5. July: Berlin: Part III: DDR Museum, Bus 100, and the Victory Monument

On the way out of the Pergamom Museum, Kristen saw a pigeon hovering at the edge of the walk with its head down under its wings and one wing higher than the other. We were sad for the “poor, sick” pigeon and started looking for something to feed it. The only thing we had was nuts, so we broke some up and got the crumbs as close to his beak as possible. Immediately the pigeon woke up and started dancing around looking for more. He was joined by about 6 more pigeons, happy to be fed.

We ate a pretzel for you, Pam from Lakeland, purchased from a vendor right outside the museum. (It’s the third one we ate for you: we had one the first day in Ratingen and another the 3^rd day at the Essen train station.)

Next we went to the DDR Museum which depicted life in the DDR. It’s a hands-on museum with lots of stuff to investigate including the Trabant car, the car designed to compete with the Volkswagen in the west. In 1985 only about every other family had a car. It took up to 16 years to obtain one, and it was notoriously unreliable. It had only a two stroke engine and was mostly made out of plastic, but it couldn’t have gone very fast anyway because the cobblestone roads were full of potholes.

The SED (German Socialist Party) attempted to bribe farmers to join collective farms in 1950 by reducing taxes and offering free seeds and farm equipment to those who joined. Those who resisted were arrested and convicted at show trials. When thousands of farmers fled to the west and many farmers revolted, the government sent in tanks to surround villages. In the end the government won, and all farmers were collectivized by 1960.

One of the things I found most interesting was a conversation between a grandma, a son-in-law, and a grandson. The dad and kid lived in the East; the grandma in the west. The son in law was a member of the party and argued with the grandma when she spoke derogatively about the East (no surprise given all the surveillance done by the DDR which we learned about the following day.) The grandma figured that the son-in-law must have a guilty conscience which would be the only way to explain why he defended the East. She complained about the steep exchange rate and forced money conversion especially since she was only there on a weekend, and no shops were open, not that there was much to buy anyway. She was horrified that her grandson wanted American pants. The grandson was tired of the talk about politics and excited to get his first pair of Levis. He would be looked up to in school, and all the girls would notice him. He even planned out how to answer his teacher when questioned why he wasn’t being loyal to the East.

We also read about the Palace of the Republic, the most expensive building built by the DDR. The Kaiser’s residential palace in Berlin was torn down to make room for it, and 5,000 tons of asbestos were sprayed on it between 1974 and 1976 even though asbestos had been banned 5 years earlier because it is carcinogenic.

Young people were the hope of the communist party. They learned socialism even in preschool where they all had a collective potty break. Every child sat on the potty until the last child was done. At age 6 they became “Young Pioneers” and at age 14, “Free German Youth.”No one was forced to join, but if they didn’t, they had difficulty getting into a university or finding a job. Not surprisingly almost all youth were members of these groups. Only about 10% of the high school graduates were allowed to go onto university. The curriculum at all universities in the DDR was the same. Students would get into trouble for telling a political joke, for owning certain books or for not participating in the May1 demonstrations. Everyone had the right to a job, but most jobs were low-tech industrial. Those who complained were considered asocial and wound up in a mining pit with a shovel in their hands. Wages for all jobs were not too different. In 1988 an engineer who had gone to school an additional 8-10 years beyond 10^th grade made 1470 marks per month. A bricklayer who had an additional two years of school past the 10^th grade made between 1220 and 1870 marks per month.

Officially the East German government was the greenest country; environmentalism was even written into the constitution in 1968. But the government exploited the environment and pollution became a severe problem. The solution? Keep the law, move the top brass out of the polluted area, and imprison anyone who notes the disparity between the ideal and the reality.

Some were more equal than others. The leaders, numbering about 10,000 drove Volvos rather than Trabants, had easy access to Western goods, special hospitals, and special resorts for holidays.

