feature in this landscape: a band of gypsum that extended over more than one hundred kilometers along the southern Harz Mountains. A bequest from the ancient sea that covered central Europe 300 million years ago, and that even now continued to shape the landscape through the interplay of water and rock.

100

The Eichsfeld is a Catholic enclave in a mostly Protestant region and, incidentally, a region I visited on my expedition and discuss in Chapter 14.

174 PHANTOM BORDER Suddenly, the train compartment was enveloped in pitch darkness—and, to judge by the location, had entered a prime example of that landscape-shaping process. On the map, this area was marked as part of the Himmelreich—the “realm of heaven,” a massif of highly soluble rock like gypsum and anhydrite which had formed from sediments at the bottom of the Zechstein Sea. In the course of drilling the train tunnel in 1868, workers had discovered a cave the size of a soccer field inside the massif.101 The train began to slow again almost as soon as it emerged on the other side of the tunnel. The PA system sputtered static sounds, then the conductor’s voice came on: “Next station Ellrich—thank you for traveling with Deutsche Bahn.” I unhitched the bike from its rack and pushed it onto the platform. As the train pulled away, a gray watchtower came into view on the other side of the tracks. Right. The border ran immediately adjacent to the tracks here. It had crossed them just a few hundred meters back, near the tunnel. For the four decades Germany was divided, the route I had traveled was closed to passenger trains. Only freight trains were allowed, and the crossing was heavily guarded. On at least one occasion the guards thwarted an attempted escape. One snowy night in 1985, they noticed a suspicious-looking train traveling west and fired shots. The “train” turned out to be a disguised lumber truck with a family of five inside; one of the children was left bleeding from a bullet wound. The parents were sentenced to prison and the three children sent to their grandparents.102 They were lucky; more than a few children of Republikflüchtlinge or other “negative elements” were placed with reliable Party functionaries for adoption.103 I walked to the end of the platform and crossed the tracks to pick up the bike trail. My destination for the day was Walkenried, a small town on the western side of the former border. The border

101

102 103

The largest space inside the cave measures 170 m by 85 m, with a height of up to 15 m. https://www.harzlife.de/untertage/himmelreichhoehle.html. Rang 2011 Rolff 2010.

HEAVEN, EARTH, AND HELL 175 itself had veered south here before looping north again, but the recommended bike route used a path through a forest as a shortcut. I could see the forest edge from here. It looked lush and inviting, and yet trepidation built in my stomach. Today’s exploration would be not only about the border and the Green Belt but about the Nazi era, too. Somewhere nearby was the site of the Ellrich-Juliushütte concentration camp, a sub-camp of Mittelbau-Dora. After World War II, first the demarcation line and then the German-German border had cut diagonally across the area marked Juliushütte on the map. Between 1943 and 1945, the German army and the S.S. forced political prisoners to construct underground factories at sites scattered over the southern Harz Mountains, to produce weapons like the V-2 rocket. The forced laborers came from all across Europe, predominantly from the Soviet Union, France, Poland, and Belgium.104 Regular citizens with regular lives—until their home countries were occupied by Nazi Germany and they were essentially kidnapped and stripped of their humanity. Nothing about the lush-looking forest gave any hint of its hellish history. The aerial photo on my phone gave no indication of where the sub-camp’s barracks once stood. The area labeled “Juliushütte” looked little different from the surrounding forest, except that the crowns of the trees there appeared smaller in diameter. Turning toward the edge of the forest, I noticed a large information panel. I leaned my bike against it to read. The inmates who were held at the sub-camp, roughly eight thousand at any given time, performed grueling construction work in the underground galleries twelve hours a day, often after being made to walk the five kilometers there and back. Built underground to protect the war industry from Allied bombing, the factories were expanded after 1944 to increase production, and the prisoners were moved above ground at some sites, including Juliushütte. Accommodations for the inmates there had been improvised in the ramshackle buildings of a former gypsum factory. Sanitary facilities were practically nonexistent and none of the buildings 104

Wagner 2009.

176 PHANTOM BORDER could be heated. Four thousand inmates did not survive Juliushütte; twenty thousand died in the Dora-Mittelbau complex as a whole. Those with specialized skills like engineering received just enough food and clothing to maintain their ability to work; those assigned to construction crews faced almost certain death, either from the grueling work, inadequate nutrition, or brutal punishment. A photo on the information panel showed the camp buildings in close proximity to the train tracks, covering the grassy area where I stood. The only building remains I could see from here were the overgrown brick walls of what had been the camp kitchen. Iron grates still barred the few window openings. I pushed the bike toward the edge of the forest, past a sign that urged hikers to stay on the trails in order to steer clear of fissures, caves, and sinkholes. This was the karst hiking trail, named after the porous geological underpinnings of a landscape formed by water in soft bedrock. Then it was as if I had crossed a threshold to a different world. I felt enveloped in a sun-dappled, airy green haven of birch, ash, mountain maple, and linden. Trills of a thrush’s exuberant song filtered through the canopy. The earthy smell, the melodious birdsong, the myriad shades of green: this is what life does, even in a place that, only nineteen years before my birth, was the site of abject inhumanity. Perhaps this place is an intelligence test, too, testing the human ability to hold two opposed realities in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. Functioning, for the time being, required little more than walking and pushing my bike along the forest trail. Walking, breathing, listening. I had begun to relax when I noticed something bright through the foliage to my left. A side trail led in that direction. At its end, I found myself at the edge of a large rectangular depression in the ground, with a wall of sand-colored field stones on the longer side. It was an almost idyllic sight: the angular stones surrounded and partly covered by rich green foliage, the sunlight casting the spaces between the stones into dark relief. For a moment I felt almost as if I were in a Vermont forest. There, my inner

HEAVEN, EARTH, AND HELL 177 landscape detective’s first thought would have been of a cellar hole on an abandoned hill farm—deserted after the nineteenth century westward migration of farmers seeking better soil. Anywhere else, it might have been mistaken for a rustic landscape installation. But this was the middle of Germany, and an interpretive sign identified the stones as the foundation of one of the concentration camp buildings. Nearby, another sign recounted the collapse of a barracks shortly after the arrival of a group of Belgian inmates, burying them under debris and causing dozens of broken limbs, spines, and other grievous injuries. Knowing the absence of even basic medical care at the camp, I shuddered to think what those inmates had to endure. A few hundred meters on, a sign marked the former site of the crematorium and explained that the dead were burned there in the days before the camp’s evacuation. No visible remains marked the site. Nearby, a large boulder held a plaque commemorating the camp inmates. The plaque was dated September 1989, two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Here in the border strip, commemoration had literally been on ice during the Cold War. On both sides of the border, a portion of the camp’s remains had been destroyed. In the realm of Cold War logic, this too made sense. The GDR razed the remaining camp structures on its territory in the course of the 1952 reinforcement of its “state border West.” The following year, a fire ravaged several of the remaining structures on the West German side. Fire engines from Ellrich arrived first and stood by on their—the East German—side of the border fence, waiting for permission from their district headquarters to cross onto West German soil. By the time permission was given, it was too late to save the buildings. The burned remains sat in shambles until 1964, when the federal government sent in a border guard unit to raze what was left, blow up the crematorium, and remove the debris. Apparently, local papers and residents of nearby villages had repeatedly complained about the Schandfleck—a word which literally means eyesore, but can also signify disgrace and shame. Indeed, the GDR government

178 PHANTOM BORDER had used the dilapidated camp remains for touristic purposes, to show its citizens the abysmal conditions in the capitalist west105— and no doubt to reinforce its view that the Nazi atrocities could be blamed solely on the capitalist west. But border tourism went both ways: in intervals along the border, there were designated viewpoints on the western side, too, including one on a hill above Juliushütte that offered West Germans a view of Ellrich and the border strip106. I pushed my bike past another “karst hiking trail” sign, eyeing the surrounding area for fissures and caves. As I walked, my thoughts turned to another piece of this particular Vergangenheit: the direct connection between the Mittelbau-Dora weapons, the V2 rocket, and the American space program. Wernher von Braun, the leading rocket scientist behind the V-2 program, surrendered to the American forces shortly before the end of the war. Transferred to the United States,107 he went on to develop the Saturn-V rocket that propelled the Apollo spacecraft to the moon. Admired by many Americans as a space hero, he consistently downplayed his involvement with the Nazi party and his knowledge of the forced labor that had made the construction of the V-2 possible.108 While von Braun’s career was following its course, nature, unencumbered by human concerns with ethics, aesthetics, or commemoration, was following its own path at the former sub-camp. Throughout the Cold War and Germany’s fitful processing of the Nazi past, forest regrew over the Juliushütte camp remains. Naturalists on both sides of the border noticed the profusion of rare plants on the rich gypsiferous soils and worked to establish nature preserves.109 The trail curved to the left and broadened. I mounted the bike again and inhaled deep breaths of the earthy forest air. Just before 105

106

107

108 109

Harz-Echo, 03/08/2000, cited in https://www.karstwanderweg.de/kww050t. htm For an in-depth treatment of West German border tourism see Eckert 2019, Chapter 3 Along with about sixteen hundred other German engineers, scientists, and technicians. Neufeld (2002) offers a well-reasoned perspective on this question. Dahlmann 1985 and Hansjörg Küster, pers. comm.

HEAVEN, EARTH, AND HELL 179 the trail reached a farm field, something about the forest to my left looked different. Only a thin veneer of trees covered what appeared to be a void. I leaned the bike against a tree and walked closer. In front of me a moonlike landscape opened, filled with bright, almost white rocky debris. At the far edge rose a cliff of sand-colored dolostone with layers of bright white gypsum. Was this the old gypsum mining operation from before the time of the Mittelbau-Dora subcamp? But that was back in the 1920s, and in the nearly hundred years since then, trees and shrubs would have grown in from the sandy edges of the clearing. And there wouldn’t be well-traveled tire tracks forming an access road. Could this be an active operation, so close to the Green Belt and to the former concentration camp? Then I remembered something Friedhart Knolle, my guide in the northern Harz Mountains, had told me: a global corporation with an office in Walkenried had been mining gypsum in an area near Juliushütte that reached into one of the adjacent nature preserves, right up to the Green Belt. Gypsum was very much in demand by the construction industry, he said. When added to cement, it controls the rate of hardening, giving workers the time they need to maneuver building components into place. The company now wanted to expand their mining operation into an area that was not only a nature preserve in the federal state of Lower Saxony, but was also protected under a European designation known as Natura. “And this,” Knolle pointed out, “despite the availability of alternative materials and this being a well-known Europe-wide biological hotspot. For decades these companies have pushed for more mining permits—always for small areas that don’t look like a big deal in and of themselves—because natural gypsum is slightly cheaper than those alternatives. The permits state that they will be required to restore the mined areas, but you cannot restore karst landscapes that have developed over tens of thousands of years— millions if you consider the formation of the gypsum itself beginning in the late Permian. Once these biotopes are gone, they’re gone, and with them the special gypsiferous soils, the

180 PHANTOM BORDER microclimates, and the rare plants and animals that depend on places like this.”110 I turned away from the crater left by the mine and picked up the trail again. It led to an agricultural road that crossed the train tracks I had traveled on a few hours earlier. If I followed my planned route, I would turn left after crossing the tracks and go straight to Walkenried, where I had reserved a room for the night. But something about the Himmelreich made me turn to the right instead. Perhaps a wish for a refuge, for the realm of heaven to be an antidote to the afternoon’s realm of hell. On the aerial photo the area looked densely forested, no more than a few hundred meters across, but without any exposed bedrock that would indicate a mining operation. Without any camp remains, either, since Juliushütte was on the side of the tracks I had just left behind me. The unpaved road beneath my tires petered out where it entered the woods. I found myself riding on a narrowing trail, enveloped by the deep green semi-dark of a beech forest. Some of the tree trunks were bigger than I could get my arms around. There was something magical about this place. “In these woods, we return to reason and faith,” Ralph Waldo Emerson seemed to whisper from somewhere in the gently shifting foliage. This is what I needed. The leaves in the thick canopy above me began to rustle and the air started to smell like rain. I should turn around. Just then my eyes fell on a grove of truly gigantic beech trunks. A few feet above ground level, the smooth elephant-gray skin of these giants divided into what looked like a wildly convoluted and interlacing web of octopus arms. A pale white shone through the spaces between them: gypsum. The fantastical octopus arms were above-ground roots anchoring the massive beeches to the craggy outcropping. In some of the small hollows where the root-trunks emerged from the soil, a powdery white substance shimmered in the twilight, as if someone had sifted flour there. A small sign explained

110

I later found out that Knolle and colleagues from BUND and other environmental NGOs were in the process of filing a complaint with the European Union (Friedhart Knolle, pers. comm.).

HEAVEN, EARTH, AND HELL 181 that the substance was called Himmelsmehl, flour of heaven. In the Middle Ages, people used this substance for baking bread during times of famine—with disastrous results, since it is actually weathered gypsum and forms hard clumps when it dries. My stomach tightened at the thought, at the same time reminding me that it would need some actual food soon. The leaves rustled ever more loudly, and in the fading light the trail almost blended into the surrounding foliage. I turned my bike around and bade a mental farewell to the Himmelreich. The rain still held off. Against the darkening sky, I could barely make out the tall sandstone fragments of an ancient church tower: Walkenried Abbey, the Cistercian monastery that had shaped the little town’s life, and the surrounding landscape, since the twelfth century. The skeletal tower fragments hinted that the church had once been enormous. Gazing at the ghostlike structure, I thought back over the day. The pleasant train ride and the hell of the labor camp. The surface mine’s impoverished wasteland. The fragility of the Green Belt, and of human life. Who was I if I did not feel the vulnerability and the brokenness? And also, who was I not to open my eyes to sources of Zuversicht? They were there, if I only paid attention: the local people setting up memorials, the students researching the history and ecology of Juliushütte, the birdsong and the forest that had returned to cover the remains, following only the ancient law of life, to live and to grow.

Chapter 12: Changes in the Land I have more faith in trees than in God. —Sarah Kirsch You never leave home. You take your home with you. You better. Otherwise, you’re homeless. —James Baldwin

Last night’s ominous wind still blew around the streets of Walkenried when I stepped outside in search of Brötchen for breakfast. On my way back from the bakery a steady rain set in. Allright. I didn’t bring this in vain, I thought as I extracted my rain gear from the bike panniers and considered my plan for the day. My only firm commitment for the day was the room I had booked in Duderstadt, some forty kilometers away as long as I didn’t wander off the route too much. After yesterday’s descent into the darkness of the concentration camp outpost, the spaciousness of a day without pre-arranged meetings felt welcome. Perhaps I would visit a border museum along the way. In contrast to the sparse ruins of the abbey church I had seen in last night’s twilight, the rest of the monastery looked considerably more complete. I leaned my bicycle against a rugged oak tree near the entrance, hoping its thick roof of leaves would keep the rain from drenching the panniers. “Guten Morgen!” A voice greeted me as I stepped inside through the heavy wooden door. A blond woman smiled at me from behind a welcome desk and asked where I was from, as she probably asked every visitor. I hesitated for a moment. Bremen? Vermont? There was no line at the desk, so I answered “Bremen and Vermont” and explained about my border expedition. From there, we fell into an easy conversation. Anja W., I learned, was born in 1967, exactly halfway through the time Germany was divided, and had practically grown up with the border in a small village north of Walkenried, in the West. “My parents’ backyard almost ran up against it,” she told me. “Sometimes during a quiet night, I could hear the dogs bark in the

183

184 PHANTOM BORDER border strip. I didn’t know they were kept there to go after people who tried to flee from East Germany. The adults only talked about the border in hushed tones. It was an eerie situation.” She seemed to look inward. “Occasionally, I would hear explosions from the border. I only found out much later what those meant: that someone trying to flee had stepped on a mine, or that an animal—most likely a deer—had gotten into the border strip and set one off.” Right. Not all wildlife benefited from the border like birds did—for mammals it was just as deadly as for humans. Eventually, the GDR installed double fences in areas of century-old deer passages.111 “How has this region fared since Reunification?” I asked. She reflected for a moment. “There is more competition for jobs,” she said, “because there is still a pay differential between the eastern and western federal states. For example, jobs in geriatric nursing pay more here in Lower Saxony than in Thuringia.” “It’s a complex situation,” Anja continued. “And it doesn’t help that eastern Germany has basically been hemorrhaging people for decades, both before and after Reunification. That makes it even harder for companies to find workers, at least outside cities like Leipzig and Dresden.” I nodded. “At least now there seems to be a reverse trend in the making. I just read in Die Zeit that for the first time since the Wende, more people are moving ‘east’ than ‘west.’ Especially when they start families, because work and childcare are still easier to coordinate there.” The GDR childcare system had been geared towards that goal from the beginning. In contrast, the old West German system was built on the assumption that most childcare would be provided within the family, specifically by the mother. While both Germanys relied on foreign labor to keep up with post-war economic growth, the East German economy had to deal with the additional challenge

111

Eckert (2019, p. 166f) also discusses an earlier attempt to solve the problem by hunting under the pretext of military maneuvers and points out that on the Western side of the border, car collisions killed even more deer.

CHANGES IN THE LAND 185 of many of its citizens fleeing the country and was therefore dependent on women being fully functioning members of the economy—and organized childcare accordingly. While childcare, like every other sector of society, underwent profound changes after Reunification, the more comprehensive East German approach had carried through into the post-Reunification Eastern federal states. “I’ve heard that, too,” Anja said. “It makes sense to me; that and the pull of Heimat and family.” She used the word “Heimat” in the sense of simply “Herkunft”—one’s place of origin—with none of the exclusionary connotations championed by the AfD. I thanked her for the conversation and opened the heavy oak door to the cloister, the interior walkway that surrounded the monastery garden. Diffuse light filtered in through tall gothic windows, the opaque glass patterned into diamond shapes by narrow lead seams. The light, the rough-hewn blocks and uneven surfaces of the sandstone walls, the curved ribs of the arched ceiling: all of this lent the space a simple yet uplifted air. This wasn’t even the church itself, and still. The walls of this unassuming cloister seemed to breathe a quiet faith. A sense of Zuversicht. It was a familiar feeling, one I had had in other sacred spaces— spaces created by human hands, but also in forests. Even in the Himmelreich last night, in the grove of ancient beeches near the overgrown remains of the concentration camp. It was the sense of the sacred in that grove that saved me from despair after the encounter with the realm of hell. What was it that made the Himmelreich feel sacred? I wondered. There was something primordial, perhaps a gut feeling that forces beyond the human realm had shaped that space. Photosynthesis, erosion, tectonics, nutrient cycles, decomposition, growth—processes that are not dependent on human ideas about how things should be, about who is worthy and who is not. What about houses of worship, then, or even this simple cloister? What makes them sacred? In these human creations, too, the builders must have drawn on something beyond immediate human concerns. Did they reach down to a shared foundation of human experience, buried deep under layers of conflict and confusion? Were they compelled by something greater and more enduring than the dark corners of the mind? Perhaps

186 PHANTOM BORDER they knew that at bottom their creations, too, are rooted in those forces beyond the human realm. That without photosynthesis and the rock cycle, they would have had no building materials. However these ancient builders did it, their creation made me feel welcome, the same way I felt welcome in the woods: not in a personal way, but as a living being. Maybe that is what these spaces speak to: the possibility that one could be at home on this earth? To be grounded and at the same time connected with the realm of heaven? That we humans could live like we belong here? And because in the force-field of everyday life we sometimes forget this deep desire, we need these spaces to remind us. I had followed the walkway around three sides of the cloister garden when, just ahead, near one of the quadrangle’s corners, I noticed an open door leading to a room with wooden desks and heavy bookstands: once the monks’ study, now part of a museum. A wooden staircase led to a spacious tower that now holds exhibits about the monastery’s nine-hundred-year history. The order of Cistercians had existed for only twenty-five years in 1129, when twelve monks and an abbot had come to the densely wooded semi-wilderness that was to become Walkenried. They were inspired by a back-to-the-basics spirit: the Cistercian monastic order had begun as a protest movement against the pomp and frivolity that had developed in monastic life over the previous centuries. Spiritual renewal may have been their mission, but that did not mean that the monks were living like hermits. The old monastic rule Ora et labora et lege—“pray and work and study”—still guided their endeavors, and much of the labora took place outside the monastery walls. As remote as the Harz region of the early twelfth century would have looked to a time-traveler from the present, the treasures of the earth hidden in these mountains had already drawn settlers—first Celtic and later Germanic tribes—as far back as the Bronze Age. Nor had the rich silver, copper, and iron ore deposits

CHANGES IN THE LAND 187 escaped the attention of kings and emperors, who established several residences in the region.112 In 1188, Emperor Frederick Barbarossa granted the monastery shares in the Rammelsberg mines, whose lucrative copper and silver deposits ensured a steady source of labora, not to mention income. The monastery had become an economic powerhouse, a major medieval corporation. In the end, though, the monastery’s success lasted only some two hundred years. When in the fourteenth century the plague— which killed half of Europe’s population—reached the Harz region, the mining industry collapsed. Agriculture fared little better. The monastery scraped by for another century until the Peasants’ Uprising swept through central Germany and laid the monastery church to waste. I retraced my steps back down the stairs to the arched cloister, then decided to follow the quadrangle around one more time. Ora et labora et lege, the whitewashed walls of the cloister seemed to whisper. Pray and work and study. Or meditate and work and study, which as far as I can tell amounts to the same thing. I’ve heard both prayer and meditation described as a means of learning to feel one’s own heart. Maybe these walls are saying that to feel our own hearts, we need occasionally to retreat to a place like this. The early monasteries for wandering Buddhist monks were known by the Sanskrit term vihara—a home for the heart and mind as well as for the body. James Baldwin wrote, “You take your home with you. Otherwise you’re homeless.” Baldwin spent the last seventeen years of his life in France, but he was not talking about picking up and moving one’s physical home across an ocean. Both as a foreigner and as an African American gay man, an Other wherever he found himself, he knew well the meaning Thoreau saw in “sauntering”: sans terre, without a land or a home. You take your home with you. Is this not the central tension for humanity at this time on earth? Certainly for those who have left their original home,

112

In the Middle Ages, German rulers did not have one central castle but rather rotated among a number of residences to ensure a regular presence across the territory they ruled.

188 PHANTOM BORDER whether by choice, necessity, or force. Can one ever find another home? Thoreau, for one, seemed to think so, at least in the sense in which “having no particular home” could mean being “equally at home everywhere.” What about my own home? Could I think of home that way? So much of my sense of belonging had to do with the land and the people, which made it rooted to specific places rather than “equally at home everywhere.” In that regard, much of me was in Vermont, where I had learned to search for the stories in the landscape and become part of human and social webs over the years. On my visits to Germany, even in close relationships with family and friends, there were often gaps in our sense of each other’s lives. At times, the gaps had sharp edges, like when a friend referred to me (lightheartedly, no doubt) as “the American.” How could he know that in my everyday life, “America” felt too vast to relate to, that Vermont was the place and scale that held meaning. Some days it could be a particular trail in the Green Mountains, sometimes a single spot where I sat quietly on the forest floor to listen to the song of the hermit thrush. Much of the time, it was my desk. Other times, a spontaneous dinner party with friends. How could my friend understand that my life in “America” did not make me any less German? And that I was beginning to discover that “German” was often too big—and at the same time, too limited—a lens for who I was here, too? But that was part of my mission on this reconnaissance, as well: to reconnect with people beyond catching up between visits, to allow time for more meaningful exchange. And as to the land, I had already pieced together parts of the story, or perhaps parts of several stories. Beyond the big chapters of tectonic movements, erosion, ancient seas, and vast expanses of ice, there were all the local and regional chapters, of humans moving earth and water, planting grains, cutting trees, extracting iron ore or other treasures. I glanced up at the curved ribs of the cloister’s ceiling, then followed the shape of the gothic windows. Even on this gray day, the light that filtered in made the space feel welcoming. An unexpected temporary home for this saunterer between the worlds, and for all these questions that were traveling with me.

