The Young Germans

by Erika von Hornstein

NOTHING is more disquieting to serious young Germans today than their sense of civic responsibility in contrast to the passivity of their fathers’ generation; and nowhere is the problem more dramatically posed than in Berlin, where the proximity of the Wall gives it a particular acuity. Last summer I talked with three of the young men, still in their twenties, who are working at some personal sacrifice to help their countrymen to freedom. Werner, a twenty-five-year-old law student from Konigsberg, came to Berlin from West Germany to help in escape work. Otto, a twenty-seven-year-old engineering student, sacrificed more than a year of academic work to tunnel building. Franz, a refugee from East Germany, is twenty-four. His family — parents, brothers, and sisters — had all fled to West Germany during the 1950s. He stayed behind in the East because he wanted to study music in Jena.

“I pulled strings and got myself into school,” Franz told me, “but I had to pay a lot of money to do it — study fees, as they were called — though that’s very unusual in the East. I didn’t get any sort of scholarship or anything. I went on with this for a year, earning money doing odd jobs; and because I stayed in East Germany I managed to get interzonal passes, which my parents never had. I could get as many passes as I wanted, so I could go to West Germany every month. But then, as time went on, the officials said, “You have to choose — join the Communist Party and show that you belong to the Workers’ and Farmers’ State; then you can carry on with your studies, and you’ll get a scholarship too.” The usual conditions; but I had to get one thing straight: I couldn’t go to West Germany anymore. So then I said, OK, I’ll join the Party; and I actually made an application for membership and went to West Germany for what I thought was the last time.

“But I couldn’t go through with it. The reason? I could not bring myself to join the Party, and second — and this is the main reason — there was always the threat of the Volksarmee [People’s Army] hanging over me. I would never have joined the East German People’s Army or the Federal German Army either. I’d rather emigrate to Australia or New Zealand than join any sort of army at all. It’s all the same to me if it’s East or West.”

“But, Franz,” Otto interrupted, “you’re not a pacifist.”

“No, I’m not,” Franz replied. “This is how I look at it. We’re in a crazy situation, with two German states in existence, and we must face this; there are two, with West German frontier guards and the People’s Army pointing guns at each other, ready to shoot if the armed truce ends suddenly. But I could never shoot just because a Herr Strauss in West Germany says we have to, or a Herr Ulbricht in East Berlin says we have to. That would be civil war. I’d absolutely refuse to do it.”

“At least you’re not worried by any general moral issues, like the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ or anything like that,” Werner said.

“That’s got nothing at all to do with it,” Franz replied. “It’s just the plain fact that two Germans are standing facing each other with guns in their hands. And that was quite enough to make me decide that I’d never join the Army. At that time the East Germans were putting on a terrific recruiting drive, and we were under pressure all the time. Apprentices had to sign statements that they would join the Army when they had finished their training, and if they didn’t sign, their examination grades were poor, or they even flunked out. The Party workers had all sorts of tricks; they got hold of you for twelve, fourteen hours at a stretch and really worked on you to sign — you understand?”

“I understand only too well,” Werner said, “though my case is rather different. I grew up in Cologne. My father fell in the war, and there is a law which says that only sons whose fathers died in the war—I am an only son with two sisters — don’t need to join the Army. At that time, I ‘m prepared to admit — though today my ideas have changed a lot — at that time I felt somehow that if I were a citizen of a country, I couldn’t just take everything my country had to offer me without serving it in some way in return: by joining the forces if the country I belonged to had conscription laws. That’s why I joined up.”

“Maybe if I had stayed in the East I would have joined the Army there for the same reasons you did,” Franz commented. “If I’d signed on as an officer for twelve years, I could have had wonderful opportunities for studying. I could have got a fat scholarship — eight hundred marks if I’d had three children. That’s what many of them do over there, people of my age who are now officers.”

“WHAT importance do you think West Berlin has for Germans living in the East zone?” I asked.

Franz quickly replied, “Oh, Berlin isn’t important today. To the East Germans it’s the same as the frontier zone, Hanover or Dresden. Until the Wall went up the East was interested in Berlin. The people were like children, happy to see a shopwindow with oranges in it, you know. I was eighteen before I saw a real orange. But it wasn’t only because of the shopwindows that we went to West Berlin. We could walk along the streets and talk without having to turn around every so often in case anyone was behind us. That is past now. Of course there are a few people who say that if West Berlin were taken over by the East, the future would look much blacker, and the whole of West Germany might be taken over too. But that’s only the minority.”

“Just a minute,” Werner broke in. “That’s the main question: is it in fact a minority?”

“That’s what I believe, of course,” Franz replied.

“I think it’s mostly people from the East zone who say that Berlin is still what it was before — a certain symbol or bulwark which will survive only if the protecting powers will keep their pledges, and that sort of thing,” said Werner.

“I think the bulwark is collapsing,” said Franz.

“That’s what scares many people and makes them say, for God’s sake, don’t let it collapse,” said Werner. “If it in fact does crumble, there’ll be nothing left on the other side but total resignation.”

