CHAPTER 5
EAST BERLIN DURING THE GDR TIMES
To Westerners, East Berlin was a place where political thrillers were set, but where most people
did not travel. East Berlin was terra incognita. The GDR government certainly did not make it
easy for Westerners to enter, setting visa regulations and set exchange fees, and other
restrictions at the border crossing that bordered on harassment. East Germany lived up to its
image as a controlled totalitarian society that made life hard for everybody. However, for those
who dared to enter the East, there was a fascinating country engaged in a socialist experiment.
Unfortunately, this system had locked itself in a permanent state of resistance to no change.
Tourist trips to East Germany were impossible, but day trips to East Berlin were allowed and
often quite common, including vacations to West Berlin. A visit to East Berlin was permitted for
one day on a tourist visa as long as you were back by midnight. Although there were several
crossing points for cars, bureaucratic regulations made it difficult to get permission to enter by
car. Therefore, most Westerners took the train to Friedrichstraße station where papers were
checked in a building called the “Tear Palace” (Tränenpalast), because so many heart-breaking
goodbyes took place there. Once inside the checkpoint, visitors had to pay a transit fee and
exchange a set amount of money before they were ready to go (#13 on map).
On exiting Friedrichstraße station visitors could turn left and go north on Friedrichstraße, which
would eventually turn into Chausseestraße. Here they would find many of East Berlin’s
famous theaters, among them Brecht’s Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, where the Berliner
Ensemble premiered his famous plays (8). Brecht, Germany’s best-known twentieth century
playwright, had lived in Los Angeles during WWII, but returned to East Berlin in 1947, because
he was to be questioned by the McCarthy committee for being a communist. Watching a Brecht
play at the Berliner Ensemble was on the must-do list for most visitors and often the only reason
to enter the East. Brecht’s museum and burial place on Dorotheenstädter Friedhof were also on
Friedrichstraße’s northern extension, Chausseestraße (10, 11) and often included on a visitor’s
tour. Another very popular evening entertainment place on northern Friedrichstraße was the
Friedrichstadtpalast with its lineup of showgirls (12). However, for a day-visit most tourists
would first turn right on Friedrichstraße when leaving the station, and then walk south. At the
intersection with Unter den Linden they would turn right and take in the sights of neo-classical
Berlin. It was an exciting experience to stand on the eastern side of the Brandenburg Gate
looking west towards the wall, this being the closest anyone could get to the wall from the
eastern side (1). Close to Brandenburg Gate sat the imposing embassy of the Soviet Union (16).
Walking back on Unter den Linden tourists would marvel at the many reconstructed neoclassical buildings, among them the Hedwig’s Cathedral at the Bebelplatz (27), Humboldt
University (33), the Staatsbibliothek (32), the Opera House (35), and finally the Museum Island
with its most important tourist attraction, the Pergamon Museum (46), that housed antique
temples. The change of the guard, Soviet style (36) at the guardhouse (Neue Wache), which had
become a GDR memorial to the victims of fascism normally attracted the largest crowd on
Unter den Linden. The Palace of the Republic (31) and the GDR State Council building
(“Staatsratsgebäude”, 30) were two sights not to be missed since they were also flanked by
guard soldiers, and both buildings carried the ominous GDR state seal on their front. In order to
establish its claim to represent a new Germany, the GDR leadership had decided to destroy the
Prussian Royal palace and to replace it with the new Palace of the Republic in 1951. The palace
square (Schlossplatz) in front of it was then renamed Marx-Engels-Platz.