CHANGES IN THE LAND 189 I was still the only visitor in the cloister. As I rounded the last corner of the quadrangle, I sent a silent thank you to the long-gone monks for the serendipitous walking meditation. Outside the heavy oak door, the rain was still falling. I pulled on my rain gear and began to pedal. Past Walkenried, the bike lane entered a patch of woods and soon turned into a soggy dirt path. In between dodging puddles and wiping rain from my face, I noticed the metallic-gray surface of a pond through the trees. Finding ponds in the vicinity of monasteries was not unusual. Because monastic rules forbade eating meat on certain days of the church calendar, fish became the preferred dietary substitute. This, in turn, necessitated fish ponds to ensure a reliable supply. What was unusual in Walkenried was the ground beneath the ponds: the porous karst landscape of the southern Harz Mountains. While there is no scarcity of water in these mountains, the band of gypsum on their southern edge means that much of that water disappears into the fissures and caves that keep forming in the soft material. How does one get water to stay in a pond in such a landscape? For this challenge, too, the Walkenried monk-engineers found a solution. They began by building dams across the low, swampy valleys west of the monastery to collect rainwater and leachate. To minimize the loss of water, they dug connecting trenches between ponds, and to regulate water levels they installed bypass channels. All in all, the monks built more than three hundred ponds. Some of the ponds filled in and grew over with shrubs and trees in the course of time; some were maintained by the monastery until the 1950s. At that point, the remaining ponds were put under a conservation easement and all maintenance activities halted. A good thing, one might think, to let the land return to a natural state. But within a few years the dams between the ponds became overgrown with alder, and the ponds filled up with leaves and turned into alder swamps. The number of bird species and other wildlife that lived in and around the ponds plummeted. It became clear that in this case, human activity—keeping the dams clear of vegetation

190 PHANTOM BORDER and cutting reeds along the shores—had had the side effect of creating habitat for a whole suite of wildlife. *** The Bad Sachsa border museum is only a thirty-minute ride from Walkenried, but by the time I reached it, the steady deluge had won out against my rain pants. If the forecast held true, the rain would be with me for the rest of the day. Still, the thought of a dry pair of pants, even for an hour or two, was irresistible. I retreated to the museum’s bathroom to sort through the various plastic bags in my panniers and fished out my spare pair of pants and socks, then draped my soggy rain gear over a coat rack in the entrance area. Reasonably dry again, I purchased a ticket for a guided tour about to start. An energetic-looking man in his fifties with a marked Thuringian accent was the guide. Herr P. seemed to know every last detail about the former border—not only the historical background, but how many kilometers of it had minefields (eight hundred), how many mines were laid in total (1.37 million), and how much it had cost the GDR government to build and maintain the border (one million GDR marks per kilometer113). One of the museum’s most prized exhibits was an original border coordination station: the set of consoles, arranged for a 360-degree view from the top of a watchtower, where all the information from a particular section of border was pooled. Herr P. demonstrated how light and sound signals alerted the guards on duty any time a signal wire was touched. From here, they could see immediately where a breach was happening and direct the patrolling guards to the scene. Even more than the mechanics of the border, I was interested in Herr P.’s own experience, so I lingered after he finished the tour. He did not mind my questions. I quickly learned the reason for his in-depth knowledge: He had been a Grenzaufklärer (border 113

The line item for the border troops in the GDR’s budget for 1988 (not including the physical border) was 2.1 billion GDR marks (Schultke, 2008). Because the GDR mark was not a convertible currency, it is impossible to give an equivalent in US dollars.

CHANGES IN THE LAND 191 investigator) for six years, a member of the elite unit that was called in to investigate after an escape. “We were the only ones allowed to enter the ‘outside sovereign territory,’” he explained. Besides investigating escapes, the unit’s responsibility was to document any activity on the Western side, usually BGS (West German border service) guards patrolling their side of the border, and respond in case any of it took place on East German soil, even if a confused tourist had stepped over the borderline by mistake. I asked how he came to be a border investigator. “I’m from Ellrich,” he replied, “that’s where my whole family was. There weren’t many job options there. Working for the border troops was a way to stay close to home. And we got a salary bonus for living and working so close to the border, so I was able to provide well for my family.” Professional soldiers, he explained, got to choose a border segment, unlike the young NVA recruits, who were sent far from home during their eighteen-month mandatory training. At times Herr P. lived dangerously. After the 1983 Helsinki Accords,114 in which the GDR agreed to remove the mines along the border, Herr P. was assigned the risky task of defusing mines. Once, during his shift, an officer on his team stepped on one and was so badly injured that he lost a leg. Danger and privilege. And impeccable ideological credentials. Anyone allowed to work outside the westernmost fence—with no other barriers keeping him from stepping over the borderline into West Germany—had to be deemed extra-reliable by the GDR. I was certain I knew the answer, but still I asked Herr P. whether he had been in “the Party.” “Oh, yes, you had to,” he responded. “But that wasn’t an issue for me. I was primed for it by my upbringing; my mother was in a party leadership position.” I remembered learning that new recruits to the GDR border troops were taught to refer to geographic directions in the vicinity 114

This agreement was made during the 1983 CSCE (Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe) meeting in Helsinki, at which the GDR committed to respecting human rights, including the free movement of its citizens. However, GDR laws continued to define any attempt to leave the country as a crime. See Hertle 2008.

192 PHANTOM BORDER of the border as “friendward” and “enemyward,” and asked whether he had thought of the West German guards as enemies. “No, I never did,” Herr P. said. “They were doing their job and I was doing mine.” At least from our interaction so far, I sensed not a shred of ideological dogma about him. Granted, he’s had a quarter century to undo the indoctrination that was certainly part of his training. I wanted to know whether any escapes had happened during his time at the border. “Yes,” he replied. “There were six altogether in our segment. Three of them were deserters—members of the border troops. In one case it was a sergeant: he knew exactly where the patrol guards were at the time, and I could tell that he had crossed precisely where one of the minefields ended. I also found out that he had taken his pistol with him.” Good thing the refugee knew the rhythm of the patrol guards’ movements, so he was not faced with the decision whether to shoot his colleagues. A study of the deaths at the border had been published just a few months earlier,115 citing a total of 327. Nine had been border guards killed by deserters.116 The study had also counted forty-four suicides among members of the Grenztruppen, several of which were later traced back to other causes. The true picture was likely more complex than the widespread perception in West Germany, and to some extent also in the GDR, of trigger-happy brainwashed SED puppets. Herr P. himself came face to face with this view when a museum visitor who had been a Stasi prisoner found out about Herr P.’s past as a border guard. The man had yelled at him: “And how many did you shoot?” That was tough, Herr P. said. And that was not the only time he had been the target of angry accusations. “How do you deal with situations like that?” I asked.

115

116

Schroeder and Staadt 2017. See also footnote 11 on p. 19 in this book and Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2023. Another twenty-four deserters died from mines, drowning, being shot by their colleagues, or suicide after failed attempts to escape (ibid.).

CHANGES IN THE LAND 193 “I try to anticipate them, try not to let things escalate.” He smiled, as if encouraging himself, then shrugged. “Everyone was doing their job.” Maybe, I thought to myself, but what about those guards who did shoot their fellow citizens just for wanting to leave the GDR? As soon as the question went through my mind, I knew it was not the whole question. For one thing, the border guards were only those on the ground, left to make decisions in situations of extreme stress. What about those in positions of political or military leadership, who had formulated and reinforced the Schiessbefehl (the order to shoot)? And how does one establish guilt in a context where the crime—to shoot and kill refugees—was explicitly condoned by the government and the legal code at the time? The latter question, of course, was exactly what courts had to grapple with after Reunification. Throughout the 1990s and up through 2004, a series of trials (known as the Mauerschützenprozesse, or wall shooter trials) were conducted to grapple with the question of legal responsibility for those who died along the GDR border. Of the 280 people charged in connection with these deaths (among them border guards as well as SED party leaders, members of the politburo, and military leaders), 134 were found guilty and received prison sentences. There was one more thing I wanted to know from Herr P. “How did you experience the Wende?” If even my far-away, uninvolved West German self had realized that the fall of the Berlin Wall meant the end of the German-German border, he certainly must have known that his job would disappear once the border became useless. Herr P. had been near the end of his shift when the news came on the evening of November 9 that the Berlin Wall was open. “I was dumbfounded,” he said. “I almost cried. Never in my life did I expect that to happen.” He was sent to a border crossing a few kilometers south of Ellrich, to Mackenrode, where people from both sides were amassing, which was opened later that night. After border controls were abolished on July 1, 1990, Herr P. was reassigned as a security guard for government buildings and

194 PHANTOM BORDER weapons depots. His last day on the job was October 2, 1990—the day before Reunification and the last day the GDR existed. “I had applied to the BGS (the West German border service), but was rejected—they took very few of us.” This was not surprising, since the BGS now also had a surplus of border guards. Most of them ended up being stationed on Germany’s border with Poland.117 “But I was lucky. I was not unemployed for a single day,” Herr P. went on. “I had a truck driver’s license as part of my NVA training and I was hired by a municipality near Ellrich. I drove grocery transports, the fire truck, everything. I still drive for the volunteer firefighters.” He was twenty-eight at the time of Reunification, young enough for a new start and a new system. From conversations I’d had with people who were over forty when the wall came down, I knew most of them had much rougher transitions. Sometime in the early 1990s, Herr P. saw a flyer announcing plans for the borderland museum, and put in his application. “Since then, I’ve been coming here one or two days a month to do this”— he waved his hand in a semicircle to encompass the museum exhibits. He is doing this as a volunteer, I realized, surprised. He helps others understand the absurdities and tragedies of the former border. Perhaps this is the best way to make use of his first career. But to offer himself as a recipient for the grief and rage of those who were personally harmed by it? I had to give him credit for that. I climbed into my rain gear again. It was mid-afternoon already; the rain was still coming down in thick, stringy drops. The heavy clouds did not look as though they’d break open any time soon. I figured I had about two hours ahead of me to Duderstadt. A short way from the museum, the road opened up to a broad valley bordered in the east by a striking cliff of light-colored rock, the last I would see of the gypsum band. Then the landscape around me took on a gentler topography marked by pillowlike hillocks: 117

The regular NVA soldiers were all transferred to the Bundeswehr, the military of the Federal Republic of Germany.

CHANGES IN THE LAND 195 mementos of the Permian-period Zechstein Sea whose salty waters had settled out into enormous potash deposits some 250 million years ago. A yellow sign by the side of the road announced the village of Mackenrode: the border village where Herr P. had been sent on the evening the Berlin Wall fell. On this damp, gloomy afternoon, the scene was quiet, a far cry from the throngs of people and mile-long lines of Trabants that must have converged here that night. *** Mackenrode, Limlingerode: Every other village name around here seemed to end in -rode. The verb roden means to clear a forest; very likely all these villages were settled right around the time the Walkenried monks arrived in the area. Eight centuries later, tiny Limlingerode became the birthplace of the freethinking, nature-loving, language-bending poet Sarah Kirsch. In an interview with the journalist Iris Radisch, she once said that “I have more faith in trees than in God”—at first glance perhaps this reflected the GDR’s atheistic worldview, but it was just as likely an expression of her own connection with the natural world. Radisch cited one of Kirsch’s poems: Here I know/Only an alder/Gray goose of/Air now I am/Everywhere (Hier kenne ich/Nur eine Erle/Graugans aus/Luft jetzt bin ich/Überall)

to which Kirsch responded, “This is what we can communicate. That one is a part of nature. This is what I know. Why I am here. With whom I speak.”118 In the span of her lifetime (1935–2013), Kirsch was a citizen of three different national entities. For the first two—Prussia119 and East Germany—all she had to do was stay put: only the boundaries and the names shifted. But life in the GDR became increasingly difficult for her. In 1976, along with a number of other prominent East German artists, she protested against the expulsion of the singer118 119

Radisch 2015 When Kirsch was born, in 1935, the village was part of the Province of Saxony, which was part of Prussia.

196 PHANTOM BORDER songwriter Wolf Biermann. After a year of increasing pressure from the East German state, she saw no future for herself in the GDR and applied for an exit visa for herself and her young son. Surprisingly, and unlike the applications of many other East German citizens, hers was granted. Together with her son, she moved first to West Berlin and later to a small village on the North Sea coast. In an interview in 1990, she noted that the harassment she herself experienced was less harsh than the treatment other writers received, several of whom were sent to jail or, if they were granted an exit permit, were not allowed to take their manuscripts with them. She explains that she ultimately applied for an exit permit because of the chicanery to which her eight-year-old son was being subjected in school. “The repressions [toward my son] began right after [my] signature [on the protest letter against Wolf Biermann’s expulsion]. So you see that you had to teach your children to be duplicitous if you wanted them to be able to get a high school diploma. You had to lie, lie, lie, and I could not do that to my child.”120 The house of her childhood in Limlingerode was easy to find: a beautifully restored timber-framed house in the center of the little village. The house was made into a Dichterstätte in 1997, a house of poetry, used for occasional author readings. Sarah Kirsch herself had returned once, after Reunification, to read from her work. From all indications she was happy in her second Heimat in West Germany. And yet it must have been a bittersweet return. For her, as for many other East German writers, the conditions under which literature could be produced had created both a greater sense of “collective undertaking” than in the West121 and a deep rift in that social and creative fabric after Biermann’s expulsion. For Kirsch herself, the rift tore right through her close friendship with Christa Wolf, another prominent East German writer. Wolf had remained in the GDR, while Kirsch considered the system “corrupt beyond redemption.” She felt that Wolf was unwittingly sustaining that system by her continued presence.122.

120 121 122

Graves 1991. Ibid. Radisch 2019.

CHANGES IN THE LAND 197 Another kind of phantom boundary, along with all the phantom pain of broken human bonds. I mounted my bike again and turned west on the one-lane road that led out of Limlingerode. The sky hung low, heavy with clouds; the rain had begun to blow in sideways gusts. The second set of pants of the day clung to my legs, soggy. As I turned, my eyes landed on a road sign pointing to another -rode village: Bischofferode, twelve kilometers to the southeast. Bischofferode: Why does the name sound familiar? And then it came to me: a few years after Reunification, in the summer of 1993, the geological story of this landscape had come into jarring contact with one of reunited Germany’s most difficult chapters. In the process, the name of this little village of two thousand had made headlines across the country and even in the New York Times. On July 1 of that summer, forty mine workers went on a hunger strike to protest the closing of “their” potash mine—the mine that had sustained the local economy since before World War I and ensured the German potash industry’s near monopoly on the world market for agricultural fertilizers. The searing human and economic fallout of the closing manifested in the form of the Treuhandanstalt, the trust corporation tasked with privatizing the East German economy. The agency had been established by the last parliament of the GDR in March 1990 in order to handle the transformation of the GDR’s state-run economy into a market economy. The Treuhand thus faced the daunting task of assessing the value and steering the fate of over 12,000 East German volkseigene Betriebe (VEBs, stateowned companies), along with the fate of their roughly four million employees—more than a third of the East German workforce. In the case of the Bischofferode potash mine, the Treuhand had arranged for a merger of the East German Kali (potash) AG company and the West German firm Kali + Salz, a subsidiary of BASF. The arrangement required closing some production sites in both east and west, with a roughly comparable loss of jobs on both sides. The main argument for the closings was the excess capacity on the world market for potash; another consideration was the loss of markets in Eastern Europe due to East Germany’s adoption of

198 PHANTOM BORDER West Germany’s D-Mark, which made East German products significantly more expensive. These arguments for the merger were rejected by the Bischofferode miners because their mines were bringing in profits and had long-established international sales contracts with countries such as Sweden.123 In addition, the Bischofferode potash was considered to have the highest quality in all of Germany. The miners initially responded to the announcement of the closing by occupying the mine, then with protests at the Thuringian state parliament and at the headquarters of Kali + Salz in the western city of Kassel. At one point, the mine workers’ council found an investor who agreed to keep the Bischofferode mine open, but the Treuhand rejected his proposal. In a desperate attempt to avert the closing, forty of the seven hundred Bischofferode miners began a hunger strike. In the end, they had to give up. The mine closed for good on January 1, 1994. The case of the Bischofferode potash mine exemplified what happened on a much larger scale across eastern Germany during the transformation years of the early 1990s: a company or mine was closed, the workers received severance packages or limited employment elsewhere, and many of them never found steady employment again. Bischofferode became emblematic of the view in cultural memory, especially among eastern Germans, of the Treuhand as a “bad bank”124—an institution that sold off East German property in order to rake in profits for western capitalists. Historian Marcus Böick points out that for many East Germans, the Treuhand was the first institution of the new, reunited Germany they encountered, as well as one of the most powerful, and that this happened at a time when virtually all the “old” East German institutions—like universities and municipalities—were disappearing or being restructured.125 123

124 125

See the MDR documentary released in 2020, which can be found at https:// www.mdr.de/geschichte/archiv/einfuehrung-bischofferode-doku-treuhand-t rauma-100.html Böick and Goschler 2017. Bidder 2019. See also Böick 2020.

CHANGES IN THE LAND 199 *** The road entered a forested area. Fog shrouded the sturdy Scotch pines and Norway spruces. The rain had eased into a light drizzle. I inhaled the damp air and felt the sadness of Bischofferode begin to lift as I pedaled. The forest exerted an almost magical pull, a yearning to walk on its soft ground and to think. Or rather, to saunter, and let the thoughts settle like the oak and poplar leaves that were slowly trundling to the ground, set loose by the earlier gusts of wind. Then the thought of walking drifted away, too, and I laughed. Did you forget? The rhythmic motion of riding the bike was having the same effect, after all, as walking in the Harz Mountains or in Walkenried Monastery. Treten, treten—pedal, keep pedaling, as my father had taught me all those years ago. And inhale this damp, forest-laden air. As I pedaled, scenes and images from the day came back and began to form a thread. The East-West pay gap, the border museum visitor’s anger at Mr. P., the rift in the friendship between Sarah Kirsch and Christa Wolf, the desperation of the Bischofferode miners: all of these were echoes from Germany as a divided country. Treten, treten. But there were those other echoes, too. Places like the now border-less Baltic Sea beach, the lush Wakenitz floodplain forest, the sea eagles scouting for prey over the glimmering Schaalsee, the Grenzweg up the Brocken, all part of the Green Belt. People like Silke Kowalski, Meinhard Schmechel, and Siggi Schefke. Places I would not have seen, people I would not have met without the events of 1989. All of these were now part of the fabric of this country, which was so different from the country I had left all those years ago. This was still my home country, but my relationship with it was growing richer day by day, kilometer by kilometer. *** Something moved up ahead on the rain-glistening road, just above ground level. My eyes tried to focus. A sturdy-looking gray-brown

200 PHANTOM BORDER cat with a thick tail. A wildcat? European wildcats (Felis sylvestris) are both extremely shy and extremely rare in Germany, but they have been documented in the Harz Mountains and the Thuringian Forest—and I was traveling right between these two areas alongside the Green Belt. The perfect corridor for wild creatures. I squinted my eyes to see if its tail had rings of lighter-colored fur. It was hard to tell in the dim light. The cat trotted into the woods on the other side of the road. Even the possibility of having seen such an elusive creature gave my mood an electrifying lift. Another sign appeared by the side of the road: Nature Center Herbigshagen. From the guidebook I knew that it had been founded by Heinz Sielmann, a name I remembered well from my childhood: he had hosted a popular TV show called Expeditions into the Animal Kingdom, which even I, a relatively TV-deprived child, was allowed to watch. It was through Heinz Sielmann that a broader German public first learned about the biological richness of the border strip. Like Kai Frobel, Sielmann noticed the unusual presence of wildlife along the Iron Curtain compared to the rest of the landscape. In 1988, he dedicated an episode of Expeditions to the wildlife “in the shadow of the border.” Sielmann concluded the broadcast by remarking that if the border were ever overcome, the landscapes along it would offer the chance at a unique national park and transboundary conservation project. What better monument to the border and German unity could there be, he asked, not suspecting what the following year would bring.126 Duderstadt looked gray in the rainy twilight when I arrived, but even so, the timber-framed houses gave it an inviting air of Gemütlichkeit. There were small ones with beams warped from the centuries and a tall imposing one with the letters RATHAUS (city hall) across the front. I dropped off the dripping panniers in my modest hotel room, then decided to treat myself to a glass of wine. The innkeeper who had checked me in turned out to also be in charge of the bar. “Long

126

Kai Frobel, Heinz Sielmann’s widow Inge, and Kai’s colleague Hubert Weiger at BUND were jointly awarded Germany’s highest prize for conservation work, the German Environmental Prize (Deutscher Umweltpreis) in 2017.

CHANGES IN THE LAND 201 day in the rain?” he asked with a smile and reached for a carafe, which he poured extra-full. I accepted the tray carefully to keep the wine from spilling, grateful for another moment of charity on this strange pilgrimage.

