Student to Student

Lessons in Germany

Traveling with a Man Without a Country

By Sarah Gray

When I heard that I had received a job in Dresden, Germany, I was overjoyed. But my friends, family, and teachers at the Univ. of Cincinnati had mixed reactions. One of my teachers looked at me with an astonished--almost frightened--look on her face: "That's in the former East, you know."

In a class on the German-speaking world during the academic quarters prior to our departure, we studied the reunification: how and when it happened, problems associated with reunification, and the effects on both parts of Germany. Though it has been seven years since die Wende ("the Big Change"), I knew from my reading that East and West Germany are still not one big happy family. I was excited to have the chance to live in the setting of those class readings, in a country in transition.

One of the topics of our research was the so-called Mauer im Kopf or "wall in the head." The phrase suggests how former West German residents ("Wessies") and East German residents ("Ossies") are still separated mentally by the last remnants of the Berlin Wall. Many Ossies resent reunification because they lost their secure socialist jobs. Employed women in the former East suffered especially hard after die Wende, because they lost special maternity and child care benefits with the Western reforms. As a female American student, I wanted to see how, if at all, this Mauer im Kopf would affect me.

When I boarded the train that took me from Köln to Dresden in mid-April, I knew my journey would take me from one side of Germany to the other. The first half-hour of the trip was uneventful, but in Düsseldorf an older man boarded the train and took his reserved seat directly across from me.

Not confident in my German skills, I didn't dare go beyond saying "Guten Morgen" to him. At his urging, I began to tell him slowly (in German, of course) that I was an American student headed to Dresden to work for five months at a structural engineering firm. He replied, "I am traveling to Leipzig, but I was born in Dresden."

For the next three hours, he told me the story of his life.

He was six years old when Dresden was fire-bombed by the Americans and British during World War II. He told me he could still see the orange of the fire and the black of the smoke in the sky today. Though I knew that the allied troops had destroyed the city and had left it a pile of rubble, I had never really thought about how many lives, and not just buildings, were destroyed by the bombs.

As we approached the former East-West border, he began to tell me about the travel restrictions imposed by the Soviet regime after the war. The town of Hof was the West-East checkpoint, where Soviet guards boarded the trains to check passports and question travelers. I had my map of Germany unfolded on the seat, and we found approximately where Hof would be. We also had a timetable of stops, which we used to gauge the time and distance.

As we neared Hof, the man kept pacing back and forth across the car. "The border is coming soon," he would say.

He kept looking out the window, searching for something. It was as if he was the Man Without a Country and I was witnessing a tale similar to that of the American man in Edward Everett Hale's story. At that moment, I realized how lucky I was to have always had a house, a city, a state, a country. Free from restrictions. Free from fear. Free from borders. I realized that I have never had a justified reason to have a Mauer im Kopf.

The man got off the train in Leipzig and I traveled the remaining two hours to Dresden alone in the compartment. My expectations of Dresden and of living in the former East changed during that train ride. I began to feel a melancholy, a humbling. For the first time since arriving in Germany three weeks prior, I felt like a foreigner. I felt that somehow I could never "fit in" in Dresden, and that I could never understand what it meant to have lived through Dresden's history. When I got off the train, I knew my experience was going to be very different from that of the other Cincinnati students in western Germany.

During my time in Dresden, I listened to co-workers' stories and thoughts about the DDR, die Wende, and the future of Germany in the European Union. I shared with them my stories of life in America and of traveling and living in a foreign country.

I learned that exchanging life's trials, tribulations, and successes with others is the most rewarding part of working and traveling abroad.

SARA GRAY is a senior civil engineering student at the Univ. of Cincinnati. She spent five months in 1997 working in Germany as part of UC's International Engineering Program. This essay originated from an e-mail journal entry to friends and family in the U.S.