Socialism - my experience

I took a junior year abroad in Munich Germany in the late 1970’s. That year I learned what socialism did for the people in those societies. Visiting Eastern Europe – for me, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Hungary – were memorable experiences, defining my thoughts on the subject to today.

My first really memorable experience illustrates the time in history. A group of fellow students had invited me to the wine region known as Burgenland in eastern Austria. Rather than pay for rooms, we camped out… about 200 meters from the Hungarian border! I thought this was a terrible idea, camping so close to Socialist eastern Europe, but who was I, this American student, to challenge the site location? In the middle of the night, I heard footsteps in the woods – probably a deer. But I was convinced this was the advance scouts of a Russian invasion, and never fell back asleep. My imagination was more active than my fellow students, but my fear of what lay across the Iron Curtain had a basis in the reality of world politics back then. Trips across the Iron Curtain offered experiences, not just an over-active imagination.

I had spent some time in rural Bavaria and Austria to have seen the beds of trucks – derelict war machinery, some – converted into stout trailers pulled by tractors to carry huge loads down dusty agricultural roads. In Yugoslavia, similar trailers had been made from derelict trucks or war machinery; but in Yugoslavia they were pulled by horses and mules. They hadn’t progressed out of World war II.

This backwardness was also reflected in Prague, Czechoslovakia, which i visited for a week with a friend. Our first day we jumped on a streetcar. This was familiar transportation throughout Europe, and since the ’72 Olympics had just been held a few years earlier in Munich, we were used to the best public transportation infrastructures on the continent. Within minutes of our first streetcar ride in Prague, as we approached a junction, the streetcar stopped; the driver got out; grabbed a five or six foot crowbar out of a slot under the bumper; walked to the junction and levered the track over to turn it toward our intended route. He then returned the crowbar to its slot, got back in his seat, and off we went. I had never seen non-electric signaled streetcars anywhere else in Europe. This was WWII technology.

Our time in Prague also revealed an economic lesson. We had heard that exchanging our German Deutschmarks (DM) at the bank would give us less than ten percent of the real value. You had to exchange money on the street. This was a new concept for me. My strict upbringing told me this was illegal and should be avoided. But another side of me didn’t want to hand over ninety percent of my money… just because.

The actual act of exchanging money on the street, with a stranger, was another matter altogether; it terrified me. So we’re walking around a really cool part of the old city; cobblestones, narrow, winding roads and alleys, plenty of foot traffic, exploring… looking for a moneychanger! We know our clothes give us away as Westerners, so we’re taking our time, waiting for someone to whisper “Geldwechsel”. (‘Geldwechsel’ is German for money exchange. Yugoslavia used to be part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, so German has been spoken widely there for centuries, and ours was good.) Sure enough a fellow walks by, muttering quietly, ‘Geldwechsel?’, and I look him right in the eye and ask ‘Wechselkurs?’ (what’s the rate?). As though I’ve EVER done this before! He’s offering 9:1 which we heard was pretty good, but you could negotiate and maybe do a little better. Not me. I’ve got a couple hundred marks out of my pocket in a flash, and this guy realizes he’s dealing with a rookie. Gesturing me to put my money away and to follow him to a quieter place, we walk into the warren of old stone buildings and alleyways. We reached a corner where we can see pretty well up and down the narrow streets, but with some private space. But we couldn’t miss another fellow, 20 meters up the street, wearing – you can’t make this up – a black trench-coat that was missing only the Gestapo swaztica – or, very much in my imagination – the Czech version of the KGB or East Germany’s Stasi insignia. He was watching us, but as I gazed on him, terrified within, noticed a palpable sense of boredom as he drew from his cigarette, and looked away, up the alley. My money friend had DM200 of Czech money in my hands, confirming the amount, all very friendly and businesslike, before saying, tschuss, enjoy your trip, and walking away with his friend in the black trench-coat.

We weren’t sure how much money we had, but it seemed like a lot. That night, after viewing a few street menus, we went out to the finest restaurant near our hotel, celebrating not being held or beaten up in a Czech dungeon, plus our new found wealth. Once we did the math and viewed the menu, we ate like kings and queens! Every night we went to a different restaurant, hit the Opera, bought a painting I still own, amazed daily at how far our money went. And we were students, where a big dinner would break the bank for a month! What an adventure!

It came back to reality late in the week when I noticed a Pentax camera in a storefront window. This particular store was not open to Czechs; we had to present our passports to get inside. I figured with all the great deals we’d had, I might pick up a new camera for 10% of its regular cost. It took only a moment to understand the Pentax camera was no deal at all. It was just as much as in the US or Europe even after considering our black market currency exchange. It was one of the few items from the west that was available… but at a true price. Currency can be manipulated, but value holds. The inexpensive dinners were service related, food (the meat, only pork) and labor intensive, as with the painting and shows and our other ‘deals’. East Germany held different lessons. I and a Texan friend (Jeff) joined a group of American students to study in and explore West Berlin for a week. The first impression was right out of another spy novel: the guard towers and fence lines. West Berlin was situated well inside East Germany, so the connecting highway (famously closed by Nikita Kruschev in the early ‘60’s, resulting in the Berlin airlift) was a well guarded corridor, barbed wire, guard towers and open fields along our bus route. We had heard of this, but the actual sight was unforgettable. Who keeps guarded borders to keep the people in?

