The young woman says, ‘I think there were advantages over there, that we forget, particularly for mothers and children. I’m a single mum and I know what I’m talking about. I had to work, and it hard to find a kindergarten place. I have a friend who lived over there and she says she didn’t want for anything . . . ‘
‘And rents were lower,’ the gap-toothed woman on my right adds.
‘The kindergartens were there,’ the dark man says, ‘because they wanted to get to the children early to bring them up loyal to the state.’
‘Sure,’ the young mother says. ‘But it all became crudely clear to me just after the Wall came down. I met a couple in the street who’d just come over from the east and had no money and nowhere to go, so I said they could stay with me. They were with me for a weekend and I showed them around. We went to Karstadt department store and looked in the food section. They were beside themselves. “How many kinds of ketchup do you have?” they said as they looked at the shelves. Then I thought to myself, it really is too much — there must be a middle way. Do we really need thirty different kinds of ham and fifteen different kinds of ketchup?’
‘The mistake the GDR made was to force people into a position,’ the dark man says, ‘either you are for us or an enemy. And if you then came to think of yourself as an enemy you had to ask yourself: what am I doing here? They wanted to put everything into their narrow schema, but life simply didn’t fit into it.’ He pauses, and the others wait for him to finish. ‘I think we need to remember that they came here for the freedom, not for fifteen kinds of ketchup.’