Further east Unter den Linden changed its name to Karl-Liebknecht-Straße after the
assassinated communist leader. Although Karl-Liebknecht-Straße went right through the
center of what used to be medieval Berlin, most of it was destroyed in WWII and the entire
medieval center was turned into a gigantic park, the Marx-Engels Forum dominated by a big
Marx and Engels statue (66). The park resembles the Washington Mall in its dimension and
was flanked by the Palace of the Republic to the west (with the Spree River in between), Berlin’s
city council house (Rathaus) to the south and the Alexanderplatz station to the east. The
highlight of the Marx-Engels Forum was the huge TV tower (61), which can still be seen from
any place in Berlin, a landmark for this flat city built on the sands of Brandenburg province. In
the evening the copper-colored windows of the sightseeing deck reflect the sun in the form of a
giant cross. Although the communists tried to eliminate this effect by recoating the glass, the
cross can still be seen today. Next to the TV tower stands one of Berlin’s oldest churches, the
Marienkirche built in 1292, the only building in the Marx-Engels-Forum. Its position at an
awkward angle in relation to the otherwise rectangular forum shows it as the only remaining
part of the medieval center.
Alexanderplatz, next to the TV tower (57) was completely redesigned after WWII. In an effort to
present itself as a new and different country the East German government chose East Berlin’s
prominent architect, Hermann Henselmann to design the TV tower and the Palace of the
Republic. Henselmann’s original concept for Berlins central district (Mitte) had called for a
combined central structure of palace and TV tower as the center for East Germany’s parliament,
merging socialism with technology. However, eventually TV tower and parliament building
were separated. The new Alexanderplatz was radically different from the old - it was a gigantic
pedestrian-only square with several modernist buildings surrounding it, Haus des Lehrers (58),
Haus des Tourismus (57), and the Interhotel Berlin with the Centrum department store (60). A
similar square went up a few blocks away at the Lenin-Platz with a gigantic Lenin monument
whose removal became the key symbol in Wolfgang Becker’s 2003 movie Good Bye Lenin (84).
Henselmann also designed the layout of the center of East Berlin’s Stalin-Allee, now called KarlMarx-Allee (83). This stretch of road, previously known as Frankfurter Allee, was chosen as the
main Communist boulevard because the victorious Soviet troops had entered Berlin here in
April 1945. Stalin-Allee, built between 1952 and 1960, was lined by luxurious apartments for
privileged workers, shops, restaurants, cafés, a hotel and a first-run movie theater, the Kino
International. The older part of the almost 2 km long boulevard is lined with monumental eightfloor buildings in the Soviet style emulating classical architecture, a return to Schinkel’s neoclassicism. At each end Karl-Marx-Allee features dual towers, at Frankfurter Tor and at
Strausberger Platz (86). Because of its prominent place in East German history, Stalin-Allee
became the focus of an uprising of the construction workers on June 17, 1953. Stalin-Allee was
used for East Germany's annual Soviet style May Day parade, with goose-stepping soldiers and
tanks and military hardware rolling alongside.
The role of literature in a communist country differed dramatically from that in the west. Since
the communists were interested in educating the working class they gave financial support to
various forms of culture such as inexpensive classical literature, theater tickets and museums.
Writers were trained to explore the social and political issues the communists were involved in.
The disadvantage of state support for the arts was that criticism was persecuted and
subsequently critical writers excluded from official forms of subsidy. As a result of this and due
to the proximity of West Berlin, a vast underground literature circulated in East Berlin. In order
to follow criticism in the absence of any political opposition, “reading between the lines”
became an obsessive sport for any serious reader in the East, and therefore literature was
greedily consumed for important information as a form of survival in a one-party state.
After Soviet forces occupied Berlin in April 1945, they went on quickly reestablishing culture in
the war-torn city. Radio, newspapers, theater performances, museums and libraries were
quickly reopened. War-weary Berliners accepted the Russian offerings eagerly as they provided
much-needed distractions from the hardships of life. Food was scarce, normal activities were
disrupted, and housing end employment were lacking. When in August 1945, the Western
sectors of Berlin were occupied by the United States, Britain and France as agreed in the
Potsdam Treaty, the Americans continued the cultural activities begun by the Russians.
