I visited Germany several times before the wall fell. I can remember taking the train from Berlin to Munich which passed through East Germany. We stopped for some reason and there was a biergarden right there. The trains windows were open and a waitress addressed me in English and we started talking. She invited me to step off for a beer assuring me that it was OK.
This seemed reasonable and as I reached for the door handle on the train someone grabbed my hand. It was the guy sharing my train car and who had earlier feigned not knowing any English. He said in clear English, 'don't do it the risk is too high. If the guards spot you they will prevent you from re-boarding the train.'
Turns out the guy was an IT consultant and we had a very pleasant chat on the way into Munich and I had dinner with him while I was there. The waitress was cute and I've always wondered if I'd have been lucky or gotten to know the inside of an East German jail cell.
This is a great story. My mother has worked on german trains as a waitress for the past 46 years (retired this year) and she has so many awesome stories about the cold war, east germany crossing and so on.
She is not a history nut at all so from her point of view these were just things that happened or that she did, not something bigger.
But she:
- shook the hand of three separate Bundeskanzlers
- smuggled Nylon Socks, Coca-Cola and Candy Bars to East Berlin
- served on a train that was driving completely in secret, on board were politicians and military personelle(they tipped well she said)
- served on a train on which German terrorists(RAF/Baader Meinhof, can't remember which ATM) were captured
Besides working on a train she:
- worked in the olympic town in Munich 1972 and served some of the Israeli athletes.
For my mother nothing of this is extrodinary and these bits seep out when she talks about "good tipping customers" or annoying workplace conditions. When I ask her for something exciting, she tells me stories of how the onboard cook made ad hoc dessert in 3 minutes for some poor Hungarian border patrol guard...
Talking to my mother is my very own german version of Forrest Gump. All of post-war German History is in there, I just have to ask the wrong questions. I'm so proud of her.
It's so nice to come across another person who is proud of their mother. Most people express their attachment as love, very few say they are proud of their parents.
Unless I'm missing something, it's doubtful that you'd have found yourself in any trouble. Only citizens of the GDR / East Germany wouldn't have been able to board that train. Since you were a visitor, it shouldn't have been any problem assuming you had proper identification/papers.
I don't think East Germany was kidnapping and imprisoning foreign tourists for talking to waitresses. Perhaps you'd have had to take another train or something in the worst case that you were still getting questioned while your train was starting to leave. I hope someone can speak from experience on this to verify (I can't, but knowing the political context it would seem pretty absurd).
It was good to see the end of this evil totalitarian system, where the Stasi would spy on civilians and monitor and record every telephone conversation.
I know it's fashionable to bash NSA, but as someone who grew up in a communist state in the Cold War, such comparison is really an insult.
Forget about living condition, corruption or censorship, let's talk about police state.
First, you couldn't just choose where you wanted to live, you needed to get government approval for it. Spending a few nights at your relatives? Had to register with the local police department.
Talking about local police, there was usually an officer responsible for a given residential area. He/she knew every member of every families living there. People, usually one per family, were "encouraged" to attend monthly meeting where they were reminded that there were "evil" forces who did everything to undermine the party and the government, and that was everyone's responsibility to report any suspicious activities (I did hear that a lot post 9/11 in the US, but only at public places, for unattended packages. Still it provokes a lot of memory).
Promotion at work? well, you'd need a recommendation from the head of the block where you lived. Make sure to be on good terms with him.
Wanted to visit another country? You couldn't, unless on official business. As the result no one could have a passport until their first trip abroad.
The sad thing is, most people considered all of that as normal, if annoying, facts of life. No one cared about police listening to phone conversation or checking (snail) mail. Because that was their job, of course. In fact, where I lived such policies were overwhelmingly supported. When the Berlin wall was demolished, I remember asking my dad why Soviet Red Army let such thing happen. Why not invade and crush "the enemies". You got brainwashed since very early years.
Where were the Snowdens you might ask? none existed, and if they did, there'd be no NYT or Washington Post or the Guardian to report on it. Newspapers closed up shop for much less serious incidents.
So bashing NSA all you want, they're hardly angels -- never broke any law evar! but the next time you try to pull a smart-ass, be damn sure you know what you're talking about.
