Commentary by Catherine Hickley Nov. 9 (Bloomberg) — The streets of Halle are hard to navigate after 20 years. The once-grimy buildings are so spruced up they are unrecognizable. The acrid, yellow fog that hung over this industrial East German city, the birthplace of Georg Friedrich Handel , has lifted. The wintry smell of burning lignite has vanished. Gone, too, are the dust of dilapidated buildings and the ersatz coffee, grainy, filmy and thick. There are smart cafes serving decent cappuccino. Halle is clean and people look content — not affluent, exactly, but not poor. I was there recently, after a long absence. My first visit was in 1989, when I packed my student belongings into a pink Volkswagen Beetle called Gretel and drove from a NATO base in West Germany through the world’s most heavily fortified border. Next to me in the passenger seat was Alastair Bassett, also a recent graduate in French and German from London University. Our Brecht lecturer had used his contacts to land us jobs teaching English at the Martin-Luther-University . We had no idea that the world was about to change, let alone that we were going to be in the thick of it. The Berlin Wall looked unassailable and Erich Honecker’s communist regime was in power. By the time I left, German reunification was weeks away and the country I’d known for a year would cease to exist. Less than 40 kilometers west of Leipzig, Halle was mainly famous for pollution caused by the local chemicals plants and lignite-burning ovens. That smell permeated everything — the classrooms, the trams, my clothes. When I catch a whiff of it now, it takes me right back to 1989. Slave Trade Alastair and I taught students training to be English teachers. Our lurid orange textbook, inappropriately called “Modern English,” was full of dry, propagandistic articles that placed Britain in the Victorian era. Everyone worked in mining pits and attended Chartist meetings. America only got a mention in relation to the slave trade. Many times during those first weeks, I tossed “Modern English” aside in disgust and tried to get the students to talk about the momentous changes taking place. Silence reigned. They feared the one Stasi informer who, statistically, was likely to be sitting in every class. And yet history was unfolding before our eyes. Week by week, another seminar group would be missing yet another student who had slipped over the leaky Hungarian border. In private, people felt secure with us: As foreigners, they knew we wouldn’t be working for the Stasi. So we heard friends deliberating whether to escape and discovered their fear of crackdowns by the authorities at demonstrations. We were invited to meetings of new dissident groups like Neues Forum. Crumbling Wall On the evening of Nov. 9, I was with a group of theology students in their hall of residence in the Franckesche Stiftungen , a beautiful baroque complex built by the Pietist preacher August Hermann Francke that was crumbling out of neglect. Often, the students had no running water. The roof of one house had collapsed onto the top floor. I went every Thursday evening to speak English with them for an hour, and often stayed for supper. We watched the evening news program, “Aktuelle Kamera,” by then obligatory viewing. When I first arrived, its bulletins were full of triumphant stories about harvest or steel quotas being exceeded. Now it was covering the main political events, albeit cautiously. We saw the now-famous clip from the news conference where Guenter Schabowski mumbled — almost as an aside — that travel restrictions were loosening and German Democratic Republic citizens would be able to visit the west. Then we switched to the Tagesschau on West German television for confirmation. Elation, Skepticism The theologists were by turn euphoric and disbelieving. One minute, someone would jump up and whoop with delight. The next, he would sit down and shake his head, saying “No, it can’t be true, it will all change again tomorrow.” Last week, I visited the Franckesche Stiftungen complex. It sparkles in the sun after the loving attentions of restorers and has a new museum and a stunning library of 18th-century books. I found the house where the theologists lived, and thought about how important that year was for those who experienced it in the east. I remembered the intense exchange of ideas, the feeling that the future was open, the passionate discussions about what kind of a society we wanted. Everything was in upheaval: Everyone was asking those questions and working out their place in the new world order. East Germany no longer exists, but 1989 stays with you. I live in the old east of Berlin, and recently bought a house 90 kilometers from Halle. Last week, I asked Alastair, who now has a Czech partner and lives in Bratislava, whether he will ever get Eastern Europe out of his system after that year. “Definitely not,” he said. “It’s part of me now.” ( Catherine Hickley is a writer for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.) To contact the reporter on the story: Catherine Hickley in Berlin at chickley@bloomberg.net .