“I think that for those in the East zone who believe that, West Berlin has already collapsed,” Franz said.

“You’re far too gloomy,” said Otto.

“Maybe,” replied Franz.

“I’d like to put in a word of warning about the sentimental feelings that play such a part in this situation,” said Otto, “on the East side just as much as on the West. In West Germany, when I talk to my school chums about Berlin and tell them what’s going on and what they could do too, they are surprised and sympathetic. They find Berlin wonderfully interesting because there’s always something happening here at the Wall — shots are always being fired, things like that. That’s why Germans like to visit Berlin. But I’m sure that if you suggested to these people that they should help us build escape tunnels, they wouldn’t do it. They’d find some excuse.”

“What sort of people do get together today to build tunnels and arrange escapes?” I asked.

“It’s difficult to say,” Otto replied. “Most of them are people who have themselves fled as refugees from East Berlin or the zone. I’d say that ninety percent of the people who help the refugees are former refugees themselves. The other ten percent are West Berliners and West Germans — Ed say three percent West Germans and seven percent West Berliners.”

“And no foreigners?” I asked.

“We mustn’t forget them,” said Otto. “Foreigners have done a lot to help us, especially when it was still possible to get refugees through the control points on foreign passports. One thing we must be clear about: you can’t expect a refugee to escape one day and to start building a tunnel the next. Refugees must first get acclimatized over here. They must establish contact with West Berliners, with other people. I know of many young refugees who complain bitterly that they can’t find any points of contact at all. They hardly ever get friendly with West Berliners or West Germans.

Somehow, there’s an impenetrable obstacle between them.”

“It’s a difference in their way of thinking, an enormous difference,” Franz said.

“I think it’s a difference in experience,” said his wife, Ursula. Franz had brought his wife over the Wall last March.

“I often get the feeling, too,” said Werner, “that some people don’t go to East Berlin because they don’t want to see the great difference in conditions there, so they won’t have to admit to themselves: yes, we’re snug as a bug in a rug here, but a few yards away they’re standing in line for three hours to get one banana. And then, when they meet refugees from the East there’s somehow always this feeling of tension: well, there he is, he’s gone through hell, and I’ve been sitting pretty.”

“I don’t find this surprising,” said Otto. “I would say it comes from the astounding apathy of West Germans and, especially, of West German youth. They simply have no idea how to sit down and talk to these people or how to deal with the terrible complexes that they get in the East zone.”

“In the East the whole day was planned for them,” said Ursula. “Even their holidays were planned to the last detail, and they have no idea what to do with their free time when they get here. They feel absolutely helpless. They can’t even make up their minds what to do with a free evening.”

“That’s right,” agreed Otto, “that’s just what happens; and this is something which would really be well worth doing — looking after people and helping them overcome this difficulty. But nobody’s interested.”

“In this connection,” said Werner, “it would be interesting to ask ourselves if this lack of interest, this apathy in young people, is something specifically German or whether it isn’t rather an apathy which is equally typical of young people in America and France and England; if, in fact, it isn’t a social problem which affects the whole of the world today.”

Now, I’d like to say this,” put in Otto. “You’ve been to Israel, Werner. I’ve seen the book called The Yellow Star; I don’t know if you’ve heard of it. The photographs alone had this effect on me: it doesn’t matter to me whether it’s Germans, Americans, Englishmen, or Frenchmen imprisoned behind that Wall — or Jews. When people under any kind of pressure anywhere want to get out, and when the possibility of getting out is taken away from them, I’d have to try to help them get out.”

“I wonder,” argued Werner, “whether you’d give up two and a half semesters of study if the people concerned weren’t your own countrymen.”

“It’s obvious that morally I feel more bound to do what I can for a German than for a foreigner,” replied Otto. “But fundamentally, this doesn’t matter. People of my father’s generation have often said to me, be careful what you do about your studies. You must get those finished first. Later on you’ll have plenty of chances to do something useful, in the developing countries abroad, for example. Of course, that’s an argument. But for me that’s not the burning question at the moment.”

“Is your conviction in this respect at all influenced by doubts or a critical attitude toward your father’s generation?” I asked.

“I can’t answer for others,” replied Otto. “I can only answer for myself. And what I say is, this whole problem of the Nazis in the Third Reich wouldn’t have been so extremely difficult for me if I could have seen that the generation before us had really wanted to cope with it somehow themselves. But they make it so terribly easy for themselves by running away from it all, running away from it into work, careers — they just don’t bother about what’s happened in the past. They sit back comfortably, put blinkers over their eyes, and don’t care a damn. It’s horrifying how little is done in leading industrial circles about problems created by the Nazis.”

“I think it’s dreadful when people avoid talking about the Nazi era,” Franz said. “It’s the older generation, after all, which is responsible for the Nazis and the war, and they show so little interest in it! Today they hardly ever speak about it — only in the family circle. Yes, The Yellow Star had a shattering effect on me, and I asked my parents about it, ‘You lived near Buchenwald; how could something like that happen, what did you say about it?’ ‘Well,’ they told me, ‘what could we have said? We knew about some things, but then we didn’t know other things; what could we do? Let’s talk about something else.’ They always pushed these things under the carpet.”

