East Berliners were as active as the rest of their countrymen in enforcing this conformity despite Berlin’s vaunted image as a bastion of political irreverence. As “Capital of the GDR,” indeed, East Berlin had the highest concentration of party loyalists in the land. The Honecker regime brought to the capital thousands of SED stalwarts from other parts of the GDR, especially from Saxony, Ulbricht’s old home turf. (The influx of Saxons was a source of constant aggravation to native East Berliners, who made jokes—but not too openly—about these crude provincials in their midst, calling them “the fifth occupation power.”) The classier districts of East Berlin, crammed as they were with ambitious apparatchiks, were among the few parts of the GDR where the citizenry voted solidly SED out of conviction, not just for want of alternatives.
In addition to prestige, East Berlin offered the best and most numerous perks of power. The city had more than its share of “Intershops,” the special hard-currency stores that sold Western goods and other hard-to-find items. Because of the ongoing competition with West Berlin, East Berlin boasted a few “international” restaurants, nightclubs, and even strip joints. Midlevel party and Stasi functionaries had access to decent apartments in the better parts of town, while the top bosses rated detached houses in the government compound near the village of Wandlitz. The compound, like a miniature West Berlin, had a high wall around it.
While East Berlin offered a host of amenities to its party functionaries, most of its citizens had to make do with living conditions that were considerably below Western standards. Rents in the city were low because of government controls, but much of the housing stock was in woeful condition due to years of neglect. Roofs leaked, balconies collapsed, bullet-scarred facades crumbled into dust. The newer housing projects on the outskirts of town, most notably the vast complex at Marzahn, were not much of an improvement, for in addition to being inhuman in scale and drably uniform, they began falling apart almost as soon as they were inhabited—instant slums. As for consumer goods, the Soviet bloc-made domestic appliances that were available in the capital’s stores tended to be technologically primitive and aesthetically inelegant by Western standards. This was also true of the East German-made automobiles, the infamous Wartburgs and Trabants, which featured plastic bodies and two-stroke engines that belched noxious fumes. Because production of these machines was as slow as the cars themselves, buyers had to wait several years for delivery after placing an order; on the other hand, the cars did not become dated since there were few design improvements from year to year. East Berlin’s grocery stores and butcher shops generally had food on the shelves, though the selection tended to be limited and monotonous. Restaurants served heavy meat dishes and canned vegetables, which one could wash down with good beer or (less good) Bulgarian wine. Cafés featured dry cakes topped with fruit jelly substitute or iced in suspiciously gaudy hues. Fresh fruit was hard to come by, especially exotic items like pineapples and bananas, which many East Berliners knew only from advertisements on West German television. (The lack of bananas inspired one of the many jokes with which East Berliners tried to laugh off the iniquities of life in the Honecker era. To wit: An East Berlin kid and a West Berlin kid face each other across the Wall. “Ha,” says the western kid, “I have bananas and you don’t.” “Phooey,” says the eastern kid, “I have socialism and you don’t.” “So what?” counters the western kid, “we’ll get socialism too.” “Then you won’t have bananas anymore,” responds the boy from the East.)
