It’s hard for me to believe that East Germany ceased to exist eighteen years ago.  For anyone under 25, the notion of two Germany’s separated by a hostile border is an historic anachronism.  For those of us who are a bit older, the separation of West and East Germany once seemed as permanent as the Cold War that created it.  Back then, the world’s political scene was both simpler and more terrifying.  Virtually every world conflict was a proxy war between the same two ideological combatants, and we could identify the loyalties of a soldier based on the silhouette of his rifle - it was either an American supplied M-16 or Soviet designed AK-47.  ”They” were the Evil Empire and “we” were the Defenders of Freedom.   Perhaps no place on earth was more emblematic of the tension between those antagonists than East Germany - where the once-allied, victorious armies of World War II stood within view of each other, armed for the seemingly inevitable, apocalyptic conflict to come.  Though that war never came, the two artificial Germanys competed in everything else.  The East produced steroid-enhanced athletes, while the West rebuilt glimmering cities.  Despite its success in the Olympics, most of us viewed communist Germany as the real Germany’s failed, tragicomic doppelganger to the east.

If that seems melodramatic, search your memories and read Time and Newsweek magazines from the 80’s.  I recall issues of those magazines devoted to tallying the estimated number of tanks, warheads and troops maintained by NATO and the Warsaw Pact.  I remember being anxious when reading that the Warsaw Pact tanks outnumbered NATO’s 3 to 1, or that their army was significantly larger, or that they had developed a new, superior fighter plane.  I remember one of my teachers weeping when Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter in 1980’s Presidential election because she was certain that Reagan’s strong stance against communism would lead to war.  The constant specter of nuclear conflict was our reality, and we knew that Armageddon was a missile launch away.  By the 1970’s, schools has stopped teaching kids to hide under their desks in the event of a nuclear attack, not because it was less likely, but because hiding under a desk was useless.  And we all knew it.  Security came in the form of Mutually Assured Destruction (”MAD”), the hope that no one would be crazy enough to launch an attack because it would be the end of the world.  It’s amazing the things to which you can become accustomed.

The recent German movie “The Lives of Others” artfully captures an aspect of that era.  The movie swept Germany’s cinematic awards, and went on to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.  The plot is set in East Germany, primarily in 1984, and follows a Stasi (secret police) agent who is ordered to spy on a playwright.  The agent is a staunch supporter of the eastern regime.  We aren’t given his age, but he was likely born around the time of the war, without any personal recollection of a unified Germany.  The movie is powerful in its subtlety.  As the protagonist observes the lives of others - thoughtful people, lovers of beauty who are tormented by the corrupt and oppressive regime under which they live, he begins to change.  Ulrich Muhe portrays the Stasi agent masterfully, and takes his character through incremental changes that alter forever the lives that he observes.  Muhe himself grew up in East Germany, and his experience certainly informed his role.  Others have written skillfully about the movie, and I won’t pretend to add to those efforts except to strongly suggest that you see the film.  Upon seeing the movie, William F. Buckley wrote “I turned to my companion and said, ‘I think that this is the best movie I ever saw.’”

The movie brought back memories of my brief time in the the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, or “DDR”.  In 1985 I traveled with a group of high school and college students to Poland for a summer-long missions trip.  Poland, then also under Soviet control, had recently undergone a series of strikes and agitations for reform that led to the imposition of martial law.  “Solidarity” was the slogan of their revolution, and the stylized Solidarity logo was plastered on building facades the world over.  But to get to Poland, we traveled by train through the DDR. Though we were only supposed to be in the country for a few hours, we ended up spending two memorable days.

At the border between West and East Germany, DDR immigration officers boarded the train wearing what looked like a suitcases around their necks.  They were escorted by soldiers wearing uniforms eerily reminiscent of the German Wermacht uniforms I’d seen in a dozen WWII movies.  The “suitcases” opened and served as portable desks.  They spoke with the typically clipped tones of an immigration officer, but unlike the others I’d encountered in Luxembourg and West Germany, they made no effort to speak English and seemed intent on intimidation.  I was only 15 and was not obligated to pay a fee to get a stamp in my passport, or so I discerned through their gestures at the birth date in my passport. 

