Ossis and Wessis

One thing that I have yet to really understand about the German culture here in the former West is the view that people have of the former East Germans (Ossis). Many westerners (Wessis) that I've met often make jokes about Germans from the former Deutsche Demokratische Republik, and the Ossis are viewed with a definitely tangible amount of hostility. One day, while sitting in a restaurant next to a cheerful but rowdy and loud group of Germans with noticable Eastern accents, an accquaintance of mine leaned over and whispered with a smirk, "They're from Erich Honecker's side."

I realize that many of the Wessis see the Ossis as a threat or a burden. When the wall fell, former DDR citizens fled to the West by the thousands, in search of new jobs, new homes, a new life -- in search, basically, of the freedom that had been denied them for 40 years. Since the reunification of Germany in October 1990, the West has poured buckets of money into the former East in order to try to bring it up to Western standards of living. Still, 16 years later, the East is still mired in sometimes astronomical unemployment and much lower living conditions than in the West. With all the money it costs (seemingly without results) to sustain and reabilitate the East, I can see why the Wessis would be bitter.

But I still can't understand the animosity. It actually makes me angry to hear Wessis making jokes about the Ossis or criticizing them for whatever reason. The former East Germans I've met are some of the friendliest, most generous Germans I know. When I visited Matze in Neustadt I got the chance to also visit some close friends of his family who had lived in the DDR until the wall fell in 1989. I'll never forget watching their daughter Aileen (who was a teenager when the fall fell) -- as tears welled up in her eyes -- explain how "suddenly, everything we'd worked our entire lives for was worth nothing." The family had to sell everything it had -- furniture, belongings -- and strike out for the West with little more than a few suitcases. The sadness in the room while we talked about this -- the weight of 40 years of the DDR and all the memories of it -- was so heavy that it was almost suffocating. It was one of the most moving experiences of my entire life. Here was a family baring its soul, sharing such a priceless piece of its memories and of history with me. It was almost too much to take in.

And then I hear jokes and see the hostility toward the Ossis. It enrages me. How can the Wessis not have any sympathy for what it was like to have your whole world turned upside-down in a matter of hours? How can they mock people who have been through so much? Whether they were loyal to the state or not, the East Germans had a life too. For some, the fall of the wall meant the end of a socialist state they'd worked so hard to build. For others, it meant the first sweet taste of the freedom they'd dreamed of for so long. For all, it was a chaotic experience that forever erased the world they'd known for four decades.

I'm reminded of the relationship between the Northern Union states and Southern Confederacy following the Civil War and the reunification of my own country. There was, for a long time, animosity and tension between North and South - animosity that is, in many ways, still tangible today, more than 100 years later. It will take time, I suppose, for Germany to feel one again, just as it has taken time for the United States to feel whole. And even after that there will be tension and prejudice that extends for years afterward.

I just hope that soon there will no longer be the distinction between the "Ossis" and the "Wessis" and that the country can rest as a whole in the knowledge that, after all, they are all Germans.