Undivided: Encounters with America 

Transcript: Excerpts of Videotaped Discussion with U.S. Students on Working in the U.S. Embassy in the GDR
CDA John M. Koenig, CAO Peter Claussen
Berlin, February 10, 2009

The "Wende" - CDA John M. Koenig (5:14) Video

JK: I will just make a couple of introductory remarks, and then I would like to have a question and answer session. I was here, as was Peter, 20 years ago. I was here a little more than 20 years ago. So I missed the big change. It was sort of the standard GDR 1980s experience when I was here, and that meant that we really failed to perceive that change was coming in the dimensions that it was in fact coming. I left Germany after that in 1987. So I spent the time from 1985-1987 working in East Berlin and didn't come back except for a few private visits until 2006. So I was gone for a very long time. So naturally my perceptions of the actual events of the fall of the Wall were those of a person who was not in Germany. I watched it on TV at the time. I was already back in Washington, D.C. for a follow-on tour and then I came back here to all the remarkable changes that had happened in the meantime.

But I thought I just mention two conversations that I have had recently because now we are beginning to process some of this experience a bit more and we have a lot of people, Peter among them, who had very vivid memories of the actual years of the transformation that took place here. And you know it's fascinating to run into former Easterners who have been successful in the Federal German Republic. There aren't huge numbers of them and you find them in many places. The most prominent, needless to say, is Chancellor Angela Merkel.

But one of the leading figures who came out of the time right around the change was Matthias Platzeck, the Minister President of Brandenburg, the state that surrounds Berlin. For a brief time, he was the leader of the Social Democratic Party in Germany until he had to retire for health reasons. Our conversation with him revealed just how sensitive dealing with this change remains for Germans. He, for example, doesn't like the term "Wende." He came out of the sort of grassroots reform movement especially in the green issues, environmental issues, and was quite prominently in the last year let's say of the GDR and quickly moved into politics after the change. But the reason he doesn't like to word "Wende" is because he believes that it was applied, and I think this can be demonstrated, by Egon Krentz, the head of the very short interim government after Honecker left power but before the communists were removed, to trivialize or domesticate what was happening after he left power. Egon Krentz was forced out and he then later described everything as the "Wende" because he wanted to keep the East German communist party alive. It did survive in a changed form and continues to be a factor here in Germany today.

I have also talked to somebody else who is quite remarkable -- Stefan Steinlein, the chief of staff to Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Steinlein had a completely different take on everything. He had no problem with the term "Wende" and as we were talking about how we should try to relate to East Germans, or former East Germans, during this anniversary year he said we just need to go for the sort of this role, reaction, what they liked about the U.S., their experience of the U.S. during the period of the GDR regime and sort of all the positives that they had associated with the U.S. So we should talk about music, we should talk about popular culture. This kind of very, very superficial phenomena or at least very non-political phenomena were very political in the GDR at the time and the easiest way to express your opposition to the regime, for example during the 1960s, was to wear blue jeans, and then there were the American army jackets. It was all extremely indirect. So everything was subtle, you know, what you could get away with, you know, without actually putting yourself at odds with the government and not falling into the dissident category. It was a kind of quiet, I don't know, if it would be as much defiance as just an expression of dissatisfaction.

Life in the GDR - CDA John M. Koenig, CAO Peter Claussen (2:14) Video

JK: I think there a lot of rather misleading feelings that exist in the West or in the United States about what life was like in the GDR. I am not trying to beautify life - but people did have stakes in the lives they had created there. That was one reason why the "Wende" was so jolting for East Germans. They had created lives that for the most part were satisfactory. If you didn't want a public life, if you were content to stay away from the public sphere you could develop your life quite fully -- and people did. They were great hobbyists and conversationalists, social people who developed networks. That was pretty seriously destroyed in the context of the "Wende." It was a casualty of change.

PC: It's something that is very hard to talk about. I don't think I've ever served in a place where you were more aware of social nuances in a room because people learned to trust one another based upon those social networks in a way that was of serious commitment. Even as foreign diplomats you got brought into it in a little bit of a way because you are meeting people, you're telling them "hey, I work for the American Embassy. You really don't want to know me. Now, if you do want to know me you better be forewarned because I am trying to be honest with you." And then there were people that continued to know you. You thought "are they brave, are they stupid or are they working for somebody?" So you had this whole constant sort of filtering process going on all the time that is fascinating and I've never really seen it captured adequately, I don't think.