As our train probed deeper into East Germany I was stunned at the stark contrast between the West and the East.  The West had been immaculate, full of sparkling Mercedes, and dotted with exquisitely appointed houses and landscaping.  The East still seemed to bear the marks of a 40-year-old war, and the buildings were covered with a film of soot.   There were no serene, panoramic views of the countryside.  Everything was gray and industrial - smokestacks everywhere belching more of that soot into the air.  But more sobering than the condition of the buildings and the countryside was the vacant expression on every East German’s face - completely devoid of hope, seemingly unacquainted with joy.

None of us spoke much German, and somehow we ended up either boarding the wrong train or failing to change trains.  In any event, we ended up somewhere we weren’t supposed to be and disembarked only after realizing that we were quite lost.  We hadn’t eaten in some time, and rummaged through our bags for some of the food we’d brought for the summer.  We found a few items that required no preparation and ate as we sat on the train platform.  Being kids, and being Christian kids on a mission trip, we sang a song of gratitude.  When we finished, the train station was perfectly quiet.  I looked up and saw that all of the Germans on the platform were completely still, stunned and staring. 

Not long after our song, we were greeted by members of the communist red cross.  They already knew who we were and where we were supposed to be.  I don’t know if someone in the train station had called an official, or if someone had been keeping track of us all along, but they instructed us to take no pictures, escorted us to a small building, and gave us some food.  For some reason they asked us to wash our feet.  After a few hours, they escorted us to another train and sent us on our way.  I’ve never felt more observed.

We ended up in Karl Marx Stadt (which, other than from 1953-1990, has been known as the City of Chemnitz), near the Polish border.  Again, the bureaucrats with the suitcases boarded the train, but this time there were more soldiers, and several of them were managing German Shepherds.  When one of the agents reviewed my passport he flew into a rage because I didn’t have a DDR stamp, at least that’s what I discerned when he held up my passport and compared it to the passport of one of my fellow travelers who had such a stamp.  I didn’t know what to do, or how to explain that I was told that I didn’t need one, because he didn’t speak English.  One of my companions was in the same boat, so they put us in the same compartment and kept us there for what seemed forever, but was probably a half hour.  It was about 4:00 in the morning, and I was sitting in a hundred-year-old train station, pulled by an apparently antique engine, surrounded by angry soldiers dressed like extras from Kelly’s Heroes. It was surreal.  Eventually, they let us go. 

Zywiec, Poland was a much prettier, less oppressive place.  But even there, the locals wore the sad expressions of a people who had long ago stopped looking forward to tomorrow.  They were drunk whenever they could afford to be.  In a candid moment when we were hiking in the hills outside Krakow, our interpreter, a Zywiec native, told us that the deeply held hope of every Pole was that the American armies would one day come over the hills surrounding the city and free them from their oppressors.  He said he was never able to tell us that when we were in the city because he feared he was being watched.  I was sad when he told us that, because I knew it was never going to happen.

 ”The Lives of Others” reminded me that the worst elements of my brief encounters had defined the daily existence of millions for some 40 years.  Yet we seem to have very quickly forgotten how wicked things were behind the Iron Curtain.  We inexplicably deny that people are now, today, similarly oppressed in places like China and Cuba.  The chief difference between Cuba today and East Germany in 1984 is that Cuba’s people are significantly more impoverished.  Like the East Germans of 20 years ago, many are willing to risk their lives to attempt an escape.  Just a couple of weeks ago, several members of Cuba’s national soccer team disappeared during a tour of the United States.  They were presumably among the privileged in Cuba, and still they left it all because the uncertainty of hope is more appealing than the certainty of oppression. 

I am sure that there are millions wondering, like my interpreter once did, whether their liberators will one day arrive.  While I neither expect nor advocate direct military action against those remaining vestiges of a failed ideology, I fear that we’ve stopped believing that we really do have something better to offer, and so we’ve stopped applying the pressure that once led to the collapse of the Eastern Block and the end of the seemingly permanent Cold War.  Our popular culture has decided that patriotism is comically naive, that we are the oppressors, and that it is presumptuous to suggest that our system is better than anyone else’s.  We may all suffer for that one day, but for now, the ones who suffer most are the ones who know best that our America really is worth preserving, because they are living the nightmarish alternative.