Fading East German Society

To most Americans the word "Germany" conjures up images of beer steins, Oktoberfest and high-tech luxury automobiles. But the Germany that most Americans visit and think about has been the Federal Republic, or West Germany. Since the Iron Curtain descended in 1945, the eastern half of Germany has represented little more than a gray stone in the impenetrable wall of the Soviet Empire.

Our lack of information has not prevented the peoples of the most productive Soviet-bloc nation, East Germany (GDR), from working with, against and outside of their socialist regime. John Borneman reveals life within this often hidden society with understandable, personable accounts in After the Wall: East Meets West in the New Berlin.

The book seeks to explain how the East Germans lived before the opening of the Berlin Wall. The title is deceptive because Borneman has no intention of describing life in the post-Wall Germany. But After the Wall accomplishes what Borneman wants: through extensive character studies, he captures the essence of a society that began to irreversibly fade after 1989.

The book begins with a simple account of the building of the Wall. Under Soviet paternal guidance, the East German government began construction of the Berlin Wall on August 13, 1961, to curb the draining exodus of frustrated East Germans to the West. Many people in Borneman's book felt as if a limb had been amputated, but others saw the Wall as an opportunity to exclude the hypnotic charm of the West. It would give socialism time to grow during its vulnerable infancy.

The book continues with several case studies of East Germans who had strong opinions about this period because they attempted to assist in the formation of a socialist society. However, Borneman is slightly biased in his analysis because he chooses only the commentaries of highly educated and intellectual socialist citizens of the GDR.

Though some, like judge Erika Gruner, spring from proletariat homes, they have all in some way risen to the highest occupational or intellectual rungs of the country. The reader should therefore not be surprised that many of those Borneman interviewed mourn the foregone possibilities of socialism and the progress left behind. On the positive side, the lean toward intellectuals blesses this book with an overview of East German society to which the working class might not have had access.

One typical example of the East German intellegensia on which Borneman focuses is Regine, a film-maker from East Berlin. She dealt with the government-imposed isolation from the West by making the best of her situation. Regine worked for the state, producing documentary films about socialist life. This occupation allowed her to inform the masses. Such work, she concedes, gave her "a touch of the self-congratulatory condescension intellectuals feel in indulging the less gifted." Though such thinking seems arrogant, it represented the dedication of Bourneman's intellectuals to socialism, though not to the state itself.

Bourneman emphasizes that virtually all of his interviewees separated themselves from the bureaucratic evils of the state. He includes plenty of emotional and philosophical inferences to prove this point, and they strengthen this book by making these though processes accessible. "Frau Gruner's socialism always exhibited a critical distance," Borneman writes. "She learned to be skeptical of any form of established wisdom."

Bourneman has clearly investigated the lifestyles of East Germans in depth and conveys this information with skill. After the Wall is not a complex, murky book about the evils of communism and its dark duplicity. Instead the author presents poignant episodes from the lives of people who experienced and endured East German society. The reader needs no German history to understand the compelling story which unfolds here.

Well-written and thoughtful, this book will endear itself to casual readers who have an interest in human drama. Borneman provides us with two stories: one about a nation that is rapidly disappearing, another a tale of the willingness of this nation's citizens to sacrifice and work on a system in which they believe. In the end East Germans will not be forgotten--their stories are mirrored in the dedication of good people around the world.