In Europe

are freshly plastered, the streets have a new layer of asphalt, the big town square is dotted with hanging baskets. I'm here to visit my old friends, Eckart and Inge Winkler, good acquaintances from the turbulent years after the
Wende
of 1989. They still live in the same flat on the edge of town, on Plittstrasse, and from their living room you can see the edge of the forest that stretches out for more than fifty kilometres, far into Poland. ‘
Das Tal der Ahnungslosen
’, the valley of the unsuspecting, is what East German intellectuals called this corner of the country where no Western television station could penetrate.
    Eckart is a construction engineer. He has his own design agency these days, his youngest employees barely remember the DDR. In his free time he is the pastor of the local New Apostolic Congregation. The members of his church are as active and lively as ever, but the number of young people is decreasing: they are all leaving for the West. This year he even lost his organist, a wonderful boy; he found a job in the West and he was gone.
    During the last decade, Eckart and Inge's flat has been completely revamped. Today, in 1999, Inge no longer does the laundry by hand. Central heating has been installed, a dishwasher is humming away in the kitchen and Eckart no longer has to get up at 5.30 to stoke the boiler with lignite. But they still don't have a television: they don't like trash coming into their home.
    This was the same attitude that kept them going throughout the DDR era: sitting in their flat with a good book, they could shut out the restof the world. Now the big yellow tile stove has disappeared, but I can still see that corner of the living room in my mind's eye: the stove radiating its gentle heat, their daughter Gudrun – home from school for a brief vacation – sitting against it and studying, their granddaughter Elisabeth playing on the floor, their son Burckhard tinkering in his room, their other daughter Alund making a doll from an old handkerchief and a tennis ball. Alund's husband, Jens, was a conscript in the army.
    Ingrid worked in a paediatrics clinic, Eckart worked for the Christoph Unmack construction firm. They did not have a lot of money, but the rent was low, the company saw to a warm meal every day, and the state guaranteed a secure existence.
    It was late February 1990 when I first stayed with them. The border with the West had been thrown open barely three months earlier, the DDR was still intact; it was right before the first free elections for the
Volkskammer
, and a colleague and I were putting together a radio portrait of the
Wende
in this forgotten corner of Germany. Around 5.30 a.m., at first light, the streets were blue with the smoke from hundreds of stoves and furnaces. A little procession of greyish-green Trabants put-putted across the big Zinzendorfplatz, the same square where the SA had marched in the 1930s, where the Soviet soldiers were buried after 1945, and whence – long, long ago, people said – the aroma of lime blossom could be smelled ‘all the way to Berlin’.
    The city had about 12,000 inhabitants in those days, and most things revolved around the big Christoph Unmack works, which manufactured railway cars, prefab wooden houses and more. The few shops in the square sold carrots, cabbage and grey writing paper.
    The town itself was founded in 1724 by Moravian Brothers, led by Ludwig von Zinzendorf. Those pious refugees from Bohemia and Moravia also gave it its name: Niesky, meaning ‘humble’ – and that is how life there remained; quiet, sober, modest. Yet the collapse of the wall precipitated a great many changes: enthusiasts set up a branch of the New Forum opposition movement, a few hundred people held a candlelight march on Zinzendorfplatz, and in early December the fifty local Stasi agents were almost literally chased out of town by an angry crowd.
    After that, things happened quite quickly. The price of a new Trabant dropped by fifty per cent in three months. The neighbours purchased asatellite dish and began watching only West German television. Eckart, who had been required until recently to ask permission from his bosses for every international telephone call he made, could suddenly cross the border whenever he pleased. Gudrun already had plans to visit family in Canada that summer. ‘It was as though we'd been living in a scary fairy tale all that time,’ she said later. ‘We were as happy as rabbits that had been let out of