The Forest Train from Gotha to Reichenwalde

If the United States of America can still be thought of as a ‘melting pot’ of nationalities and cultures, then Germany of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries can perhaps be thought of as a high-speed intersection of the same sort.?There are safety features in place, signals and rules of the road which, if observed, can help avoid collision.?But, even the USA would be hard-pressed to claim more diversity than its former enemy and now trusted ally in West-Central Europe which has not been monoethnic for a longer time than most people realize. ?According to the ?great historian Alexandra Richie, (Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin, 1999), the reign of Friedrich III Hohenzollern, ‘Old Fritz,’ Frederick the Great,?that King of Prussia ?said to his ministers one day that he was sick and tired of seeing nothing but blonde hair and blue eyes, and why didn’t we get some Greeks and Italians to come live in his kingdom.?Why indeed??If Old Fritz could only see New Germany today.?Of the Vietnamese, Japanese, Nigerians, Kurds, Turks, French, Romanians, Koreans, Ukrainians, Serbo-Croatians, Czechs, ?Russians, Ethiopians, Chinese, Thais, Spaniards and Sri Lankans, et al, with whom I have been personally acquainted and whom I have even befriended in some cases, at least one of each is a fellow traveler I met in Germany.?

Everyone has a reason to be there, to be anywhere really, but that can be because of the lack of an exit strategy, or even a desire for one.?The Peasant and Worker State of the German Democratic [!] Republic [!!] was part of a great exchange of science and technology within the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union and within the even wider global and ‘eternal brotherhood’ of socialist democracies.?This was to maximize the improvement of industry, technology and science over against the capitalist mania for money and world domination.?If we are old enough, we have all heard this sermon before.?Quite seriously there was a COMM-intern and Komsomol concern for a brain-drain to the West.?This was an especially serious preoccupation where the People’s Republic of Vietnam was concerned, a nation committed to winning its independence from Western colonialism (first the French, now the Americans and the nations of SEATO), whether the Chinese, even older rulers of the Viet Kingdom, or the Russians helped or not.?The Americans and indeed the League of Nations had been given their chance to?befriend Vietnam at Versailles, but France refused to let Ho Chi Minh speak, and America and its racist President followed suit, even though Ho in his manifesto named Thomas Jefferson, not Marx and Engels, as the father of his country.?The fact was in the 1960s and ‘70s that young Vietnamese men, women and children, the future of the country, were being bombed in their cities, burned in their villages and dying on he field of battle.?They had to be rescued and educated and trained and to return to Vietnam alive someday.??East Germany offered to help.?So, it was ultimately for this reason that I found myself on a little train in the Thuringian forest one afternoon with two lovely young Vietnamese ladies doing what Vietnamese people and most of the population of East Asia do on public conveyances.?They were polite and quiet and considerate of others.?

But how did we get there??It was not by bus, not his time.

It was I think mid-September 1989.??Having just arrived with my family in Hameln to take up my pastoral duties, and having just been installed in the Abbey of Saint Boniface, I was called away on a job for the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Society, something in which the Lutheran Territorial Church of Hannover supported me wholeheartedly.?I was to travel for the second of three times in my life from West Germany to East Germany, the border still more or less intact, but crumbling.?I was to meet with the East German ‘Bonhoeffer Committee’ which existed under the auspices of a federation of Protestant Churches (Lutheran, Calvinist, Methodist, Moravian mostly) officially sanctioned by the Communist state under Erich Honecker.?I remembered the tension of a similar crossing of the border in 1984 when ?I delivered a paper to this same group, but also with representatives, from all chapters of the International Bonhoeffer Society.?There I had made some fast friends among the Easterners, and I was looking forward to seeing them as I had done, some of them, just the previous year in Amsterdam.?Things were becoming fluid all across the western flank of the East German border.?Third countries such as Austria and Czechoslovakia were letting the East German ‘tourists’ just not return home, but rather go on to West Germany where they were automatically citizens.?One might have thought of all this as a promising sign, except for something that had happened in China earlier that summer—Tiananmen Square.?

