On the German Democratic Republic (East Germany)

Stefan Heym is the pseudonym of Helmut Flieg, a German writer who fled to Prague in 1933 to avoid the Gestapo. After moving to Chicago and becoming a U.S. citizen, Heym joined the U.S. Army and returned to Germany to fight the Nazis toward the end of World War II. After the war, he found his leftist views out of favor in the United States and moved to East Germany, becoming a citizen of the German Democratic Republic. Though a committed socialist, Heym was much too free-thinking for the East German regime, which kept him under continual surveillance. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Heym opposed German reunification and continued to advocate socialism, becoming the oldest member of Germany's Bundestag in 1994 as part of the Party of Democratic Socialism --the reformed Communist Party.

On the German Democratic Republic (East Germany):

I certainly hoped that in the Eastern part of Germany, what was just beginning to be called the German Democratic Republic, you would develop a system of socialism with freedom and democracy in it, because I believed that this new form of social relationships and this new form of production could only succeed if you had freedom of initiative and freedom of speech and freedom of expression and freedom of criticism -- which, by the way, is what Marx demanded in the beginning of the whole thing.

When I came [back to East Germany] I was surprised to find that not all people were enthusiastic about the new thing. You mustn't forget that even in West Germany in the beginning, people wanted [a] kind of socialism. You find [evidence of] that in the early plebiscites that you had there, in the early decisions of the parliaments then, especially in the state of Essen. So when I came [back to East Germany] I was kind of disappointed to find that a great many people didn't like the system that much, and in fact the system was run so that people couldn't really love it.

On the East German secret police:

We had agents of the secret police right here in the house. Our household help was paid by the state security an additional wage to report on us and to steal my manuscripts and bring them to the state security so they could photograph them. ... And you saw with your own eyes the guards in their cars sitting on the street behind our garden and watching us. But these were only the direct things. You had censorship. If you brought a manuscript to the publisher, you knew where he was going to take it first, and you knew that he would try to suggest changes and would tell you, "This you can say and this you cannot say." And if you wanted to write and speak what you thought had to be written and spoken, then you had to act against all these suppressive rules and measures.

Of course it had its effects [on the East German people]. People knew what they could do and what they could not do, what they would not be permitted to do. And one of the worst effects was that by suppressing critical thought, it also suppressed critical thought in the field of economics and hampered the development of economics -- and the country would fall back further and further in the economic competition with the West. So there were all sorts of effects that this kind of restriction caused, not only intellectual, but practical too. ...

Most of the time you lived perfectly normally and people who were not in intellectual jobs or active in the intellectual life of the country could go on without feeling restricted, except in the very important point that they could not go where they wanted. They could not cross the border to the West whenever they liked; and some never crossed it, so that was something they felt all the time. But otherwise, my God, you ate your breakfast, you ate your lunch, you ate your dinner, you slept, you lived a normal life and there was no unemployment and the social services worked better than in the West. These were the things that the government supplied you with -- in turn, of course, demanding obedience. But you must not imagine that it was a constant feeling of outrage that was in the minds of people and the hearts of people. ...

We found one day in the snow in front of our house, one of the little notebooks that a guard had left who had been observing us. ... It was a very strange experience [reading] what they had observed and that they had referred to us by invented names. It was nonsense what they had written. And we knew we were being observed, and to a certain extent it was also a feeling of satisfaction. That might sound strange, but it meant that you had been recognized -- [that] you [would] be recognized, even if you were recognized as a danger, but [it meant] they took you seriously. Today, when we live in a what is called Western democracy here ... you're not taken seriously all the time. You can write what you want because nobody cares about it. But at that time, they cared very much about what you wrote, so that's an entirely different feeling. ...

On the exodus of East Germans into West Berlin before the Wall was built:

People in the East looked toward the West with what I might [call] longing. They would have liked to have the same comforts, the same goods, the same chances. And they saw, in what was called socialism at the time, a system that demanded of them sacrifices with nothing but promises for the future. ...