Subsequently the years 1945-48 saw an intense cultural competition between East and West
Berlin. Literature written in Berlin during those five years was uncensored and politically
neutral in all four sectors, as the Communist system was competing with the West in winning
over as many Berliners as possible. Because many intellectuals had been left-leaning and were
now returning to East Berlin from various countries they had emigrated to, initially, Russian
cultural politics was highly respected at first. The most prominent of them was Bertolt Brecht
who returned from the United States. After the GDR was founded in 1949, the East German
Communists founded an office for furthering cultural politics (Kulturpolitik) as a copy of Soviet
practices. This office would eventually supervise and censor all East Berlin authors through its
writers association (Schriftstellerverband).
After 1949 the GDR introduced the German version of Soviet literature, socialist realism, in
reaction to Western “decadent” literature. According to the theory imported from the Soviet
Union, Socialist literature was concerned with people while Western literature was only
interested in formal experimentation. To advance socialist realism, the communists created new
art institutes, such as the film academy “Konrad Wolf“ or the writing school “Johannes R.
Becher” that Christa Wolf attended.
The construction of the wall in 1961 enabled the government to relax its cultural rules.
Dissidents could no longer leave or import unwanted ideas from the West. Since Western
formalism was no longer an issue, communist dedication to socialist ideas now became the
central topic for East Germans. From now on the party was reluctant to grant any leeway to
writers, which eventually lead to major rifts between politics and authors. The quarrels
culminated in the poet and songwriter Wolf Biermann’s expulsion from the GDR in 1976 for
presenting his song “Der preußische Ikarus” at a concert in Cologne. Unlike in the West where
literature and culture is seen as a supplement to public life, in the East the Communists
regarded art as essential. Thus Biermann’s expulsion was considered a major crisis for the GDR,
foreshadowing its eventual demise. GDR texts written in the 1970s and 1960s are prime
evidence of hidden resistance in a society that had no other way of expressing its opposition.
Writers and singers like Biermann had become important resistance icons. When other wellknown artists expressed their solidarity with Biermann after his expulsion, most were expelled
as well, eventually leaving the GDR and Berlin without a critical opposition.
The mass exodus of artists was the beginning of the end of the GDR. Due to the continuing
censorship and repression, the remaining writers now turned away from official cultural
politics. Instead, a literary GDR underground scene developed in the run-down buildings of
Prenzlauer Berg in East Berlin, where young writers lived. One of those young artists without a
voice was Thomas Brussig whose style is considered one of the most important post-wall
expressions of Berlin’s literary scene during the Communist times. All of Brussig’s work was
published after 1989.
East Berlin’s literary texts focus on areas outside the city. As one of the first authors in the GDR
to take up the topic of escaping from Communist Germany (Republikflucht), Christa Wolf
concentrates on West Berlin. Both Kunert and Brussig show their obsession with East Berlin’s
public transportation, especially the S-Bahn, whether as a means of escaping reality as Brussig
does or of romanticizing the past, as Kunert does.
WOLF BIERMANN, DER PREUßISCHE IKARUS (1978)
1976 became one of the most important dates for the GDR, a country where literature and
political development were closely intertwined. 1976 was the year when the songwriter Wolf
Biermann was denied reentry after he had given a concert in Cologne on November 15 where
he had played, among other songs, the ballad “Der preußische Ikarus”. The authorities claimed
Biermann had offended East Germany with his songs and therefore was stripped of his
citizenship. A tremendous political campaign followed which eventually brought down the
GDR.
Because his father, a dockworker, had sabotaged Nazi warships and was murdered in a
concentration camp,Biermann believed that East Germany’s communists did a better job of
getting rid of old Nazis than the more traditional West German parties. Biermann was educated
in an eastern boarding school where he studied Marxism-Leninism and became a successful
“culture worker” (Kulturarbeiter). From 1957 to 1959 he was assistant director at the Berliner
Ensemble, Brecht’s theater at the Schiffbauerdamm. However, Biermann eventually recognized
that East Germany’s communism had very little in common with his socialist ideals, and he
began to write critical ballads. After the 1965 Communist party convention he was singled out
as a scapegoat who had gone too far with his criticism and was silenced. Biermann then became
East Berlin’s best-known dissident who many visitors contacted at his home at Berlin’s
Chausseestraße, among them the American singer Joan Baez.