Chapter 13: The Wall in Our Heads More than we usually care to think, our everyday lives are criss-crossed by border zones, pockets, and eruptions of all kinds. Social borders frequently become salient around such lines as sexual orientation, gender, class, race, ethnicity, nationality, age, politics, dress, food, or taste. —Renato Rosaldo

Bright sunlight filtered through the blinds of my spartan room, whose size and simplicity resembled a monastery cell. Every available surface—the single chair, the radiator, even the sink—was draped with a piece of my wardrobe. I touched the pants that my rain gear had not protected very well in yesterday’s all-day downpour. Much better. The sun and the airflow would take care of the remaining dampness. An upsurge of energy and anticipation pulsed through me. I gathered up my scattered belongings, said Auf Wiedersehen to the innkeeper and thanked him again for the extra-large glass of wine last night. With the morning sun warming my skin and the still-damp pants, I pushed my bike out of the little hotel’s alleyway in search of Duderstadt’s market square. The Marktplatz (market square) was only a cobblestone street away. I scanned the neat rows of timber-framed houses that lined the square. There: two bronze figures reaching for each other but kept apart by an invisible wall. The folds of the two figures’ bronze clothing looked alive, they seemed to move toward each other. It was almost painful to see them stopped in their tracks by that gap, their bodies ending in flatness as if pressed against a pane of glass. This was Karl-Henning Seemann’s “Reunification Well” sculpture, created in 1994 “to illustrate the challenges of Reunification but also the unique historical opportunity.” I pushed my bike closer. He’s good at what he does. The early morning quiet was giving way to the gentle thud of tires rolling over cobblestones, an occasional squeaky bicycle brake lever, and shreds of conversation: the sounds of people starting their day. My eyes landed on a sign for “Hermann’s Bakery” at the same moment the smell of fresh Brötchen reached my nose. With 203

204 PHANTOM BORDER barely a conscious thought, I pointed my bicycle in that direction and leaned it against the bakery’s wall. Breakfast roll and steaming coffee mug in hand, I claimed a table at the edge of the patio, with a view of the Reunification Well and the striking backdrop of the market square’s timber-frame facades. Just as I was wondering if it was a bit too postcard-like, I heard someone say “Guten Morgen!” A woman with short, dark hair had approached the table. “Do you mind if I sit here?” Startled for a split-second, I told her of course not and mustered a smile, both at her and about myself. It has been a long time since I experienced the German custom of joining strangers at a table. Eateries here rarely assign customers to specific tables, leaving guests to fend for themselves when the space fills up. As a shy child, I used to find this alarming. Now it felt like a quirky cultural difference: Americans, who place such value on personal freedom, let themselves be assigned a table, while Germans, who like things to be well organized, gamely march up to strangers to sort out seating arrangements. Maybe the difference had to do with what I called the American space bubble? During my first few months in the United States, I was puzzled to observe how people shrank back when others passed them in a grocery aisle or on a sidewalk, and to hear them say “Excuse me” when a stranger stepped closer to them than about three feet. Eventually, I concluded that an invisible bubble of personal space surrounds Americans. The woman took a seat across from me and placed a steaming cup of coffee on the table in front of her. She regarded the GermanGerman Bike Route guidebook on the table next to my mug of milky coffee. “You’re biking along the Grenze?” I filled her in about my expedition and took the opportunity to ask whether she had lived here when the border existed. “Sure did,” she replied. “Those were sad times. The border was right over there, barely a kilometer away.” She pointed east. “Now it’s hard to believe it ever existed.” Stirring her coffee, she went on, “I moved here from Greece forty years ago. So I have lots of experience crossing borders.” Only now did I notice a very slight accent.

THE WALL IN OUR HEADS 205 “Back then, you had to stop at checkpoints each time you wanted to cross from one European country to another. Often you had to wait for hours—not to cross the Iron Curtain, but to cross from Italy to France, from France to Germany, Germany to the Netherlands, and so on. I don’t miss that at all. That’s the best thing about the EU, to my mind.” I had not thought about those other borders nearly as much lately as about the phantom border I’d been tracing. But I agreed with her that the open borders have made the other European nations feel a lot closer. “Did you know anyone in the GDR?” I asked. “My husband had some relatives drüben,” she replied. “We went to visit them several times during the time of the division, and I was always so impressed with people’s inventiveness. They could fix anything, they didn’t throw things away that could still be used.” We sipped our coffees and I asked, “What was it like when the border opened near here?” “It was amazing. It happened in the middle of the night on November 10, the day after the Berlin Wall fell. There were throngs and throngs of people, lots of Trabis everywhere. We let several people stay at our house overnight, people who came from longer distances. It was an incredible time.” She must have noticed me gazing at the exquisitely maintained timber framed facades because she said, “To think that all of this came this close to being destroyed.” She formed a small gap between her thumb and index finger. “Have you heard of Major Link?” I hadn’t. “He basically saved the town. In April 1945, Major Link was told by his army superiors to defend Duderstadt at all costs from the advancing U.S. army. By then it was clear as daylight to anyone except the Nazi leadership that Germany’s defeat was imminent. Major Link knew it, too. So he transferred the tank battalions to an out-of-the-way location and surrendered the town to the Americans. That was almost an entire month before Nazi Germany’s capitulation on May 8, 1945.”

206 PHANTOM BORDER I was impressed. Not even the toughest army major could have been unconcerned about flatly ignoring a Nazi general’s order. “That must have taken a lot of courage.” “He had a very strong faith,” my breakfast companion said. “His son said in an interview later that his father had told him that his faith helped him overcome the fear.” Like Siggi, and like so many others. It’s not that they weren’t afraid or pretended not to be afraid. They faced their fears and did what they felt they needed to do. Looking over the serene market square again I sent a mental thank-you to Major Link for saving this remarkable ensemble of wood, cobb, and stone from obliteration, and even more for sparing Duderstadt’s residents a bloodbath.127 My breakfast acquaintance picked up her coffee mug and told me she had an appointment. “Good luck with your border expedition!” she said in parting. “Danke—also for telling me about Major Link!” I called after her and waved. I spread my map on the table to review my route. The next three days would take me through the Eichsfeld— the region AfD co-chair Gauland had pointed to as an example of typical Germanness. Geographically, the “field of oaks” (the meaning of Eichsfeld in English) connects the southern Harz Mountains and the Thuringian Basin with a tapestry of gently wooded hills and small towns. Culturally, it is a region with a distinct identity, known for its residents’ strong Catholic faith. I had puzzled about this when I planned this section of the expedition: the Eichsfeld’s boundaries go back to the twelfth century, but the CatholicProtestant distinction has only existed since the early sixteenth century, when Martin Luther triggered the Reformation. There had to be something before the Reformation that defined the Eichsfeld. Not surprisingly, the answer to the puzzle had to do with the various regional rulers whose dealings over centuries had made the 127

At the close of World War II, Duderstadt’s (then) 7,000 residents also somehow housed 8,000 refugees, more than 3,000 evacuees, and about 1,000 foreign prisoners of war. (Nachtwey 2015). Today Duderstadt has approximately 23,000 residents.

THE WALL IN OUR HEADS 207 German map an ever-shifting patchwork. Back in the twelfth century, the Eichsfeld came to be delineated—and then ruled—by the Archbishop of Mainz, whose seat was some three hundred kilometers to the south, near Frankfurt. Back then, his rule would have had only administrative consequences in matters like taxes. As for religion, there was only the Catholic church and faith. Fast-forward five hundred years. After the Reformation, the rulers of the surrounding territories joined the new Protestant denomination—along with their subjects, who had no say in the matter. Meanwhile, the Eichsfeld remained Catholic. It was then that the region’s territorial boundaries took on both religious and cultural significance. As its residents married within rather than across boundaries, celebrated holidays together, and brought their children up in the Catholic faith, they developed an ever more distinct Eichsfeld identity. When the Iron Curtain cut across their Catholic island in a Protestant sea, the Eichsfelders were especially hard hit.128 Those in the Sperrgebiet suffered the most, separated from family and friends on the West German side—like those in Duderstadt—and allowed only limited contact with the rest of the GDR because of the strict border regime. I looked across the market square at the sculpture again and contemplated the gap between the two figures. It reminded me of something the author Peter Schneider wrote in his novel The Wall Jumper: It will take us longer to tear down the wall in our heads than any wrecking company will need for the Wall we can see. (1982)

Now those words almost sounded prophetic. The Wall Jumper was published a full seven years before the fall of “the Wall we can see.” Among East German writers, there was a whole genre of Wall

128

Here, as all along the demarcation line, the Allied Powers reused an older border to delineate their respective occupation zones. In this case, they picked one from 1815 that had split the Eichsfeld between the kingdoms of Prussia and Hannover after the defeat of Napoleon. That border imposed only minor inconveniences on human movement, but the German–German border was a different story.

208 PHANTOM BORDER literature, but Schneider’s Wall Jumper was the exception in the West German literary landscape. I washed the last of my Brötchen down with the last sip of lukewarm coffee, then walked my bike through the pedestrian zone to the road that would take me back to the Green Belt. The turnoff from the main road required no signage: the holepatterned concrete panels of the border patrol road were well preserved here. My eyes followed the double tracks up a gentle hill. They were bordered on both sides by low shrubs and scattered trees. To the left, a vast wheat field clothed the hillside in a light ochre, marked only by the regular parallel lines of an irrigation rig. To my right—towards “the West”—a broad strip of green meadow paralleled the narrow band of trees and shrubs before more amber fields stretched towards Duderstadt. I noticed movement a short distance up the patrol track: another bicyclist came rolling towards the turnoff. Strapped to his upper body were a pair of binoculars and a camera with a telephoto lens. Simultaneously, we slowed for the turn and said Guten Tag. I asked him whether he had seen anything interesting this morning. His eyes lit up. “Oh, yes,” he answered, “some whinchats129 and a red kite.”130 This was exciting. Both species were extremely rare in Germany. In fact, the whinchat was something like the poster child for the birds along the Green Belt: this was the species a thirteen-yearold Kai Frobel had observed and tallied in the 1970s. “This looks like great habitat for whinchats,” I remarked, pointing to the mix of shrubs, young trees, and grasses on both sides of the patrol track. The shrubs and trees made for good perches to survey the scene and scope out food on the ground, as well as potential mates. Beyond the former border strip, a gigantic wheat field stretched into the distance. The view was pretty enough, with the ground rising in gentle waves toward a small village. But for ground-breeding birds that need a varied topography, this kind of landscape is a desert. 129 130

Saxicola rubetra. Milvus milvus.

THE WALL IN OUR HEADS 209 “For sure,” the birder agreed. He noticed the guidebook on my handlebar bag. “So you’re seeing a lot of the old Grenze. The Grünes Band is quite a silver lining for such an awful thing. Have a good journey!” He mounted his bike again and turned toward Duderstadt. I tried to keep my eyes open for birds as I followed the patrol track up the hill, avoiding the rectangular slits in the concrete slabs as much as possible. Close to the top, I turned around and surveyed the panorama before me: in the sea of wheat, the thin band of trees and shrubs alongside the elongated green meadow presented my clearest view of the Green Belt yet. The red roofs of Duderstadt lay to my left, and those of a smaller village were visisble almost straight down the hill, just on the other side of the narrow band of green. The two were no more than five kilometers apart, and if it weren’t for the Green Belt there would be no indication that an international border had ever run between them. I continued to the top of the hill, my eyes peeled for signs of a gate. This gentle knoll was the site of the West-Eastern gate, a living memorial inaugurated in 2002 by none other than Mikhail Gorbachev. So far, the hilltop yielded only a grove of young red oaks, a picnic table, and an interpretive sign. I leaned my bike against the picnic table and walked closer to the oak grove. The trunks were slender, no thicker than my arms, but the leaves formed a sun-dappled canopy well above my head. After a few minutes of peering through the undergrowth, I spotted two tall oak posts: the West-Eastern Gate. Pleased with my discovery, I walked over to the interpretive sign. A photo showed the oak posts surrounded by tiny saplings that look like they had just been planted. Among the people pictured were two I recognized, although I had not met either: Gorbachev and Kai Frobel. It was here on this hill that Gorbachev had agreed to become the patron of the European Green Belt. I sat down at the picnic table to drink some water. There was a serene beauty about this place, and yet it had a lonely feel. Do people ever come here? As if in response, another bicyclist approached the clearing, a fit-looking man I estimated to be in his mid-sixties. We both said

210 PHANTOM BORDER Guten Tag. He leaned his bike against the sign and looked at the photo, then came over to the sole table, asked “May I?” and sat down across from me, then looked at the oak grove and to the opposite side, where the concrete slabs of the patrol track took a steep turn down the hill. With some people, silences can be awkward. After a few moments, this complete stranger and I fell into an easy conversation, and I sensed a calmness about him, an uncomplicated gentleness that told me he was not one to be bothered by silence. He asked about my journey and told me about his—he had picked the WestEastern Gate as his destination for a day trip—and I learned that he was from Hesse originally, a retired teacher, and had lived in the western Harz region for forty years now. “Long enough for the Harz to become my second Heimat,” he said, but let on that he still sometimes found the Harz people a bit gruff. I was secretly delighted when he went on to say that he had experienced northern Germans as straightforward and easy to get along with—more often I have heard us described as a taciturn, curmudgeonly bunch. I liked the way this man talked about his impressions of regional qualities: he had a twinkle in his eyes even when he talked about the enigmatic Harzers; he was not putting them down. The friendly silence returned for a few minutes and we took in the stillness of the place. After a while I asked what memories he had of the time of the German division. He reflected for a moment. “I suppose my first memory of it is connected with heartbreak. In the summer of 1961, when I was thirteen, I had my first glimmer of romance with a girl from East Berlin,” he began. “I think we were the same age. She was visiting relatives in the west, in Hesse, with her family. One day her parents received a call from a relative back home—something had happened in Berlin, a wall was being built through the city. At thirteen, we couldn’t know what any of this meant. But I still remember the feeling of absolute turmoil that came over her family. They packed up their belongings and left the next day.” “Did you ever hear from her again?” I had a feeling I already knew the answer.

THE WALL IN OUR HEADS 211 “No, I never did,” he said with a mix of sadness and wonder in his tone. It is not often that a stranger confides his first heartbreak. I needed a moment to take in the layers of his loss: the girl’s sudden and final departure, the not knowing what happened to her, the realization that geopolitical events could interfere so profoundly in the lives of regular people, even thirteen-year-olds. We both stared out at the patrol track where it stretched from the little oak grove down the southern side of the knoll. “Can you imagine how many human bonds were cut by that border?” he asked. I did not think I could, but I knew he did not expect an answer. “I wish everyone could come to a peaceful place like this to contemplate their losses,” he continued. “It’s important to feel them.” As we sat quietly again, I noticed a large bird sailing elegantly above us. Its forked tail made it look a bit like an oversized swallow, but the head was raptor-like and this bird flew much more calmly and slowly than a swallow. “A red kite!” I pointed to where it circled the West-Eastern Gate. “That’s a rare species!” I felt the urge to share some of what I had recently learned. “Its habitat keeps shrinking, but at least its German population has stabilized in recent years.” “It must have a great view of the Green Belt from up there,” the man mused. “Yes, and of tasty critters to eat,” I agreed. I looked at my watch. It was later than I thought. I thanked my conversation partner and pointed my bicycle toward the patrol track. He waved goodbye, a hint of a smile on his face. For a moment it seemed odd that we did not know each other’s names. But like the silences in our impromptu conversation, the absence of a name carried no sense of anything missing. What mattered was knowing that openhearted encounters with strangers could, and did, happen. I knew even then that this one would stay with me, another treasure in my store of Zuversicht. ***

212 PHANTOM BORDER Ahead of me, the parallel concrete slabs of the patrol track led straight down the hill, like a green tunnel through the woods. For a split second, I considered turning onto a paved bike path that veered off to the left—the suggested route in the German-German Bike Route. That would make for easier riding, but something intrigued me about the way the patrol track narrowed into the woods. I decided to go for it, hoping it would not peter out in the middle of nowhere. The bike bounced uncomfortably over the oblong holes in the concrete, as I knew it would. The decline also quickly turned steeper. I gripped both brake handles tightly. The vegetation on both sides narrowed into a mini-jungle of … I could not even tell what kinds of trees, because everything was a green blur. Then the track’s steep slope leveled out, the right side of the jungle opened up, and I was rewarded with a picture-postcard view of Duderstadt. The spot must have been bittersweet for the border guards who patrolled here: to see the little town over there— drüben—close enough for a lunch break or a coffee, but utterly out of reach. A few kilometers on, out of the corner of my eye, something that looked like a cross caught my attention. I turned around and found it was indeed a simple cross, made of weathered wooden slats. Its small metal plaque told me that André Roessler, a nineteen-year-old NVA soldier, died at this spot in April 1976 while attempting to flee, killed by a scatter mine. A separate interpretive sign quoted a Stasi officer’s orders to keep the young man’s parents “under control” to prevent word of the incident getting out to western media. Once more my insides clumped into a black ball of grief. If I had thought that these memorials would get any easier to take in, I had been wrong. I imagined the agony of André’s last moments, the searing pain from the shrapnel, and the realization that his young life was over. His parents’ shock when a stone-faced uniformed officer came to their house to tell them that their son died while committing a crime. A short distance past the simple cross, a paved bike lane led down to a federal road. On the opposite side, an old watchtower

THE WALL IN OUR HEADS 213 stood next to a band of open land. A double row of fences and a line of tall light posts came into focus: the old border strip, kept open and maintained. Nearby sat a gray concrete building. I crossed the road to get closer. A sign confirmed what I had guessed: Eichsfeld border museum. The door was locked, but a plaque on the side of the building told me that this used to be the Duderstadt-Worbis border crossing. It also told the story of the “suitcase protest” (Kofferdemo) in January 1990. On a cold winter day, two months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, an estimated fifty thousand East Germans had walked up to the checkpoint carrying suitcases and proceeded into West Germany. Fifty-thousand would have been impressive in Leipzig or Berlin, but here in the rural borderland, where the two closest towns had around twenty thousand residents each? It was an impressive down-to-earth manifestation of grassroots democracy. The protesters all walked back into East Germany that day, but threatened to leave for good if the government did not hasten the pace of reforms. All across the GDR, people were becoming frustrated with both the Party and the slow pace of reforms. No longer imprisoned by the Berlin Wall and the inner-German border, many East Germans had already turned their back on the GDR and moved to West Germany, and the protesters wanted to prevent a further drain on the region’s population. Reunification was not a done deal yet; all through the Peaceful Revolution many protesters had chanted “Wir bleiben hier!” (We are staying here!), determined to reform East Germany rather than dissolve it as an independent state. Calls for Reunification were getting louder, but few people were concerned with the details of the process then, or could imagine that it would mean anything other than a path to quick salvation. Other than the building that was now the border museum, nothing was left of the old border crossing—no barriers, no guard booths. I took another look around. The place felt strangely familiar. In a flash of memory, I saw myself sitting in a car with some friends, my heart beating high in my throat. This must be where we crossed into East Germany that day in December 1989, elated and

214 PHANTOM BORDER in disbelief that the border guard had waved us through without even a glance at our passports. The memory of the open-air Kaffeetrinken in the village down the road put a smile on my face. I mounted my bicycle again and rejoined the patrol track, which led up a long, gentle hill, flanked by the preserved border strip. When I reached the watchtower near the top of the hill, I leaned my bike against it and turned to take in the view. A wavy landscape of fields and forests unfolded before me, the border strip a distinct feature on the museum’s side of the road, but barely visible where the forest had grown up on the far side, the side where I had made my way up and down the concrete slabs of the patrol track. A few kilometers later, I smiled again when a yellow road sign announced the village of Böseckendorf. When I had first heard about the escape of fifty-three people—half the village’s population—in 1961, I could barely believe it. Somehow they had gotten wind of imminent plans to fortify the border in their area, and someone knew a place where it was not closely guarded. Just as incredibly, twelve more people escaped the area in 1963. *** For the next hour and a half, my route took me along quiet back roads that wound around serene wooded hills, through farm fields, and back and forth across the phantom border. Occasional roadside shrines reminded me that I was still in the Eichsfeld with its strong Catholic tradition. The landscape felt spacious, and very remote. Even after weeks in this borderland, I still caught myself feeling surprised to find remoteness in the middle of Germany. With few distractions and easy riding, I let my thoughts return to the question of the wall in our heads, or the gap, as I was coming to think of it. How much of the rift could be explained by developments after the Wende? How much went back to the time of the division and the GDR? Once the two separate states were founded, the two fundamentally different economic systems engendered their own

THE WALL IN OUR HEADS 215 divergent cultural norms and practices.131 I remembered what Axel had told me about how much of people’s time outside of work, even vacation, was organized by one or another state organization; how work brigades organized weekend excursions and barbecue evenings. In contrast to West German parents, no East German parent had to worry about childcare: each child had a guaranteed spot in a preschool. While West German families largely held on to traditional gender roles—father as provider, mother as Hausfrau—most East German women worked full-time outside the home.132 I also remembered what Carla, a woman from Eisenach, had told me about her experience after Reunification. A highly skilled engineer at the Wartburg auto plant there, she lost her job after the Wende—even before Reunification—when plummeting demand for East German cars133 forced the plant to close. Many of the Wartburg workers were hired by the Opel134 plant that was set up in its place. I could still hear the disbelief in her voice when Carla told me about her job interview with a West German HR manager at Opel: “He asked me whether I was married and whether my husband still had a job. Then he told me that all the men who had lost their jobs needed the Opel jobs more than I did.”135 I could feel her frustration. Combined with the other major life changes that came with Reunification, this kind of encounter with

131

132

133

134 135

Taking the notion of a wall in people’s heads even further, historian Edith Sheffer suggests that while geopolitics created the conditions for the Iron Curtain, regular Germans on both sides came to see the demarcation line as a chaotic frontier, a zone of crime that needed to be brought under control (Sheffer 2011). East Germany’s gender equality in the workplace was based on the economy’s need for the entire population’s labor, but it naturally led to a much different self-image and high level of professional training among women. At the same time, the provision of state-run preschools gave the GDR an easy way to school even young children in socialist ideology. After the Wende, demand for East German cars plummeted; East Germans preferred to buy western cars now that they could. At the same time, the longestablished eastern European market vanished because East German products became too expensive with the adoption of the Deutsche Mark in July 1990. A West German subsidiary of General Motors. On a societal scale this preferential treatment of men after Reunification carried significant economic consequences, especially for divorced East German women. See, for example, Hentschke 2022.

216 PHANTOM BORDER the more traditional West German gender roles only added to the culture shock for East German women.136 When I met Carla in 2010, she had re-trained as a guide, sharing Eisenach’s musical and historical treasures with American tourists. I did not know about her engineering background then, and perceived her as a consummate tourism professional, engaging, kind, and dedicated to sharing her hometown’s deep connection to both J. S. Bach and Martin Luther. Carla’s story, I thought, as I followed the meandering roads of the Eichsfeld, shone a light on two phases of the gap: the time of the division, which had enabled her to become the accomplished engineer she once was, and the aftermath of Reunification, which led to the loss of that professional life. That loss had continued to reverberate and occasionally even been underscored by her new professional life. In addition to Luther and Bach, Carla also talks to her guests about the post-Wende economic convulsions that hit much of East Germany. “And when I take western groups to the Opel plant and I tell them about the end of Wartburg, about the last car coming off the assembly line and going straight to the Wartburg museum, almost every time people seem to think it’s funny, and I stand there with tears in my eyes.” Sitting with Carla at an outdoor café in Eisenach when she told me this, I sensed her disappointment at not being heard, at finding her listeners unable to relate to her experience. I knew there were many more stories like hers and those of her colleagues at the Wartburg plant: the Bischofferode miners, for one, but also the electroceramics manufacturing plant in Saxony I had read about in a newspaper article. In April 1991, six months after Reunification, the workers at that factory had been told that their plant would be closed because it was no longer profitable. The news came as a complete shock to the employees, whose products had been exported world-wide, including to western countries. Eight hundred and fifty workers in a town of three thousand

136

While East German women did have more rights and more equality than women in West Germany, the GDR’s societal and political structures were also still fundamentally paternalistic. See, for example, Kaminsky 2019.