JK: And it was naturally simpler for us than it was for East Germans. I mean they had the same kind of thing going on but we were protected.

Reagan Speech, Movement in the GDR, Leipzig Book Fair (4:28) Video

JK: I left in 1987. I was here when Ronald Reagan gave the speech. A legend has developed around that speech. It is undoubtedly a fine speech, but it had relatively little resonance in East Germany. I don't mean to make this a political criticism of Ronald Reagan. But he was an unpopular president in Germany, in both sides of Germany. It was a fine speech that turned out to be rather prophetic in its message but it played no role among the East Germans, that I knew, in anything about the timing of the events that they saw coming.

What seemed relatively significant, although we never really adequately appreciated it, were two things. One was external - Gorbachev and his bad relations with Honecker. The reform movement that he started in the Soviet Union had direct implications for the East German Communist Party. People kept a close eye on that. It was still back in the age of Kremlinology and such. People would watch things like who showed up for parades and who didn't; how hard was this kiss with Brezhnev or Gorbachev. That was a big factor. And then here in Germany sort of affiliated with the peace movement, which was actually a block sort of in part finance movement that was in West Germany and West Berlin at the time. It was genuinely in part manipulated. There developed a rather similar parallel movement in the East very much anchored in the church, which was the only autonomous institution in East Germany and which really began to snowball. But it didn't amount to very much by the time I left. It amounted mainly to meetings in churches and talk, but no direct challenges to the state, no street demonstrations. Certainly street demonstrations only began much later.

PC: They began a little later. And there was a change. But again we didn't know. I mean it came as a shock on the night that it happened, when the Wall fell. There was a change over time but that also had some internal factors as well as the external. That is... God now my history... 1988, when was the meeting in Bonn, when Honecker went to Bonn? Was it '87?

JK: 1987.

PC: I think it was the fall of '87. There was a meeting between the two German heads of state in Bonn and then we began hearing signs from our political colleagues that the Honecker government wanted a similar meeting in Washington. And as a result of that there were a lightening of the pressures that I think you guys dealt with when you were here in this sort of the generation before, so much so that we began to be able to do things. We were able to establish the Fulbright Commission. That was, I think, in the works when you were here. We were given permission to open a stand at the Leipzig book fair, which we used to collect names. Again, getting out as a diplomat in the GDR was very, very difficult. We both knew that anybody that we met, struck up a conversation with on a train car, or wherever was likely to get in trouble from having contact with us. So you kept your distance and only sort of had those meetings that were sanctioned and official. But at the Leipzig book fair we were able to display American books. And then we would ask people who wanted that copy of the book to write on a three by five card their contact and why they wanted the book and then leave the card with us. So we collected in that way hundreds of index cards of people who had little statements why they wanted the book, and we would pick one and send them the book, but in the meantime, we had these names and addresses of people in the GDR, which we wouldn't otherwise been able to get.

Q: Did the Stasi know that you were doing that?

PC: Yeah, we never hid anything.

Daycare, Educational System in the GDR - CDA John M. Koenig, CAO Peter Claussen (2:25) Video

JK: There are some things about the east that were progressive, and over time it seems there were people in the west who would paint kindergarten or daycare with a communist brush. This is a communist institution and we should have it.

It's a very strange mix. This is an interesting experiment, a country coming together after being raised under two systems for forty years.

PC: The day care thing was a double edged sword, it was always there. You could bring your kids there, fairly early on, eighteen months, 24 months dropping them off.

When you didn't, as some of the church groups, in particular, chose not to, that became noticed. If by four your kid wasn't in daycare there was an indication there was. .....

JK: Dangerous tendencies

PC: it was very, very strange

JK: The other thing was: I love it when I run into an eastern German (and it's not that uncommon) who will stand up for something about their society, especially something successful. The Microsoft manager for Berlin is a woman from the eastern part of Germany. I was at an event with her. We were sitting there (everyone else on our table was West German businessmen).

The question arose about educational system and the East German system was single school, single stream and really quite a high standard, especially in technical subjects. The West German system is of course is highly differentiated, three stream and, in fact, kind of class oriented. This woman stood her ground, insisting this whole never-ending debate in Germany over whether or not you can afford to abandon the three tier system is a good idea. She said, we proved it in the GDR it is a good idea to go to a single stream system. It perhaps has no impact on the national debate, but, in fact, it is a very relevant experience.

And I just find it refreshing to see them stand their ground and say, "I can believe what I lived through, I don't need to just believe what has come about since 1989".