A Bridge Over the Elbe Takes Place of a Fence

DOEMITZ, Germany —  Broad and meandering as it nears the end of its journey to the North Sea, the Elbe River has been pumping life into this fortress town of brick factories and half-timbered farmhouses since it was founded in the 13th century as a tollgate for Saxon traders.

The river was highway, port and playground for those on either side of its island-stubbled shallows. Even in the icy depths of the Cold War, there was something about it that symbolized the power of common purpose and better days. It was along the Elbe that Soviet and U.S. troops linked up in the final days of World War II.

But for what now counts as a mere heartbeat in history, this stretch of the river divided Germans into adversarial nations.

Christel Fuhrman was ironing in her upstairs parlor on a fall day in 1961 when border guards began unrolling blankets of barbed wire and nailing them to trees standing only an arm’s length from her windows.

There hadn’t been much of a view of the river anyway, because grass-covered levees and reedy marshes obscured most of it. No one had been allowed to approach the riverbanks since the end of World War II. Still, it broke Fuhrman’s heart to lose the last glimpse of her estranged countrymen on the far shore.

“We couldn’t even complain to anyone. That was the worst,” says the 73-year-old widow, whose life has spanned the economic devastation of the Weimar Republic, Nazi horrors, a world war, the terror of rape and pillage by occupying Soviet soldiers, and Communist dictatorship.

Part of 863 miles of imprisoning edifices that began with the Berlin Wall, the barriers along the Elbe were meant to staunch the hemorrhage of easterners drawn to the west’s “economic miracle” and to shield those left behind from a corrupting view of prosperity.

“Our leaders thought that if we couldn’t see the west, we wouldn’t want to go there,” Marina Mueller, the town’s de facto historian, recalls with a mix of amusement and sadness. “The worst part is that it worked. It was part of the dumbing of our society. Over time, we just stopped asking questions.”

Doemitz in the age of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was a typical rural notch on the Communist rust belt, where laborers churned out heavy machinery and building supplies. Streets were usually empty after working hours as residents turned inward, retreating to their Nischengesellschaft--quiet homes where politics and propaganda were shut out.

Since the disappearance of the intra-German border and the departure of 400,000 Russian troops from Germany, Doemitz has shed its torpor. The first new bridge built between east and west after the 1990 reunification has accelerated the healing process and reconciled the two communities of Germans. The Allies had bombed a 19th-century bridge here on Hitler’s last birthday, April 20, 1945, and postwar Communists saw no reason to rebuild it.

“We never knew what it was like over here. It was just ‘the other side,’ ” recalls one western German, Reinhard Kroekel. The 46-year-old songwriter from Hamburg has bought a 200-year-old cottage in Doemitz as a vacation home. “It’s so peaceful here now, it’s hard to believe that just a few years ago there were guards and dogs right across the street.”

Life wasn’t all bondage and failure, easterners are quick to note. Although shops were empty and human rights were trampled, no one starved. There was work for everyone, and family life was richer in the absence of the west’s distractions.

“I can’t put those 40 years of my life in the GDR in a box and forget about it,” says Hans-Herbert Vollbrecht, 50, who has restored his family’s 118-year-old hardware business. “There were happy times as well as harsh ones, and it is just too much of my life to simply cross off as a big mistake.”

Veterinarian Christa Luth describes life in the old GDR as “sleepwalking.” But easterners were less troubled by their lag in consumer comforts than by a leadership that didn’t trust them.

Like other easterners, she resents those in the west who believe they rescued the east at their own staggering expense.

Vollbrecht’s wife, Renate, who has embarked on a new career in politics, won a June mayoral election.

“We never wanted to leave. We had built our lives here,” she says now. “For me, it was the mental restriction that was offensive. We resented being suspected of wanting to escape.”

As a border town, Doemitz was part of communism’s bastion against the west. In 1952, “Operation Insect” moved surviving relatives of Nazi soldiers. The river was gradually sealed off by three successive fences and patrolled by armed guards with shoot-to-kill orders. Even other East Germans had to have permission to visit.

“I still get a lump in my throat every time I drive across the river,” says the new mayor, who often goes west to buy supplies for her husband’s business and to visit their 22-year-old daughter who is studying in Hamburg.

The Vollbrechts take pleasure in the younger generation’s swift adjustment to the new world.

“Our daughter doesn’t see or feel any difference between easterners and westerners her own age. The wall has no meaning for them,” the mayor says. “Her boyfriend is from the western part of Germany. But, to her, he’s just another kid in Hamburg.”

Lars Prusar, a 21-year-old heating contractor, commutes to Doemitz from his hometown in the west.

“You go where the jobs are--whether in the east or the west. It’s just one country now,” Prusar says.

But nostalgia afflicts many others in the east, where unemployment runs as high as 20% and economic despair has given rise to extremism reminiscent of the 1930s, when Hitler came to power.

Harold Kunas, pastor of the Evangelical Church here since 1986, blames the destruction of Christian values under communism.

“People have such short memories,” he laments.

Posters of the right-wing German People’s Union demanding “Jobs for Germans First” can be found on trees and lampposts, but Doemitz has been spared the worst. Thanks largely to the new four-lane suspension bridge connecting it to Dannenberg on the west side of the Elbe, unemployment is a mere 7%--enviable even by western standards.

Much of society in the former East Germany is “kaput,” says filmmaker Volker Schlondorff, a westerner who returned from the United States in 1991 to work in the east. Clutches of angry young men mill around street corners in depressed cities where there are no jobs and few prospects.

But memories of their infringed freedoms endure among most easterners and temper nostalgia for Communist days, Schlondorff says. He has found a wellspring of creativity and liberated spirit.

Still, the need to go west to find work has emptied many eastern towns. The population of Doemitz has dropped by more than 25% since reunification, and many of the remaining 2,700 residents commute to jobs in Hamburg or Hanover.

One prospect for the local economy is the budding business of memorializing repression.

Reinhard Zeller runs the Elbklause restaurant on the nearby Rueterberg peninsula, where border guards used to lock residents behind iron fences each night to make sure no one tried to swim west from its beaches.

“People from the west come here to see what it must have been like to live behind barriers, like in a zoo,” the bartender says.

At Doemitz’s medieval fortress, Mueller, the de facto historian, guides visitors along scenic overlooks that were off limits during the Communist era and to dank cells where rulers have imprisoned their opponents since the 1200s.

“People from the west always ask how we could have put up with such controls and restrictions for so long,” says the 48-year-old as she gazes, bemused, at photographs of the old walls along the levees. “They don’t understand that our spirits were broken.”