Ash Wednesday in the GDR

The great, heartlifting moments are gone: on the ring in Leipzig, when the masses suddenly started shouting We are the people! and in Berlin, on Alexander Square, when the people, one million of them, realized that they had, overnight, learned how to walk upright and a kind of collective sigh of relief was audible, and finally at the border crossing on Invalidenstrajfe when the Wall was opened and the people, still uncomprehending, fell into each others arms and first one person said it, then another, then a third and a fourth: Crazy! Afterwards, Ash Wednesday. The very same people who had risen up and taken their fate into their own hands after decades of kowtowing and fleeing, the people who had only recently seemed to be marching nobly into a promising future became suddenly a horde of frenzied shoppers, backs pressed into stomachs, marching only to the Hertie and Bilka department stores and on the hunt for glitzy trash. What expressions on their faces as, with cannibalistic lust, they rooted like pigs through display tables intentionally placed in their paths by Western shopkeepers; and what bovine humility beforehand, when, with the patience and obedience they had been taught at home, they stood in line for the hand-outs called deceptively and with psychological treachery welcome money by the strategists of the Cold War. But all of this is understandable. How long did they have to wait, the poor people, until they were able to touch what was there, to eye it, to smell it, to feel it, the fancy stuff piled high on the store shelves, without

Political science · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · European history and politics · German History and Society

• Time at a Standstill

  Nitzan Shoshan•Ethnos•2012

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