[People] wanted to better themselves, they wanted to have a better life, and they thought they would get it in the West. That's why they tried to get there. And as long as the borders were open, it was relatively easy to get there. All you had to do is board a subway or board what they called the S-Bahn train -- surface train [or] city train -- and you were in another world. And it was really a crazy system. Imagine, you go from "socialism," in quotation marks, to capitalism in two minutes. And of course this [influenced] the minds of people in Germany and led to the establishment of the Wall. It was really thought that a foreman [at] a plant in the East wouldn't know how many workers he still would have the next day, because part of his working force had left him, had left the East, had left the system in order to go over there. And of course, in West Germany, they made every effort that people who came from the East would get jobs and would get a comfortable existence. That was part of the Cold War -- and part of the winning side of the Cold War.

On how he felt when the Wall went up:

I knew that this Wall was the result of a very bad situation. They didn't do it because they were fun-minded or something like that. They did it as a necessity, and I thought, "What kind of system is it that can only exist by keeping them with force in their own bailiwick?" And the Wall was the actual symbol of a defeat, of inferiority, and I thought, "All right, they have it, and let's call it an improvisation that's only going to last as long as you had these economic shortcomings; and perhaps it gives the government a chance to catch up and produce enough for its people to be satisfied too, and to eliminate the necessity for the Wall." So I always had the attitude [that] this Wall cannot be permanent. If it's permanent, it's permanent defeat. And also, of course, I knew that the German people, they're one, and would tend to consider themselves as one; and therefore they would consider the Wall as an enforced imprisonment. And I was right in thinking that way.

On fears of nuclear war during the Berlin crisis:

I not only saw the possibility of nuclear war, I feared it very much. Not that I thought that either side would be foolish enough to start with it. But if they started a military conflagration, it would automatically lead to nuclear warfare, because one side would be defeated in the beginning and then it would answer by atomic bombs. It was quite clear. ... And I was worried about it. After all, you know, I was living only once too, you know, and I didn't want to die in an atomic war; nor did I want my family to die or the other people to die -- and I knew that [if there was a nuclear war] there would be a holocaust unequaled ever. And perhaps the end not of Germany or the end of Europe, but the whole world; that was all in the cards. And I'm very, very relieved that it didn't come to that, but the situation [in] Germany was [such] that the danger existed. ...

Margit Hosseini lived in West Berlin when the Wall was built. She was interviewed for COLD WAR in September 1996.

On differences between East and West Berlin:

It was a different atmosphere; it looked optically quite different. Even as a child I noticed that when you came across Friedrichstrasse [into East Berlin], there were big kind of posters advertising socialism and the greatness of it. As you entered more into East Berlin, away from the center ... it got duller; there were less colorful posters and more gray. A more subdued kind of picture. In general, I remember ... it smelled different coming from West Berlin, entering East Berlin. And for many years I was thinking, "Why is there a different smell?" And it came of course from the coal: they burnt different coals. It was a sort of ... well, we called it "the Eastern smell."

I think the sort of grayishness was not just optical. In a sense ... it was also the people. In some ways I always felt, as a little girl, they were much more subdued [in the East]. I don't know whether that was because of the kind of propaganda we had in the West, of course, or whether it was a real fact. I do remember the endless gray shuffling of people along the street, not talking a lot to each other. You know, when you saw a group of people in the West, they were talking and laughing or making gestures, and I remember that wasn't like that [in the East]. ...

I think basically [the difference between East and West] showed in clothes. You know, when we went across, we always had bags; like every family from the West, we always took lots of things: you took fresh fruit -- oranges were unobtainable in East Berlin -- clothes, nicer clothes, sort of soap and things. So you were always loaded when you went across. And in those days, you have to remember, there was no Wall, so you didn't have your bags checked. I mean, sometimes you could cross anywhere where the street went across the border; sometimes you were stopped and checked. In the S-Bahn they quite often did sort of random checks.

And I remember once, my cousin actually came with her mother to stay with us the weekend, and when they arrived both of them were in tears because they had gotten oranges from some relation, and they actually brought the oranges to us as a gift -- which was a very precious gift for them. [But] they had run into a random check and the oranges were taken away from them, because that was a sort of Western influence which the authorities in the East didn't want. And it seemed to me so utterly absurd to make a political issue out of oranges -- and I can't have been more than 11 at the time -- I just thought, "This is totally ridiculous."

