In the Shadows of a Fallen Wall

“We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.” —R. D. Laing

Can you live in a place that no longer exists yet still experience what life was like there?

That is the quest of Rowan University professor Sanford Tweedie. In 2000 he uprooted his family—wife Roberta and two daughters Tara and Callan—to the medieval town of Erfurt in the former East Germany. He had been awarded a Fulbright scholarship to teach there for a year.

He picked eastern Germany because he wanted to expand his comfort zone, to “stand at the threshold of the unknown and look into the room of fears.” Mr. Tweedie was also intrigued by the concept of the reunited Germany and how reunification had affected the nation’s citizens.

When one thinks of Cold War-era Germany, the Berlin Wall comes immediately to mind. But as Mr. Tweedie points out, there were actually two walls, “the Berlin wall that encircled West Berlin and the one that ran between the two Germanys that had been divided since World War II’s end.”

Physically, walls have two sides, each providing different perspectives based on an observer’s viewpoint. “For those in the East, the wall represented a bland cover to an intriguing book they were never allowed to read.” While “West Germans treated the Wall more as a coloring book on which to express themselves through art and graffiti.”

Mr. Tweedie and his family were heading for Erfurt on the bland side of the wall, a gray place that seemed little changed since the fall of Communism 11 years earlier. While the wall was physically gone, it occupied a corner of every former East German’s mind in what is referred to as die Mauer im Kopf, the “wall in the head.”

If Mr. Tweedie wanted to experience what life had been like in the former German Democratic Republic, he found the perfect apartment. It was located in a bleak gray and tan four-story Plattenbau, so named because they were constructed out of “prefabricated concrete plates stacked one upon the other.” While to Western eyes they had the appearance of tenement housing, to East Germans they were considered luxurious since they offered central heating and a bathroom in each apartment.

The differences between east and west smacked them in the face as soon as the family entered their home for the next year. Overhead lights were suspended by spliced wires, the electrical cord for the microwave ran through the sink, and “since most rooms contained only one outlet, extension cords were part of the décor.” Mr. Tweedie’s wry observations about life in the former GDR add immeasurably to the book.

But Mr. Tweedie acknowledges they had nothing to complain about. He passed up more modern housing offered by the university because, “We had wanted to see how eastern Germans lived . . . We wanted to live like, not simply among, the former East Germans.”

For the full immersion experience, he and his wife sent their children to a local school rather than the international school that expat children normally attend.

Even though East Germany no longer exists, he tries to soak up as much of it as remains. His full immersion does not extend to fully soaking up the language though. “My grasp of the language remains limited. I enjoy the country; I love the people; but I cannot overcome the language. Not knowing German well, I cannot look Germany square in the face.”

He overcomes this shortfall though by making good German friends who are able to explain situations that would otherwise remain incomprehensible to him. Their eyes and experiences fill in the blanks of his understanding of the country and its complicated past.

He ends up living so much like a local that at one point the aging Ford Escort that came with the apartment is stolen. Thus begins an almost comical process as he has to deal with a wheezing police bureaucracy to convince them that a) the car has actually been stolen and he hasn’t misplaced it, and b) they should maybe go look for it.

There are a few quibbles. For a book written by a professor of Writing Arts, one would expect better proofreading. An individual who is from South America is referred to as being born and raised in Columbia, the spelling for the university, not the country.

The other is that about two-thirds of the way through, Mr. Tweedie trails off from his chronological account to writing a series of essays. While this affects the flow of the narrative, he still gets his main points across.

The experience may have had the most profound effect on Mr. Tweedie’s daughter Tara. She embraced Germany so much that she went back to the country for a year abroad in high school, again in college, and for a third time for graduate school.

As for the author, he returned to Erfurt in 2007. The progress that had been in its infancy seven years before was now maturing into a full-fledged adult. The apartment building he had lived in was abandoned, marked for demolition. In the interim, he had lost some of his German habits and felt even more like a foreigner.

He found himself “at once on both sides, insider and outsider to a land that I am no longer and not yet living in.”