Biermann’s international celebrity status began after his expulsion in 1976, after most East
Berlin authors, musicians, actors and other intellectuals, including the novelist Christa Wolf,
published a protest letter on his behalf in the West. As a consequence, most signers of the
petition lost their citizenship and left for the west, thereby creating an ever-growing group of
dissidents. Criticizing the GDR from abroad, Biermann continued his musical career in the west
after his expulsion and became one of East Germany’s harshest critics. After the wall came
down in 1989, Biermann discovered that more than two hundred Stasi men had worked on his
surveillance. Biermann’s poem “Der preußische Ikarus” was published in 1978, which is
reprinted in Berliner Spaziergänge.
The poem is a good example of Biermann’s style. Written in his apartment on Chausseestraße, it
provided a multilayered symbol combining an image from his neighborhood bridge,
mythology, and from the general political situation in Germany. “Der preußische Ikarus”
reflects Biermann’s personal experience as a citizen of the GDR who does not want to leave his
hated and beloved country. When he describes the iron bird, it becomes clear that Biermann
compares his own fate with the bird that symbolizes not only GDR history, but Prussian and
German history as well. The metal bird does not waver and does not fall nor will it be
destroyed by history as history, represented by barbed wire, has grown into his body. The bird
becomes the metaphor for Biermann who sees himself as a Christ-figure embodying the
suffering of his country. The poem ends with the lines “But I cling fast here until this hated bird
claws me and drags me over the edge—then I’ll be the Prussian Icarus listless here at the railing
over the Spree.”
GÜNTER KUNERT, FAHRT MIT DER S-BAHN (1968)
Undoubtedly Kunert’s short text “Fahrt mit der S-Bahn” is disturbing. The text, divided into
two parts with eleven segments of varying lengths, begins with a description of Berlin’s S-Bahn.
The first part ends with the evocation of a window the narrator watches. He contemplates why
he never noticed this particular window, perhaps because looking out at night forces us to look
back at ourselves. And thus by reading a newspaper, we avoid looking at ourselves. The text
continues with the repeated evocation of the firewalls and their faded advertising bordering the
train tracks and ends with a mythological contemplation of objects tossed next to the tracks,
metal parts, cars, stones and even cemetery monuments.
By comparing these objects with his brothers and sisters the text leads to the turning point, the
sudden appearance of the window. Through the window the observer recognizes a sideboard
and a china basket with red apples, and he recognizes himself talking to a dead friend in the
room. The following parts are spent trying to discover where this window is, by taking the train
back, but the narrator never finds it except when riding the train in one particular direction.
Each time he passes the window he recognizes more details, time has passed and other people
have entered the room, family members and friends who are all dead. The narrator marvels at
the relaxed atmosphere in the room, and knows that if he could enter and join the party, he
would be saved, and the city as well.
As most texts in Berliner Spaziergänge focus on the flaneur, a nineteenth century gentleman
passing his time promenading in the busy streets, Kiunert instead chose the S-Bahn for his
explorations. During the Weimar period the S-Bahn had become a major mechanical way to
transport people within the city, and sightseeing by public transportation was now a
fashionable mode of transportation. When Kunert’s story was written in 1968, the S-Bahn had
become a political symbol of the Berlin division, as relations between East and West had begun
to sour during the Cold War. When the Berlin Wall went up on August 13, 1961 Berlin’s public
transit network was also cut into two halves. Friedrichstraße station was divided into two
physically separate areas, one for eastern passengers and one for westerners. Although
Friedrichstraße station lay within East Berlin, western passengers could transfer between SBahn lines or to the U-Bahn without passing through border checks like passengers changing
planes at an international airport. The Friedrichstraße station also became the main entry point
for train and subway riders from West Berlin into East Berlin.
