I had already gotten the Begrüßungsgeld(welcome money) before the borders opened, on my only visit to the West. After the wall fell I didn’t get it again. In the 80s more and more people I knew either left or were considering it. Many an evening was spent talking about it.
I lived in Potsdam and was apprenticing as a font and graphic painter. In 1988, at the Xth Art Exhibition in Dresden, I saw a picture that really moved me. It was of a desolate treeless landscape and an asphalt road leading to nothingness. That same year, I finally got permission to visit my grandmother near Cologne for her 81st birthday. She had moved to the West as a pensioner. I had applied a year earlier but my application had been arbitrarily rejected.
Going from Potsdam to East Berlin felt like a small world tour. With the Ferkeltaxe (lit. piglet taxis – small railcars in the GDR), Sputnik (trains on the outer ring of Berlin), the S-Bahn to Friedrichstrasse, through the Tränenpalast (lit. Palace of Tears Palace, a colloquialism for the border crossing) over the border and then with the Mumien Express to the west.
In Cologne I got the Begrüßungsgeld(welcome money) twice because my Aunt knew that you could also get it from the church. So I had 200 DM. With it, I bought the book “The Townhouse in Potsdam ” by Friedrich Mielke, which wasn’t available in the East. My wife – we were newly married – and I wanted to restore a house in the Dutch Quarter (Potsdam) and we thought it could be of use. I paid 100 marks for the book and the rest I used for day tickets to the museums in Cologne and a lunch at McDonald’s.
In Cologne I saw an advertisement for the Raiffeisenbank. You could see a treeless landscape and a road leading to nowhere with the tagline “We free the way”. In that moment I thought I could not stay long in the West, that I did not need this free way. In the end nothing came of the house because the wall fell but my son now has the book.