Berlin полностью

In selling off its state-owned factories, the Treuhand was supposed to commit the purchasers to retain as many workers as possible, but in many cases the buyers salvaged only the profitable parts of the operation and shut down the rest. Thousands of plants proved so outmoded, expensive to run, or destructive to the environment that they found no purchasers at all. They were kept open for a while with federal funds, but eventually most were simply closed down. As early as December 1991, 4 million East Germans were out of work, and millions more were underemployed. The Treuhand, which had been founded as the putative savior of GDR industry, became the most hated institution in the land. Rohwedder began receiving death threats on a daily basis, and in early 1991 he fell victim to a terrorist’s bullet.

The murder of Rohwedder, of course, did not turn back the tide of privatization, which continued under his successor, Birgit Breuel, who led the Treuhand until its dissolution in late 1994. By that time, the former GDR, including eastern Berlin, which alone lost 150,000 manufacturing jobs, was substantially deindustrialized, with about half the adult population out of work. Assessing the role of the Treuhand, Ghrista Wolf wrote bitterly: “Isn’t it a little uncanny how the work of two or three generations can just vanish into nothing—not by physical destruction, war, or bombs but in the middle of peacetime, by the stroke of a pen, by the inflexible magic word ‘privatization’?”

In his satirical novel of post-Wall Berlin, Schlehweins Giraffe, Bernd Schirmer writes of a giraffe who has been abgewickelt (weeded out) from a Berlin zoo so strapped for funds that the weaker animals are fed to the stronger ones and superfluous specimens sold off to the public or to other zoos. The giraffe in question represents the millions of Ossis who after the Wende (the turnaround engendered by unification) suddenly found themselves deprived of their old cages and keepers, sold off to new owners—in essence devoured by their more powerful neighbors. The process of Abwicklung affected not only the redundant, but also the politically tainted: animals with the wrong spots, stripes, or colors. To weed these specimens out, the government of united Germany established a series of committees, consisting mostly of Wessis, that combed through the personnel lists of eastern German public institutions, including the army, police, universities, secondary schools, and research institutes. Like the Western Allies after the collapse of Nazism, the interrogators distributed questionnaires designed to identify people with problematical political pasts. As the former Communist capital—the central attraction of the GDR zoo—East Berlin came under particularly intense scrutiny.

In Berlin as elsewhere, weeding out known Stasi collaborators and SED time-servers proved the least controversial part of the purge. It was the marginal cases that caused the most problems, along with the dismissal of people who were simply seen as too old or intellectually calcified to adjust to the new environment. Rife as it was with condescension toward the “primitive” GDR, this process generated tremendous resentment in the eastern states. When queried by Western reviewers whether the employees of his institute had the linguistic skills to keep up with the latest English-language scholarship, one research director replied: “Look, it’s not so simple. First we have to learn to eat with a knife and a fork, then maybe we can start on English.” A group of abgewickelte economists from the East German Academy of Economics founded a cabaret in Berlin called Kartoon. A performer quipped in one of their skits: “We’ve got one thing in common with the government in Bonn: we haven’t the foggiest idea of what we’re doing at the moment.”