Valuable Freedom (cont.)

Yesterday, I wrote about the typical preparations for a trip to communist East Germany in the late 1980s. After all the preparations, the actual day of travel would arrive. Since the distance from Delft, where I lived, to Dresden, where my pen friend lived, was “only” about 550 miles (880 km), I would leave really early and do the trip in one day. Crossing the border into the East Block country at Helmstedt was a bit of a scary experience. Although I never had any real trouble (apart from it taking two hours or so), there was always the possibility they would find something wrong with the paperwork, or have questions about the things I was bringing into the country. (I would always have a box with me with all kinds of stuff that was hard to get in East Germany, like various shampoos, candy, etc.) Crossing the border felt like entering a maximum security prison. I had repeatedly been warned not to stray from the direct route to my destination, as my entry permit was only valid from the border crossing to the place I was staying. The day after arriving, I would report to the police station, my passport would be stamped with a permit to stay for a specific number of days, and I would get a separate exit permit. At the end of the visit, I would usually take two days to drive back, because crossing the border back into the free world would take even longer than entering the communist country. They would inspect the car much more careful, making sure I wasn’t smuggling any people out.

Brandenburger Tor, Berlin, 1988

One of the most impressive moments came in 1988, when my pen friend and I visited Berlin for a few days. In those days, Berlin was a divided city: East Berlin was the capital of East Germany, while West Berlin was effectively a part of West Germany. West Berlin was of course surrounded by East Germany, and had, since 1961, been separated from it by the famous Berlin Wall. Standing at the Brandenburger Tor, we could not only see the Wall, but also West Berlin behind it. There it hit me, stronger than ever before, the difference between my friend’s world and mine. A few years earlier I had stood at almost the same spot, in West Berlin, looking at the East. I could go back to West Berlin whenever I wanted, but she would (we thought back then) never be able to do that. Look at the police man in the photo above. For a moment, I thought of him as a kind of park ranger, there to help tourists and protect the monument from vandalism. In reality, he was a border guard—not to protect the country from outside attacks, but to make sure the East German people stayed inside. Earlier, I compared crossing the border from West to East Germany to entering a maximum security prison. That analogy was no accident: East Germany was, for all practical purposes, one giant prison for its population. The prison warden, Erich Honecker, determined what was shown on TV, what was printed in the newspapers and magazines, who could do what, where and when. The sixteen million or so East Germans had to obey him. Standing there in front of the Brandenburger Tor, looking at the West, knowing that I was free and my friend, because she happened to be born in this country, was not, really brought home to me that Freedom isn’t a given, isn’t free. Freedom is something we inherited from our parents and grandparents, some of whom may have paid dearly for it. I feel that we, all of us in the “free world,” have a responsibility to cherish and defend this precious gift.

Valuable Freedom

I have been thinking about starting a Blog, and finally decided to take the plunge. There are things I want to say, and here people may be hearing them. “Freedom” is something that is very dear to me, to a level that sometimes even surprises me. Looking back at my life, I have realized that some of the formative events in that respect were a series of visits I made to the then-communist East-Germany.

Checkpoint Charlie, Berlin, 1985

Back in the late 1980s, visiting East Germany was not something one would do on the spur of the moment. It started off with the visa application. This application process would take six weeks—if you were lucky. To be safe, better plan two months of more ahead. As part of your visa application, you would have to specify where you would expect to be staying. In my case, I would be visiting a pen friend who lived in a small village not far from Dresden, and would be staying with her. She had told me that this information would go into her “file.” Nobody know exactly what information the Stasi (the East-German secret police) was collecting about the country’s citizens, but it was fully expected that contact with foreigners would be noted. Of course, the fact that she was regularly receiving letters from people in a capitalist country would already have been noted. Being a kindergarten teacher, which would have been considered a kind of public trust position, she would not have undertaken a regular correspondence with foreigners lightly. Choices like these could impact her career opportunities, could cause her to loose her job even. As someone born and raised in the West, I had always taken our basic freedoms for granted. Sure, western countries have their own “secret service” agencies, and we expect them to protect us against potential evil people. But I never expected that my government would want to know or care who I would exchange letters with, who would be visiting me, where I would travel. The East German government was known to keep that kind of information about its own citizens. In fact, with my visa application, they were bound to have opened a file on me. Sure, I could understand that there would be some kind of a background check if I would apply for a position that involves dealing with state secrets, and at such a point there might be questions about what I had done and who I would have known as a student. But for my East German friend, this was expected as part of every government job—and in a communist country, just about every job is directly or indirectly a government job. ... to be continued