THE WALL IN OUR HEADS 217 residents lost their jobs. Employees had to muddle through with temporary work, continuing education, and early retirement. Many lost all confidence in their professional worth and felt superfluous. Marriages ruptured, families cracked under the stress. In a trajectory similar to Carla’s, the former director now volunteered at the museum that displays the visible reminders of his vanished professional life. It was through the story of the electroceramics plant that I first heard about Petra Köpping, then the state of Saxony’s minister of gender equality and integration. When she was first appointed to her post in 2014, Köpping thought that, logically, her task would be to further gender equality and the integration of immigrants. But those were also the early days of the PEGIDA movement, and Köpping wanted to better understand what was behind the anti-foreigner sentiments. So she went to the PEGIDA marches in Dresden and tried to engage with protesters. Many were yelling, their voices full of rage: “Germany for the Germans,” “Lügenpresse!” (lying media). Finally, one of the protesters stopped at her table and told her, “You with your refugees! Why don’t you first integrate us!” For Köpping, this was an aha moment: the moment she realized that her job would also include working for, and with, disillusioned Germans—those who felt left behind by the Wende. After that aha moment, Köpping set out on a listening tour of her state and heard story after story of unemployment, part-time and temporary work, retraining, never regaining traction in a professional life. And for those reaching retirement age, receiving much smaller pensions than they would have earned with full employment. *** The lonely country road had climbed up a gentle hill. From the crest I could see Heiligenstadt, the Eichsfeld’s district capital. Concerned about my pace and wanting to reach my overnight quarter before nightfall, I kept pedaling. I had worked up a sweat and was on the

218 PHANTOM BORDER lookout for ice cream when, in a small town called Uder just past Heiligenstadt, I noticed a distinctive wrought-iron fence whose uniform sections depicted a shell. Behind the fence was a well-kept garden in which a bronze figure sat on a bench. I spotted a bronze plaque in the grass and walked closer. Centuries-old army and trade route from Leipzig to Cologne, as well as St. James Pilgrim’s Route from Europe’s East to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Half-way through my own sauntering—saint-terring—along the sacred ground of the border, here I was crossing paths with a route that led to an actual holy site. I looked around, hoping to catch sight of a pilgrim, but the little town’s streets were nearly empty. Thousands of soldiers and merchants and pilgrims must have passed through Uder and Heiligenstadt—whose name means City of Saints—over the centuries, possibly by this very garden. What borders had they crossed on their travels? What would they have made of the Iron Curtain? What of the walls in people’s heads? The sun had moved closer to the horizon while I’d been mulling over borders and pilgrimages. I mounted my bike for the remaining stretch of gentle hills, crucifixes, and long vistas, and finally, after passing by another borderland museum, a steep descent to the Werra Valley that made me pray my brake pads would last to the bottom.

Chapter 14: Shifting Ground They feel like strangers in their own land. —Arlie Russell Hochschild

If the East-West divide had ever receded from public awareness, the parliamentary election of September 2017 focused public attention on the East again like a laser beam. Nationally, the AfD garnered 12.6 percent of the vote, but in several eastern states the party scored over twice that. In Saxony, the AfD emerged as the strongest party, with close to 30%. Though it outpaced the CDU—Chancellor Merkel’s party—by only a tenth of a percent, the fact that it did was symbolic: the CDU had been Saxony’s undisputed and popular leading party ever since Reunification. One has to be careful with gross generalizations about the East/West pattern on the political map: in actual numbers, support for the AfD in parts of “the West” surpasses that in eastern federal states—about two-thirds of its total votes came from the West. In parts of Bavaria, it surpassed the SPD; in Baden-Württemberg and the Ruhr region it took a strong second place. A survey showed that three quarters of AfD voters in east and west had chosen that party out of protest, not from a deep conviction.137 If there was a problem with “the East,” what exactly was its nature? This much was certain: the election results signaled a seismic shift in Germany’s political landscape. For the first time since the Third Reich, a party to the right of the CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the CSU, had entered parliament.138 The flip side of the AfD’s electoral success was that the two traditional Volksparteien (people’s parties)—the CDU and the Social Democrats (SPD)—suffered significant losses. Neither party had enough votes to form a 137

138

Nevertheless, that leaves one quarter who apparently agree with the nationalist tenets of the AfD. Wagner (2018) discusses the enduring presence of Nazi ideology in the GDR, and Mau (2019, pp. 147f) points to a nationalist element in the slogan “We are one people” in the fall of 1989. Except for the Deutsche Partei, a small party that first existed from 1866 to 1933 and briefly reappeared in the 1950s and in 1993. See Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung 2020

219

220 PHANTOM BORDER government on its own, neither wanted to form a coalition with the AfD, and neither wanted to continue the so-called grand coalition, which had formed the previous government. In the end, it took a personal appeal by Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier139 to resolve the stalemate and convince the two parties to continue their coalition. Before the election, some politicians had criticized Saxon integration minister Petra Köpping’s efforts to listen to frustrated Easterners for tearing open old wounds, making false promises, confusing disappointment over personal losses with xenophobia, and for underestimating the complexity of the pension issues, which a special commission had worked on for years in vain. After the election, she became a sought-after guest on political talk shows, as if western Germany and the political establishment were looking for someone who could translate East German discontent into terms they could understand. *** Over the holidays at my parents’ house that year, I mentioned that I was beginning to understand the frustration of many Eastern Germans in light of the massive post-Wende upheaval. I shared Carla’s story and that of the electroceramics plant workers. My mother said she could understand it, too, and that she had not been aware of the extent of the upheaval. My father reacted with a look of skepticism, saying that he was tired of hearing these complaints. “It’s been thirty years—there has to be a time when we all move on! Those who lost their jobs got unemployment money or were retrained. And think of what they gained. The freedom to travel, the beautifully restored cities, new roads….” “I know,” I said, “On the whole they gained a lot. But I don’t think it’s all about money, and no one I’ve spoken to wanted the GDR back. I think many people lost their sense of self-worth when they lost their jobs.”

139

Joachim Gauck had retired earlier in 2017.

SHIFTING GROUND 221 My father shook his head, unconvinced. “But what kinds of jobs were they? It’s not like they were all that productive.” He had a point. While SED officials proclaimed, in the 1980s, that the GDR was one of the ten strongest industrial nations worldwide, this would have been hard to believe even for loyal GDR citizens. Historian Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk140 describes the GDR’s astronomical foreign debt, shrinking industrial and infrastructure investment, and significantly lower labor productivity compared to other industrial nations.141 Still, I asked, how much influence did individual workers have on the larger system? Like Herr M., a hydrologist I had spoken to who had, on his own initiative, laid out a plan to safeguard his village’s drinking water. Instead of considering his proposal, party operatives with no background in water management had denounced him to the Stasi. My father agreed such thwarting of individual efforts was terrible. Still, he felt, such experiences should not keep people from becoming creative once they were free of the GDR’s constraints. Like the woman from whom he and some friends had rented accommodations on a bike trip along the Elbe in the 1990s: “She was refurbishing her house to rent rooms to service technicians. When we showed up, she immediately got rooms ready for us. That kind of resourcefulness is what I like.” Me: “I like that, too, but it helps to own a house on the Elbe Bike Route or in an area where service technicians need to stay during the week. That’s not true of people in rural Lusatia.142 And I have a feeling that the frustrations aren’t all about money or material things.” Him: “In any case, frustration is not a reason to vote for a rightwing nationalist party.” At least that much we agreed on.

140 141 142

Kowalczuk 2019. See also Brunner and Heydemann 2021 and Kowalczuk 2009. A region in eastern Germany that was particularly affected by post-Wende transformations and, more recently, the phaseout of coal mining.

222 PHANTOM BORDER *** Soon after the New Year 2018, Petra Köpping had her first appearance in a western federal state, in Bavaria. Following a phone call to her office, I received an invitation to join a press trip to the event. This is a story of serendipity, I quickly realized during the introductions. Of how an air balloon released one summer day in 1967 began a cross-border pen-pal friendship between two young girls, Brigitte in East Germany and Ruth in West Germany. Even as a teenager, Ruth visited Brigitte when West Germans were granted short-term visas to the GDR in the 1970s. After 1989 the visits became mutual and grew to include the two women’s husbands and eventually people from their respective communities. It was Ruth’s husband who organized trips for people from Brigitte’s town to Neuendettelsau and vice versa, and it was he who had invited Petra Köpping to speak that day. With the news about PEGIDA and the AfD, the attacks against foreigners or people perceived to be foreigners, and now the election results, “we felt we hadn’t learned enough yet from our visits,” Ruth’s husband said. More than a manifestation of serendipity, after the shrill tones leading up to the election, Köpping’s visit to the small Bavarian town of Neuendettelsau was a welcome manifestation of civility. The hosting town’s mayor was a member of the CSU,143 Petra Köpping belongs to the SPD, and the audience—some one hundred people seated at long tables—seemed to have come to Gasthof Zur Sonne’s main conference hall out of a genuine desire to better understand developments in the neighboring states to the east. A tall woman with reddish shoulder-length hair, silverframed glasses, and an open, direct gaze, Köpping quickly built rapport with her audience by connecting to the existing ties with Saxony. “I know you’ve seen the beautifully restored cities, you’ve seen the Elbe Sandstone Mountains; you know that Saxony has a lot to be proud of.

143

Christian Social Union, the CDU’s sister party in Bavaria and somewhat more conservative.

SHIFTING GROUND 223 “So when I tell you about people’s discontent and what makes thirty percent vote for the AfD, I don’t want to make excuses or paint the picture of Jammer-Ossis,” she told the assembled Bavarians and journalists, “I certainly am not condoning violence and hate. What I want to do here is promote a greater understanding of people’s life histories.” I looked around the hall. Many in the audience nodded with eager anticipation. “You see,” she continued, “the discontent in the East is not so much a matter of tangible things like income, and it’s not about whether people are better off now than they were in the GDR. It’s a matter of more subtle things.” The conference hall was quiet. “After my listening sessions, many of my constituents write to me that they don’t even expect money, that they are simply glad the issue is being talked about in a respectful way, with dignity and without condescension.” She cited the example of Großdubrau, the electroceramics plant where, from one day to the next, the workers were told that “nobody needs this stuff anymore.” In places like that, with a single large employer, “a whole generation moved away,” leaving older people behind without work or family: a broken social fabric. “If a factory closes here or there, that is one thing, but if it happens across the board, that is a whole different story.” In that context, she noted, it is no wonder people feel left behind, feel that their hopes for better lives after Reunification were dashed. “And as you know, all the people who left after the Wende— that was our second emigration wave. The first one was during GDR times; so many well-educated people left. For the people who stay, if that happens twice in a person’s lifetime, that is a hard thing to recover from. The shock goes deep.” She told of people who lost their jobs, attended multiple low-paid re-trainings, and then found their social security payments barely enough to get by on. “So there’s injured pride, a sense of one’s work not being recognized. And some of them start to ask why all at once there is money for the refugees.

224 PHANTOM BORDER “And we as a society need to work through—aufarbeiten—this part of our history,” Köpping said. “It is part of a grieving process that hasn’t happened yet. Beyond that, though, I want to emphasize that there are structurally weak areas in the west, too. We need to pay attention to such regions in the whole country”—whether they were left behind by the demise of the East German economy, by the vicissitudes of globalization, or by the phase-out of coal. Listeners across the room nodded. “Do you really think talking with disgruntled PEGIDA and AfD folks is the solution?” a man from the audience asked. “Don’t you risk giving right-wing extremists too much attention?” “There is a segment of society with whom I cannot talk,” Köpping replied. “But there are many people with whom one can, and should, talk. Saxony has a problem with right-wing extremism, but not everyone who votes for the AfD is a right-wing extremist.” A woman at my table nodded. “She makes sense to me. And she’s authentic,” she said to the man sitting next to her. He nodded back in agreement. “She knows what she’s talking about.” Before the Wende, Köpping shared, she had been mayor of a small town near Leipzig but, like so many East Germans she, too, lost her job. Though she renounced her SED membership in the summer of 1989, voters were so fed up with the party that represented the oppressive government they had just gotten rid of that Köpping’s earlier association with it proved toxic. For several years, she worked as a sales representative for a health insurance company. “She’s not afraid to get outside her comfort zone,” the man said. *** On the train back from Neuendettelsau, my thoughts turned to the United States. In between segments of my expedition, home in Vermont, I sensed that the societal fabric there was fraying, too, and that something I had long admired about Americans was at risk of being lost. Beginning with my first visit to the U.S. in the 1980s and many times after that, I had been impressed by the open and friendly social contact. People did not seem to let differing political

SHIFTING GROUND 225 leanings get in the way of congenial barbecues with neighbors, or chats with other parents while watching their kids’ softball games. I relished that one of Vermont’s senators, James Jeffords, sang in a mixed-party ensemble known as the Singing Senators. But during the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, I sensed that something was shifting. Parallel to the rise of Donald Trump I had observed an aggressive Othering, disdain and insults aimed at refugees or people perceived to be foreigners. The notion of a heavily militarized border wall was greeted ecstatically as if it were the answer to all that ailed society. Trump’s own insult of African nations, Haiti, and El Salvador as “shithole countries” and his belittling of the parents of Humayun Khan (a Muslim captain in the U.S. army who died protecting a U.S. army base in Iraq) shocked me. These things did not square with the qualities I had so admired in Americans. As the political discourse in the U.S. became uglier, I began to hear of friendships, neighborly relations, and family bonds fraying over political differences. Thanksgiving dinners turned into shouting matches over politics. If I was distraught over the rifts in German society, the situation in the U.S. seemed on an entirely different scale. More than mere disagreements, I sensed aggression, even downright hate, in the way people spoke about those with whom they disagreed. A Pew Research Center survey144 found that nearly 80% of Americans now had just a few or no friends at all across the aisle—and that they saw their differences as ones of basic morality, not just policy disagreements. In her book Political Tribes,145 author Amy Chua described how deep the rifts went: “The Left believes that right-wing tribalism— bigotry, racism—is tearing the country apart. The Right believes that left-wing tribalism—identity politics, political correctness—is tearing the country apart.” I sensed that the chasm had been

144

145

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2014/06/12/political-polarization-in -the-american-public/ Chua 2018.

226 PHANTOM BORDER widening for some time,146 gradually and beneath the surface like the Mid-Atlantic Rift. One person who had paid close attention to the widening gulf was sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, a self-described liberal who decided to climb what she called an “empathy wall” and to “permit [my]self a great deal of curiosity about the experiences and viewpoints of people that I knew I would have differences with.”147 After several years of close contact with Tea Party Republicans in Louisiana, she concluded that the roots of their discontent were not primarily material, but stemmed from a sense of betrayal and a deep distrust of government, which led them to feel like “Strangers in Their Own Land” (the title of Hochschild’s 2016 book). In a radio interview, she noted that none of the many approaches to analyzing societal issues had so far acknowledged the significance of emotions in politics.148 This rang true. We like to think of ourselves as rational beings acting on well-reasoned insight or even God-given truths. But there is ample evidence that this is not how human minds function. Social psychologist Mahzarin Banaji, who specializes in the science of implicit bias, describes the mind as a “difference-making machine” that helps us “navigate the overwhelming complexity of reality” by sorting people and ideas into categories.149 That process happens in split seconds, before we have time to form a rational argument.150 This can be a gift in a situation where one is faced with an actual threat—or a curse if we overreact because we falsely project dangerous qualities onto someone based on a category that may not be applicable or relevant. With so much of political discourse now taking place on social media, tensions that once flared up only occasionally were now being amplified around the clock.151 If our brains are prone to bias 146 147 148 149 150 151

The above-mentioned Pew Research Center survey was conducted in 2014. Tippett 2018 Ibid. Tippett 2016. See also the discussion in Haidt 2012, chapters 1–4. In her book The End of Bias, Jessica Nordell describes how Universal Studios used Facebook’s “affinity labels” to create race-specific trailers in marketing Straight Outta Compton (Nordell 2021).

SHIFTING GROUND 227 even in analog life, and if algorithms promote biased content, it is no great surprise that debates on social media spiral into hate. Still, as someone who enjoys time in the woods more than time spent on screens, the scale of what this meant for society took some time to sink in. I could certainly relate to the desire for help in navigating the complexity of reality. But on my brief visits to social media platforms, I saw mostly instant reactions to others’ posts, often denigrating the author in question rather than offering an informed response. Then I came across the work of conflict researcher Helena Puig Larrauri, and her conclusion that the majority of people are not intentially driving polarization, but that “it is happening to them and they may not be aware of it.”152 Not aware. Perhaps that was something to work with. It turned out that I was not alone in that belief. Soon after the Trump election, I learned about Braver Angels, an American citizens organization that offers forums for civil exchange between opposite ends of the political spectrum. The group takes its name from something Abraham Lincoln said to his fellow citizens on the eve of the Civil War: Countrymen, we are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.153

I began to sign up for workshops that were set up to include equal numbers of “Red” and “Blue”-leaning participants and structured to ensure equal, uninterrupted speaking time for each person, putting the onus on each person to also listen to the others. One workshop was designed to help participants “depolarize within,” a surprising and at moments scary opportunity to examine the walls in my own head. Even though Vermont’s population leans mostly “blue,” one cold winter morning I had an opportunity to speak to someone with starkly different views from mine. “Randy” was a somewhat 152 153

Frischen 2020. Braver Angels changed “better” to “braver” to reflect its call for intellectual bravery

228 PHANTOM BORDER reclusive neighbor a few houses away with whom I had rarely exchanged more than a Hello. That morning our paths converged at the street corner and we began to talk about work. He told me he worked for ICE154 and that they were superbusy getting rid of all those “rapists and criminals” that were crossing the border from Mexico. After a moment of shock, I remembered that there was no need to make a statement in response. I paused for a moment and then asked whether he believed that all those people trying to cross from Mexico were really rapists and criminals. He thought for a moment and then replied that they were probably not all rapists and criminals. “But they can’t all come here!” he added. I asked if he thought they were going through all that hardship, leaving their belongings behind and walking for days in often dangerous conditions, to get to the U.S. for no good reason. “What about the gang violence?” I asked, “What if someone in your family was abducted and you knew you or your children are probably next?” He thought again and said, “I don’t know if I could stay there either. But still, they can’t all come here.” By now it was time for both of us to get to work. We waved good-bye and wished each other a good day. I knew that some of my friends in both of my countries would think I was too soft on him, that I should have “taken a stand” or “drawn a red line.” I have not seen Randy since and I can’t know if our conversation changed his mind. But I am quite sure that making a statement or breaking off the conversation would not have changed his mind. It seemed more important to think about how to be effective than whether I was right. For now, at least we had a basis for conversation. ***

154

Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the primary law enforcement agency of the Department of Homeland Security.

SHIFTING GROUND 229 As the time neared to go back to Germany for the next leg of my expedition, I kept thinking about how the situations in my two countries differed and in what ways they were similar. The work of Petra Köpping and Arlie Hochschild spoke to something I saw happening in both societies: the feeling among part of the population that they were left behind and that Others were getting unfair advantages. Both societies exist in the larger context of globalization and its often dramatic effects on employment, infrastructure, and familiar patterns of daily life. Journalist Jochen Bittner draws a parallel between Trump voters and AfD supporters155 as sharing a longing for Heimat, in the sense of “shelter from a disorderly world”—a longing they accuse the established political elites of ignoring. To avert the danger of using Heimat as justification to exclude Others, Bittner suggests that an enlightened version of Heimat could help counter the forces of polarization. For the German context, he writes: Contemporary notions of Heimat are no longer simply about emotional connectedness to a place or creed. And they are certainly not about drawing lines to exclude outsiders—let alone to push out people already in a community. But they do mean loyalty to the bedrock of modern German society: [...] The Basic Law. Happy is the person who is able to celebrate this as part of Heimat, whether he wears lederhosen or not.156

While globalization by definition affected people and societies around the world, societies that were already undergoing massive change—like East Germany and other eastern European countries—were hit especially hard. Sociologist Steffen Mau thinks of eastern Germany as a laboratory of transformation: an economy and society that experienced first what the effects of globalization brought to other regions around the world a few years later. Because of this, Mau says, eastern Germans have a greater awareness of the fragility of all societal structures, no matter how static and immovable they may seem.157

155 156 157

As well as Brexit supporters in the U.K. Bittner 2018. Mau 2021. See also Ther 2020.

230 PHANTOM BORDER Regarding the AfD’s support in eastern Germany, journalist Adam Soboczynski finds an explanation in the way the GDR related to the Nazi past.158 Because the GDR159 presented itself as the anti-fascist state and West Germany as the successor state to the Third Reich, Easterners, he suggests, have a deeply ingrained selfperception as being innocent by definition. Western accusations that support for the AfD and for Pegida trivializes the Nazi era simply do not gain traction in that context.160 The influx of refugees in 2015, Soboczynski says, did not cause the rift between East and West, but merely heightened its visibility. Because East Germans had lived under back-to-back dictatorships since 1933, many see themselves as “playthings of ideologies” and react allergically to any new rules of conduct. According to Soboczynski, this explains why some Easterners have applied the cry of the Peaceful Revolution—“We are the People”—to other protests, like those against the social reforms of 2004 and to Pegida marches.161 To Western Germans, Soboczynski says, this style of opposition is a complete mystery. He has a point. This Western German, for one, was baffled to hear chants of “We are the People” in those other contexts. It felt almost like a desecration of the Peaceful Revolution, though I was aware that I myself had no ownership in that Sternstunde of German history—that magic moment when the stars aligned. I was reminded of a phone call from a man who had heard about my project. After telling me about the difficulties he had experienced in the GDR and of his joy at the opening of the border, the conversation turned to the state of German Unity. Immediately, his voice took on an angry, aggrieved tone and he said “You know, we brought a government down once, and we can do it again.”

158 159

160

161

Soboczynski 2018. Soboczynski says the same applies to other eastern European countries such as Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. Soboczynski’s perspective is rooted in his family’s migration from Poland to West Germany. In a biographical essay he describes how he realized that they had come from a “land of pride” to a country of “Befangenheit”—a self-consciousness about its dark, shameful past (Soboczynski 2023). Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung 2019.

SHIFTING GROUND 231 I was taken aback. It was one of the moments in which I began to understand that even people who speak the same language can live in profoundly different worlds of meaning. Clearly Herr W. and I had very different understandings of “the people,” “the state,” and democracy. The way Soboczynski puts it, Eastern Germans don’t specifically hold a grudge against the reunited Germany’s government or the Federal Republic, but take a critical attitude towards all forms of government because, in their experience, they are transient and fragile phenomena. History matters, as does socialization—personal history, if you will. As to my other country, the Unietd States, some see echoes of the Civil War that once tore this country apart. Historian Manisha Sinha162 suggests that the Civil War never truly ended, that old enmities are bubbling up. History, after all, does not mean that things that happened leave no trace. If at times I felt discouraged in the face of the deep societal rifts, I could also see that the actions of individuals could rebuild the social fabric. It matters whether someone listens or shouts, posts statements on social media or engages in direct conversation. A conversation with a person from the other political side may require courage. But courage builds upon itself. I thought of Siggi and all the East German protesters who brought down the Berlin Wall. Speaking out against their iron-fisted government required a different order of daring than it takes to talk to someone who voted differently in the last election.

162

Sinha 2018.

