In Berlin, the Wall in the Head was evident in a falling-off of movement between east and west. Rather than streaming to the west to shop, as they had in the immediate post-Wall era, East Berliners stayed home and even began buying eastern-made products again, which they now professed to find preferable to western goods. In 1993 only 9.3 percent of East Berliners said that they would live in West Berlin if given the chance; 7 percent of the West Berliners said they would go east. In the same year, a study of Berlin’s youth scene revealed that contacts between eastern and western young people had not increased since 1990. Now, Ossis who drove their sputtering Trabis into western Berlin got hostile stares, or perhaps dog feces smeared on their windows. Rather than gifts of bananas, they got banana jokes, such as: “How do we know that Ossis are descended from apes? From all the bananas they eat.” The easterners vented their indignation and humiliation in anti-western tabloids like
The major source of resentment in the East derived from the nature of unification itself, which involved the wholesale imposition of Western institutions, values, and practices on the former GDR. While many East Berliners, especially at the beginning, were willing enough to adopt—or to try to adopt—Western ways, a sense of victimization soon took hold. Easterners claimed that they were being “colonized” by a West that was determined to extinguish everything that the GDR had stood for.
One of the first tasks that victors often undertake after absorbing a conquered territory is to replace objectionable place names with designations reflecting the altered political circumstances. As we have seen, Berlin had experienced several waves of name-changing over the course of its modern history, the most extensive being that following the Nazi defeat in 1945. Reunification brought another spate of rechristening, particularly in the east, which was littered with streets and squares named after Communist leaders, leftist heroes, and Third World Marxist martyrs. The legal tool for the name-changing was the 1985 West Berlin Strassengesetz, which was amended and extended to the entire city. It called for “the removal of those street names from the period 1945 to 1989 [honoring] active opponents of democracy and also intellectual-political precursors and defenders of Stalinist tyranny, the GDR regime and other unjust Communist regimes.” Following these guidelines, authorities in united Berlin ordered seventy-five name changes in the eastern part of the city in the two years following German unification. Many of these changes were made by district councils and were not controversial. But as time went on, with more and more Communist heroes losing their places of honor on the municipal map, East Berliners with ties to the old system began to complain that the Wessis were trying to rob them of an important part of their collective identity.
