Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, author Oliver Fritz reflects on growing up behind the Iron Curtain
Imagine a country where prices don't go up for more than 30 years yet salaries rise by around 4 per cent every year.
A country where unemployment is unknown, employees are unsackable and childcare is readily available for next to nothing.
Of course, no such country exists.
But
once it did and for 22 years I was one of its citizens. What was this country? East Germany, of course.
To the West, this rather small country behind the Iron Curtain was known mainly for two things: its Olympic athletes and the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961.
Western authors and filmmakers regularly used it as a backdrop for spy stories and made it a place of dullness and danger that was home to fearful and wary people whose wardrobe did not extend beyond brown, grey or green tones.
What an insult. The great majority of East Germans had no trouble receiving Western radio and TV stations and, as much as we liked watching American or British spy movies, we were equally enraged by this misleading portrayal of our homeland.
The German Democratic Republic, as East Germany was officially known, existed from 1949 to 1990 and in 1989 it was among the 20 industrial leading nations of the world. It was a member of the United Nations and had diplomatic relations with 150 countries.
People did not have to queue for everything, nor was it customary to communicate only in hushed voices. We were not in constant fear of being randomly arrested, nor did churchgoers have their fingernails pulled out as a punishment. And our dress sense and haircuts did, more or less, keep up with Western trends.
What Western visitors to East Germany often commented on was that our women seemed very confident. Little wonder, perhaps, considering that 90 per cent of them earned their own money and more than 60 per cent worked full-time.
They also married young and if the marriage later turned out to be a mistake, they equally quickly filed for divorce. Many of my friends had single mothers, at least for a while. But the state did all it could to actively encourage young families to stay together and have children.
Interest-free loans and payments upon a child's birth were two incentives. Others included the provision of an efficient nationwide childcare network and the granting of additional paid time off work for parents.
The days of my childhood in East Berlin in the 1970s were filled with fun, laughter and excitement. Corporal punishment in schools was forbidden, school uniforms were unheard of, my mates and I enjoyed taking part in the activity events organised by the Pioneer organisation (East Germany's answer to the Scouts) and when we wanted to play on our own we could chose from three adventure playgrounds nearby.
My two biggest gripes with the 70s are that sunscreen hadn't been invented (I often got sunburned during our holidays at the Baltic Sea) and that the decade made me constantly sweat.
In line with the fashion of the time, nearly all of my clothes were made of unbreathable man-made fibre. And Berlin summers can get very hot. I embraced the 80s and their pastel-coloured cotton clothes with open arms.
Becoming a teenager behind the Iron Curtain was no different to becoming a teenager in the West. We, too, felt misunderstood, exchanged first shy kisses with our first love, talked meaningless nonsense for hours on the phone, followed the latest fashion trends, went dancing and hoped we would never turn into the well-behaved people our parents were.
My attempt at rebellion was to grow a Hitler-style moustache. Sometimes I even darkened it slightly with Mum's mascara. Worn together with my khaki outfit I must have looked quite fascist. But the police did not stop me once.
They must have been busy with keeping a watchful eye on the growing number of skinheads. After a few months, my parents' nagging finally won and I shaved it off.
Instead, I began to turn people's heads by wearing a fluorescent skinny leather tie that my grandmother had bought me on one of her trips to West Berlin. A metallic outfit, "Made in GDR", consisting of a pair of silver trousers, a silver shirt and a silver tie followed later.
But becoming a teenager also meant the state began to step up its efforts to turn us into "socialist personalities" who would one day take over the reins of our country, which was officially ruled by the working class under the leadership of the Communist Party.
The only problem was, we weren't interested. Call us shallow, but sitting through a politically motivated afternoon meeting in school wasn't even half as interesting as listening to the weekly chart show on West Berlin radio.
Instead of following a speech about why our state was the better Germany, we secretly played noughts and crosses. If we were asked a political question, we told the teachers what they wanted to hear, regardless of our real thoughts.
As young as we were, we had already adopted the great East German tradition of having two opinions, a public one and a more honest private one. Not necessarily because we feared being arrested for speaking our mind, but because it made life much easier and hassle-free.