Erich Honecker was a bit nervous, looking at his increasingly slipping hold on power and at his citizens’ holding of their own Tiananmen Square-style demonstrations each Tuesday night on church squares all across the GDR outside of Berlin, with everyone given a candle to hold so that they could not pick up a stone.?The stones and the bricks were there, delivered in great piles by the dump-truck load in the middle of the night from Monday to Tuesday, just waiting for the people’s pent-up anger to explode.?Honecker, it was later discovered, had given police, border guards and the German People’s Army the ‘shoot to kill’ order, which they had followed many times when it came to shooting and killing small groups or solitary individuals in the back trying to break out of his prison state.?He called it ‘the Chinese Solution.’?In the Kremlin, Michael Gorbachev got wind of this,?called Honecker, and told him in no uncertain terms that, if he committed such a crime, the Soviet Union would not back him up, and that all Soviet troops stationed on East German soil would be strictly confined to barracks.??

Honecker’s intentions were rumored.?That took no genius to divine.?The Communist party newspaper, Freies Deutschland (‘Free Germany’) threatened the mostly Lutheran bishops for organizing these so-called ‘peace demonstrations,’ and accused them of ‘revanchist’ tendencies, the desire to get even with the Socialist regime for the defeat of Germany and its partition.?I was going to be meeting with some of those very bishops that weekend, some of whom had been students of the martyr to the Nazis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.?Compared to Hitler’s henchmen, these people were just amateurs.?The bishops were not afraid and were all old anyway.?I was not yet forty, however, and still remember the feeling I had on having to hand over my passport to the People’s Police for the duration of the brief conference.

But, speaking of that meeting, how did I get there and what did the Vietnamese have to do with it??Instead of crossing at Marienborn as usual on the way Berlin, I took a train from Hameln and Hannover that crossed elsewhere, since I was not headed for Berlin.?I was headed for where Martin Luther at least said he still thought all the witches of Germany took off from came home to roost, the Thuringian Forest around Gotha. It was a jolly trip in a full compartment of East Germans, some getting their first look at an American.?I noticed three things right away that were different from 1984, the last time I had crossed: (1) No drug- or other contraband-sniffing dogs on the train.?(2) Friendly, downright jocular East German border guards (“They’re just making nice because they know something’s going to change,” quipped one of my fellow passengers under her breath). (3) The prettiest border guard I ever hope to see at any border anywhere in this world, and telling me that I looked much nicer in person than in my passport [!].?That excitement over, we approached Gotha.?One of my companions, a man of about 60, gave me some sage advice which I should have followed.

“Do not under any circumstances eat at the railway canteen.?There’s a nice hotel just down the street where you can get a good and very cheap meal.?Don’t eat here!”?Of course, I did.?What if I missed my train??What if the People of the Peasant & Worker State noticed thought that I was snotty American imperialist who thought he was too good for the Bahn-Restaurant?!?And then, why had no one told me that the entire Red Army and German People’s Army were on their last summer maneuvers and that they were apparently all here, at the Bahnhofsplatz in GOTHA?!?There they were, all over the place, the German soldiers looking attentive but otherwise bored and the Russians looking like 12-14 year old Boy Scouts, crowding around their Sergeant or Lieutenant Scoutmasters, all talking at once and terrified.?I often think of those faces these days.?I was not leaving the Gotha train station.

