In Europe

within a few months thrown up an ultramodern shopping mall,and the people of Niesky were packing their cars as though they'd been doing it all their lives: washing machines, colour TVs, it was one huge catch-up operation. Most people could afford it as well. Life in the DDR had in many ways been so inexpensive, with so little to be had, that almost everyone had saved up a considerable nest egg.
    Niesky made a sprint through time; in one fell swoop it seemed to have swung from the 1950s to the 1990s. Everything it had taken a comparable Western European town forty years to achieve happened here in less than forty months. The grimy café on Görlitzer Strasse, where two years earlier the drunken and crippled comrades had spent their evenings arguing with the five local punks – ‘Do you snots have any idea who did the work around here for all those years?’ they shouted – had been turned into a kind of French tearoom: white tiles with light-blue trim, ornamental chairs, quiet music and neat tables covered in damask. Only the bicycle repairman had kept something of the flavour of the old days: he sold two varieties of bells: the shiny West German ones for five marks, and the old, indestructible East German bells for one mark.
    Niesky in 1992 was one great paean to capitalism. The aerials on the old party headquarters were rusting, still aimed at Berlin. The building now housed an employment agency, and in its hall sat dozens of the unemployed, waiting with number in hand. One man there told us he had worked for a storage firm where, back in the days of the DDR, sixty employees had once whiled away their days, even though there was barely work for ten. Today that firm employed five people. Unemployment in Niesky was hovering around thirteen per cent, and rising all the time, especially among women. The fairy godmother had seen to that as well.
    A modern bathroom had been installed in the Winklers’ little flat, the old DDR radio had been replaced by a brand new CD player, a computer screen flickered in one corner, and Eckart's ten-year-old Wartburg had made way for an almost new Opel.
    In a way, Niesky during that second visit seemed like a German variation on Twin Peaks: it was a town with a past, with a secret everyone shared and which constantly threatened to disturb the peace and quiet of the present. Beneath the town's friendliness and
Gemütlichkeit
lay a morass of confusion, of right and wrong, of loyalty and betrayal. Almost everyweek, another, even deeper layer was revealed: betrayal after betrayal, disloyalty beneath the old disloyalty, evil that went on and on.
    Among the advertisements for ‘introductory visits to the Costa Brava’, the
Sächsische Zeitung
ran almost daily articles revealing local Stasi activities. It turned out, for example, that a doctor from a nearby psychiatric institution, acting on orders from the Stasi, had poisoned a dissident clergyman with psychoactive drugs. The clergyman – now a cabinet minister in the state government – had appeared on television after seeing his dossiers. He looked like a broken man.
    Eckart and Inge wanted nothing to do with any of it, although they were sure that both of them had hefty dossiers as well. ‘Don't let the future be ruled by the past,’ they said.
    On 6 October, 1991, Gudrun married her
Wessi
fiancé, a young doctor; at the wedding, all of the contradictions between the two Germanys seemed to meet. Eckart and Inge felt there were far too many guests, the West German family found the party much too sedate. The West felt that Gudrun's East German girlfriends were too docile and subservient, the East was amazed that the West German women depended on their husbands for their status. West felt that East was badly dressed, East found the West German women silly and lazy, and Gudrun found herself caught between the two extremes. It made her feel, she said later, ‘almost like a traitor’.
    1993 was an important year for the family. Eckart had shaken off the yoke of his former DDR managers and, together with Jens, had started his own company in a little attic room. They earned a mere pittance in those days – even the purchase of a new drafting lamp was reason for intense consultation. But their enthusiasm was boundless, and gradually the jobs began trickling in. The bucket-dipping comrade was still managing director of the old plant. But he had done his best for all his employees, and Eckart had gradually – to his own surprise – come