On learning that the border had been closed:

My first feeling was a personal one, because my sister that summer had stayed with my aunt just outside of East Berlin ... My father actually woke me up and said, "You know, they closed the border," and I didn't understand what he was saying. It was incomprehensible, you know; it was so strange. And then my mother came in crying, and my older sister, and we were thinking, you know, "How do we get my sister back?" Telephone links were cut; you couldn't phone. So in the end I think my father went to the police station, and the police phoned around and then they told my parents to go to Friedrichstrasse and try to sort this out. So we all took the S-Bahn, and it was an absolute chaos in Friedrichstrasse, it was terrible: people crying, shouting; some were frightened, some were angry, some wanted to go from East to West, some from West to East. Some looked for their relations, like we did.

It was utter chaos. And I just remember I'm so frightened -- I thought, "We'll never see my sister, she's lost," so to speak. And it took quite a long time until my father somehow found somebody to talk to, some official, and we discovered that my aunt actually was also in Friedrichstrasse with my sister, trying [to do] exactly the same [thing] from her side. And in the end, after a huge sort of paperwork, and my father, who had a very short temper, starting to have a rather sort of shorter temper, as usual, and my mother worrying that he would lose his temper and then my sister would not be allowed to leave ... in the end we did manage to get my sister back.

On the mood in West Berlin after the Wall was built:

I think it was probably the reaction [of], "What is going to happen [now]?" [Or] in a wider political sense, "What will the Russians do, what will America do?" ...

I remember when there was very little reaction coming [at] first from America -- Kennedy being on holiday and not reacting -- there was anger. We all felt, "They are dropping us like a hotcake." You know: "They don't care about us, they don't do anything." All this sort of talk about West Berlin, the sort of "front-line island," was just a propaganda thing and now they are turning away because it's too risky to do something. And I think that also explains then the totally different reaction when Kennedy actually came, quite a bit later, to Berlin: that people were absolutely jubilant.

But these first few days, I think the town was rather subdued. We were so scared. And I think generally, people thought, "That's it," you know, "we will now be part of the GDR and [have] lost our sort of freedom." I talked later, many years later, to my cousin, and she explained to me the Eastern side: they were angry; they were just very, very angry. She said she thought it was disgusting, a state who locks in its population. ... And she said she, at the time, decided, and said to her family, "I will manage to go across." And the family of course convinced her that that isn't very easy; and as time passed, it got more and more difficult anyway. But she said there was an enormous amount of anger. You felt that Big Brother was treating you, everyone, like a child, telling you: "This is good for you, because I know better." And there was anger. And that was different from the West: in the West there was fear, you know, the feeling of helplessness. ...

On President Kennedy's visit to Berlin:

Oh, it was terribly exciting, really exciting. Even if you were totally unpolitical, it was really exciting. ... It reminded me of what I thought when my grandmother was telling me about the Emperor's birthday: little girls waving flags, and everybody was in such a good mood. All the shops closed. ... It was a bit like New Year's Eve in Germany ... it was that kind of atmosphere. Everybody was really sort of delighted. ...

I did think it was a bit silly, his sentence, "Ich bin ein Berliner," because it was with such a strong American accent. And then, of course, in West Germany, "Berliner" means a pancake ... so I thought that was rather silly (laughs). But, you know, one sort of respected his effort he made. ...

Everybody was delighted, and everybody was very, very grateful. It was that feeling of, "Ah, now we are sure, now we are safe." ... And well, as I was sort of a young girl then, I thought, "He looks madly handsome." I think we all realized it was an historical moment.

On the Wall:

To me, it personified the absurdity of political life. I probably am one of the few in my circle of friends who firmly believed that this division is not forever. I did not think that it would happen in my lifetime -- that it would sort of dissolve, so to speak -- but I thought it was so absurd and so unrealistic that it could not survive for long. And, because I like history, to me 50 years in history is not a long time. It's a long time for a person, but not in historical terms.