Chapter 15: Visits in Kella, or: Heimat and Faith The line does not run between East and West, but between tolerance and intolerance. —Silke Kowalski

My first destination back in the German borderland was Kella, a village of 500 located on the Eichsfeld plateau, directly in the former Schutzstreifen. Even though I did not know anyone in Kella, I had received an offer to be picked up at the train station in Eschwege, the next larger town. Another gift of charity, which I gladly accepted. Besides the challenge my leg muscles would face on the way up the steep escarpment, I had neglected to get new brake pads and was concerned that the current ones would not last for the way back down. It was Anna Schumann who had made the offer. She had been good friends with Daphne Berdahl, the American anthropologist who had conducted field work here shortly after the Wende. While Berdahl died young, in 2007, her book Where the World Ended163 laid the groundwork for my understanding of life in the borderland before, during, and after the Wende. Anna easily picked me out from the other passengers by my bike, which I locked up outside the station. In the car, I was touched to realize that she had taken the day off from work to show me around. I sensed a genuine friendliness from her but guessed that I was also benefitting from her friendship with Daphne, as I came to think of her during my visit. Soon the engine started to labor as the road climbed ever higher. We had to be close to the former border. During the Cold War, the border ran alongside and just over the tops of the hills that surround Kella on three sides. Eschwege, which is only seven kilometers from Kella, became increasingly unreachable with each round of border fortification. I knew from Daphne’s book that for

163

Berdahl 1999.

233

234 PHANTOM BORDER generations, the two towns had been closely connected by economic and family ties and the border caused deep gashes in the social fabric of lives on both sides. Anna’s family, I was about to learn, had its own such wound. Anna downshifted again, then turned off the road into a parking area just past the crest of the hill. “This is Braunrode.” She explained that this spot had served as a viewpoint from the west during the division. Western relatives waved at their loved ones in Kella from here—the closest they could get to the town. Sometimes tour buses came here for a glimpse of the border strip and the GDR. “The road ended right over there in a big pile of debris and wire fencing.” Anna pointed just past the parking area. “We could see from Kella when someone waved from here, but waving back was strictly prohibited.” Still, she said, villagers came up with all kinds of creative ways to send covert signals across the border: “Some people shook feather blankets or jackets out their west-facing windows. I would hang towels and cloth diapers out to dry and discreetly wave them.” Now, the village was hidden behind the lush summer foliage of a row of trees—trees that, I could tell, had grown up in the abandoned border strip. A few specks of red shone through: the claytiled roofs of Kella. A short distance on, we passed a row of trees and the concrete grid of the patrol track. My eyes followed it north along the line of trees until it curved to the right—the east—where a wooded hillside sloped down to a freshly mowed field. As we entered the village, a prominent crucifix on the side of the road reminded me that we had reentered not only Thuringia but also the Eichsfeld. Kella and the Eichsfeld had both been part of a number of borderlands—regional, religious, territorial, and national—for centuries. At different times, this boundary line had delineated Hesse from Prussia, and later from Thuringia, and the Catholic Eichsfeld from various Protestant states and principalities. Not surprisingly, as Berdahl observed, this history of multilayered and shifting boundaries shaped the village’s social landscape and perhaps even its residents’ sense of identity. To her,

VISITS IN KELLA, OR: HEIMAT AND FAITH 235 border zones presented a particularly fruitful way of thinking about societies, identity, and the concept of culture. Inspired by anthropologist Renato Rosaldo’s idea that our daily lives are affected by social borders such as sexual orientation, race, class, nationality, and age, Berdahl drew this conclusion: In many respects, this view of borderlands and border zones offers a particularly compelling way of conceptualizing identity and social life. Such an approach not only highlights the processual, fluid, and multi-dimensional aspects of identity but also stresses how identities are contextually defined, constructed, and articulated. (Berdahl 1999, p. 7)

The more I listened to Anna, the more she came to exemplify for me someone with a fluid yet grounded sense of identity: someone able to transcend societal boundaries without losing her sense of self. On the one hand, she clearly had a deep connection to the Catholic Church and faith. At the same time, the state socialism of the GDR—which was adamantly atheist—was the socioeconomic “air” she breathed for the first twenty-five years of her life: it was part and parcel of her Heimat. Things that grated on older villagers, like the constant identity checks at the Schutzstreifen checkpoint and the unpredictable supply of goods in the village store—the Konsum— were easier for her to bear: “I was born into it; I didn’t know it any other way,” she explained. She told me of her and her husband Lothar’s first visit to West Germany, in 1988, for an aunt’s sixtieth birthday.164 As they traveled through West Germany by train, Lothar exclaimed, “The grass really is greener here!” by which he meant that the cars were fancier and the building facades cleaner than those in the GDR.165 Anna, 164

165

Anna’s father and cousin had also traveled along. Initially I wondered whether the four received travel visas because they were deemed reliable GDR citizens, or whether this was an early indication of more relaxed travel regulations. But Anna’s and Lothar’s two children and Anna’s mother had stayed behind, effectively serving as a security deposit for the GDR. Still, few other GDR citizens under sixty-five were allowed to travel to the kapitalistisches Ausland (capitalist foreign countries). As Daphne Berdahl describes in her book, travel visas and other permissions were granted in seemingly random and unpredictable ways. Kai Frobel told me later that the grass may also literally have been greener in West Germany, because the application of large amounts of fertilizer began earlier there than in East Germany.

236 PHANTOM BORDER with the remarkable honesty I came to appreciate so much about her, told me that “even if the grass had been greener, I would not have admitted it, out of principle!” Thankfully, state indoctrination had not been able to throttle Anna’s human instincts, most notably with Daphne who, as an American, would have been considered a Klassenfeind (class enemy) by the GDR. Anna was the first person Daphne encountered in Kella that day on her search for a Schutzstreifen village for her doctoral research. She had tried several other villages already, but was unable to find accommodations in any of them. Restrictions on new construction in the border’s “protective zone” meant that residents made do with whatever living space they had, often living several generations under one roof, with no room to spare. Two auspicious circumstances helped Daphne find the one vacant apartment in Kella that December day: Anna, who was employed by the mayor’s office at the time, was working late that evening, and because Anna knew everyone in the village, she also knew that an elderly woman had recently died. The fact that Daphne spoke good German undoubtedly helped her case, but there must also have been a spark between the two women during that first conversation, an impression that only grew during my conversations with Anna. In any case, Anna made the connection with the recently deceased woman’s family, and the path was clear for Daphne to begin her research. Anna pulled her car up to a white-stuccoed, two-story house on the eastern edge of Kella: her childhood home, where her mother still lived in the groundfloor apartment. She led me to the living room window. A sweeping view to the west stretched before us, over the roofs of Kella and straight toward Braunrode and the surrounding wooded hillsides in Hesse—the “other Germany” for Anna until her mid-twenties. Below the deep green of the forest, the light golden hue of freshly mowed wheat fields completed the serene picture. “Right below the edge of the forest, that was the border strip,” Anna commented, describing a half circle with her hand. It was a picture-postcard view, much more attractive than the view of the

VISITS IN KELLA, OR: HEIMAT AND FAITH 237 apartment buildings in Bremen with which I grew up. The oncebarren border strip no longer stood out; it looked like any other wheat field edged by forest. While Anna prepared coffee and Eisenkuchen (iron cakes, the regional expression for waffles)—she filled me in on some visits she had lined up for me. “Today I want to show you around Kella and its surroundings a bit. Tomorrow we’ll visit some people whom Daphne interviewed for her book when she lived here.” *** “Let me show you the chapel,” she said as we began the orientation round. The car climbed the hill behind her house. I knew from Daphne’s book that the chapel was important to her and the other Kellans, even though it sits outside the village proper. Built in 1888 as a local pilgrimage site, over the next one hundred years this little chapel witnessed some of twentieth-century Germany’s most intense moments. In 1939, the windows, doors, and altarpiece were destroyed by Nazi thugs. After the end of the Third Reich, villagers restored the chapel, but the new border protocol of 1952 put the chapel in the five-hundred-meter Schutzstreifen, along with the entire village. The GDR did not want groups of people congregating so close to the border and prohibited processions along the stations of the cross—the pilgrimage path that led to the chapel through the woods. “And when the border regulations were tightened yet again in 1961, the chapel ended up between two border fences,” Anna says. “The only people who could access the chapel after that were the border guards. Sometimes they used it as a shelter; in winter they built fires with pieces of its furnishings to keep themselves warm.” For anyone else, trying to access the chapel would have posed the same deadly risks as an escape from East Germany. Even so, the tiny church remained deeply meaningful for many villagers. Despite or because of that, in the early 1980s the GDR government decided to tear it down. Even the diocesan provost agreed to the plan. As Daphne relates in her book, only spirited action on the part of the villagers spared the chapel: even if they

238 PHANTOM BORDER could not access it, the chapel represented a piece of their Heimat and they wanted it preserved. Almost immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Hans Becker and other villagers set out to clear the pilgrimage path of border installations and to restore the chapel yet again. Less than three weeks later, they made their way along the stations of the cross. Daphne writes: What [Hans Becker] had missed during the period of socialist rule was not necessarily the freedom to travel or an array of consumer goods, although certainly these had been lacking. What had been painfully absent—precisely, perhaps, because it had been so close—was simply the freedom to walk up to the chapel on a beautiful day, pull his thoughts together, and straighten the altar cloth.

In a 1992 photo in Daphne’s book, the chapel is still surrounded by barren ground; the border guards had cleared all but a few small trees to ensure clear lines of sight. Now, twenty-five years later, it was dwarfed on three sides by towering Norway spruce, poplars, and birch trees. The fourth side opened up to the concrete slabs of the patrol track, the only visible reminder of the border strip I could detect. Anna led me around the chapel to a smooth granite boulder flanked by a lantern and a pot of fresh flowers. A plaque attached to the rock bore the following inscription: In memory of DAPHNE BERDAHL 1964–2007 American researcher She wrote a book about Kella after 1989 And loved this village and its people. Nineteen sixty-four: she had been born the same year as I; Anna, the year before. Anna pulled out a photo of herself and Daphne. On it, she has her arm around Daphne’s shoulder. They look so young, so joyful. Something about the picture moved me close to tears. Although I did not know Daphne, I could sense the hole she left in people’s lives. And yet, something of her was still present in this

VISITS IN KELLA, OR: HEIMAT AND FAITH 239 little village “where the world ended,” a spark in the hearts and minds of the people who knew her. Sadly, none of them had been able to read her book, because few East Germans studied English during GDR times—Russian was taught as the preferred second language. *** We walked a short distance from the chapel to where the row of trees thinned out. Anna’s husband Lothar joined us and pointed along the Kolonnenweg. “You can follow the track all the way to Braunrode.” In fact, I’d been dreaming about a hiking excursion around here. These mountains, I knew, were home to all kinds of wild creatures, from the European wildcat to one of the Green Belt’s signature birds, the great gray shrike. Peregrine falcons bred on the rocky cliffs, and a number of rare forest biotopes persisted in hidden ravines. Anna pointed to a cone-shaped hill with long, sloping sides in the distance. “That’s the Hülfensberg. On top of it is a Franciscan monastery that has long been a pilgrimage site. The mountain, too, was in the Schutzstreifen, so access to it was restricted during the division. For the last several years of the GDR, there was only one monk up there to tend to the monastery.” “We have a favorite spot near there,” Lothar said. “We packed a picnic dinner.” I was touched. As we got closer to the mountain, Anna pointed out a large wooden cross on its flank. “It gets lit up at night; you can see it from miles away.” “That probably didn’t happen during the division, with the GDR’s antipathy towards all things religious?” I asked. “Actually it did,” she replied, “and the government didn’t like it one bit. They told the monk to stop, but he said it was an offering for people who had recently died, and that people died all the time. Eventually they left him alone.” I had to laugh at the monk’s creative response. Apparently his faith, and perhaps his secluded forest haven, gave him the strength to test the extent of the government’s grip.

240 PHANTOM BORDER There was another matter of church and state I was curious about. In an effort to develop alternatives to church rituals, the GDR introduced a socialist coming-of-age ceremony, the Jugendweihe, in 1954. Both the Protestant and Catholic churches opposed the ceremony, but even in the deeply religious Eichsfeld it eventually gained traction. By 1975, when Lothar was in eighth grade, threequarters of his cohort participated. “They really pulled out all the stops,” Anna remembered. “Trips to Berlin, special events, concerts. Young people felt they were missing out if they weren’t part of it.” Lessons about the responsibilities of socialist citizenship were, naturally, also part of the deal. Some parents saw Jugendweihe as incompatible with their faith and kept their children from participating. Anna, though deeply devout, participated; she did not feel that anything she heard there contradicted her faith. “I had already had my church communion several years earlier. The Jugendweihe program was just social life for me,” she explained. I knew from Daphne’s book that among the Kellans during GDR times, there was a range of attitudes toward the Party and the government it represented. People were careful with whom they discussed political views, but everyone had thoughts about who was “red” (those who had joined the Party or another state organization simply to make life more bearable) or “really red” (those who were committed communists). “My father was a forester,” Anna said, “he joined the party because that was the only way to get a hunting permit, not because he was a committed communist.” Anna’s uncle, on the other hand—her father’s brother—was “really red.” In the early years after World War II, while the border was still somewhat porous, Anna’s father and uncle had ended up in Kella with their mother, Anna’s grandmother. In 1975, the grandmother—free to leave the GDR as a retiree—moved to West Germany to live near her three daughters, who had ended up in Eschwege after the war. She did, however, have to say a final goodbye to her son, Anna’s uncle. He was an officer of the NVA and would not be allowed to have any contact with westerners, family or not.

VISITS IN KELLA, OR: HEIMAT AND FAITH 241 One day several years later, the uncle’s army superior remarked to him, “I hear your brother has filed for a travel visa to attend the funeral of Mrs. Emma Beyer in Eschwege.” Anna’s uncle was in shock: Emma Beyer was his mother. When he could speak again, he managed to say to his superior, “Do you understand that I have just now, from your mouth, found out that my mother has died?” Even this, Anna explained, was a daring thing to do—talking back at NVA superiors was not taken lightly. “But he kept his commitment to the socialist state. He saw his family situation as a necessary sacrifice for the greater good. I don’t expect you to understand this,” she said, matter of factly. She was right, but I told myself I didn’t have to understand it. All I had to do was give space to the possibility that it made sense in the uncle’s life, which had unfolded in circles of meaning as different from mine as that of the Turkana of Northwest Kenya, our shared language and ethnic background notwithstanding. We stopped at Anna and Lothar’s favorite spot on the Hülfensberg, a picnic table with a view of the Werra Valley, surrounded by fragrant forest and a gentle evening breeze—a welcome relief from the hot July day. The next day, Anna had to return to work down in that valley, in Eschwege. Her job at the mayor’s office ended soon after the Wende, and she’d found a position at a hospital drüben in Eschwege. “How long did it take you to feel that it was normal to work drüben?” I asked her. She reflected for a moment. “Ten years, for sure.” Until then, she said, it felt “like a dream, like I would pinch myself and the border would be back.” I asked her if she remembered any difficult encounters with westerners, like those Daphne described in her book. “Occasionally,” Anna said. “One time early on, when I was getting out of my Trabi in the parking lot, a West German colleague pinched his nose in my direction because of the stinky exhaust. And there were tough times because I had to learn so much that was different from anything I had done before. But now it’s fine, it’s really not an issue anymore.”

242 PHANTOM BORDER Anna’s experience struck me as milder than some of the situations Daphne described in painful detail: villagers being refused service in a factory cafeteria, being yelled at for buying up all the fruit in West German stores, or being accused of not having worked for forty years. At the same time, clichés of Besserwessis and Jammerossis gained currency, and jokes about the respective “other” Germans began to fly. Half apologizing to me, Anna related a typical example: What’s the difference between a West German and a fox? A fox acts stupid but is actually smart, whereas a Wessi acts smart…. Still, neither she nor the other Kellans I met expressed any of the vitriol—against Wessis, foreigners, or Others of any kind—that comes from followers of PEGIDA and the AfD. For those I spoke to, the measure of life was that the oppressive state and the border that had caused them so much suffering were gone. Anything else, they could handle—or had already handled. As the sky over the Hessian hills turned various shades of orange and crimson, we packed up the picnic basket and began our descent down the Hülfensberg. *** During the time of the division, only one single-lane road had connected Kella residents with the rest of the GDR. On our way back, Anna pointed out the spot where the Schutzstreifen checkpoint had been, roughly halfway between Kella and the nearest village on the other side. All Kella children took a bus to school in that village. I was not surprised to hear that the bus and all the children had to get checked every day, on the way in and out of the Schutzstreifen. “So I could never invite friends over to my house, unless they also lived in Kella,” Anna said. “Also not Lothar, because he lived outside the Schutzstreifen.” This meant that when Anna and Lothar became a couple, Anna’s home in Kella might as well have been on the moon—or in West Germany—as far as any notion of Lothar visiting her was concerned. Even when Anna became pregnant, Lothar could only get a temporary permit—one that expired the day before their

VISITS IN KELLA, OR: HEIMAT AND FAITH 243 daughter’s birth. When he applied for an extension at the district office in Heiligenstadt, he was told that “a daughter is not a family member” because he and Anna were not yet married. Lothar was so annoyed with this response that he drove all the way to Berlin and went straight to the Staatsrat (state council, one of the GDR’s constituent governing organs) to complain. Shortly afterward, the district office gave him a permit. “I’m sure the Staatsrat called them and said, leave us alone with your local B.S.,” he commented. “I don’t think either of those guys had any idea what life near the border was like.” Despite the restrictions on travel even close to home—or perhaps because of them—Lothar had developed an impressive knowledge of faraway places. He’d collected and studied maps for as long as he could remember. One of his prized possessions was a highway map of the United States. In conversations with Daphne, he could tell her from memory which interstate highways would get her from one city to another. “How were you able to get your hands on that?” I asked him. “I thought maps of the capitalist Ausland were impossible to come by in the GDR.” “That’s true,” Lothar replied. “I was lucky. One day when I stopped at a bookstore in Heiligenstadt, they had just gotten a set of international maps in. I was in the right place at the right time.” “Did you think you would ever be able to go to any of these places you were looking at on the maps?” “No, I didn’t think that would ever happen,” he replied. “I always wanted to. And I also wanted to come back home.” There it was again, that strong sense of belonging, even in this vexing borderland. *** After breakfast at the Gasthaus the next morning, Anna took me to the Beckers’ house. Both in their late seventies, Hans and Rita Becker sat down with me on the shaded patio of their house, built largely by their own hands with the help of family and friends—a

244 PHANTOM BORDER process that had stretched over years because of the unpredictable availability of construction materials in the GDR. “The Eichsfelders were dirt poor for a long time.” Herr Becker explained that during the Industrial Revolution, the Eichsfeld’s once-prosperous textile industry was outcompeted by faster production elsewhere. “That’s why a house and garden of one’s own is still our most valued possession.” “Daphne wrote that the gardens were very important in ensuring a reliable food source during GDR times,” I told them. “Especially since the supply of groceries at the Konsum was often spotty.” “The Konsum!” Frau Becker sighed. “Turns out that the spotty supply was not just because of the centrally planned economy. Over the years we noticed that whenever the couple who normally ran the Konsum was on vacation, supplies were noticeably more plentiful. Later we learned that Konsum operators got rewarded for keeping the rate of unsold goods low. So it was in the operators’ interest to risk shortages rather than surpluses. Apparently the young man who covered for the couple during vacation times was less motivated by awards.” The Beckers had also been on the receiving end of plenty of harassment from border guards. As teenagers, if they or their friends returned from outside the Schutzstreifen past the curfew, they were charged with “resistance against the power of the state” and thrown in jail for the night. Later, they were told they needed a permit to get to a piece of land they owned near the chapel, even though both that land and the house they lived in were in the Schutzstreifen. Once, on his wife’s birthday, Herr Becker had already crossed the checkpoint multiple times that day for work. In the evening, he went back out to get a case of beer for the birthday party. “And the same guard, for the seventh or eighth time that day, made me show my papers, and took all the time in the world to check them,” Herr Becker said, his voice still echoing the exasperation he had felt. I asked the Beckers whether they ever thought of leaving the GDR. They looked at each other. “One time in 1961, we went to Berlin,” Herr Becker began, “and the thought crossed our minds…”

VISITS IN KELLA, OR: HEIMAT AND FAITH 245 “But your mother had sent your sister with us. I bet that was on purpose!” Frau Becker interjected. She turned to me. “His sister was only ten. His mother sent her to make sure we didn’t go rüber!” “And as we were walking around Berlin our first morning, we were stopped constantly. They checked our papers at every corner,” Herr Becker continued. “Then in one street we saw soldiers slapping concrete blocks on top of each other and we realized they were building a wall right through the city. We could hardly believe our eyes. So we got out of there and came home to Kella.” With the construction of the Berlin Wall, GDR citizens’ one remaining loophole to West Germany had closed. Back home, the Beckers had to watch as the border was being built up with ever more obstacles. As twenty-year-olds, they might well have taken the leap and gone rüber that day in 1961, had it not been for their ten-year-old chaperone and the overnight construction of the Berlin Wall. After all, I had left my Germany at twenty-one, pulled toward an alternative future, barely able to grasp what it would mean to leave behind all that was familiar. But I also knew I could come back. After the Berlin trip, the Beckers concentrated on building their house and making as good a life for themselves and their family as they could in this challenging Heimat. I remembered from Daphne’s book that Herr Becker had built up the Heimatverein again after the Wende, and asked him about that. “The original club was founded back in 1894,” he said. “My grandfather was a member back then, and people from all over the place were members—all the little villages around here and down around Eschwege. All of that was disrupted when the border was built up.” “It was a cross-boundary Heimatverein even before the German division?” I asked. He nodded and explained, “We’ve always had strong connections with the Hessian towns in the Werra Valley because the Eichsfelders often had to go outside the Eichsfeld for work. They were basically migrant workers. And when the border opened,

246 PHANTOM BORDER people came in droves—from Eschwege, from Grebendorf, all over the place, and wanted a Heimatverein again.” “That’s really saying something for these connections, that they withstood the German division,” I commented. He agreed. “It worked out beautifully, for a few years. We staged concerts and plays and even went on trips together.” That was in the early 1990s. At some point in the course of that decade, things changed. Herr Becker stepped down as chair in 2001, and though he was still honorary president, he was no longer invited to events, nor were the members from Hesse. “The Leftists,166 in the Verein and in the village, kept dumping on the FRG [the abbreviation for West Germany as well as the reunited Germany]. To them everything was better in the GDR. Now cliques are forming, the sense of community is falling apart.” His tone was even, but I heard a sadness in his voice. I asked the Beckers about their post-Wende work experience. During GDR times Frau Becker, like many women in Kella, had worked in a local cigar factory that was later converted to manufacture suspender clips. Like many East German manufacturers, the company closed soon after the Wende. For a while Frau Becker worked temporary jobs through state-organized projects, but at fifty-eight years of age, she had no choice but to apply for early social security benefits. “So we were okay financially, but I felt like I was no longer needed. That took some getting used to,” she told me. Her husband, through an auspicious encounter soon after the Wende, was able to step almost directly into a job at a West German company.“ I came home one evening after a visit to the chapel,” Herr Becker recounts, “and was flagged down by the occupants of a shiny Mercedes Benz—clearly not a car from Kella, or anywhere else in East Germany. It was a couple from Hesse and they asked me for a restaurant recommendation for dinner. Well, restaurants are few and far between here, so I told them to come home with me.”

