Europe: Tales from East Berlin

A few days ago, Anna and I went to coffee at a neighbor’s. Anna cut some flowers from the garden, then we donned our raincoats and walked down the street to a cottage (I just can’t call them houses) in Tasdorf.

Maria Elizabeth greeted us. She is late middle aged; she wears her hair blonde and bouncy and her shirt has sparkles on it. She keeps two dogs, a cat, and 12 rabbits of different breeds. Upon our arrival, she pulled out a tea set, gold and royal blue, talking animately in German the whole time. She filled the dishes with coffee cake and some sort of pie with a brownie-like crust, a cream filling with mandarin oranges, and chocolate-flake topping— both homemade that morning. Since I don’t drink coffee, she poured me a glass of wasser, followed by some juice squeezed from the apples in her backyard.

Two more neighbors showed up, Kurt and Anne-Else. The four of them began talking in German, and Anna translated for me. Maria was telling a story about seeing tanks roll through her little hometown in East Germany in 1969. The tanks crushed the paving stones under their treads. The Russians who drove them were from the far east, looking foreign and primitive and terrifying to her. She wondered if her family would be safe.

Then she began to tell the story of her life. Anna translated for me, and I saw the expression and the nuance in the way Maria spoke. She did voices, made gestures, stood up to demonstrate. A soft light washed the room, darkening in the rain, lightening in the sun. The cat wandered in and rubbed our legs. The teacups gleamed in the incandescent light. I felt myself transported to another world, a world that existed up until a few months after I was born.

Maria and her family lived in East Berlin before the wall was built. Her father was not a Communist party member. Because of this, a red dot was placed next to his name in official documents. Her family wanted to visit their relatives in West Germany, and were only allowed to do so because two of his coworkers vouched for him. The relatives begged him to stay. “It’s not safe for you to return to East Berlin with your family,” they said. Maria’s father didn’t argue with that; he knew things were going downhill. But he also knew that if he didn’t return, his two coworkers would probably be arrested, so he and his family returned.

In school, Maria said the children were encouraged to spy on each other, and teachers asked children nonchalant questions to see if their parents were speaking poorly of the party, or even watching Western television. The wall was built. Russians guarded the city and were kept strictly segregated to prevent fraternization.

In the meantime, Maria grew up, got married, had two children, and went looking for a job. Thanks to a friend, she was able to get a good position at a factory. After she was hired, however, her employers discovered she wasn’t a party member. They immediately pulled together the paperwork so she could become one. She kept making excuses— “I have two little children and can’t attend the meetings.” (“No problem, you can leave work early.”) “It’s too expensive.” (“You’ll make more money as a party member.”) After she gave several excuses, her employer leaned back in his chair, folded his hands on his large stomach, and said, “Ah, so this is how it’s going to be.” Since the amount of paperwork required to fire someone was exponential, they gave her a worse job and waited for her to fail. They assigned her a trainee who was there simply to trip her up. Still she persevered, for many years, even through a divorce and being a single mother.

At one point, Maria wanted to go to her uncle’s funeral in West Germany. Crossing the border required 48 passport photos, a note of debt-free status from her bank, a police permission (which normally took four months to get), written permission from a party member, and countless other documents. She managed to scrape together all the documents, but because she wasn’t a party member, she was still not allowed to go.

Despite the continuous pressure, she refused to join the Communist party. Eventually she resisted so long that Stasi, the secret service agency of Eastern Germany, had a huge file on her. They sent one of their agents, a young, dashing man who was good at smooth-talking, to spy on her. 

Of course Maria fell in love with him. But something unexpected happened: he also fell in love with her. One day, while sitting at his apartment, he happened to let it slip that this was a government-provided apartment. Maria was immediately suspicious, and inquired further. He made up a story, but at last she got him to admit that yes, this was a Stasi apartment. That meant the entire place was bugged. Maria didn’t hesitate; she got up and ran.

They continued their romance for a while; he dropped her notes at work and they met in the woods in secret. They considered trying to escape across the river into Bulgaria. But eventually the man gave up his hopes of running away with his love; he was a dead man if he went to West Germany, and he was a dead man if he stayed with her. As a tangible sign of their separation, he married another woman. Stasi got off their backs.

At one point, Maria tried to escape through Hungary. She called her ex-husband— a hurried call, so Stasi couldn’t trace it— and told him to come over. They forged a document that left all her possessions to her ex-husband and her daughters, so that the government couldn’t seize everything when she tried to escape. But again she was unsuccessful. 

Years later she gathered her daughters— now both grown, one married— and left for Hungary, again determined to escape. They got all the way to the border, but her daughter realized she couldn’t leave— her husband was Russian, and if they escaped into the West she would never see him again. The three of them decided that they would stick together, and they returned to East Germany, together.

In Berlin in 1989, Maria remembers a group of protestors filed out of the churches one night. They walked through the city bearing candles, chanting, “Stasi, roust! Stasi, roust!” People watched from their apartments— with the lights out, in case Stasi was watching them. Three days later, the Berlin wall came down. 

Soon after, everyone in East Germany was offered 100 marks if they came to West Germany. Maria said the queue at the train station spiraled on and on. Her employer who had given her a hard time stood in the queue with everyone else, dying to go west. The girl giving tickets was a non-party-member’s daughter who had suffered all her life. She cut off the line for the day right in front of a party member who had once held a lot of power over her. The message was clear: this is the new world.

And Maria? With her daughters in the care of their husbands, she was free to move west. She found her way out of Berlin, got another factory job, married a man, raised another family, and now lives in Tasdorf just down the road from my uncle. 

It was getting late; Anna and I had to go. Maria showed us her rabbits and chatted more in German, cuddling an angora bunny in her arms. I have rarely seen someone so exuberant, so full of life and passion. Anna and I waved goodbye, and I said my last Tschüs to the woman who lived in a world I can hardly imagine. “You come again?” she asked. I told her I was leaving in the morning. “You come visit us again,” she said. “We will have a big party with many young people.” She squeezed my hands, gave me a hug, and sent me on my way with a smile as bright as the sunshine.

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