West Berlin was similar to Munich, rebuilt after relentless bombings from World War II, and vibrant, bigger than we expected, including a large forest with a lake. We ventured into East Berlin almost daily, passing through Checkpoint Charlie or the Brandenburg Gate when these passages were well known and romanticized in yes, spy novels, which were popular then.

The deals in East Germany were limited; money exchange was higher risk and the exchange rate not as punishing, so we behaved like the poor students we were. But the bookstores! These had inexpensive but excellent books on the language, the best language books I secured in my year in Germany, including ‘German for Foreigners’ , German idioms, and others. East Berlin was a destination for well heeled Russians, Poles, and Czechs so subsidized language tools made good sense.

If West Berlin was chaotic, East Berlin was sterile. Poured concrete apartment buildings of similar design lined the streets; not a drop of litter evident. One afternoon we met a group of three athletes about our age. We were interested in them, and they were interested in us, and we got along well, hung out for hours, not just partly because they each carried athletes’ duffel bags – full of beer!

We learned from these guys that there were two kinds of police: Volkspolizei (people’s police) and Staatspolizei (state police). The ‘Vopis’ were useless and openly disrespected. They just drove around or walked around in pairs, easy to spot in their dingy, dark grey uniforms. Staatspolizei were another matter. Fewer and not always uniformed, these were the serious arm of government; best to avoid their attention entirely.

One of this trio described how his mother had split the family, keeping him and a sibling in East Berlin for the glories of socialist Germany – a rejection of the destructive Fascism that had preceded it – as the father and brother had left for West Berlin before the Wall was completed. His hatred for the system was reflected in the jailhouse tattoo on his hand: Three dots: ‘Ich hasse Euch’ (I hate You – in the plural sense – meaning the entire state structure).

Jeff and I gave these guys some of the Deutschmarks in our pockets – both in appreciation for the beer, and because you needed western currency to get Levi jeans. We felt good about that. It was all we could do.

One experience outside Berlin, further into East Germany, was more normalizing. Jeff had read about a jazz band playing in a suburb outside East Berlin, easily accessible by train. Our daily visas into East Berlin were restricted to the city itself, but our German was very good and there was no music like this in the city. We’d keep quietly to ourselves. What was most striking about this foray outside the city was the similarity to suburbs of Munich or even suburbs of Boston: this was the place local people gathered on a Friday night. Beer, pretzels, music, and friends.

‘Gemuetlichkeit’ is a German word for this atmosphere, and it was striking in its normalcy in this place outside the sterile city. We didn’t engage with any people here, much as we would have liked to, having been warned earlier about the Staatspolizei. Breaking laws of movement carried potentially severe consequences; so we listened to a couple sets and returned to Checkpoint Charlie before midnight. But we saw that humanity had a home in the suburbs outside East Berlin. This juxtaposition of sterile East Berlin and normal town activity challenged my ideas about the ubiquity of the state.

One impression that no visitor to West Berlin could miss was the Wall. The wall was about fifteen feet high, rounded on top to prevent grappling hooks from holding. The walls were covered in graffiti on our (western) side. The other side began (or ended – depending on your direction) a minefield, two rows of barbed wire fencing, and guard towers. Without artistic, athletic or diplomatic cover, East Germany simply was not a place you could leave.

The Russian adage, “we pretend to work, an they pretend to pay us” was behind many in West Germany who feared the economic consequences of reunification: half the country didn’t know how to work as in the West. The cost of reunification was indeed steep to Germany in the decade transition after the Wall came down.

One final experience with Socialism was in Sweden. My sister had stayed in touch with her grade school pen-pal, Bibi, who invited me to visit. She and her husband Kjell were wonderful hosts. Kjell was a professional photographer who explained to me how he used film as barter. Running personal expenses through a business is done occasionally here, but was ubiquitous in Sweden. The tax rate on personal income was so high that figuring out how to run personal expenses through a business was necessary to keep some of what you made. Everybody did it. You were a fool not to. Being the young conformist, I was struck at Kjell’s easy acceptance this country-wide adaptation, the cheating. This was in the late ‘70’s before tax law changes backed off on that high cost experiment. Humans are nature’s most adaptable species, and adaptation to legal realities is certain, though where paths go is not always clear. Some broader observations now make sense to me. In East Germany, to get your own apartment you had to be married. Many young people married to get out of their parents’ homes. Forced secularization in East Germany had eliminated religion, so there were no religious reasons for marriage; but the social pull was powerful. In the years following reunification, with freedom of travel and a new economic model, post reunification divorce rates reached 46% in the former East Germany. Compare this model with the United States’ welfare system where getting a free apartment and a monthly stipend means getting pregnant, but without a husband. Different rules, but less marriage – eventually – under both social structures.

Today, as young people talk about the benefits of yielding systems to government for delivering better service, I can only come back to the old adage: the people pretend to work, and the government pretends to pay us. Not for me. Not for our country.