In “Fahrt mit der S-Bahn” Kunert uses the S Bahn as a symbol for Berlin. He introduces a
number of ideas belonging to Romanticism, among them the doppelganger motif, the notion of
time suspension and the idea of salvation and redemption for himself and the city. Obviously
Kunert’s story is not realistic, not even socialist realist. Kunert takes everyday life, such as a
monotonous S-Bahn ride and fantasizes about a world parallel to the existing one. This other
self, the doppelganger, represents our dreams and fantasies and appears in a variety of fictional
works involving traveling through time and parallel universes. A famous film example is the
movie Der Student von Prag, where a man sells his soul to the devil and consequently loses his
shadow.
Kunert’s S-Bahn traveler who watches himself shows his dissatisfaction with his current
situation. He hopes that after watching himself in the doppelganger scene he might come to
terms with himself and his complicated background. But the story shows that reality and the
ideal world cannot come together except in our fantasy. Applying a socialist perspective, it
means that ideal socialism or a perfect world will not be possible and subsequently we will
have to settle for the current situation - a position that could easily be labeled revisionist by
hard-line Marxists. Although Kunert lived in East Germany until his expulsion after the
Biermann affair, his literature can still be called Marxist in the widest sense. Like his model, the
romantic poet Heinrich Heine, Kunert recognizes that we depend on the past to guide us and
we need our on our curiosity and creativity to explore the future. But according to Kunert there
are no ready-made answers, which indicates a cautious rejection of socialist belief in progress;
instead Kunert wants to shows contradictions in our everyday life.
Kunert, whose Jewish background plays heavily into his writing, is one of the most profound
authors in the GDR. He was born in Berlin in 1929 and became a communist after the Nazis
had kept him from attaining a higher education. As a communist and member of the SED he
explored the “post-formalist” rules in GDR culture that permitted any art form as long as the
writer showed a firm socialist base. Kunert is considered one of the most versatile and most
important contemporary German writers, whose work included many genres ranging from
lyric poetry to drama.
CHRISTA WOLF, DER GETEILTE HIMMEL (1963)
The novel tells the story of Rita Seidel, a nineteen-year old girl who falls in love with Manfred
Herrfurth, a chemistry student ten years her senior. Rita and Manfred are two very different
characters: she is impulsive and open-minded, full of expectations for the future while Manfred,
very intelligent and a keen observer of people, eventually becomes cynical about life in the
GDR. Rita moves in with Manfred to begin a new life as a teacher, but living with Manfred
turns out more difficult than expected. While she immerses herself in socialist ideology during
her summer internship at a train car manufacturing company, Manfred becomes embittered
with the socialist state after one of his research projects runs into bureaucratic obstacles, and he
leaves for West Berlin. Manfred is convinced that Rita will follow him, but she is reluctant and
her decision to stay in the East is confirmed during a visit to West Berlin.
Following her visit to Manfred, Rita tries to kill herself and suffers a nervous breakdown.
Manfred’s and Rita’s life together is recounted by Rita in her hospital bed, where she is trying to
come to grips with what happened to her. The story concludes with a recovered Rita who is
finally able to rationalize and resume her life in the socialist state without Manfred.
The excerpt reprinted in Berliner Spaziergänge describes Rita’s visit to Manfred after his escape to
West Berlin, which takes place in the summer of 1961, a few weeks before the wall went up on
August 13. At that time it was still possible, although not legal, to cross the border from East to
West Berlin. The first excerpt, on the train, shows the nervousness of the passengers as they
approach the Eastern part of the city where everybody’s identity had to be checked. Prior to the
introduction of the wall, Berlin was an open city governed by an Allied Control Commission
consisting of France, Great Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States, as agreed at the end
of WWII. Since neither West nor East Berlin was officially part of the two German states,
passengers going to Berlin entered a separate political territory. At that time there were
additional checkpoints between West and East Berlin, but no physical border.