166

Members of Die Linke (the Left), the successor party to the SED.

VISITS IN KELLA, OR: HEIMAT AND FAITH 247 Impressed by the Beckers’ hospitality, their homemade Thuringian sausage, and Herr Becker’s experience in construction work, the West German man offered Herr Becker a job in his company. “What was it like to transition to a western company?” I asked. “Construction work was much more physically demanding in the GDR. When I first saw the fancy hydraulic lifts at my new jobsite, I almost cried. You know, I had messed up my back from years of carrying buckets of cement.” I cringed when he related how some of his new colleagues had commented that he would first need to learn how to work, since supposedly no one had worked in the GDR. Herr Becker reflected. “True, it was common for people to do personal errands during working hours. And in many cases party membership counted for more than hard work or competence. But there were also strict production quotas you had to meet.” Herr Becker ended up proving the clichés wrong and worked his way up to a management position. “And that was not just me,” he said. “Franz Bode and Heinz Schenk did the same thing.” *** The houses of the Bodes and the Schenks sat only a few meters from the former border strip, a situation that exposed them to close contact with the enforcers of the border regime. Once, Herr Bode related, he had noticed that a pair of hikers on the western side had overlooked the GDR border markers and wandered into the GDR’s outside sovereign territory. He had to make a quick decision, not knowing whether any border guards were within earshot: Yell across the border strip to tell the vacationers they were in danger, and risk being charged with a border violation himself? Or pretend he hadn’t seen them, and hope they would notice their mistake before any border guards noticed them and impulsively decided to shoot? He decided to call out to the hikers, “You are on GDR territory! Turn around!” Fortunately, no border guards had noticed the brief interaction. Years later, after the Wende, a couple from a West

248 PHANTOM BORDER German city drove to Kella, knocked on doors to find the Bodes’ house, and thanked him for his courage that day. Frau Schenk, now eighty, recalled how her own elderly mother had often gazed toward Braunrode through binoculars in hopes of seeing her relatives drüben. One day—in the midst of her birthday celebration—two border guards banged on the door, barged in, and barked at her, “You were looking west!” “My mother was beside herself with fear. She was certain that our family would be expelled from the Schutzstreifen,” Frau Schenk recalled. “When there was another knock at the door, she cried, Jetzt holen sie uns ab—now they’ve come to take us away.” This time, however, it was the commander of the two border guards. To everyone’s surprise, he had come to apologize for their earlier behavior. After that, the guards let the old woman gaze west. “How absurd!” I exclaim. “If your mother was a retiree, couldn’t she simply have moved west if she wanted to?” “That’s right,” Frau Schenk replies. “I guess that guard took his instructions a little too seriously.” Both Frau Schenk and Anna could still feel the fear those situations had evoked. At the same time, both showed understanding for the border guards’ behavior. “They were trying to do the right thing” based on their situation, Anna reflected, recognizing that they could have gotten into trouble if they had not followed up on prohibited behavior, and a by-the-book commander had found out. Frau Schenk remembered watching the border guards build the signal fence on a hot summer day in 1961 and thinking, “Those poor guys in their dark uniforms.” “You practically had to watch them wall you in,” Anna added. Frau Schenk nodded. “Yes, and later they installed halogen lights in the border strip that lit up our bedroom.” The halogen lights had been part of the GDR’s final round of border “improvements,” undertaken in the summer of 1989. That fall, when the Peaceful Revolution spread to the Eichsfeld, Frau Schenk, together with seventy or eighty other villagers, walked up to the border fence and placed candles on the fence posts. Border guards ordered them to take the candles down,

VISITS IN KELLA, OR: HEIMAT AND FAITH 249 but the villagers chanted: “Forty years has been too long! To Braunrode we want to go!” “Wie ein Wunder,” she said, “like a miracle, that the border came down without bloodshed. I am eternally grateful that we were able to experience that.” When the time came to say good-bye, Frau Schenk insisted that I must take a homemade sausage. This, too, had been a way the Kellans had managed to sustain themselves during all the tough times: many families had kept not only gardens but also pigs. Both of my own parents’ families survived World War II that way, and even though I myself rarely eat meat, I knew I would eat this homemade Thuringian sausage with the highest appreciation.

Chapter 16: The Bakery Has Closed Forever Thank you that I did not have to shoot —handwritten note at the German Unity Sculpture Park

The sight of the tiny village of Henneberg (population 613) in the light of the setting sun lifted my spirits. A reward for the double distance I had covered since that morning. Wanting to keep the day flexible, to see how far I could ride in the deceptively gentle-looking Rhön Mountains, I had not booked accommodations in advance. For some reason, not a single room was available in Fladungen by the time I decided that the thirty-five kilometers there would be a reasonable goal. Gaps in cell phone coverage kept me from making other inquiries; a forest path petered out into a narrow hiking trail criss-crossed by gnarly roots; and after a long moment of disorientation, the village at the end of that trail turned out not to be the one I had expected. Not that I didn’t like the surrounding forest. But wanting to travel light, I had not even brought a sleeping bag. Every time anxiety crept in, I reminded myself that it was July—daylight would last until close to ten p.m. The heat wave of the last few days had passed, though I worked up a good layer of sweat during the morning’s long push up to a sprawling plateau. After that, it was mostly a thrilling descent through the Rhön Mountains’ never-ending sweep of grand vistas. Eventually my phone showed a bar of cell service again, along with an affirmative message from the “old forestry house” in Henneberg where I had requested a room during my afternoon stop at the Bay of Pigs cafe. Only another thirty-five kilometers. I can do it. The Bay of Pigs café: I had noticed signs for Gaststätte Schweinebucht ever since I began to descend from the high plateau and was intrigued by the name. Was “Bay of Pigs” a reference to the unsuccessful invasion of Cuba, in 1961, by Cuban exiles and CIA forces? Was there a GDR connection with the Cuban defense? Were the café’s owners signaling nostalgia for a former socialist brother state?

251

252 PHANTOM BORDER I wasn’t the first guest to ask. When the server came, she deflected my questions and pointed to the menu: “It’s all written up in there!” The true story of the little establishment’s name, printed in free-flowing verse on the inside cover of the menu, supported neither of my guesses. Instead, it was a story of creativity in the face of post-Wende challenges. There had been actual pigs here thirty years ago, along with cows and sheep, which had provided their owners Harry and Rolf with some extra income. Then the border had opened. The farming business struggled, and Harry and Rolf’s wives lost their jobs. The four of them brainstormed and decided to open up a beverage and ice cream shop, but their customers wanted more. The two couples expanded the shop, made it into a modest restaurant, and named it Schweinebucht in honor of their former farm animals. Between the lines, I thought I read a tongue-in-cheek nod to Cuba. Now that I knew about the real pigs, the little establishment’s peculiar pastel pink color scheme made sense, too. And the piece of homemade cake I ordered proved that the astute entrepreneurs were in the right business. By the time I saw the first houses of Henneberg, the cake was a distant memory and the sun nearing the western horizon. Like a piece of Vermont, I thought, the way the village lay nestled between fields and pastures against a wooded hillside. The realization that there were places like this in Germany, too, put a smile on my face. As did the “Bäckerei” sign I spotted the next morning a few houses down from the old forestry house. Something about it seemed off—there was no shop window displaying baked goods. I decided to take a closer look, and stepped through the wroughtiron gate into a small bricked courtyard. No cars, no bikes, no people, no smell of Brötchen. Finally, my eyes landed on a hand-written sign attached to one of the building’s doors: Die Bäckerei ist für immer geschlossen. The bakery is closed forever. This was unfortunate news, though at least I had been able to make tea in the ramshackle kitchen of the old forestry house and still had some provisions to get me through the day. More unfortunate for the residents of Henneberg, who apparently had to drive the twelve kilometers to Meiningen for their breakfast rolls—and for everything else they didn’t grow in their own gardens. Though

THE BAKERY HAS CLOSED FOREVER 253 the guidebook mentioned a snackbar, I had not seen one. Or, for that matter, a Konsum or any other store. Orphaned bakeries, closed bank branches and post offices, understaffed fire departments, doctors working long past retirement age because no replacement can be found, few if any public transit connections to larger towns—these are well-known facts of life in much of eastern Germany. But abandoned rural areas are not only an eastern problem—in my parents’ neighborhood in Bremen, the sole savings bank branch has closed, too—nor are they limited to Germany. Sociologist and planning expert Gerlind Weber sees a trend reinforced by political decisions: rural areas often do not even figure in regional planning concepts, because “a Euro invested in an urban center has a greater effect than one invested in a structurally weak region.” Weber also concludes that these decisions have political ramifications. Using Austria as an example, she showed significant correlations between abandoned rural areas and election successes of the right-wing FPÖ party. Similar correlations have been found in France, the U.K., and the United States.167 Reminding myself that I was looking for the German Unity Sculpture Park, I located the unpaved back road through the forest that the guidebook recommended. When the forest opened up into a clearing, I could see a dilapidated watchtower on the far side, near where the federal road had to be. On the opposite side, near a turn in the unpaved back road, I glimpsed a row of the patrol track’s characteristic concrete slabs. Perhaps I would find remnants of the border fence if I did some detective work along the edge of the forest. But the open space before me was filled with an intriguing display of objects: a squat wooden structure the size of a small house, a number of steel shapes, and an array of colorful flags. The sculpture park. I walked over to two pairs of angular pillars with beams placed across the top, making them appear like gates. Words had been stenciled out of each of the pillars. I pushed my bicycle closer to read the words, and then noticed another bicycle leaning against one of the pillars. A man was standing next to it, apparently also 167

Gasser 2016.

254 PHANTOM BORDER contemplating the stenciled words: “Sind wir” (are we) on the two pillars to the left, and “ein Volk” (one people) on the ones to the right. Together, the four words made a question out of the “We are one people” chant from the Peaceful Revolution. Are we one people? My mind flashed back to the reunification sculpture in Duderstadt, to the two figures moving toward each but kept apart by an invisible wall. The man turned to me and said Guten Tag, then commented with a smile, “a fellow traveler in the borderland!” when he noticed the guidebook on my handlebar. He had started at the Czech border and was traveling north—the opposite direction than I was. “What are your impressions so far? And where are you from?” I wanted to know. “I’m from Bonn,” he replied—the West German capital during the time of the division, near the Rhine; closer to the Belgian border than the one with East Germany. “One thing I’m coming to see on this trip is how people in the GDR were kept down by their government. Not only with all the restrictions, but also with harsh measures like the expulsions from the border area. And that sometimes the regime was using people to make a point. I don’t think many of us in the West really knew or understood that.” He went on to share how he himself had once come to sense the repressive reach of the GDR regime. In the early eighties, he worked for the BGS, the (West German) Federal Border Guard, and had been stationed along the inner-German border near Lübeck. On a private visit to East Germany, the GDR border guard at the Marienborn crossing, after checking his papers, wished him a “happy onward journey, Herr Kollege [colleague]”—letting him know that East Germany had researched members of the West German Border Guard. “That felt really creepy,” he said. “Who knows what else they knew about me.” I wandered over to the wooden structure, which turned out to be not a house but the “Golden Bridge of Unity.” Its exterior had weathered to a grayish brown. I stepped underneath its rounded arch. Though open on both ends and with just the grassy meadow as a floor, the space under the bridge pulled me in with an almost church-like atmosphere. Along one of the curved walls hung about

THE BAKERY HAS CLOSED FOREVER 255 a dozen simple paintings on wooden squares and rectangles. Some were painted on a golden background and reminded me of medieval church icons; some had hand-written messages on them. “Thank you that I did not have to shoot,” one of the inscriptions read. “The miracle of Leipzig” and “true heroes” was written on another. Several of the pictures showed candles; one had the inscription “We were prepared for anything but candles,” quoting Stasi director Erich Mielke after the huge protest march in Leipzig on October 9, 1989. Another picture had a stark drawing of a gun, a body slumped on the ground next to a splotch of red paint, and the words “No Chinese solution”—a clear reference to the massacre at Tiananmen Square in June 1989. Among the painted panels, a sign explained the story of the bridge. The initiator of the sculpture park, Herbert “Jimmy” Fell, wanted it to symbolize his wish for “that which belongs together to grow together again,” using the words of the former West German chancellor Willy Brandt after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Fell had chosen the golden color for the bridge to symbolize the great value of unity, and had recruited students from technical schools on both sides of the former border to build the bridge together—right across the former border line, as the map on my phone confirmed. Fell’s hope, the note said, was that as the bridge disintegrated over the years, German Unity would grow. He wants us to take the long view. If the bridge’s decay stands in any relation to the process of Reunification, that process has barely begun: the bridge had stood for twenty-one years and, apart from the faded gold paint, showed few signs of deterioration. I stepped out from the arch. Across the grassy meadow, beyond the colorful flags, stood the simple steel frame I had noticed earlier. Now I saw that it outlined the basic shape of a house, with a toppled-over chair lying outside it. The meaning was clear before I even saw the sign with the artist’s notes: the sculpture was titled “expulsion.” Fell had intended it to symbolize not only the expulsions along this particular border during GDR times, but expulsions everywhere: of the Huguenots from France, Germans from Poland, Palestinians from the land of their ancestors, Jews from just

256 PHANTOM BORDER about everywhere, and ultimately, the expulsion of humans from paradise—the “ur” meaning of Heimat. I turned to the two tall metal frames next to the sculpture and read the words that had been cut out of them in uneven letters, allowing the clear blue of the sky behind them to shine through: You can drive a person from their Heimat

said the one on the left, but not the Heimat from the person

the other. A thrush’s spiraling notes carried over from the edge of the forest; the sound of a car came from the nearby road. Otherwise, the clearing was perfectly still, the gentle air not too hot, not too cold, the forest peaceful. I had not expected to be so moved by the sculpture park, but these sky-blue words, the stick-figure steelframe home, and the toppled chair spoke of countless worlds of loss. I could sense how this place allowed me to slow down, even more than my journey by bicycle had already done. What was it about these sculptures that made them speak to me so powerfully? Maybe we humans use far too many words. Jimmy Fell had ended the story of the bridge with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s advice on how to build a ship: When building a ship, one does not begin by drawing up plans, gathering timber, and cutting planks, but rather by arousing in people the yearning for the great wide sea.

Maybe this place holds the aspirations of people building a ship together—of students from Thuringia and Bavaria building a bridge and a field of flags together. Not a sinking ship, Joachim Gauck’s words came back to me. Maybe this is the story of humankind, too: there are always strong gusts, but as long as people work together to build a bridge—or a country—we are not a sinking ship. ***

THE BAKERY HAS CLOSED FOREVER 257 My stomach made a rumbling sound. After all of this food for thought, it was time for bodily nourishment. Knowing that the Henneberg bakery would not be open (ever again) and that my remaining provisions were meager, I remembered seeing a sign for Bauerbach. I had not noticed the village on the map, but according to the sign it was only three kilometers away. After yesterday’s marathon ride, it seemed worth a try. The slender road to Bauerbach playfully curved its way through farm fields in a series of long-stretched, smoothly descending S-shapes. There was little traffic, and I became increasingly taken with the scene before me: a little village with red clay-tiled roofs surrounded by the light ochre tones of the farm fields and the dark green of the forest covering the gently sloping hillsides. I had just passed the yellow Bauerbach sign at the entrance to the village when I noticed another sign saying “Schiller-Museum” that pointed in the same direction. I was intrigued: What connection could the great poet and playwright Friedrich Schiller—friend and contemporary of Goethe—have had with a little village in rural Thuringia? Did the sign even refer to that Schiller? I was about to find out. Instead of a bakery, my quick orientation ride through the village yielded exactly one food establishment: the Schiller-Gasthaus. Its artful facade, I learned from the menu, had been painted by villagers with themes from a ballad Schiller had written in Bauerbach. Schiller himself had eaten, and drunk, here regularly—and left behind a sizable unpaid bill. He was young then and his already precarious employment situation had just fallen apart. He had arrived in debt from self-publishing his play The Robbers. At least the restaurant was not at risk of losing out; the family that had sheltered Schiller in Bauerbach had promised to pay the bill if he could not. In any case, there seemed to be no hard feelings now: the restaurant had kept the bench and table where Schiller had eaten back in 1782. The waiter was clearly pleased to have a guest on this quiet early mid-week afternoon. When I asked for a salad, he looked mildly taken aback that I was not interested in any of the traditional meat-heavy fare. After a primer on the excellence of Thuringian

258 PHANTOM BORDER cuisine, we found a solution that pleased us both: to my first-rate salad he added a Thuringian dumpling as a side dish. The Schiller Museum turned out to be a stately-but-not-grandiose two-story timber-frame house. A friendly elderly attendant greeted me warmly and asked if I would like a tour. And so, for the second time in one day, the borderland treated me to an impromptu study visit. Schiller, I learned from Herr Richter, had needed to get away from his employer, the duke of Württemberg, because he had made an unauthorized trip away from the court to attend the premiere of The Robbers in Mannheim. The performance was an enormous success, but that did not mitigate the duke’s anger. On the contrary, he punished Schiller with two weeks’ house arrest and forbade him to write. That was too much for Schiller. The duke had already imposed on him an unwanted professional path: he had first ordered thirteen-year-old Schiller to attend the ducal military academy, and then to study medicine. Not surprising, I thought, that a main theme in The Robbers is the use and abuse of power. After fleeing the court, Schiller spent several months of precarious employment at the Mannheim theater until his time at the military academy yielded a silver lining: the mother of two former fellow students there offered him her house in Bauerbach. Schiller arrived incognito one December night in 1782 and was introduced to the villagers as “Dr. Ritter,” an alias he maintained for the next seven months. All of “Dr. Ritter’s” needs for food, laundry, and heating fuel were taken care of by his host’s staff, and so Schiller was able to use his hiding place as a writing retreat and complete his tragedy Cabal and Love. Herr Richter, the museum docent, took me up the creaky wooden stairs and showed me the rooms Schiller had occupied: a gemütlich bedroom, a small sitting room, and a study with a desk, well-lit by natural light. Except for the barren surface of the desk, the rooms looked as if Schiller had merely stepped out for a walk. In the hallway I noticed a map of Württemberg and the neighboring territories around Schiller’s time. On it, someone had traced all of Schiller’s travels in different colored felt-tip pens. Bauerbach was shown in the upper right corner, in a ducal territory that

THE BAKERY HAS CLOSED FOREVER 259 belonged to the principality of Henneberg. I counted at least seven borders that Schiller had crossed between various territories. His last crossing, on his way to Bauerbach, had been near Henneberg. What would he have made of the Iron Curtain that descended there two hundred years later? Schiller, a fervent apostle of freedom, would likely have been deeply empathetic to East Germany’s peaceful revolutionaries. Herr Richter had talked so knowledgeably and engagingly about Schiller’s life and work that I asked him whether his main work was as a literature professor. “No,” he laughed, “I’m a retired civil engineer.” Seeing my astonishment at that answer, he filled me in about his long-standing interest in literature and we were off on a wideranging conversation about life, the GDR, and how a “crime” he had committed as a young man almost derailed his professional ambitions. The trouble started one evening when, as a 19-year-old, he was walking around town with a few colleagues from his construction job, to which he had been assigned while he waited for his mandatory NVA training to begin. “We were listening to Western music from a boombox when we were stopped by a VoPo (Volkspolizei or People’s Police) patrol car and ordered to shut off the music. One of my colleagues got really aggressive. I tried to calm him down by telling him to ‘just let them be, those Russenjungen’ [Russian boys; referring to the close relationship of the GDR government with the Soviet Union]. The VoPos overheard me and arrested me on the spot.” In the end, he was lucky: the charge of Staatsverleumdung (slandering the state) could have kept him from ever pursuing higher education, but he was allowed to enter university if—like Siggi Schefke—he proved himself in socialist production. For Herr Richter, this meant working in construction for another two years. During that time, he proved himself so well that after just a few weeks he was made foreman. At the same time, because of his “hostile actions,” he was deemed “unworthy of performing [his] service of honor for the NVA”—a punishment that saved him eighteen months of military training. Later, after obtaining his engineering degree, he was able to pursue a specialized degree in tunnel construction.

260 PHANTOM BORDER Herr Richter received by far the most lenient treatment of anyone I spoke to who dared to criticize the East German regime, no matter how mildly. What had saved young Klaus Richter from this fate? “Sheer luck with my superiors at the construction collective,” he said, shrugging as if to say he really didn’t know either. “They recognized that I knew what I was doing and they always treated me fairly.” After the Wende Herr Richter had started his own business, which lasted for sixteen years and then went under. “But the Wende was amazing,” he said. “My life has been spannend (exciting), I have experienced two very different societies. I am fortunate that I never experienced war.” What about after the Wende, I asked—how did he think Reunification had gone? “The cities turned out beautiful: Leipzig, Meiningen, Dresden. But the Treuhand—there were some unethical people in there. The GDR companies did not all have to be closed or sold.” Back on the winding road to Henneberg, the riding felt easy. If I had chastised myself for poor planning yesterday when the accommodation search proved difficult, these encounters were auspicious reminders that planning is not everything. The day-tripper who lost his first love to the Berlin Wall, Louisa from the forest preschool, and countless other conversations in between. Even the briefest ones made news stories and history books more real. Once again, I was grateful for these encounters in the borderland. Although the shadow of the border was always present, the conversations felt easy and thoughtful, an attempt to understand rather than take a stand.