Wolf Biermann, a singer/songwriter who initially believed in communism enough that he moved from West to East Germany but later became a dissident, stated, “Soon we will need neither prisons nor walls”, but he was wrong. Over 250,000 people were arrested and treated inhumanely in Stasi prisons; conditions only improved slightly when they starting ransoming prisoners to the west because they needed the money to support their extensive spy and prison work.

One machine allowed me to write my name in Russian using the letters it gave and then it transliterated it to English. The section at the back showed a typical kitchen, living room, and classroom during the communist times. All students were forced to learn Russian. Everyone we met on our trip who had lived in the east during communism knew some Russian.

One display showed how East Germany opened its borders. In summer of 1989 Hungary opened its borders to the West and dismantled some of the barbed wire fencing at the border. By August about a hundred people were able to cross to the West per day although hundreds more were arrested. Many people were arrested for demonstrating during the celebration of the 40^th anniversary of the DDR. . Lenin had quipped that the Germans would only storm a railway station if they had first bought tickets, but nevertheless a huge demonstration broke out in Leipzig triggering other demonstrations around the country; the huge numbers of protesters prevent the police from intervening. The DDR started the day on November 6 planning still to regulate travel. The 7 p.m. news announced that they planned to open the border, but by 11 p.m. thousands of people lined up waiting to cross, so they were forced to open the borders to relieve the pressure of the crowd. By midnight all of the border crossings were forced open.

After we finished at the DDR Museum, we walked back to Alexanderplatz and climbed to the upper deck of Bus 100 which we took to Unter den Linden, one of the most famous streets. We scouted out the used book store at Humboldt University. I hadn’t planned to buy anything but wound up with 3 books, the first a present whose description I will add after the gift has been given. The second, a book on making a dirndl including knitting and crochet stitches, and the third, a small guidebook to the Pergamom museum—all of the books at the museum had been too large for my scrapbook. We also walked across Bebelplatz to see the monument in the square—a glass section flush with the bricks showing an empty library below.This commemorates the burning of books by Nazi supporters prior to WWII. We walked around and in St. Hedwig’s Cathedral, known to Berliners as the upside down teacup. It is the least decorated Catholic Church I have ever seen—not too surprising considering that it was redone after the war by the atheistic East Germans. We also saw the opera house which was under construction.

Then we continued on another Bus 100 past the Brandenburg Gate (considerably more crowded in the mid-afternoon), the Oyster (officially the House of World Culture), and the Schloss Bellevue to the Grosser Sterne (Great Star), to the Victory Monument (siegessäule) a monument built by the Germans in them middle of the 19^th century to celebrate their victory over the French. It had carved relief at the baseand mosaics somewhat higher showing the victorious German soldiers and the vanquished French. One side of the relief showed the victorious Germans marching into Paris. Bullet holes could be seen in the granite and the carved relief. At the very top is a statue of a woman representing victory which is why Berliners call it the “Chick on a Stick.” Hitler had moved it to the Tiergarten, a huge park in the middle of Berlin, in the middle of a star shaped road. Albrect Speer, Hitler’s architect, had made it taller so that it could be the center of the Third Reich celebrations. In 1945 the French flew their tricolor flag at the top and removed 3 of the 4 relief panels, returning the last in 1987 as a gesture of reconciliation. In 1946 they campaigned for its destruction in the settlement after World War II, but it had been allowed to stay. We climbed the 285 steps to the top, past the anti-graffiti sticker and a fair amount of graffiti, and looked out at Berlin. We could see the Alexander Tower, but the sun wasn’t the right angle to see the cross on it. Ironically the East Germans had torn down all the crosses but then when they built a tower to show their supremacy over the West, they built it in the form of a large ball on a tall tower which reflects a cross when the sun shines at the right angle.

After a half hour adventure around the park trying to find the bus (all the entrances and roads looked the same), we took bus 100 again to the Zoobahnhof. Then we changed to the subway (U-bahn) and went to Nollendorf Station. We ate our lunch/dinner at Habibi (it was now 4PM)--salad with falafel and yogurt sauce with fresh squeezed orange juice—he made our dinner first; then he squeezed the oranges into juice.