DDRüben – “Over There”: Travels in East Germany 1987-2010

Pat Kelly, an Irishman, travels the length and breadth of post-Communist East Germany over 20 years and meets its people while learning German “on the fly” – with often hilarious results. This is a rare piece of Ostalgie travel writing in English, and essential reading for the English speaking visitor to the former East Germany and Berlin. A book filled with humour, quirky travel experiences, Ostalgie, Stasi and the ghost of an extinct state. “DDRüben – Over There” (a play on the German word “drüben” meaning “over there”, used by both West and East Germans to refer to the other German state.) is the former East Germany (DDR) seen from an Irish independent traveller’s perspective and experience over almost a quarter of a century. “Don’t Happy – Be Worry!” read the ominous graffiti as my train headed for the Iron Curtain in the summer of 1987. When I went “over there” into East Germany, or “drüben” as the Germans say, I felt that I had exchanged a 1950s time warp (West Berlin) for a different planet. That different planet, the DDR, crashed to earth on November 9th 1989, and died at midnight on October 2nd 1990, a rare case of a modern European country simply ceasing to exist overnight. Travellers in the eastern part of Germany are haunted by the ghost of this extinct state. Independent travel in the first decade post-DDR was absolute madness, in which you could find your B&B to be a spare futon in the living room of a granny, a high-rise flat in a dodgy suburb, or even a room over a drapery shop. Ostalgie, nostalgia for the old days of the DDR, actually abounds. As one of my seventy-something year old granny hostesses said in halting English over breakfast in her sixth floor high-rise apartment, “Venn vee had ze Stasi, vee had no crime! Zey should bring zem back!”, before going on to tell me about her summer holidays last year in Siberia. I stayed in the home of a rocket engineer who had loved life in the DDR, and saw his 1942 era home-made radio made of spare parts pilfered from the Wehrmacht. In Berlin, I stayed in the Stasi elite apartment block. I had the most wonderful seaside holidays on the Baltic coast, and went back in time on the ancient steam trains still running in this land that time had forgotten. This is the story of a unique destination, no longer on a map in name, but alive in spirit. DDRüben is the quirky view of a foreigner, English-speaking but not Anglophone in mentality, who has travelled extensively in the former DDR while never actually taking up residence in Germany. A little bit like Crocodile Dundee meets Heinrich Böll! It straddles Ostalgie (nostalgia for the good aspects of the former DDR, especially among East Germans) and the bad aspects, which it touches on without emphasis. The book is non-judgmental on the DDR, without overemphasising either Ostalgie or the Stasi State, and with a view to the Alltag or everyday life of people in the former DDR. A rare view is presented of what it was like in the island of West Berlin before the Wall came down, as well as the actual experience of the author of travel in East Berlin under the DDR regime. A “what if” chapter deals with the lost Eastern German Territories beyond the DDR, a subject rarely touched on in any popular writing on the subject.