Chapter 17: Crossing an Ocean, Crossing the Phantom Border Here you can still make a difference. —Mayor Christine Bardin, Ummerstadt, Thuringia

“Bardin!” A woman’s voice answered the phone. I introduced myself, told her about my border expedition and asked whether she might have time to talk to me. I felt sheepish for not calling her at least the day before; somehow I must have missed the fact that I would come through her little town today. Maybe my mind was preoccupied with reports of a gigantic right-wing rock concert in another, even smaller town, where the crowd had enthusiastically raised their hands in the Hitler salute. It was only when I passed the yellow municipal sign for Ummerstadt that I realized with a start that this was the town whose mayor I had read about and whom I was hoping to meet. Christine Bardin has been mayor of Thuringia’s smallest city—population just over 500—for seventeen years. I knew that she had lived in Los Angeles for eight years before moving to Ummerstadt, but had grown up in a village across the border in Bavaria, in what was then West Germany. I figured she might have something to say about things like Heimat and East-West grumblings. “All right,” she said after a brief pause, “Why don’t you come to my office at three. It’s in the Rathaus (City Hall). You can’t miss it.” I thanked her profusely and contemplated my good luck in even being able to reach her, when all I had gotten from my phone was “this call cannot be completed.” A Funkloch (literally, “radio hole”—a cellular dead zone). If there ever had been a pay phone on the small square where I had stopped, it had by now been consigned to history. Unwilling to give up on my plan so soon, I looked around the square again and noticed some tables and chairs in front of one of the neatly painted houses. A cafe! I pushed my bike closer, leaned it against the building’s timber-framed wall and settled in for a tea break. 261

262 PHANTOM BORDER A moment later, the server came outside, a slender man with graying hair and a serious expression. After placing my order, I asked if I could borrow his phone and whether he could check the number I had for Mayor Bardin. “Sure,” he said, took out his phone and opened the contact list. “Her number is in here.” Why not? I mused. In Thuringia’s smallest town and Germany’s second-smallest, why shouldn’t the first person I ask have the mayor’s phone number saved? They probably all have her number. Somehow this thought pleased me, as had the sight of Ummerstadt when I had first seen it from the road. Even from a distance the little assembly of red-tiled roofs and dark brown posts and beams burrowed itself straight into my soft spot for Fachwerk and small towns. Right about the moment Ummerstadt came into view, I had stopped to take a picture and noticed the memorial plaque for Erlebach, a village that had sat just a little closer to the border than Ummerstadt—too close for the GDR leadership’s comfort, and so its residents had been expelled and the village razed in 1986. Try as I might, I could not see a trace of it. The plaque stated that Erlebach had been founded in 1310. I thought of everything the village had survived over seven centuries—the Peasants’ War, the Thirty Years’ War, and who knows how many smaller skirmishes and fires. I handed the phone back to the server when he came out with my tea, and brought my mind back to the present. “What a gemütlich café! Are you the owner? Are you from here?” “I grew up here,” he replied, his somber expression allowing for a slight smile, “but I lived in Würzburg for a long time.” That meant he had lived in Bavaria—the West. I looked at him, the question probably plain on my face: Was that during GDR times? How did you end up drüben? My gut feeling told me that he had been through things that were still haunting him. I remembered what the biker at the sculpture park had said, about people in the GDR having been beaten down for four decades. The server’s expression grew even more serious. “I spent a year in a Stasi prison,” he said in a flat voice. “Eventually West

CROSSING AN OCEAN, CROSSING THE PHANTOM BORDER 263 Germany bought me free.168 I always wanted to come back here, and now I am finally giving it a go. My daughter and I are trying to build up this cafe together.” “It looks like you’re off to a great start,” I encouraged him. “I’d be a regular for sure if I lived here.” A smile brightened his expression. For a moment I considered asking what had landed him in the Stasi’s crosshairs, but another table was filling up. He excused himself to greet the new customers. From all I had learned by now, I knew it would not have taken much to be labeled an enemy of the state, and I’d seen a Stasi prison first-hand. On a visit to the one in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen, the guide, a former inmate, had told us that he had torn down an SED party poster as a 16-year-old. Someone had seen him and reported him. The next day he was picked up in an unmarked windowless van, driven around a circuitous route and marched into a barren cell with a padded door. He only found out a year later, after his release, where he had been held. I thought back to Herr Richter, the docent at the Schiller Museum in Bauerbach. He could have easily landed in a Stasi prison for calling a VoPo “Russia boy,” but he had gotten a break. There still was some time before my appointment with Mayor Bardin, so I decided to give myself an orientation ride around Ummerstadt. The market square was an elongated, cobblestoned plaza surrounded entirely by timber frame buildings that all looked exquisitely maintained. Like a movie set for a medieval scene, I commented to myself before I remembered that this very Marktplatz was indeed the setting for several scenes in a movie about Martin Luther and the Reformation. In one, an actor portraying the preacher Johann Tetzel scared the film-villagers half to death with his vivid depictions of how they would burn in hell for their sins— he held his hand into a flame until the flesh seemed to melt, then offered them relief through certificates of indulgence, which they

168

Beginning in 1963, West Germany began to “buy” political prisoners “free” from East Germany through complex processes of negotiation. By 1990, approximately 33,000 GDR prisoners had gained freedom and been released to West Germany through “Freikaufen.” See, for example, Kühn 2011 and MDR 2021.

264 PHANTOM BORDER could purchase from him. The real-life Tetzel had been highly effective with his sales pitch, and convinced even dirt-poor people to part with their hard-earned money to ensure god’s good will in the afterlife, either for themselves or a departed loved one. Now the market square was quiet; only an occasional car passed by on Ummerstadt’s Main Street, the Marktstrasse. One building with ornate slate-blue timber-work on one of the lower corners of the square looked even more meticulously maintained than the others. Luxurious red geraniums billowed from the flower boxes attached to its mullioned slate-blue window frames. Above the building’s main door tall letters spelled out R-A-T-H-A-U-S. City Hall. The square followed Ummerstadt’s topography: its buildings hugged the hillside, giving them a slanted look and as much as an extra story on the downhill side. Near the top of the hill, a church spire poked out behind the red-tiled roofs that lined the narrow street. Hoping to get an aerial view of the Green Belt, I began to push the bike in its direction, finding the hill to be deceptively steep. Closer to the church, I saw that it was enclosed by a sturdy stone wall. An enamel sign stated that its origins dated back to somewhere between the 6th–8th century. That would make it not only the oldest building in town but also the oldest fortified church in all of Thuringia. Next to a medieval-looking tower, a gate led into the churchyard. The church itself was just as sturdy as the stone wall surrounding it. Like most of the town’s buildings it, too, slanted up along the hillside, making the nave look even more massive than the thick stone walls alone would have. In front of my inner eye a scene appeared, whether from the Luther film or from my imagination I could not say: people in simple, homespun clothing streaming toward the church, pulling carts and children, carrying baskets, desperate to find refuge from one or another military conflict. Did the Ummerstädters seek shelter here during the 20th century wars, too? The sturdy walls would have offered little protection against the more powerful weapons that were in use by then. Barely a month before the end of WWII, an American incendiary bomb hit the tower, which crashed into the nave, setting it on fire

CROSSING AN OCEAN, CROSSING THE PHANTOM BORDER 265 and nearly destroying the church. Though Thuringia was part of the Soviet occupation zone, U.S. forces had gotten to parts of it first. Like many other parts of the borderland farther north—Amt Neuhaus, the villages on the eastern side of Lake Schaalsee—this area, too, was part of a territorial exchange between the Soviets and the western Allies. I walked along the inside of the stone wall to get a view of the surrounding area, mustering my landscape detective brain for telltale signs of the Green Belt. Looking in the direction I came from this morning, I noticed a meandering line of dark green tufts in a wide band of luscious lighter, almost khaki-colored green. The little tufts were trees, probably floodplain species like willows or alders. I knew there was a stream down there, the Helling—I had crossed it this morning, from Bavaria to Thuringia—though from here all I could see was an occasional silvery sparkle in the sunlight. I opened my mapping app to check for the dashed line between the two federal states. There it was, right in the center of the stream: a squiggly white line on the map, a haven for the creatures of the floodplain on the ground. Even the secretive, and extremely rare, Eurasian rail (Crex crex) had been spotted there. I let my eyes follow the dashed line on the map towards Ummerstadt and realized that this little town, like Kella, was once surrounded by the German-German border on three sides—the only access to the rest of East Germany was through the village of Bad Colberg, a few miles to the north. Unlike Kella, Ummerstadt was not in the 500-meter-zone, but life was obviously constricted. No wonder so many people had left during the time of the division. At the founding of the GDR there had been almost twice as many residents. The hands on the church tower’s clock were almost at ten to three now; time to make my way back downhill to the Rathaus. Mayor Bardin’s office was on the second floor, a bright room with a view of neighboring timber frame facades and a courtyard. A tray with two coffee cups and a thermos sat on her desk. Maybe my surprise call did not cause her undue stress.

266 PHANTOM BORDER “Thanks again for making time,” I said. “I know this is not your only job.” I’d read that she was an architect in her main professional life. She smiled. “You’re right, but it’s auspicious timing—my calendar for today was fairly flexible. So, what brings you here?” I explained about my desire to see the former border and the Green Belt for myself, and to better understand how Germany had changed over the last thirty years. Where to begin? “Maybe we could start with how you got from L.A. to Ummerstadt, and when you moved here? I only know it was after the Wende, but was it because of that?” She poured two cups of coffee from the thermos and said Bitte—help yourself. I did, and she began. “That was in 1996, and no, it wasn’t primarily because of the Wende. The pull was really once my first son was born. I had always worked a lot in L.A. and I loved my work, but then when my son came, I longed for my family. And that was when the contrast in work lives really hit me. The constant stress my American colleagues were under, the long hours, the constant race to make arrangements for childcare, the little time they had with their kids; families so spread out across the country. My own in-laws lived far away in Texas. And I missed the small-town connections I had grown up with. My husband was willing to give it a try, even though he didn’t speak a word of German at the time. So we used my parents’ house as a base camp, and from there we drove around the area to look at houses. One day we were driving in this direction and had a view of Ummerstadt across the valley and—I just fell for it.” I laughed and told her that my reaction had been exactly the same. She smiled. “Soon after, we bought our house,” she continued. “It looked the way it must have looked in the 1930s, so I had my first architectural project.” “Did you ever sense any aversion from the villagers because you were from Bavaria, from the West?” I asked. “No, I never experienced that. It probably helped that I came from the U.S., not straight from West Germany. We showed up here

CROSSING AN OCEAN, CROSSING THE PHANTOM BORDER 267 with suitcases and a child in tow and said ‘here we are!’ and everyone was interested in us, and in the wider world. And pretty soon I was asked whether I wanted to be on the city council. I knew how to apply for permits and funding, how to write concepts, things like that. But it wasn’t that I was the big savior, all of this was also really interesting for me. I just saw the enormous potential in this little town and I said to myself, here you can still make a difference, you can move things forward. It was not just the town but also the people; they were so open and had so much self-initiative. And somehow I ended up becoming deputy mayor and after that I was elected mayor.” “Hier kann man noch was bewegen”—here you can still make a difference. This sounded familiar, and I knew where I had heard it before: from West Germans who had worked for the Treuhand or moved to East Germany for other reasons after the Wende. Their reflections were full of optimism and Tatendrang, the energy to get something accomplished. Many of them felt that things were too set in stone in the West to leave much room for creativity. “Why do you think people here have so much initiative?” I asked Mayor Bardin. “For one thing, the people here have always stuck together because the town was almost encircled by the border, which made it even more remote than it would otherwise have been. Right now, for example, they are repairing the village brewery. I’m really impressed. They do everything—once in a while I hear that they need some bricks or some concrete and I make sure those things get paid for. But they do all the work. The other thing is our small size. It’s quite different in the larger towns—everything is more anonymous; it’s easy to not feel responsible and to think that someone else will take care of things.” “They know they are the town,” I commented. “That’s right,” she replied. “But I worry that this spirit may suffer. We are currently facing a difficult situation. There’s a big push from the state government toward larger administrative structures, to consolidate services in the rural regions. And that would mean that small towns like Ummerstadt would lose their independence, that they would be left without a kindergarten or a fire

268 PHANTOM BORDER brigade. All of that would be centralized to the larger towns. I’m afraid that people’s sense of community will suffer if that happens. That would be really sad.” “So we’ve started a foundation partly for that reason: a regional initiative to strengthen that spirit of connectedness—within Ummerstadt but also the ties between the towns in the region, including on the Bavarian side. It’s called the Rodach Valley Initiative. The idea is that if the current structures were to disappear, we’ll have something to build on and we can still take care of our own affairs—along the lines of ‘if they don’t do it, we’ll do it ourselves.’” I told her I was reminded of New England and the town meetings that still survive in some smaller towns. “People feel very strongly about things like schools and school budgets and they come together to sort things out in person. They are leery of giving up local control.” She nodded. “Right. And it’s not as if we haven’t thought about efficiencies, which is the main reason given for consolidation. Here we’ve formed an administrative association, so that we are already sharing certain resources and positions, like a justice of the peace.” I took another sip of coffee and let my gaze sweep over the neighboring buildings. “I noticed that most of the houses in Ummerstadt look freshly renovated,” I told her. “Is that your doing?” She laughed. “Not quite, though we did restore one of the old buildings on the Marktplatz through the Rodach Valley Initiative. The idea was to make it into a competence center for construction methods. The house goes back to the 1670s; it had sat empty for several decades and was close to falling apart. The project cost close to a million euros; that was a big deal for our small city budget. But we were able to get some grants so that Ummerstadt didn’t have to come up with the whole amount. That helped a lot. We’ve already offered seminars there on traditional crafts like cobb construction and making paints with linseed oil. I love things like that—bringing traditions into the modern age.” Here’s a person in her element, I thought to myself. I was reminded of a passage from a career-advice book, about finding the

CROSSING AN OCEAN, CROSSING THE PHANTOM BORDER 269 sweet spot where what you have to offer to the world meets up with what the world needs. “The seminars are very popular and people come from all over the region,” Frau Bardin continued. “And the restored building now serves as headquarters for the Rodach Valley Initiative.” Besides her background in construction, she seemed to be a natural at networking. With her own community spirit and Tatendrang, she had clearly integrated herself deeply into her adopted little town. I decided to ask her what Heimat means to her. She reached for her coffee cup and closed her eyes for a moment before she spoke. “Heimat is where I was born and where I harmonize with the people. You know, Ummerstadt reminded me of my childhood, of the way people walk in and out of each other’s houses, how you can leave your children with someone and know they will be taken care of, of people bringing each other flowers when there’s a death in the family or for a special occasion. But it is also a Lebensgefühl—a feeling of life—that you carry with you. To some extent I had that in L.A., too, certain places where I would spend time with friends. So it’s not necessarily only about a specific place or where you were born, though the landscape here very much feels like Heimat to me.” She took another sip and gazed out the window. “It’s also not about Germany. Sure, there are certain qualities that people ascribe to Germans that I’m sure I have. But I feel Frankish more than German.” This rang a bell. I had long thought of Franconia as a geographic place name, as the northern part of Bavaria, but I had also picked up on a strong regional identity among Franconians even before I arrived here on my bicycle. Years ago I had made the mistake of referring to a man from Coburg as being from Bavaria, and he had set me straight in an angry tone: “Ich bin ein Franke! (I am Frankish!)” What I was piecing together now was that Franconia is not only northern Bavaria but also southern Thuringia. I’d noticed this in the way people talked along this stretch of the former border, here where it meandered in and out of the foothills of the Thuringian Forest in broad U-shape: the southern Thuringians spoke the same dialect as their neighbors on the Bavarian side. For the most

270 PHANTOM BORDER part, I could understand them just fine, but I had to tune in carefully to the soft consonants, the strong rolled r’s, and the swallowed syllables that are different from the ones that North Germans swallow. “You sound Frankish, too,” I told Mayor Bardin. She laughed. “Yes, I think that helped the Ummerstädters accept me, too, when I first arrived here. Imagine if I had moved to somewhere in Saxony instead, or moved here speaking with a Saxon dialect?” “Right, you were able to blend right in. I would have stuck out like a sore thumb, whether here or in Saxony,” I said, aware with a tinge of sadness that despite my crush on Ummerstadt, I would never fit in here quite like Frau Bardin did. She laughed again, a twinkle in her eye. “For sure. You sound North German from a mile away.” I nodded, then smiled. Of course she was right, and of course there was nothing wrong with that. Just like I cannot leave my Germanness behind outside of Germany, my North German roots are part of me inside the country. “It seems that for some people, Heimat is becoming more about Germanness and Abgrenzung again—about setting boundaries, about who belongs and who does not. Some of it sounds downright right-wing extremist. Do you notice any of that around here?” “Oh yes,” she responded. “There’ve been right-wing noises in the next larger town, on and off, and last year they staged a large event. That’s when I decided to get involved. The city council there seemed to think that if you sweep these things under the rug, they will go away. But that’s not at all how I see it. So I started an initiative called Ummerstadt ist bunt—Ummerstadt is colorful. The idea is to strengthen civil society and strengthen solidarity, and to involve young people who might otherwise get pulled in by stupid ideas because there is not much going on for them here.” Two words were going around my mind as she spoke. One was Bodenständigkeit, a term that denotes a connection to place, a groundedness. The other word was Weltoffenheit, an openness to the many facets of the wider world. I sensed both these qualities here, in Mayor Bardin and in the way she described her fellow Ummerstädters. This was a place where people knew they could make

CROSSING AN OCEAN, CROSSING THE PHANTOM BORDER 271 a difference. Together, she and they were creating the society they wanted to live in. Maybe, if I ever needed another home, they would let me live here, despite my North German accent.

Chapter 18: The Birds at the End of the World Life has unfathomable secrets. Human knowledge will be erased from the archives of the world before we possess the last word that the Gnat has to say to us. —Jean-Henri Fabre

The night air had done little to cool my gemütlich but tiny room from the previous day’s heat, and my groggy attempts to hunt down a hungry mosquito had failed. But as the morning sun coaxed my eyelids open, I remembered the plan for the day: to explore the Green Belt with Kai Frobel. I’d heard bits and pieces of his story over the years. How, as a thirteen-year-old, he noticed rare bird species along the border with the GDR, which ran less than a kilometer from his childhood home. Not only did he recognize them, he kept detailed records of his observations, year after year. In 1977, when he was seventeen, he wrote up his findings and entered them into a science contest held by the Bavarian environment ministry. His entry won first prize. Even more importantly, his report was the very first to document the astonishing biodiversity in the border strip. That information was crucial when the border became obsolete in 1989. I had also heard about young Kai’s unlikely friendship with another young birder, Gunter Berwing, who lived on the East German side of the Iron Curtain. For several years, all they could do was exchange letters about their respective observations. Then Kai was able to obtain a twenty-four-hour visa for East Germany, and the two finally met in person. Much later, after the Wende, they found that their friendship and Gunter’s work with an environmental youth group had aroused the suspicion of the Stasi: hefty files had been compiled about each of them, complete with copies of every letter they had exchanged and comments about the supposedly subversive nature of their activities. And I had heard about the meeting, only one month after the fall of the Berlin Wall, where he presented the resolution to preserve the border strip as a nature preserve. After finishing his PhD, Kai had begun work as a regional director of conservation at BUND 273

274 PHANTOM BORDER Naturschutz (BN).169 Together with BN director Hubert Weiger, he had mailed invitations to the twenty-seven East German conservationists for whom they had contact information. In the midst of the chaos following the sudden opening of the border, in a time before email or social media, and before there were phones in most East German households, they had expected a handful of attendees. To their surprise, four hundred people had taken up the invitation, undaunted by treacherous winter roads. When Kai read the resolution and asked for a vote, every single hand went up. Contemplating all of this on the hotel’s sun deck, while my morning tea dissolved the remaining fatigue, it occurred to me that I had probably made a faux pas in my email requesting a meeting. According to his online bio, he was a professor at Bayreuth University in addition to his responsibilities at BN. The proper way to address him would have been Sehr geehrter Herr Prof. Frobel or at least Herr Dr. Frobel. I had written Dear Herr Frobel. It was too late now to worry about this. Perhaps the fact that he had agreed to meet me meant that he was not overly bothered, or had given me some slack for not being academically correct because I lived in the United States. I’d written down what felt like a thousand questions to ask him, but now, sitting in the morning sun and looking at my map of the nearby section of the Green Belt, all I could think of was the prospect of joining him on a field walk. As much as I loved hiking and simply spending time in the woods, I had come to appreciate the value of looking closely and trying to figure out the stories of a landscape—the pieces, patterns, and processes that have given it its present shape and continue to form it. To go on a field walk with someone as tuned in to the land and its creatures as Kai Frobel felt like an antidote to the sad and draining parts of the expedition—the memorials to people who died trying to cross the border, Mr. Lauterbach’s anti-Muslim rants, and the times heat and rain exhausted me. My watch showed close to ten, the time he had suggested we meet at the Wasserschloss Hotel in Mitwitz. I asked the breakfast 169

The Bavarian section of BUND.

THE BIRDS AT THE END OF THE WORLD 275 server to save some coffee and positioned myself near the front door. The next time it opened, he stepped in, looking so much like the pictures I’d seen of him in the BUND publications that it almost felt as if I had met him before. A friendly face with brown eyes and a gray-streaked beard. Just like in those pictures, too, he looked ready for a field walk, in sturdy boots, jeans, and a field vest over a casual shirt—and with a pair of binoculars slung around his neck. As we shook hands, my gut feeling told me that he was not overly concerned with his academic title, or even the informal one of “father of the Green Belt,” though both are doubtlessly important pieces of his life story. Maybe he is too busy to spend mental energy on that. I had an inkling from what I’d read that getting the border strip designated as the Green Belt was a piece of cake compared to the ongoing challenges of overseeing a fourteen-hundred-kilometerlong conservation project: the behind-the-scenes work of raising money, talking to landowners, negotiating land purchases, navigating legal issues and protection categories—combined with the on-the-ground work of keeping open habitats from overgrowing, installing interpretive signs, and conducting biological inventories. Except in this case, there were the extra layers of coordinating with nine of Germany’s sixteen federal states, of navigating a project that straddles conservation and historic preservation, and of protecting something that in the eyes of some should not be preserved at all because it is a reminder of the brutal border. Some even feared a repeat of the expropriations that had happened in GDR times. How did this all work, and how had he gotten past that first obstacle, proposing to preserve the death strip? We sat down at a table outside, where the attentive breakfast server soon appeared with a carafe of coffee and two mugs. “Right,” he reflected, “Just imagine the atmosphere in December 1989. The border had been open for just a few days in some places, a few weeks in others. It was an amazing time, a euphoric time, when everyone, myself included, was just elated that this border was finally gone. And then we conservationists come and say, ‘Folks, let’s preserve the border as a component of the landscape.’ That could really have backfired! We half-expected politicians to say: you guys are out of your minds.

276 PHANTOM BORDER “But we knew that there would soon be enormous pressure on this strip of land. Fortunately, the resolution was well received, and the media did a good job explaining the significance of the space. Hubert Weiger and I had written it up by hand during a break in that first meeting. And we had to decide what to call it. Of course, we couldn’t call it by any of the previous names—the zonal border, the death strip, the demarcation line, the antifascist protection wall. So I thought, why not call it Grünes Band?—‘Band’ [ribbon or belt] to indicate its linear shape and ‘grün’ [green] to signal nature and everything alive. And that name has really worked and stood the test of time. It’s quite a popular term, and it’s been anchored in the Federal Law on the Conservation of Nature for years now.” There was something else about the resolution that I’d been wondering about. “With the whole situation so wide open and no telling what would happen with the two German states and governments, to whom was the resolution addressed?” I asked. “It was directed at the politicians, but it was also meant as a broad appeal to the public,” he replies. “You see, the origins of the Green Belt go back to the 1970s, long before anyone could remotely imagine the border opening. So we had very good data and material. And that was very important in presenting the resolution properly.” As Frobel went on to fill in the picture for me, I realized that what made the resolution so effective was a chain of developments that sounded almost providential. The phrase he used was glückliche Fügung, the coming together of auspicious circumstances. What became quite clear to me that morning was the central role he had played in all of this. First there was his 1977 science project, published in a scientific journal the following year. Kai had also been the volunteer leader of a youth group for BUND Naturschutz, and, with that group, had conducted a large-scale ornithological survey of his home district of Coburg, part of which abutted Bavaria’s border with East Germany. The survey in itself was an impressive undertaking, with a study area of close to four hundred square miles. It was the most thorough ornithological inventory conducted in either German state up to that point. And in a move that made the

THE BIRDS AT THE END OF THE WORLD 277 survey even more significant, Kai had decided to include the border strip in the study area. “That was of course complete nonsense in a way,” he reflected with a twinkle in the eye. “Those birds were flying or perching over East German territory and therefore not, strictly speaking, in the West German study area. In that sense they were GDR birds, not Bavarian or West German birds. But they could easily be seen and counted from West German soil, since from the actual border line you had a clear view of the outward sovereign territory, the western fence and, if you looked carefully at certain angles, parts of the border strip itself.” The border fences, he had already noticed, were favorite perches of several bird species during mating season. The birds could not have cared less whether they were being counted by someone from the East German or the West German side—nor, for that matter, that they were perching in the world’s most heavily fortified border—as long as it provided suitable habitat and a chance at finding a mate. “So I guess I had a gut feeling about it. And the real significance of it is that now we had a comparison: we had an inventory of which species occurred in the ‘normal’ Bavarian landscape, much of which is intensively used agricultural land, and which ones occurred in the border strip, a landscape that had seen very little human land use for four decades. “And what we found for many of the red-listed bird species was that ninety percent of their populations occurred in the border strip, and only very small numbers in the rest of the landscape. We drew attention to these findings in a press conference in 1981, along the lines of ‘Death Strip as Refuge?’” I flashed back to my own high school career, which in terms of grades was reasonably successful. But quite apart from my inability, at least back then, to tell one bird species from another, could I have come up with a research question like this? To compare the incidence of certain bird species in two kinds of landscapes with different land use? How had Kai been able to do this in his teens— had he attended a Waldkindergarten? Had he gotten this understanding of nature from his family?

