Translated material
My Germany
By the way, I still don’t know exactly what was meant: the colors of the German flag or huge flower beds somewhere on Karl-Marx-Allee or Leipzigerstrasse... And much later, Chancellor Kohl spoke about the “blooming landscapes of the new federal states.”
I met “our” Germany in the early 80s. I remember the metro bridge across the Spree, blocked by something resembling hedgehogs... I remember how German friends cut off phrases like “they say that in Germany...” with the correct but insistent “... in the German Democratic Republic.”
And when, while walking along Unter den Linden, we saw a helicopter with white American stars overhead, heading from the Brandenburg Gate towards Alexanderplatz, my German friend Stefan raised his hand above his head: Das ist Provokation!..
A year and a half ago, when I arrived in Munich for Christmas, I tried to find Stefan. Deutsche Telecom offered me the numbers of 11 subscribers with that name. But “my” Stefan Wuttke was not among them. “Nothing surprising,” noted an elderly Turk at the hotel reception. “He’s from the new federal states, and many from there went to work in Europe. What is his profession? A driver? Well, even more so...”
I have jumped ahead a little, because before that there was still an institute with exemplary “students from the fraternal GDR”. Our Englishwoman said with undisguised surprise: “Imagine, I’m about twenty minutes late for the first couple of minutes. I approach the audience - silence. Well, I think, for sure: they’ve gone out for coffee... I open the door, and there’s one of my GDR members with three more Germans, Two Czechs and one Pole are checking their homework... You can go crazy!”
And when we were in our second year, a law student from the GDR jumped out of a window. They say that he was afraid of not passing some exam in the winter session...
I came across the events in Germany in the late 80s and early 90s while working at Litgazeta. Everything that happened was perceived through the prism of Gorbachev’s reforms. Together with the publicist Leonid Pochivalov, everyone asked the question: “Germany is united, and the Germans?” "One of the newspaper issues published a photograph from an old German magazine - children playing war games, aiming at each other through an improvised masonry made of some blocks. My colleague and teacher Oleg Bitov came up with the caption: “This photograph was taken in East Berlin sometime in the late 60s. Imitating adults, children play “at the wall.” Now these children have grown up...”
Remember the song about “Friendship - Freundschaft”? There were these lines: “We are always together, we are always together, the GDR and the Soviet Union...” As someone sarcastically remarked after the collapse of the USSR and the unification of the two Germanys, “that’s how it happened: we lived together and died almost on the same day... »
It must be said that the breakdown of the mentality of the Soviet man is quite comparable to what the Germans had to face ten years ago. And not only eastern...
Once the sculptor Mikhail Duhomenok came to our editorial office and told the following story. A few years ago, a friend from Bremen dropped by to see him in his Tallinn workshop. Among other works, I saw Mishina’s “Funeral”: a wall into which a soldier falls, clinging to the edges of the resulting hole. At the top is the inscription “Notice”, and then - an exact reproduction of the front side of the funeral... On the back side is a crying mother. So: the visitor, pointing to the model of the monument, said: “I know what it is. This is a death notice... My relatives received this from the Eastern Front during the war...” So the idea came up to erect two monuments: in Moscow - to a Russian soldier and to a German mother mourning the death of her son. And in Berlin - to a German soldier and a Russian mother.
I remember how Duhomenok talked about his idea to representatives of the Evangelical Academy from Mülheim an der Ruhr. The guests were sincerely perplexed: is this really possible in Russia?..
Now that German military cemeteries have begun to open in our country, this idea no longer seems crazy. And then, at the beginning of 1990, it made me shiver... And yet we overcame this barrier within ourselves. “To forgive does not mean to justify,” Father Mikhail (Peregudov), a priest from the Yaroslavl diocese, who blessed the idea of restoring three German military cemeteries in the region in the same 1990, liked to repeat...
A lot has had to be “broken” over the years. Have we become closer or further from the Germans? For some reason it seems closer to me. When we last saw Stefan, and it was three months before the “death” of the GDR, in the summer of 1990, he said: “There is no need to be afraid that we are saying goodbye forever... The world, God willing, will become more open. You can come to Berlin again. Maybe Britta and I will get together with you..."
Stefan was right. The unpredictable curve of relations with “my” Germany has taken another turn. There seemed to be everything in this relationship. If we define “extreme points,” we get a complex path from “forced love” during the “socialist community” to today’s “marriage of convenience,” based on the understanding that we need each other. Perhaps the strongest marriage...