Some Leipzigers grumble that now they’re also supposed to pay “West German prices” in restaurants that used to be affordable to them. They’re already avoiding the erstwhile Stasi and rip-off hotels. They were only patronized by those who disposed of Western money in the two-class society of Honecker’s GDR. Is there now a danger of a new two-class society? “It’ll settle down,” say invited guests of the West German coffee roasting company Eduscho while visiting an exhibition of drawings on the cultural and everyday history of coffee in the “Pfeffermühle” house near Thomas Church. Cabaret artists are playing for this coffee klatsch: “The same money? They mean the same currency. We’re a long way from having the same money.” Johann Sebastian Bach, himself a great entertainer and coffeehouse musician, not just a solemn cantor, would have been delighted with the young group that was doing a rock and jazz version of the master’s “Coffee Cantata.”
Many West German economists are uncertain. In Halle, we’re told, a Western bank gave out ten loans to start up businesses, eight of which had already gone bankrupt. The head of the Treuhandstelle, who is liquidating GDR “national property,” says: “At the moment, no company is paying for shipments and practically no one is paying bills.” The longest lines are in front of financial institutions, which are almost as rare as gas stations. They want clear general conditions, secure loans, actionable law. In many cases, they still don’t know who really owns what and where they want to or should invest.
This “Western” frustration matches that of the Saxons and Thuringians: “Our government is paying way too much attention to the capital of Berlin, the anthem, the flag, the voting law.” Legal uncertainty is also causing distress for private individuals. In Markkleeberg, a Leipzig musician and his wife, a potter – “we work Ton in Ton”* – are living in her father’s house. The father, however, had been dispossessed as a “capitalist,” and the previous SED rulers, as they did in so many other places, quickly sold the house to someone else after the Wende.** Now they have to fight for their property with the help of a lawyer. Fortunately, they were not dispossessed by the Soviets; strangely enough, the injustice of those occupation-era expropriations is supposed to become law after unification.*** The wife’s daughter is studying in the West and is thrilled with the international atmosphere of the student dorm in Rodenkirchen near Cologne. They themselves are hosting a female student from Bonn. These days, the unification of the Germans is taking place not only in the mountains of paper amassed by negotiators from both states. It has nothing to do with megalomania or a “Fourth Reich.”
Anyone who traveled through Thuringia and Saxony shortly before the Wende, returned a bit later during the winter campaign for the first free Volkskammer elections, and returned once again after introduction of the Deutschmark will immediately notice changes: the most important one is the visible triumph of freedom. At Herleshausen they’re taking down the floodlights that were used by the border guards who turned the GDR into one big prison camp, and who now want to become civil servants in the West, if possible. No one is controlling the border any longer.
* A wordplay on the German term Ton, which means both sound/tone and clay – eds.
** The German term Wende refers to the events that led to the downfall of the Communist regime in 1989/90 – eds.
*** See chapter 3, document 10 – eds.
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