No three cheers

National Review, Feb 17, 1992 by Alistair Horne

From the window of the train from Dresden to Berlin, almost empty and still with the red plush upholstery inherited from the Third Reich, I saw a series of remarkable and reassuring sights. First we passed an endless train of flat cars, loaded up with Red Army armor heading east; a few miles further, on an airfield where lay the biggest scrapheap of wrecked military planes I've even seen, a crane was swinging a massive iron ball against one of those giant Soviet helicopters. Outside Zossen, formerly the GHQ of both Hitler's Wehrmacht and the Communist Volksarmee, some Russian soldiers were endeavoring futilely to manhandle a huge railroad tanker that seemed to have lost its locomotive.

It was a year ago that East Germany became officially reunited with der Vaterland. Then such indications of withdrawal and collapse of the "Evil Empire" would have been a cause of unqualified rejoicing. Now, after a year's experience of Helmut Kohl and the new West German occupation (which is how many east of the River Elbe see it), although no one wants the Russians to stay a moment longer than necessary, the euphoria is distinctly muted.

One good reason why my first-class compartment to Berlin was empty is that, though the 150-mile journey costs an incredibly modest (by British standards) $20, few can afford it. Predictably, Wiedervereinigung (literally, reunification, or "The Change," as East Germans mildly call it) has had a devastating impact on the rickety economy of the former GDR. Already, in a society where unemployment was unheard of, there are an estimated 1.5 million workless in a total population of 18 million - and worse to come. Already many hopelessly uncompetitive industries have simply been closed down - such as Eisenach's Wartburg, which produced half of East Germany's antiquated and pollutive automobiles, and gave employment to ten thousand.

Superficially, the changes in East German cities have been staggering. In East Berlin a year ago, you could saunter across the Unter den Linden with your eyes closed; today you would be mowed down by traffic as hectic as anything in London or Paris. (As one of the benefits of Western Civilization, travelers on the Autobahn between Berlin and Nuremberg recently found themselves caught in a sixty-mile traffic jam and had to spend the night in their cars.) New restaurants are popping up everywhere, with good food and lively service hitherto unknown. Shops once laden with drab, utilitarian products are now crammed with Western luxuries.

In Dresden's Neustadt, on a soulless Stalinist agglomeration called Liberation Street (Befreiungstrasse - perhaps at least this name will be allowed to remain), I found deluxe designer kitchens for sale at $20,000. But who on earth can afford them? My companion explained to me that, the day "The Change" cam, every "Ossi" (as they are patronizingly called in the West) went on a wild spree, and spent savings hoarded during the years when there were no consumer goods to buy. They would even throw their money away on costly West German product was every bit as good. Now they had largely exhausted their savings, and - with unemployment so menacing - were wondering, What next?

After a lecture I gave in Dresden - my first visit since 1979, when it was grimly Stalinist - I accompanied a dozen or so of my audience for dinner at a local restaurant. Mostly professional people, ranging from surgeons and biochemists to university professors, they were a congenial and friendly group, perhaps gentler and more relaxed, and relaxing, than their equivalents in Dusseldorf might have been. Several admitted, without evident embarrassment, to having been members of the Communist SED - which they would not have done a year ago - and there appeared to be no rancor between them and those who had not joined the Party. (Nor. in marked contrast to what one would find in the Soviet Union Today, was there any bitterness about the oppression of the past half-century.)

Only one, an English teacher, had qualified praise for the benefits brought by the "The Change": with shinning eyes he asked, "Have you seen the new Haussmann's Tower? It's our pride and joy, a symbol of what we have been given." I had seen it: 13 years ago it stood like a gaping, burnt-out skull - a memento still of the terrible Anglo-American raid of February 1945, exceeded in ferocity only by Hiroshima, which had destroyed this baroque jewel of a city and killed over forty thousand of its inhabitants. Now it bore a dazzling golden spire, rushed up by Chancellor Kohl just in time for the first anniversary of "The Change."

I asked the table if they would draw up for me a profit-and-loss account of the first year of reunification. Unanimously they declared that, top of the list on the profit side, came freedom to travel. One woman with a faded face - who, like so many older people in East Germany, looked seventy instead of her sixty years - said she had been 12 times to Leningrad, but only once to London (in the past year), and was making her first visit to West Germany (to Munich) next month. It reminded me of Ernest Bevin's famous definition of freedom: "To buy a ticket from Victoria Station to anywhere you bloody well please."