“Franz, don’t be too harsh,” said Otto. “We must realize the human difficulties. A man has to have great strength of mind to admit that he failed to do something. And those who really resisted Hitler, or who suffered under him, don’t like to talk about the things they endured and what they knew. They don’t want to pretend they knew better, to say, yes, I knew the war was lost as soon as Hitler began it. People don’t believe that sort of statement anyway. But I think the basic reason for the apathy of young people today is that they haven’t received any guidance at home. Their parents don’t discuss political problems; they just avoid them.”

“No American generation has been unfortunate enough to live under a dictatorship and to know what it was really like,” Werner commented. “If you have never lived under a dictator, you can’t imagine how difficult it would have been for a mother of young children, whose husband has just been killed in the war, to shout out suddenly what she really believed and to be thrown into prison because of it. You couldn’t know what it was like.”

“My feeling is.” said Otto, “that we were lucky that our fathers took part in the Second World War, and that they lived through the Third Reich. And Germans of our age are old enough to know what happened then. Unfortunately, much too little is done in the schools to tell what actually did happen in Germany. But the situation is quite different regarding the Berlin of today.”

“Today,” Franz said, “resistance means building tunnels! The pressure all comes from the East — people want to get out; all we have to do is open the hole for them to escape through.”

“Did you have a hard time getting out yourselves?” I asked.

Franz replied, “Well, we were separated when the Wall went up because I had a West German identity card and Ursula did not.”

“I’d been in East Berlin with the children for three weeks,” Ursula explained, “and we had to keep hidden because I had gone illegally to East Berlin and couldn’t go back home again. So then my husband said, ‘You stay here in East Berlin; we must manage something somehow.’ So I stayed on, and he went to West Berlin. When they started looking for me in our hometown in the East zone, my husband got together a group to help us get over the Wall.”

“The first time we tried,” continued Franz, “a Communist on the West side made a signal to the police on the East side and shouted something like ‘Someone’s trying to escape!’ At that point we had to call off the whole operation because a Vopo came along.”

“The Vopo went up to look at the cut in the barbed wire,” Ursula said, “but he didn’t arrest us.”

Franz continued with his story. “An hour later we came back to the same place again — kind of a silly thing to do. But we had arranged beforehand with our friends in the West that if they thought we couldn’t make it, they’d stand up somewhere where we could see them and blow their noses with white handkerchiefs. We came back an hour later, and the Vopos were standing there. An officer had already come along and inspected the place where we’d tried to escape. All our friends on the other side were standing and blowing their noses like mad. And the Vopos let us go again.

“So then we tried it again at the same place four weeks later. We planned the escape for six thirty P.M. — twilight in March, when it gets dark early. We were there on the dot. Just try standing there sometime with the Wall looming up a few yards in front of you — it’s not exactly a pleasant feeling! We stood there waiting for twenty-five minutes, and I was ready to give it all up, but my wife said, ‘Stick around a moment longer.’ She’d seen the people on the other side approaching and at last putting a ladder up. Then everything happened so quickly; they came up to the Wall, cut the wire, threw the ladder over. My wife took one of the children. I was scared she’d break down, or someone might shoot at her, or something like that. But I’ve never seen her move so fast. I was left miles behind. Up with the kids — it all went like lightning. She took one kid and I took the other, and there I was on the top of the Wall, like a fool sitting astride the Wall, just because there were so many people standing underneath on the other side, and I yelled at them at the top of my voice to get the hell out of the way — as if it mattered if I’d jumped and fallen on a head or two.”

“Here in Berlin,” Otto said, “we refugee helpers go through the most unbelievable experiences. For example, you’re in the tunnel one day working with a tunnel outfit when suddenly up roars a West Berlin police car, siren blaring, blue top-light blinking, racing along the border, and it makes straight for the house where you’re building your tunnel. Naturally the Vopos on the other side are immediately alerted to what’s up as soon as they see a police car coming like that. Then the West Vopos clatter down into the cellar, draw their pistols, jab them in our backs, and order us to stop digging and to come out at once. One time while I was getting out, I tried to light up a cigarette — I was so jittery I was ready to puke — whereupon the West Vopo knocked the cigarette out of my mouth! If things continue like this, if even West Berlin guards don’t allow us to go on with this kind of work, then the Wall will stand there as long as the Great Wall of China!”

“We’re the last handful of people who are doing anything at all here,” Franz said. “But even if we go on building tunnels, and even if we have to build a tunnel all the way to the Alexanderplatz, we’ll keep looking for ways of making contact with the people, with the politicians on the other side. Our Bonn politicians can dream up an ‘All-German policy’ to prevent any kind of contact from taking place; they haven’t another idea in their heads. But we must take a stand once and for all, and not just go on waiting, waiting to see what the Americans intend to do.”