278 PHANTOM BORDER He laughed. “Well, my father was always very interested in natural history. We had field guides for plants and animals around the house. That was probably a bit unusual at the time. For many bird enthusiasts, the normal sequence is that you start with the common species and then expand your knowledge to the less common ones, and eventually you get to see some rare ones, maybe even threatened ones. But growing up here next to the border, you practically stumbled onto rare species. “My volunteer work with BN was a natural progression from that. And then in 1979, I did my Zivildienst170 at BN with Hubert Weiger, who’s done very important work there. After that I got my PhD in geo-ecology, and, starting in 1985, I was working for BN in a professional role, and building relationships and contacts as part of that. “So we were extremely well prepared when the border opened. But of course we had never expected that would actually happen. Especially when you’ve grown up here, seeing it every day—on my route to school, ten kilometers, the road led directly along the border strip—I really thought this monstrous thing was here for eternity.” “What was it like for you to grow up with these extremes?” I ask him, “the brutality of the border and at the same time knowing it was a haven for so many creatures?” “It felt like a situation of extreme tension. On the one hand, these treasures of nature, but with this immediate backdrop of extreme brutality.” There was a bone-chilling incident during his youth when heavy rainfall swept a landmine under the border fence into a farm field on the Bavarian side. The mine exploded when the farmer raked it up amid a wad of debris. Kai was present when his father, the village doctor, was called to help the severely injured man. The man survived, but lost his eyesight.

170

Civilian service, an alternative to army training for young men in West Germany.

THE BIRDS AT THE END OF THE WORLD 279 “I had nightmares about the border all through my childhood,” he told me. “About Soviet tanks coming across the border, things like that. Sometimes at night I could see signal flares over the border strip, sometimes I could hear mine explosions. And even as an eight- or nine-year-old, I somehow understood that we were living right at the seam of a world conflict, and that powerful weapons were close by on both sides. Not only the machine guns of the border guards, but in Bamberg, next to the airport, some forty kilometers from here, there were American anti-aircraft missiles. Everyone could see them. The whole situation was constantly hanging over us, and I always had a queasy feeling when I walked near the border.” But the more he became fascinated by birds, the more he walked near the border and observed their behavior. That’s how he knew that whinchats used the border fence as a prop for their courtship dance, and would occasionally even land in the minefields. On a few occasions, he even stepped across the borderline. “Do you know of other people who spent time so close to the border, or who noticed any of this?” I asked. “Sometimes school groups or other groups from various western cities would be taken to viewing points from where you could see the border. They’d be shocked at seeing the fences and watchtowers and all the contraptions, but they wouldn’t necessarily notice the open ground. And even though that was truly fascinating, that’s really something that requires a closer look to notice. “Other than that, there were only the border guards. Some of them had an interest in biology and told me about their observations—the western ones, of course, since those on the eastern side were not allowed to speak to anyone on our side. But as far as studying this strip of land consistently and in a focused way—I was probably the only one who did that. In the 1970s conservation was not a big issue. “Certainly there were times when the GDR border guards would check me out with their binoculars. I had binoculars too, and I’d be wearing a green parka and green rubber boots—because that makes sense for birding, but it probably looked kind of military to them.

280 PHANTOM BORDER “The western guards all knew who I was—‘Oh, that’s the doctor’s son, he’s looking for rare birds.’ But there was one place where they, too, seemed to get suspicious of me. I had noticed a pair of European nightjars nesting in a particular place. Those are birds that hunt insects and breed on the ground, so they need sandy open areas. They are almost impossible to see. The only way to detect them is by the sound they make during their courtship dance—sort of a purring sound, like a soft R-R-R-R—which they do at night. The federal border guards stopped me several times there and asked for ID. I thought that was really strange since they knew who I was and what I was doing. And it wasn’t until after the Wende that I found out that very close to the nightjars’ nesting place, there had been a tunnel under the border—an unofficial crossing point where the GDR would let secret agents pass between its territory and West Germany. And the federal border guards thought I might be hanging around there because I had something to do with that. Later I found out that they had a file about me at their headquarters.” “So both Germanys had a file about you?” I asked. “That’s right,” he confirmed matter-of-factly. We finished our coffee and walked outside to climb into his VW. *** A few minutes later we left Mitwitz behind us. “We are now entering the Steinach Valley,” Kai explained. “The Steinach River comes down from the Thuringian Mountains; it used to meander all over this broad plain. This used to be a very wet landscape; there were huge bogs that have now almost completely disappeared. And there were extremely rare bird species here—records from the nineteen twenties and thirties mention black grouse.” Like so many fertile floodplains, the Steinach Valley had been too attractive for agriculture for its own good. The wet meadows were drained, tributaries of the Steinach were regulated, and the birds lost more and more of the habitat they depended on. A local naturalist commented on this development in 1934, a decade and a half before the Iron Curtain descended, taking its own toll on the

THE BIRDS AT THE END OF THE WORLD 281 valley. An ever-shifting stream would have presented great challenges for the meticulous GDR border regime. So a section of the Steinach on the East German side was forced into a concrete channel. On both sides, farmers continued to dig drainage ditches and convert meadows into fields. The prospects for wild creatures did not look good. Kai slowed the car down to point to a large boulder by the side of the road. “We just crossed into Thuringia. This stone is a memorial for the village of Liebau. The residents were evicted and the village was razed in the nineteen seventies because it was so close to the border. I saw the plume of dust when I was riding my bike near the border, only about three hundred meters away. When the dust cleared, there was nothing left. We are right in what used to be the village. There were houses and stables right here.” Another phantom village. I felt the desolation again, that eerie absence. I could not even say how many missing villages I had seen by now—or rather, not seen—but the absence of Liebau felt just as acute, and just as disorienting as every other. Kai was driving on the overgrown double-track of the Kolonnenweg now, the border guards’ patrol route. He pointed back across the valley. “Those houses on that hillside over there, that’s where I grew up. It’s less than a kilometer from here to there. So it was easy to ride my bicycle over here. “These fields were here back then too—a field on the Thuringian side, a field on the Bavarian side, with the border strip in between that was left largely to its own devices. Right here it was actually quite narrow, only about forty meters. And right over there a farmer has planted corn right in the Green Belt. That’s a gap of two hundred meters. The farmers on the western side were quick after the Wende. Some leased or purchased land on the Thuringian side, sometimes for unbelievably low prices because their eastern neighbors had no experience with western land values.” And sometimes farmers would simply plow a bit farther into the no-man’s- land, which of course was not truly no one’s but GDR territory, and after Unification, the newly united Federal Republic

282 PHANTOM BORDER of Germany’s territory. “That was of course completely illegal,” Kai said. “In the early nineties, the Green Belt suffered major losses in this way.” “Would you say that that was the greatest challenge in protecting the Green Belt?” I asked. “No,” he replied, “the single biggest challenge was the Mauergrundstücksgesetz in 1996—the law governing border property. This law stated two things: one, that those whose property in the border had been expropriated by the GDR would be able to buy it back at twenty-five percent of market rate, and two, that any remaining properties in the former border should be sold off on the open real estate market. More than 60 million euros [USD 85 million] would have been needed to buy the land, which was way beyond any available conservation budgets. And all the environment ministers [of Germany’s federal states] were actually supporting the Green Belt, but the finance ministers were against it, because their ministries would have benefited from the sale. “Angela Merkel171 was the environment minister for the federal government at the time. She had spoken vehemently in support of the Green Belt, but she had to inform us that it was not possible to give consideration to the Green Belt under the Mauergrundstücksgesetz because it is not a matter of public concern.” I was surprised. Even if the full extent of the Green Belt’s significance for biodiversity was not known in 1996, I thought that its meaning as a landscape of remembrance would have been easily apparent and that that alone would be a matter of public concern. Maybe even as a symbol of unity, or the aspiration toward unity. How many countries get a chance to have such a unique national monument? It would take another twelve years of lobbying by Kai and his BUND colleagues, and a new federal government, for this view to win out. In 2008 the Mauergrundstücksgesetz was reversed. “What happened to the people whose property was expropriated?” I asked. 171

Merkel, who grew up in East Germany, became German chancellor in 2005 and held that office until 2021.

THE BIRDS AT THE END OF THE WORLD 283 “Those who applied while the law was in effect were able to buy their land back. So about one-third of the Green Belt is in private ownership. Most of the owners are actually quite supportive of the Green Belt.” He then explained that for legal reasons, the remaining areas had to be transferred to the federal states, which in turn had to entrust special conservation foundations with the actual administration of the areas. But even with all of these steps accomplished, the Green Belt was not truly protected. “Ten percent is in intensive agricultural use or destroyed, meaning that roads or buildings make it unlikely it will be restored to natural conditions any time soon,” he explained. “But there is good news, too. We just concluded an eight-year project called “Closing the Gaps”172 (Projekt Lückenschluss), through which we’ve been able to purchase more than 300 hectares outright and negotiate habitat-specific management measures in other areas. That is very significant for the role of the Green Belt as an ecological corridor. We can already see that it is helping the whinchat in SaxonyAnhalt—that is one of the few areas where breeding populations are stable or have even increased. In the rest of the German landscape—and across Europe—they are still declining.” That was sobering news for the poster-child bird of the Green Belt, albeit with a silver lining. “The other piece of good news is a new protection category, that of National Monument of Nature,” Kai went on. “It’s the perfect category for the Green Belt because it considers both natural and cultural history. Two federal states, Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt, have already granted this designation to their respective sections of the Green Belt.173 Kai pulled over and parked the car. “This is exactly the place where I would see all the whinchats and the other rare birds. From here you could see across to the first

172 173

See Pentz 2020; also Pieck 2023, p. 54. In 2023, Hesse became the first western German federal state to designate its adjacent areas as a National Monument of Nature.

284 PHANTOM BORDER fence. I would scan the top of the fence, and of course I could hear them if they were singing, and that would help with identification.” I asked, “This vegetation between here and where the fence was, is that what used to be the outward sovereign territory?” He confirmed my guess. “The outside fence would have been just there, some fifty meters away—in some places it was as little as ten, in others over a hundred meters, depending on local conditions like topography.” I asked if that area was where the highest biodiversity had developed, in the outside sovereign territory. To my surprise, the answer was no. Frobel explained, “It was really the entire structure of the border strip that was important. Of course, the outside territory was important for breeding and feeding and for cover because of the vegetation structure with the scattered trees and shrubs. But the vehicle ditch was also important because water collected there. The fence was important because it functioned as an elevated perch for birds during the mating season. Even the control strip mattered. As you know, that was kept free of vegetation and regularly raked— but there were wild herbs there, including extremely rare ones. And birds like the whinchat also need some open areas because that’s where they can easily hunt insects. Ground beetles are practically on a display platter for them there. “So the control strip was very important biologically. We could never actually prove it while the border existed because we couldn’t get in here. But the dramatic decline in species like the whinchat, except for stretches where the control strip is kept open, is a strong indication of its importance. Over the last ten years or so, in the landscape at large but also in the parts of the Green Belt that no longer have these open stretches, we have seen a population crash of ninety percent. They are getting really close to extinction now.” He raised the binoculars up to his eyes. “There’s a yellowhammer over there. It’s hard to see with the naked eye.” I could see a small yellowish bird near one of the young trees, but it moved too rapidly for me to focus in on any fieldmarks.

THE BIRDS AT THE END OF THE WORLD 285 “That’s another typical species for the Green Belt that used to be common in the rest of the landscape. But with this severe crash in biodiversity in Germany, now you have to look pretty hard to see a yellowhammer. “See those cows over there? They are here as a conservation measure. A farmer lets them graze here in the Green Belt, based on an agreement with the conservation agencies and BUND. Having the cows here keeps a mix of open land, some bushes, some trees, and these reed grasses. And because of this mosaic of open areas and wooded areas, we have open land bird species like the yellowhammer and the red-backed shrike, but also the tree pipit, which, as the name indicates, needs more tree cover.” “So before the Wende, it was the border guards who kept the vegetation down?” I asked. “Right. They brush-hogged [mechanically cleared] the area every six to seven years. Some of the taller trees you see now, they wouldn’t have been allowed to grow this tall, but otherwise it looked quite similar then. Of course they weren’t keeping it open as habitat management but to have an open field of view and a clear trajectory in the event of an escape. But it had the side effect of increased biodiversity, because of this mixed structure. Now the cows are doing that. It’s important, by the way, to keep the number of cows fairly small. Otherwise, the impact would be too intense.” “Does it make financial sense for the farmer, then, to put just a few cows here?” “The farmer is compensated from conservation funds for having to install an electric fence and for any losses from waiting until after the bird breeding season to bring the cows here. And he still has the income from the milk.” We walked a little more, past the content-looking conservation cows to where the scattered trees and shrubs opened out onto an expanse of farm fields and meadows. We were now back on the Bavarian side. “See that small paved road there.” Frobel pointed. “That used to end at the border. And from there you could see that small village on that hillside over there, on the other side of the border. And I remember being out here once in winter to watch migrating birds,

286 PHANTOM BORDER and there were some children and teenagers from that village sledding on that hillside. They were only about a hundred and fifty meters away from where I stood, and I looked over there through my binoculars and I knew I would never be able to meet them, ever.” He pointed back across the Green Belt, past the conservation cows. “Back there behind that long, sloping hillside, those are the mountains of the Thuringian Forest. Sonneberg, too, is in that direction—that’s Gunter’s hometown. “One summer night, on one of my twenty-four-hour visits, after they had shown me some of their conservation sites, Gunter and some of his friends and I were standing on a hillside up above Sonneberg and we had a view to the west, across the border. It was a beautiful sunset. We had a clear view across the border to Fortress Coburg.” I had passed the fortress on my bike just yesterday. With its massive thirteenth-century walls and towers, commanding a vast panoramic view from its perch on the tallest hill for miles, it is the stuff of fairy tales. In 1530, it sheltered Martin Luther when he sought refuge from the Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Emperor. After the Reformation, the ideological divisions in Germany and Europe were at least as glaring as during the Cold War. Except that back then, the divisions stemmed from religious beliefs and had exploded into a hot war.174 I snapped back to the present and young Kai’s cross-border visit. “And somehow we started to calculate when Gunter and his friends would be able to visit me in Bavaria. It was 1982 or ’83, and most of them were just under twenty years old. And GDR citizens were not allowed to travel west until they were sixty-five. So it would be another forty-five years, and we figured that they could visit me in Bavaria in the year 2027. And we were completely serious, because that was what the situation was then. Fortunately, things took a different turn.” Kai and Gunter’s friendship deepened after the border opened. Both have been closely involved with the Green Belt from its earliest days—Kai at BN and Gunter at the Sonneberg district 174

The Thirty Years’ War, from 1618 to 1648.

THE BIRDS AT THE END OF THE WORLD 287 administrator’s office, where he is in charge of conservation issues. Gunter also leads a group of BN volunteers for the Sonneberg district. Just from the way Kai spoke of Gunter, I could tell that this friendship was an important part of the glückliche Fügung, the auspicious path that led from his passion for birds to the resolution for the Green Belt and his present work. “Let’s look at a forested area,” Kai suggested. We drove a short distance, left the car by the side of the overgrown patrol track, and within a few minutes, entered a different world. An enchanted forest. Pure bliss spread as I inhaled the exquisite, slightly damp air. Some ten meters ahead of me, Kai slowed down and stood still. I could see a small, gleaming green shape with filigree wings moving through the air near him—an enchanted dragonfly. “A green snaketail,” he said quietly. “They are extremely rare.” The snaketail floated off into the mottled green shade between some trees. There were ferns along the narrow dirt path now, and I saw light reflecting on water ahead of us. Kai stopped again and trained his binoculars on something. “A black stork,” he whispered. I peered through openings in the dense foliage hanging over a quietly burbling brook. Kai handed me his binoculars. There—I made out a dark shape that almost blended in with the deep shade where some alder branches overhung the shoreline. The dark shape moved, and then its thin, orange-red legs gave it away. With a rustle, the large bird took off along the brook, away from us. “I don’t think I have ever seen a black stork and a green snaketail in one day,” Kai remarked, “here or anywhere else.” I had never seen either one in my life, and told him that I’d been waiting to see a black stork for the last 1,000 kilometers of my expedition. Until that morning, I had never even heard of the green snaketail. We followed the brook around a bend. “This stream is the Föritz,” Kai said. “This is prime habitat for river mussels—an undisturbed, clean, shallow stream with sandy and gravelly patches— the same kind of habitat the green snaketail and the black stork need. And for humans, too, this is a really special place. This is another special thing about the Green Belt, that parts of it are absolutely quiet. Except for the harvester we can hear humming in the

288 PHANTOM BORDER background at the moment,” he noted with a grin. “And these places feel like the end of the world. Whoever wants to, can go there and breathe deeply.” Sich besinnen was how he put it—to reflect and return to oneself. “Along this stretch, the border ran right along the middle of the stream. There were signs on this side saying: ‘Achtung, Bachmitte Grenze’ [border in stream center]. And this was one of the places I loved to spend time in back then, and to look for river mussels. They usually dig down into the riverbed so only the upper third sticks out, and they are not easy to see. You have to step into the stream and dig with your hands to find them.” I looked at the winding stream and tried to picture how one would stay clear of the invisible borderline in its center. Kai seemed to be reading my thoughts. “But for heaven’s sake, where is the center? And in any case, it doesn’t make sense to count only the mussels on one side and not the other. And if a dragonfly landed on a reed on ‘my’ side, I would step to the other side to photograph it— and with that, I’d technically already be on GDR soil. The regular guards couldn’t actually see me from their ground bunker. Only the officers were allowed to walk along the stream because this was part of the outside sovereign territory. But the chances of them coming here were not high, because it was so overgrown and difficult to access—and most likely I would have heard them before they saw me.” He shrugged. “Thankfully, I was never caught.” For a moment, I puzzled over why the border guards hadn’t brush-hogged this area, too. Maybe the area next to the river was too wet for heavy machines. Then I thought of the Oker River in the Harz Mountains and the answer came to me: “Let me guess—this stream was left alone only because it was right on the border? Because neither of the two states could straighten its course or get close to it with big machinery without risking a run-in with the other?” “Exactly,” Kai replied. “If it hadn’t been for that, the Föritz would have been straightened for sure.” And that would have been the end of the enchanted forest and its wild creatures.

THE BIRDS AT THE END OF THE WORLD 289 It was time for us to return to civilization. Kai had a conference call scheduled and I needed to retrieve my bike from the hotel’s barn and ride the fifteen kilometers to my next overnight spot, Kronach. I knew even as we walked back to Kai’s car that the enchanted forest by the Föritz stream would take a special place among the gifts I received along this journey. I had not mentioned my thoughts about pilgrimage to Kai, but on our way back, he shared his vision for the Green Belt: an alternative Camino de Santiago, a kind of pilgrimage route that allows people to come to Besinnung. A place for contemplation and renewal.

Chapter 19: Working through History over Beer Stammtisch (der): a regular gathering at a pub or restaurant

The small town of Kronach sits on the Bavarian side of the former border—the West German side, though along much of the line between Bavaria and Thuringia, the “west” is geographically south. As I drew closer to Kronach, I could make out the fortress on top of the hill and the clay-tile-roofed, timber-framed houses of the Upper Town. The fortress goes back to at least the year 1003, but my first impression of it is related to the Thirty Years’ War. During a siege by Swedish troops in 1634, the women of Kronach defended the town in a display of fierce warriorship. According to legend, the Swedish general later commented that “the Kronach men fight like the devil, but the women are nine times worse.” That legacy is fostered to this day in an annual reenactment of the battle by a group of strapping female warriors. It was past 8 p.m. when I arrived at my accommodations, as exhausted as if I myself had just fought in the battle. For several kilometers I had ended up on a federal highway without a separate bike lane. If the infernal roar of the traffic was disconcerting, the gusts of air from the trucks zooming by were truly unnerving. I yearned for the enchanted forest, or, for that matter, any other part of the Grünes Band. All of that was forgotten by the evening when my B&B hosts invited me to join them on their patio to share a bottle of local wine. The Hofmanns were an engaging, fit-looking, recently retired couple who had converted part of their house into guest rooms. Formerly a teacher at a Gymnasium,175 Herr Dr. Hofmann had conducted research on the economic effects of the former border and was pleased to have an interested audience.

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Roughly equivalent to high schools in the U.S., but a Gymnasium usually offers 13 years of schooling.

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292 PHANTOM BORDER “Before the division of Germany, the economy of this region— Upper Franconia—was mostly tied in with Leipzig,” he explained. “The supply chains had grown around those ties. So when the border was closed, all of that was disrupted. The sources for raw materials, energy, and semi-finished products were cut off. The same was true, of course, of the markets for industrial and consumer goods from around here.” He drew the shape of the border with his index finger on the tablecloth. “To export anything from this region via the western seaports, like Bremen or Hamburg, you had to go around the GDR. The distance was a third longer that way, and that increased the cost by a third, too.”176 Despite the subsidies the West German government provided for its zonal borderland, the region had never fully recovered. Soon after the border opened, Dr. Hofmann was invited to help a number of VEBs in the GDR get familiar with the principles of a market economy. “This was the time period when no one yet knew what was going to happen with the two German states. Some were calling for Reunification, but that was by no means a done deal in late 1989,” Dr. Hofmann continues. “What was becoming very clear, though, was that the East German economy would somehow have to compete with the West German economy.” Listening to Dr. Hofmann, I could tell that he enjoyed the unexpected challenge of teaching a German-German market economy crash course. He still seemed bemused by the creative effort it took to explain concepts that were second nature to him but entirely foreign to most of his East German students—all adults with years, if not decades, of working life under their belt. “How do you explain the point of a balance sheet to someone who has spent their entire working life in a state-run economy?” he asked me, rhetorically. If he was only half as animated in class as he is here talking to me, his students were lucky.

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