The selection in Berliner Spaziergänge begins with a scene typical for many people all over East
Germany before the construction of the wall, of people coming to Berlin to secretly find their
way across the border. Rita’s travel companion suspects correctly that Rita is one of them and,
as it turns out, he himself also wants to escape to West Berlin. Going to the East was much
easier than Rita had expected. Berlin’s status as an open city meant that buying a ticket for
twice twenty pfennigs would buy two different lives: Spending only twenty pfennigs meant
staying in the West, while spending forty pfennigs meant going back to the previous life in the
east.
The location of the excerpt in Christa Wolf’s novel in West Berlin shows the rebuilt Western city
center that for the West had become a symbol of freedom and capitalism throughout the Cold
War period. Rita leaves the train near Manfred’s apartment at West Berlin’s central Zoo station
with its homeless people and drug addicts, which the communists used as a warning against
bad Western influences. West Berlin’s main boulevard Kurfürstendamm ran west from the Zoo
station and its main business and shopping boulevard Tauentzien Street to the east past the
Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church with its destroyed church tower and the modern church by
Egon Eiermann. Next to the church was the Europa Center, Berlin’s first indoor shopping
center, topped by a giant rotating Mercedes star that could be seen from the East.
Why does Rita not stay in the West? The short excerpt does not give a clear idea of her
motivation. There are some signs in the text however, that indicate her reservations towards
the West. Since she does not see West Berlin as an opportunity for freedom, as Westerners
would expect, the novel distances itself from a Western audience. Rita‘s choice is either, to stay
in the West and be with Manfred or, to come back to the East and have a life without him. In
the scene with Manfred in the restaurant, Rita’s increasing distance to her fiancé becomes clear
when he wants to propose a toast to both of them, to which she responds: “I am not toasting to
anything.” The subsequent street scene elevates their dilemma into a nature symbol with a dark
sky in the east and a bright sky in the west, which is turning darker and darker, as they are
discussing their life together. With this scene, from where the title of the book originates,
Christa Wolf raises Rita’s and Manfred’s life to universal proportions, true to her motto that
every life is universal. The dialogue with its embedded symbolism illustrates the division
between male and female perception and underlines Rita’s now firm decision that she will leave
Manfred.
Der geteilte Himmel is Christa Wolf ‘s first popular book. As in most of Christa Wolf’s books she
writes a female bildungsroman about a young woman coming to terms with her life. Some of the
issues addressed in the book are the protagonist’s entry into professional life, her relationship
with her fiancé Manfred, and her relationship with the Communist party and the East German
state she lives in as well as the East-West conflict. In Der geteilte Himmel Christa Wolf uses a
stream-of-consciousness technique to tie the narrative strands together. The story is thus her
mind’s retrospective from her hospital bed where she is recovering from the experience with
Manfred. The multifaceted novel provides insight into her mind as a GDR citizen at the time of
the construction of the wall. It challenges the common belief in the west that the wall was an
outrage and that every freedom-seeking person would pack their bags and run to the West. The
protagonist acts differently and displays contradictory messages; she wants to visit Manfred,
but is not drawn to the West, and remorsefully returns to the East after she realizes how she had
grown apart from Manfred.
Like Rita, Christa Wolf herself went through a phase of connecting her personal life to that of
her country, the GDR. At age twenty Christa Wolf joined the SED, East Germany’s communist
party, after an internship at a train factory. She attended the notorious eleventh party
convention in 1965 as a party delegate, where a number of writers were criticized, among them
Wolf Biermann. Christa Wolf was the only one to speak out against censorship. Stasi records
found in 1993 show that from 1959 to 1961 she had worked as an informant (Inoffizieller
Mitarbeiter), but it was also discovered that after 1965 she herself was under surveillance, mostly
as a reaction to her critical remarks at the eleventh plenary session.