I'm not sure what you're trying to show with this photograph (it's of a deployed SWAT-style police team, with armoured vehicle) though? That there are incidents in the US that require armed response teams? The fact that you had to obtain a picture from a national news source, taken during an on-going crowd-control/rioting incident means this is an unusual situation, not indicitave of 'Police State America', and is just compunding the insulting comparision.
Try looking at photographs of city streets taken during a normal working day, and note the absence of APCs and riot police. A police state is a very different thing to the situation in the USA or the UK.
> an on-going crowd-control/rioting incident means this is an unusual situation
You mean like Budapest in 1956? Prague in 1968? Riots like those? Or are those rioters worthy of their aspirations, while the rioters in Ferguson are unworthy of their aspirations?
> Try looking at photographs of city streets taken during a normal working day, and note the absence of APCs and riot police.
There weren't many riot police regularly tromping around Moscow or Bucharest or Kiev or Sofia during the 1970s either.
Not really. The means were much more brutal, but the effect was the same: stifling opposition, containing criticism, controlling the population through fear of an external enemy and internal traitors, etc.
> Had to register with the local police department.
Every visitor to the U.S. needs to inform the authorities where s/he will reside for the duration. With the exact address, not something vague like state or city.
> and that was everyone's responsibility to report any suspicious activities
Have you heard about neighborhood watch? They even have menacing signs all over the area that they patrol, reporting any suspicious activity, calling the cops on you if you linger and look around.
Lately the public appeals to rat suspicious strangers intensified. About 3 years ago, in Boston's subway I was hearing a PSA with a friendly fireman telling us to be vigilant and report any suspicious individual to the local authorities. I did not have the courage to pull out my camera and take photos of the station. I was suspicious enough already.
> Promotion at work? well, you'd need a recommendation from the head of the block where you lived.
It was worse than that. You needed to be a member of the one true Party in order to get ahead. But it wasn't much different in the States at one point: you had to be proven innocent from accusations of un-american activities if you wanted to keep your job. Even today, people have to register as democrats, republicans or independents before voting. Can you guess how many of them get to keep their political affiliation a secret?
> No one cared about police listening to phone conversation or checking (snail) mail.
Of course they did. Those brave enough to seek information from external propaganda sources like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe were taking a serious risk. So were those who told jokes that mocked the regime. Or those trading in banned books. Or those practicing religion in an atheist state. Or those secretly passing manuscripts to foreign visitors so they can be published abroad. Or those dealing with abortions in a state that forbid them categorically because it needed as many new citizens as it could get. Etc.
If you didn't guess already, this was not the communist block's cushy poster state. This was Romania.
> Every visitor to the U.S. needs to inform the authorities where s/he will reside for the duration. With the exact address, not something vague like state or city.
You're talking about foreign visitors. That's very common in other countries as well. Obviously not a shining example of a freedom country. Still, I was talking about residents. In your own country.
> Have you heard about neighborhood watch? They even have menacing signs all over the area that they patrol, reporting any suspicious activity, calling the cops on you if you linger and look around.
Still, that's no where near as prevalent as what I described. Not even close. Also I figure neighborhood watch resonates well with Americans and their take-matter-into-my-own-hands, government-distrust mentality.
To be fair, I only experienced the last few year of the Cold War. I was young, my family didn't suffer from any hardship, and I still love the place and go back whenever I can.
>Have you heard about neighborhood watch? They even have menacing signs all over the area that they patrol, reporting any suspicious activity, calling the cops on you if you linger and look around.
It is beyond me why you think this is menacing. These things weren't set up to catch reds or terrists, they were set up to prevent burglaries and child kidnappings, which are real, regular occurrences. 99% of the time there's not even really a watch, it's just a sign to deter burglars.
That museum is good fun, though extremely touristy. For a really deep dive, be sure to visit the Stasi Museum. The guided tour is excellent. http://www.stasi-museum.de/en/enindex.htm
I would suggest the Stasi museum (in their former headquaters). It's a much better museum for finding out about how repressive it was.
The DDR museum has many mundane things like "what type of soap they had in East Germany". The Stasi musuem makes you realise how oppressive it was. Letters from school children written to people who build the Berlin Wall thanking them for building the wall to protect the East German people, etc.
The pure number of employees sounds like a bad metric for "oppressiveness". What would the NSA do with all those people? Machines are doing most of the collection which the MfS/StaSi had to do manually.
