22 Years After

TWENTY-TWO YEARS AFTER

Ajit Chaudhuri – June 2013


I first travelled in Germany in 1991 – I spent three months there, hitchhiked around the country, did some journeys on cycle, stayed and ate on the cheap, and generally had a good time. I visited again this April to present a paper at an academic conference in Heidelberg, and took the opportunity to do some more travel within. This paper looks at what has changed in these 22 years.


Let me begin with what has not! I was an unemployed and broke bum in 1991 with an abiding interest in cold beer, good food, beautiful women and football (not necessarily in that order), not dissimilar to my situation today (OK, plus 20 kilos and a few grey hairs!). Germany too continues to be a beautiful and efficiently run country that is a pleasure to visit. Landing in Frankfurt was a revelation – it took 15 minutes from leaving the plane to leaving the airport (immigration, baggage retrieval, customs all included) – quite a change from the chaos of Heathrow that I had grown accustomed to. The forests are just as abundant, and access to them for long walks just as convenient. Beer is still cheaper than water, each town still has its own breweries so that one doesn’t drink customized branded stuff, and two litres of Bayerische dark beer washed down with ‘weisswurst’ and sauce continues to be worth dying for.


And football continues to be important! In 1991, Germany was the reigning world champion and Bayern Munich the richest, most successful, and most hated (outside the province of Bavaria) team in the country. Today, with both Champion’s League finalists from Germany, it is difficult to suggest that German football is not right up there, and there was evidence to support the latter statement as well. The footballing public continues to be passionate, knowledgeable and friendly – I was in the country for the Champion’s League semis (when Munich and Dortmund played Madrid and Barcelona respectively), saw two of the matches in packed bars and felt welcome and comfortable despite my more-Spanish-than-German looks and the fact that I was the only one not jumping around every time the German clubs scored.


Now, for the changes! First, the roads have turned kinder. In 1991, when a German got behind a steering wheel, s/he reverted from a polite and considerate person into the sort of barbarian that had had the Roman Empire trembling, helped along by the best cars in the world and a highway system sans speed limits. They still have great cars, but the drivers are considerably gentler. All that testosterone seems to have transferred to cyclists over time – they are now rude and aggressive, just as the cars used to be. The train system, which was a mess in 1991 and a laughing stock in neighbouring countries (the French had just introduced high speed TGVs), has sorted itself out – I did some travel by train and found them clean, fast, convenient and punctual (though not quite to the minute that Germans are famous for). And the public transport was of a very high standard – there is a saying that ‘a developed country is not where the poor use cars, it is where the rich use public transport’ – Germany truly is a developed country by this standard.


Some changes are because the world has changed! In 1991, Germany was still a frontline state in the cold war (even though it had just unified). Western Germany had large numbers of American armed forces strutting around, and the eastern side still had the considerably scruffier looking Soviet Army all over the place. I remember that, when I was there, five of them saw an opportunity in unification and asked to defect to the west. The German government asked the Soviet government what to do, and the Soviets replied, “By all means take them, but be ready because tomorrow you will have 500,000 more.” The Germans didn’t! The Americans are still there, but with a smaller and a lower key presence, and the Soviet Union doesn’t exist. In 1991, unification was on top of everyone’s mind; the erstwhile East Germany, according to everyone from the western side, was a dump that had to be dismantled and rebuilt from scratch, all to be paid for from their (the Wessies) taxes – think German attitudes to Greece and Bulgaria today. I travelled a bit in the East as well, and saw the Easterners initial struggles with the capitalist paradise they thought they were entering, where, for example, free day-care suddenly turned prohibitively expensive. At that time, if you had suggested that, twenty years later, the all-powerful German Chancellor, sitting on the same chair as Bismarck, Adenauer and Kohl, would be an East German woman, your audience would have thought you were smoking something.


Germany’s place in the world too has changed! In 1991 it was still tentative, low key, and somewhat apologetic about its Nazi past – a financial centre but a political minnow. It’s capital was Bonn, a small university town along the Rhine whose only recommendation was that it was uncontroversial. I was in Bonn in 1991 when a referendum was held as to whether it should continue as capital and, while there was a sense of sadness that Germany chose against it, there was also a feeling that the large and historic city of Berlin would be a suitable headquarters for a European powerhouse, which was Germany’s rightful place in the world. Today, Bonn has reverted to being a small university town – the federal government has shifted completely to Berlin, and Germany is the economic and political centre of Europe.


Two changes took me by pleasant surprise! The first is that the German immigration police have turned nicer! In 1991, and in my many subsequent visits in the late 1990s and early 2000s, about the only unpleasant thing about visiting Germany was dealing with these racist pricks (I crossed passport controls in many European countries in those days and it was rarely, except for the UK, an easy experience, but the Germans had harassment down to a fine art – maybe it was because I used the city of Cologne a lot to get in and out, a smaller and less busy airport where they had the time to pester a kaalu). In fact, I think I almost had a heart attack when I last visited in 2006 and was handed back my passport immediately, with a stamp, a smile, and words of welcome – a cynical German I mentioned this to told me that they had been told to ‘be nice’ for the four weeks that Germany was hosting the World Cup and, not to worry, they would revert back to business as usual once it was over. Well, they were ‘nice’ this time too, and I am left wondering how to explain this! Indian passports have become more acceptable? I don’t look like an undesirable alien any more? Or, the principles of niceness, dignity and politeness have finally invaded that last bastion of apartheid values?


And second, the women have turned beautiful! This too was quite a shock! Germany in 1991 was an ornithologist’s hell, and a blind lecher would not have rued his disability here. This time, there were beautiful women all over the place, in numbers, and in all age groups. Again, I am left having difficulty explaining this phenomenon. Can a Darwinian evolution in response to post-modern values of ‘self’, ‘image’ and ‘beauty’ have occurred in just twenty years? Or has my taste deteriorated in inverse proportion to age? A possible explanation is that, in 1991, German women were trying to look as bad as they possibly could (no make-up, bad hair and frumpy clothes) – an outcome of the feminist attitude of the time that ‘you have to like me for what I am inside’. And today, they are trying to look as good as possible (realism has set in, and the attitude is – tart up and be noticed, who has the attention span for substance?), and the wide difference between the two explains the change.


Last but not least of the changes, the Germans have learnt English! In 1991, only the educated elite could hold a conversation in English, and I had to use my rudimentary German while travelling around – for getting directions, buying beer, organizing night stays at youth hostels and everything else – and get taken for a Turk or an Arab in the process. One often got to see people’s real attitudes in small interactions, and there were many surprises. For example, I found that that famed Prussian rudeness in Berlin was just a cover – if one needed help, Berliners would go out of their way to provide it. This time, almost everyone spoke enough English for me to get by, and people were happy for opportunities to show off their command over the language (good English continues to be a sign of education and status), making the small interactions considerably easier – but also, I missed the opportunity to improve my German. You win some, and you lose some!


Twenty-two years is a long time and of course there will be changes, especially as 1991 was before the Internet, the cell phone, and low cost airlines, when globalization had yet to set in, and this paper would be a long one if I were to recount them all. It is the soft changes that have been, in Germany, (almost) universally for the better. I would happily visit again!