The novel is a document of beginning GDR literature which, aptly called “construction
literature” (Aufbauliteratur), does not advocate a rejection of the GDR. On the contrary in 1963,
the same year that she wrote her novel, Christa Wolf became a candidate for the Communist
party and although she was reluctant to follow hard-line directives, she remained a loyal
communist for the following twenty years. Her literature shows that a sensitive approach to life
could be combined with East German politics, at least during the nineteen-sixties when the
country defined its identity. In the late seventies Christa Wolf’s position changed when she
became one of the prominent intellectuals protesting Biermann’s expulsion. After German
unification West German intellectuals accused her of collaboration and tried to censor her
previous work.
THOMAS BRUSSIG, HELDEN WIE WIR (1995)
Helden wie wir was the literary sensation of 1995. With its satirical style, the book had the fresh
look different from other books written about the Wende such as Günter Grass’s Ein weites Feld.
Helden wie wir is a novel written in the form of a monologue by the protagonist Klaus Uhltzscht.
The fictitious Uhltzscht was born in August 1968, as Soviet tanks squashed the Czech uprising
against Soviet domination. His father worked for East Germany’s secret state agency, the Stasi,
and his mother was a doctor and a hygiene fanatic. Much of the book is devoted to Uhltzscht's
sexual obsessions, his pursuit of women and his frequent masturbation. Following in his
father's footsteps, he eventually winds up working for the Stasi himself. An accident in 1989
leads to complications that affect his sexual organ, which grows to a size that frightened the
Berlin border guards from protecting the border and allowing everybody into the West.
Helden wie wir was turned into a moderately successful movie in 1999. However, in 2000,
Brussig collaborated with Leander Haussmann on the script to the more successful movie
Sonnenallee, which describes the life of a typical East Berlin family living near a border crossing
to West Berlin. Labeled an “ostalgia” film (a contraction of Ost, East, and nostalgia), it follows
the lives of a group of young people who grow up in East Berlin and portrays them in rosy
colors. Instead of using satire, the movie employs rock music and slapstick humor.
While Günter Kunert had been roaming Berlin by S-Bahn trying to find the city’s lost history,
while Wolf Biermann had paced its center as a true flaneur, and while Christa Wolf had
ventured into West Berlin, none of that was available to Thomas Brussig. Helden wie wir shows
how narrow and physically limited his hometown had become as it was no longer possible to
escape into history, nor to the west, all that remained was a fantasy world. Uhltzscht, who was
born in 1968, the year of the Prague Spring, grew up without knowledge of any place other than
East Germany’s closed society.
The scene in Berliner Spaziergänge expresses the protagonist’s feeling towards sexuality by using
the underground train crossing East Berlin to and from West Berlin as a symbol for the
inaccessibility of Western women. Because Uhltzscht is longing for a touch by Western women,
he presses his nose to the air grate above the passing trains to catch a whiff of Western perfume.
Unfortunately the hero finds no way to fulfill his desire and his psychologist Kitzelstein cannot
help either, as he accepts the role of a quiet sympathetic listener to Uhltzscht’s bragging sexual
frustrations.
The East Berliner cowering above the air grate is a pathetic symbol, that illustrates his
helplessness as he knows that he will never be able to leave the GDR. Uhltzscht was too young
and inexperienced to leave since the only exception to that rule was a rare professional trip
sanctioned by GDR authorities who made sure that a close family member stayed at home. East
Berliners over sixty-five were also allowed to go since they would take a financial burden off
the state if they settled in the West.