Technology still didn't replace the policing part. The NSA may be recording everything we say, but you won't be taken during the night and disapeared to some cell because of it.
http://www.dw.de/east-german-stasi-had-189000-informers-stud...
"About one in 100 East Germans was an informer for communist East Germany's secret police in 1989, according to a new study. Political ideology was their main motivation, both in East and West Germany... According to the report, political ideals served as the primary motivation for people to turn in their neighbors, friends and acquaintances to the secret police. Financial incentives played only a minor role and blackmail was rare."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/03/24...
"5.1 million Americans have security clearances. That’s more than the entire population of Norway... About 5.1 million people — or more than 1.5 percent of the population — held security clearances last year."
Security clearance is a poor proxy for whether or not someone is involved with the security services.
A lot of people obtain security clearances because of jobs that brings them only in cursory contact with anything secret, either because it is a requirement, or because it is a hassle not to.
E.g. I once did a two week contract for a Norwegian defence research group. The stuff I worked on was not restricted in any way, but the only reason I didn't have to be put through security clearance procedures was that they were in too much of a rush and opted for the inconvenient alternative:
One of the senior developers spent two weeks "babysitting" me: Despite working from an office in a wing of the building that housed no high security projects, he had to follow me around wherever I went. Including standing outside the toilets whenever I had to go, and follow me when I went to lunch.
Last time I checked, every commissioned officer in the military gets at minimum a Secret clearance. Per Wikipedia that's 236,826 in 2010 in the active military, add the reserves and I'd assume it's over 300K.
If the security services in East Germany thought you weren't secure, you'd be working menial jobs for life, if you weren't in prison. In the USA, is a "security clearance" necessary to go to university? To work as a doctor?
There's a bit in the film "The Lives of Others", where a neighbour sees the Stati agent install bugs. The agent tells the neighbor that if she tells the target he's being bugged, then her daughter will lose her place in university. One of the characters in the film is a director of plays. He has "lost his security clearance" for critiquing the regime, was blacklisted and couldn't work.
I was 11 at the time the Berlin Wall came down, and I remember my mum waking me up and telling me to come downstairs. She was patiently trying to explain how important all this was, but as I sat there watching all of these people joyfully smashing a giant wall to pieces I kept thinking, "I wonder if I can ask for a sledgehammer for Christmas, if people on the telly are using them it must be okay for me".
So yes, that was me growing up in the UK during the 80s. Cold War tensions, threat of nuclear war, proxy wars springing up all over the place and at the end of all that my abiding memory is "hmm, sledgehammers are cool!"
That and the film Threads[0], possibly the scariest film I've ever watched and if offered the chance to watch it… DON'T.
[0]: Nope, not linking to it. I'm doing you a favour, seriously.
One of the many interesting facts about Threads is that it is based on a rather optimistic view of what a Soviet nuclear attack on the UK would have been like! They used the official "Square Leg" exercise as a basis:
When I was a kid I remember watching Threads with my family. I had friends go on and on about how freaky The Day After was, which I never saw until about 2000 or so.
Those kids who talked about being scared by TDA obviously didn't watch Threads at the time. I still shudder thinking about some of the scenes.
I did rewatch it not too long ago and just kind of shrugged. I suppose that's a statement on both how far we've come in terms of actually fearing nuclear annihilation as well as the graphicness of horror movies.
You know, I tried to rewatch Threads a couple of years ago just to see if I'd been desensitised to graphic violence. I hadn't been! I don't watch horror movies and graphic violence on the telly, they genuinely scare and disturb me. So that's my excuse for not making it through the first 45 minutes of Threads as an adult!
I think one of the scariest things for me was that it was set in the north of England where I'm from. Normally disaster movies are all about London and the south-east corner of the UK if they are set in the UK at all. I'm from the North West, and it was the sheer ordinariness of the people that they managed to capture so perfectly that made themselves empathetic to me. It actually felt as though I might have known some of these people. I think it was that deep empathy that made it much easier to place oneself in their position, fucking terrible position though it was.
You know, I was thinking about what you said about fearing nuclear annihilation and I think I'm more worried about it now. At least in the good old days there were only two likely candidates to start lobbing nukes about the place, these days who knows who's going to be the first to set one off.
Oh, I think that nuclear activity is at least as, if not moreso, likely than it was back then. But IMO it's much less likely for it to be a full scale, global thermonuclear war (to borrow a phrase).
