World | Other World Stories
Shopping spree in the West with 'welcome money'
With the start-up cash given by the West German government, easterners learnt to adapt to their new economic environment
- Financial Times
- Published: 00:00 November 9, 2009
- Image Credit: AP
- This November 10, 1989 photo shows East Berliners getting help from West Berliners as they climb the Berlin Wall, near the Brandenburger Tor (Brandenburg Gate).
Berlin: The Berlin Wall was 14 years old when Peggy Meinfelder was born in 1975, and she was 14 when it fell.
The young East German watched it come down on television and then, two days later, went with her father and sister to visit the West — in nearby Bavaria.
"I was very conscious of the fact that we were making history," recalls Meinfelder. "I forced myself to look at everything very carefully, until I got eye-ache."
After queuing for several hours to cross the border, they then joined the next queue, to pick up their DM100 Begrussungsgeld (or "welcome money") given to every easterner by the West German government.
Near the queue, locals were doling out used toys and bananas (the West Germans believed the East Germans didn't know what bananas were).
"But we had bananas from Cuba," Meinfelder says in exasperation. "Then the toys. Why used toys? It was so demeaning. I'm sure they meant well, but can't you see how on this first day the misunderstandings started?"
Nearly ten years later, during a degree course in product design in Stuttgart, Meinfelder was asked to make a machine that "dramatised the exchange" at the heart of commerce.
She constructed a foot-high box with a banana-shaped slit on the top and a tomato-shaped hole on the bottom. "At first, I was just amused by the idea of swapping a fruit for a vegetable, yellow for red, long for round," says Meinfelder.
But the more she thought about it, the more her first artwork spoke to history. "It seemed this was how I experienced reunification. First, everyone wanted it — that was the banana.
And then the trouble started, that was the tomato". In 1991, when disgruntled former East Germans protested at the large-scale closures of their factories, a tomato was thrown at the country's Chancellor, Helmut Kohl.
It wasn't just older East Germans who were disoriented by the sudden changes, says Meinfelder.
"On the one side, we saw the failure of our parents' generation, and on the other side, we were suddenly being told, ‘You can become anything you choose'. But how were we to do that without any role models to emulate?"
In 2002, Meinfelder began work on what would become her "100 Westmark" project. She asked people from her home town and region to donate the items they bought with their Begrussungsgeld — and to reminisce about that time.
"The people where I came from suddenly had a voice," she says. "These objects show the reaction — they are the reaction — of East German citizens [to their new situation]. They are symbols of the new order."
She points to a photo of two white shirts and the accompanying words of Monika J., born in 1947. Monika says she bought them because she thought "a double pack would be especially cheap".
Meinfelder looks up. "Isn't that amazing?" she says. "She's trying to adapt. We never had sales in East Germany, because the idea was that everything was always available at a fixed price".
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