Jetzt keine Mauer

[muckefuck]

Somewhere in this apartment I have a chunk of the Berlin Wall. This is not one of the pretty shards chipped to a convenient size and tarted up by industrious Turks for sale at the Brandenburg Gate. (When I visited Berlin in 1990, I had vantage point from which I could see the entire impressive assembly line.) It's a part of the wall Westerners didn't see, the part fronting to the east on the other side of the Death Strip. Constructed about ten years later, it's appalling how poor the quality of the concrete is. The original piece I found fallen on the sidewalk was too large and breaking it down to portable size only took a few whacks against the pavement.

While visiting Rome the following year, I met an East German exile named Holger Hinze. We exchanged information and five years later, when I returned to Berlin with Nuphy, he showed us around the commune he lived in in Weissensee. But our first meeting was at the Vatican and I tried to explain to him what it was like being an ex-Catholic, how there's something about that upbringing you can never shake. He told me it was the same for Ossis, that no matter how long they lived in a united Germany, they would be bound together by that common experience. Recently, Die Zeit published a series of maps supporting that contention.

Comments

[anicca-anicca2.livejournal.com]

I'm a Wessi working in an Ossi environment since 1993, and the divide has never been clearer. (For them. My eyes have been glazing over for a while now when the subject comes up, and it comes up all the bloody time.)

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I've heard that it's less pronounced among the post-reunification generation, however, because so many of those born in the Former East have had to move west to find work. Can you comment on that?