When the Berlin Wall fell 20 years ago today, it opened the way for romances to bloom
WHILE THE rest of the world talks about German unity, couples like Katja and Hendrik live it.
Both were born in Berlin, but Katja grew up in the western neighbourhood of Mariendorf while Hendrik spent his childhood on the other side of the Berlin Wall in Treptow.
“We were about 5km apart as the crow flies,” says Hendrik. “The same weather yet another world.” He had relations and penpals in West Germany but was never allowed travel there while she had never been to East Berlin.
“I always saw the [East Berlin] television tower,” says Katja, “but I couldn’t understand the rest: I had no idea what was around it, what it looked like.” Today they live around the corner from the monumental tower, just off the pompous Soviet-style Karl Marx Allee, formerly Stalinallee.
The two are perplexed that anyone would find their relationship interesting. Yet Katja and Hendrik are a statistical rarity: two decades after 1989, just 4 per cent of German couples are of the east-west, or Ossi-Wessi variety. According to dating agency Elite Partners, four decades of division have left different attitudes and priorities on family, work, holidays and each other.
Today some 70 per cent of “Wessis” say they consider it important to know whether their partner is an Ossi or Wessi, while just 38 per cent of easterners said they cared.
For Katja and Hendrik, their background wasn’t an issue when they met at a party 11 years ago last week. “The most important question for us was ‘your place or mine’?” laughs Katja. “I don’t even remember when it finally came up where we were from.” Though they didn’t meet until 1998, the two experienced similar feelings of euphoria after the fall of the wall, followed by disappointment of meeting the “other” Berliners.
“All the East Berlin girls had red hair, were studying childcare and called Peggy and Mandy,” says Katja. “We joked that the East Berlin men were better in bed. That research was never fully completed.” Hendrik remembers West Berlin women as an interchangeable bunch in identical clothes, all sporting pony tails. “I remember, too, thinking how confident the West Berliners seemed, yet they were unable to talk to someone in a bar,” he says. “The easterners lacked confidence in general but were raised to go up to people and introduce themselves.” That bit of East German nurturing is what brought Hendrik and Katja together in 1998.
Their compatible personalities have kept them together for 11 years, yet there are moments when their different pasts are present. “Eastern men have many good sides, for instance they are generally less chauvinistic,” says Katja. “They know how to do the dishes, you don’t have to ask them.” Hendrik is pleased by the compliment, putting it down to the fact that eastern parents both worked and, out of necessity, shared the housework.
Warming to the theme, Katja says she “can’t keep her mouth shut” while Hendrik is more careful and cautious about speaking.
“I’m more likely to wait and see, initiative was never encouraged in East German schools,” he says, “it was always about collective thinking and never initiative.” That rings a bell with Katja. “Today that means that Hendrik will say he’d like a new bed,” she says, “while I’m the one who has to find and buy the new bed.” Their politics are different too: Katja has a positive view of socialism whereas Hendrik says his East Berlin childhood inoculated him against that for life.
Despite their political differences, both agree that Chancellor Merkel – born in the West, raised in the East – is a stroke of luck for Germany.
“She’s not a beauty but she’s charming,” says Katja. Adds Hendrik: “She’s not slick, she’s slightly awkward but she has a very human air about her.” The two are philosophical about this evening’s anniversary in their home town.
For them and thousands of other east-west couples here, the united German capital is an experiment in living, where their priorities and goals have changed over the years. In particular the fixation about reaching a “West German” living standard has softened – on both sides. “That ‘West standard’ was only ever calculated in financial terms, salary and GDP, a big car and a home you never saw because you worked too much,” says Katja. “What I’ve learned from Hendrik’s eastern friends is that health, personal happiness and perhaps working a little less are all just as important.”