In I walked to a confusing sight.?No problem finding a seat, because almost no one was there.?Knowing German restaurant customs, I was fully prepared to share a table with someone, but there was no one there except a couple of Russian officers, one quite rotund, knocking back alternate shots of vodka and brandy, nothing to eat in sight.?My Russian not being all it should be at that point, or now, I decided not to invite myself to their table.?Instead, I sat down at the table nearest me and the door out to the platform. And I noticed two things on the table, and they were not a salt and pepper shaker.?The first was a little folded note, which I noticed on all the other tables, all the empty tables, and on it was printed, “Schichtwechsel,” ‘Change of Shifts.’ Well, the labor unions certainly ran that place.?I wondered if my father, a union man, would have approved.?And then, there was the other thing to keep me company, and it was looking right back at me, I think.?Apart from some palmetto bugs I have seen, this was the biggest and fattest cockroach I had ever kept company with. ?I would say ‘German cockroach,’ except that we were in Germany and there they are French cockroaches, just like the measles.?This standoff went on for what seemed like an eternity.?I checked my ticket and itinerary, my watch, my roach.?There was still no server or anyone who seemed in charge in sight.?Perhaps this was the anarchist side of state socialism.?Finally and finally she came, tired, expressionless, fed up with life, like those girls I remembered from the bus station in Joplin, Missouri, long ago.?There was no menu, but before I could say anything she said, “Phosphat, Bockwurst und Pils—drei Mark!”?(‘bun, hot dog and a beer—three marks!’)?“OK,” seemed the only appropriate response, and mercifully short.?Away she went and back she came.?My friend meanwhile had scurried off to somewhere else before I could even order for him.?I paid and fairly gobbled my lunch, which was just as bad as my fellow traveler had told mine it would be, and went out to wait for my train which was due in about half an hour.?

The East German Railway, still calling itself the Reichsbahn, was many things, but punctual was not one of them.?I reserved my seats, but that was with Deutsche Bahn in West Germany, something that would have been considered a joke in the East.?But it meant that I was standing at the right spot, and at just the right time and that I got on exactly the wrong train, double-deckers, mind you, very impressive.?What I got on was not the little Forest Train from Gotha to Reichenwalde, No!?I got on a Russian and German troop train.?What to do??There were more German troops than Russian standing near me, so I asked one of he Germans just that.?“Oh,” he said, unperturbed, “just get off at the next stop, at Eisenach, and take the next train back to Gotha.”?“But, I don’t have a ticket for that.”?“Nobody’s checking tickets.?Nobody’s checking anything anymore.”?Interesting statement.?I did as the soldier told me, got my one and only glimpse of the gleaming cross atop the Wartburg where Martin Luther had translated the Bible, ?and, when I got off at Gotha, I found the most official looking but non-military person I could, who turned out to be the station master.?This kind gentleman practically took me by the hand to where I was to wait.?“Stay here, and just get on.?It is a little train.”?And soon the little train arrived, something so cute you thought that perhaps it was a toy.

Very different from a troop train or any train I had ever taken, this was like entering a German restaurant.?Everyone said hello, not just the conductor-engineer.?Returning their greeting, I stowed my luggage, found a comfortable seat and enjoyed the ride, for a little while.?Up and up and around and around we went into the deep forest on a late Friday afternoon.?And then someone thought he had to ruin it all.?The Vietnamese girls were seated up right next to the conductor, probably a place of greater safety they knew from experience, and a drunken lout made his strap-hanging way like an orangutan up to the front from the back, making a swerving beeline for the girls.?I translate in Trumpish, ”So how come you’s don’t go back where you’s come from??Just take a look in the mirror.?You don’t belong here.?Get out!” He may have been an employee for the Reichsbahn, or just one of the nobler souls I have ever seen in action,?but, stone sober, the man sitting right across the aisle from me very nonchalantly stood up, walked up and said to the drunkard, “You shut up right now after you apologize to these ladies, or my friend here is going to stop the train, and you are going to get off.”?An apology was forthcoming, ”Es tut mir leid” (‘Sorry’), but it was an apology nonetheless, and our hero added his to it very gallantly. ?The little train continued on to Reichenwalde and to other stops I would love to explore, at least in my imagination, but this one, I assure you, I did not make up.

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?Guy Christopher Carter