Uhltzscht is a collaborator like many GDR citizens were. The air grate scene is a creative and
bizarre way to illustrate the frustrations as it shows the complete powerlessness caused by the
absurd political conditions in the divided city. Brussig’s method of condensing the complex
political situation in a satirical image is an effective way to understand this life. The satirical
effect of the book originates in the presumed innocence of the protagonist who belittles himself
as an innocent bystander, exacerbated by the fact that Uhltzscht had joined the Stasi. As can be
seen in the movie Das Leben der Anderen, Stasi informers had no private lives - they could only
live through the lives of others. Thus the air grate scene is a perfect example of the lives these
predators led.
Showing sexuality in movies or books was something East Berliners were not allowed to, as
Erich Honecker had declared the GDR a morally clean state. One of the first things East
Berliners did after the border opened was to visit porn shops in West Berlin. In this context,
showing his grotesquely enlarged male organ to the border guards as Uhltzscht did was an
ultimate East German male fantasy. Uhltzscht achieved what decades of quiet submission to
repression or the 1989 protests against the government had not achieved.
The book focusses on the mentality of East Germany’s hero culture when Uhltzscht confuses
East Germany‘s top ice-skating coach Jutta Müller with Christa Wolf, the GDR writer, at the
large pro-democracy demonstration on Berlin’s Alexanderplatz on November 4, 1989. It was
here where prominent East Germans began a dialogue with the masses to bring about change.
By equating East Germany’s two famous mother figures and by comparing them with his own
mother, Brussig presents a subversive text about East Germany’s ”mother culture”. It is
obvious that Brussig describes Christa Wolf’s protest as feminine and inefficient and
undermines Christa Wolf’s reputation in East Germany.
Uhltzscht’s mother describes Christa Wolf’s approach as real heroism as a subtle and nonviolent way of dealing with everyday repression. Uhltzscht cannot accept these tactics because
of his violated masculinity. Thus his imagined sexual revolt is a liberalization of his maleness, of
trying to reestablish himself as a strong person emasculated by the communist government.
These effects can be contrasted with the frequent allusions to American culture, such as cowboy
boots, jeans, and movies, since they represent a male dominated culture. Helden wie wir is a
GDR novel disguised as a satire and shows the psychological scars of socialism that had
castrated an entire country.
QUESTIONS AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER STUDY
1. Compare the East Berlin map with the one of Berlin during the Weimar period and the
19th century. Highlight the building the communists built and make a list of those
buildings that disappeared with and after the war. What are the most important
architectural changes you notice?
2. Compare the East Berlin map with the map of Berlin today and list the buildings that
have been built since the wall came down. Where is the main building activity?
3. Can you empathize with Wolf Biermann’s feeling of attachment to the GDR in his poem
“Der preußische Ikarus”?
4. Look at Kafka’s short text “Before the Law” in his novel The Trial, which ends with the
gatekeeper’s statement “No one else can gain entry [to the law], since this entrance was
assigned only to you. I’m going now to close it.” What similarities do you see between
Kafka and Kunert? http://records.viu.ca/~Johnstoi/Kafka/beforethelaw.htm.
5. Why is the S-Bahn an appropriate symbol for German history? Look up what you know
of S-Bahn history and how it affected Berlin.
6. Look up the history of the wall and explain why Rita did not want to stay in West Berlin.
Does she only have personal reasons for severing her relations with Manfred or can you
find political ones as well?
7. If possible look at the movie Sonnenallee and compare Micha’s escapades with the
protagonist Klaus Ultzscht in Heroes Like Us. Where are their similarities? What are their
common interests? How did these interests differ from those of Western teenagers in
the nineteen-seventies?
8. What part of East Berlin would you have visited if you had had the chance of going
there before the fall of the wall? Do you know of anybody in your family who had a
chance to visit East Berlin or East Germany during the Communist era? What were their
experiences?
9. What are American feelings towards the fall of the wall? How does that compare with
German feelings? Look at the Lemo site to look at eyewitness accounts of those fateful
days in 1989. http://www.dhm.de/lemo/home.html
10. Why would East Germans currently have nostalgic feelings for the communist times?
Find some more information on the Internet to explore that question.