I just don't see people living in fear that any day might be the day that the entire world ceases to exist as we know it. For instance, I'm guessing that grade schoolers don't have a nuclear attack drill (which were laughable, now that I think back).
Personally I fall into that camp, but if I woke up one morning to find out that some large city had a nuclear device go off in it via a terrorist attack, or (purely an example) Israel dropped a bomb somewhere in Iran, I wouldn't be surprised at all.
I agree with you 100% that the likelihood of global thermonuclear war has decreased, I definitely think it's going to be a small scale incident when it happens. If there is any such thing as a small-scale nuclear event.
But yes, I don't think anybody would be surprised if there was a limited exchange between Iran and Israel one day. Or maybe a container ship containing a nuke goes off in a harbour somewhere in a terrorist attack, we'd be horrified, but not surprised.
The thing that struck me as a kid was the mental image of two groups of generals and leaders sitting over a map, one in Downing Street and the other in the Kremlin. I always wondered why they didn't just play Diplomacy[0] instead, but play for real countries instead of the imaginary ones in the boardgame. They still get to do all the scheming, backstabbing and other diplomatic shenanigans that politicians seem to love but without the loss of life and destruction.
Not sure my idea would gain traction these days though!
> I always wondered why they didn't just play Diplomacy[0] instead, but play for real countries instead of the imaginary ones in the boardgame. They still get to do all the scheming, backstabbing and other diplomatic shenanigans that politicians seem to love but without the loss of life and destruction.
The reason is, of course, the metagame. The first one to drop a real H-bomb on the other or launch a real assault would win, hence both sides need to play at the least simulated level available.
Also, you have just reminded me of ST:TOS episode "A Taste of Armageddon", where two planets fought a virtual war in which computers simulated the mutual bombing and after such fire exchange a computed number of people were euthanized.
The documentary "Countdown to Zero" (2010) convinced me it's only a matter of time before an improvised nuclear weapon is used in a city somewhere. Scary to hear how easy it is to buy nuclear material.
There is a lovely, very recent film about this (in German) called "Bornholmer Strasse" starring many of the people who were actually there 25 years ago.
Came here to say this. It was on ARD in the week. I enjoyed it a lot. Interesting to see what a pickle Herr Jaeger was left in by his superiors. Amazing really that nobody was shot.
I spent several months in Berlin a couple years ago and was particularly fascinated by the wall. There are many exhibits. To the north is a recreated section of the wall, with a guard tower, etc and a museum across the street.
Near checkpoint charlie is a good museum of people's attempts to escape the wall. Unfortunately it's usually overrun with tourists and tough to get thru- so physically packed with bodies.
Berlin has done a good job of memorializing the wall, and you will see its impact wherever you go in the city.
To be honest, if you have any geographic flexibility, go spend 3 months in berlin doing a startup-- great startup scene, great place in europe, wonderful city, and lots of stuff worth experiencing.
There's even a section of the metro that was closed for 40 years because it was in east berlin... that you can now see.
We stayed in east berlin in an AirBnB apartment. It was winter and despite all the snow I loved it. Alexander Platz has the Festrum(sp) a fantastic, east german version of the space needle, well worth visiting.
If you get homesick the Sony theater in Potsdamer Platz runs american movies in english.
But above all, the wall really made a huge impression on me. A much bigger impression than, say, stonehenge.
The most fascinating aspect of this is that he sounds like an absolutely ordinary guy 'just following orders'; it's likely what he actually was and has been.
The evil of legitimizing immoral actions is that they become what is, within that context, justice.
> The evil of legitimizing immoral actions is that they become what is, within that context, justice.
Yes, that's a very important point to learn from at least the 20th century, I'd say. I you haven't already, read Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem".
now lets get some israelis to take down the apartheid wall in palestine. Lets stop israeli colonialism and racism, and oppression of the indigenous arabs that live in palestine.
This seemed reasonable and as I reached for the door handle on the train someone grabbed my hand. It was the guy sharing my train car and who had earlier feigned not knowing any English. He said in clear English, 'don't do it the risk is too high. If the guards spot you they will prevent you from re-boarding the train.'
Turns out the guy was an IT consultant and we had a very pleasant chat on the way into Munich and I had dinner with him while I was there. The waitress was cute and I've always wondered if I'd have been lucky or gotten to know the inside of an East German jail cell.