Depending on who was around, we would switch between opinions, in much the same way as people today might refrain from telling their bosses what they really think of them, while still moaning about them to trusted colleagues.
Our leaders' obsession with trying to find enemies of the state aside (every 60th East German had links to the secret service), people actually lived cushy lives.
We had low crime (our imprisonment rate was a quarter that of the United States), jobs for life, free healthcare and education, no household spent more than 5 per cent of its income on rent and, despite regular hiccups with the production and distribution of goods, our shops never had empty shelves. People's larders were always full.
We had the highest living standard of the eastern bloc, yet we still weren't satisfied, because every day West German TV programmes showed us how much more convenient life was on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
And all their advertised products looked so temptingly colourful. Add to that the fact that we couldn't travel freely to the West (only pensioners and a small number of VIPs could go backwards and forwards as they pleased) and you were left with a constant, nagging dissatisfaction.
Our leaders' decision not to follow Gorbachev's example of giving companies and individuals more freedom resulted in a gradual build-up of pressure in East Germany from 1986.
It was released in summer 1989, when Hungary began to pull down its decaying border fortifications to the West because their replacement would have been too costly.
Rather than waiting in hope for a relaxation of our travel restrictions in the near future, young East Germans jumped at the opportunity. They packed their bags and bought one-way tickets to Hungary, from where it was only a stone's throw to West Germany, via Austria.
I, too, was tempted to see the West but living there permanently on my own, without my family and friends, made me hesitate.
Then on November 9 the Berlin Wall fell. I was among the first 1000 people to cross. No one knew how long this newly gained travel freedom would last, so people went to West Berlin and celebrated as if there was no tomorrow.
The next morning we dutifully went back to East Berlin to be on time for work. Out of the hundreds of thousands of people who had crossed the border westwards that night, only 100 decided stay in West Berlin for good.
Initially the plan was to reform East German socialism, but no one knew how to do it properly and, rather than starting an experiment with an uncertain outcome, joining West Germany seemed a much more convenient option. The deutschmark was a huge magnet and in October 1990 East Germany vanished from the maps.
Today East Germans are divided in their judgment of their former homeland. One half says life is better now, the other half says life was better then. Both sides are right in their own way.
Anyone earning good money undoubtedly prefers today's life. Unemployment figures in Germany's east are still twice as high as in the west.
Consequently, anyone out of a job for a very long time and struggling to find new employment is in favour of the old system and its social achievements that we all took for granted back then. After all, what is the freedom to travel worth to someone who can't afford it?
I prefer the freedom and individuality that capitalism offers, despite its shortcomings. But if the German Democratic Republic still existed, I would visit it often to experience again the collective innocence and the life in the slower lane, even though at the time we all loved to tell this joke: A plane is flying from Tokyo to East Berlin. The stewardess addresses the passengers over the intercom: "Ladies and gentlemen, soon we will be landing in Berlin, capital of the German Democratic Republic. Please buckle up, stow your tables, bring your seats into an upright position and set your digital watches back by 15 years."
Today I'm grateful for having had the chance to experience two different political and social systems, with their advantages and disadvantages.
Better executed, communism might be a worthy alternative. But until such a day comes, I am happy to make myself comfortable in capitalism.
I'd rather be exploited by capitalists than ruled by a dictatorship of the proletariat.
Oliver Fritz's memoir, The Iron Curtain Kid, is available at lulu.com
THE WALL
* The Berlin Wall was more than 140km long. It existed, in some form, from 1961 until 1989.
* The final version, the "fourth-generation" wall, was made of reinforced concrete topped with a smooth pipe, designed to make it hard to scale.
* Mesh fencing, anti-vehicle trenches, barbed wire, dogs, watchtowers and 20 bunkers completed the barrier.
* The East Germans erected a parallel fence 100m inside their territory and removed property and people in-between. This No Man's Land became The Death Strip as it offered guards clear fields of fire.
* Some 5000 people successfully escaped to West Berlin. At least 100 died trying to flee.
* One notorious failed attempt involved Peter Fechter, 18, who was shot and bled to death in full view of the Western media, on August 17, 1962.
* Berlin celebrates the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Wall on November 9 with a "Festival of Freedom".
