Carmen Paul - Horse´s Hoof and Heaven

German was always my favourite subject at school. I had no problems with the language at all and loved writing essays. In the 4th form we were to write an essay on the subject “my pen”.

I really looked forward to getting down to this, but I had no idea what was about to happen. So I got started and described my pen with a flourish, making it plain in the conclusion that “no other pen writes better than this one”: so lightly flowed the words onto the paper that one literally didn’t have to press the pen down at all; it was completely subservient to the movements of my hand.

I was exuberant as I could be with myself seeing just how easily the words transported themselves from pen onto paper. I submitted the essay and relished the grade one which I believed I would receive.

The time came for the marked essays to be handed out: What did I see before my eyes? A grade one for the grammar, yes, but a grade four for expression! Furthermore the teacher wrote as commentary on my script “long and meaningless”. The only mistake I’d made was that my pen was made by ‘Pelican’ (a stationery firm from West Germany). Why was I being punished just for using a pen from the west, I asked myself?

There was also another teacher who I remember well, called Mrs Herrschel. I did not make life easy for her, hardly ever doing what was required of me, let alone behaving as one ought to in the school. Nowadays one would just dismiss this as being ‘typical teenage behaviour’. Mrs Herschel was generally pleased with my Russian language as this was not a difficult subject for me to get to grips with. Mrs Herschel was my form teacher, and apart from several minor incidents we had got on with each other.

I consider that the trouble came due to my acute sense of right and wrong – once I had voiced an opinion about something I would not change it. Nowadays I have learned from my faith in Jesus that sometimes one should quietly back down, especially when one is in the wrong.

The last cigarette

The 12th of January 1969 was a typically cold winter morning. Like every morning I heard my stepfather getting up, going to the window in the lounge, opening it in order to smoke his first cigarette of the day, this being the “Salem Gelb” sort, available at every kiosk in the former East Germany at a cost of 2,10 Marks; the smell of that tobacco sticks in my nostrils even to this day.

This particular morning was no exception in this respect as I heard the squeaking of the lounge window opening; but then quite suddenly there was a dull thud, one which somehow made my heart race. I suspected that something awful must have happened. I ran into the lounge, and saw my stepfather lying lifeless wedged between the bedroom door and the armchair.

I saw my mother stuck in the bedroom through the slightly ajar door, with my stepfather’s 75 Kg blocking her access to him. She tried with all her might to get the door open attempting to push the body aside in order that she could get out of the bedroom, but he was just too heavy. He was lying completely jammed between the door and the armchair so she could not do anything about it alone. My stepfather lay there with his face utterly contorted with pain; his hand pressed against his chest. With almost supernatural strength I managed to shift his body centimetre by centimetre into a slightly different angle; it seemed like hours before my mother was able to squeeze herself through the now ajar door. She then kneeled next to her husband on the floor.

She sent me to telephone for the emergency services, but the doctor on duty could only establish what we already feared, that he had already died.

For the second time in my life I had to experience the loss of a relative; only this time I was actually there when it happened.

I was not especially brought up to ‘believe in God’. It was ingrained in me that I was the one who did the achieving, and I wasn’t to rely on anyone else apart from myself.

I was a dedicated “Young Pioneer”. This title was used for those in the 1st to 4th years at school who were on the first steps of the ladder to becoming a fully-fledged communist youth. The next stage in this process for those in the 4th to 7th years was called a Thälmann pioneer, again I was dedicated to this cause.

Everything we needed at that stage in our education was laid on for us – school, children’s centres for after school, entertainment during the school holidays, and proper children’s camps during that time as well. Everything was put on for us as a matter of course, but only later on in my schooldays, did I realise that there were ulterior motives behind it all. All we had to do was just “play along”.

The child-friendly system of the German Democratic Republic (former East Germany) exerted full control over my life, which I just took for granted. There were several incidences which made me pause for thought, concluding that something ‘just wasn’t quite right with it all’(i.e. the essay on my pen), however I was far too deeply engrained in the system as a whole to really be able to stick my neck out and seriously air my grievances.

Communism as it really was

Towards the end of my school years I had still set my sights on becoming a vet. Nevertheless, before I was able to embark on my dream career, studying for it in Meißen, I had to have practical training related to working with animals. I could have decided to work in a zoo, becoming certified as having done such a job, but clad in dungarees looking after monkeys, elephants, crocodiles, and zebras was not my ideal

I could work for the same qualification at the LPG, private farmers and farmhands officially being deemed no longer to exist. My main venue would be at the technical college, and to my dismay in the cowsheds.

Now I was able to experience counter side of communism. Everything that I had been taught and painstakingly learnt about communism over the years at school and what I actually saw in practice simply didn’t match up. Theory and practice had become contradictory to me.

Whenever the trainer noticed that he or she had a conscientious and diligent worker on their hands, they were used as easy labour for adults in every aspect of working in the cowsheds so that they could casually take two or three days off at a time. This gradually angered me, and I began to give vent to my rebellious feelings. Eventually I was moved to another training place under a fully dedicated communist manager which at first I treated as rather exciting, quickly giving way to feeling harassed. Nowadays I am glad that I been through this all, so that I can better empathise and thus help those who likewise have had the same sort of experience.

This is an example of the absurd nature of the communist system in former East Germany: On a rainy Monday morning while still living at my mother’s flat in Löbau I made my way half-asleep to the bus stop, having an early morning shift. To reach the bus stop I had to circumvent crossroads, where one was supposed to have crossed over one road at a time, but I was simply too lazy for that. I slipped diagonally over the road in my conspicuous yellow raincoat given to me by my uncle in west Germany with the prominent sticker of the growing youth peace movement in East Germany(a sword being knocked into a claw of a plough) on the front.

Unfortunately, I had omitted to see the policeman present there. He stopped me in my tracks, issued me with the standard torrent of abuse, but only once he spotted this sticker on my raincoat! He was angry at the sight of this, bellowing at me the whole time, making it quite clear that if I didn’t take off this disgraceful article of clothing representing the evil capitalism from the West he would see to it straight away that I would be wearing prison uniform with its standard yellow stripes instead.