Chapter 21: Split in Two

We split the office equipment in half, packed a van full of supplies, and made our way to the newly absorbed island of West Berlin. When we arrived, we found that the building contractor had run behind schedule and the mission office was still under construction. It was officially the first day of the Berlin Mission’s existence, but newly called President Schulze was attending his son’s wedding and wouldn’t arrive for several days. We stared at each other, a leaderless lot with nowhere to go, wondering what to do next.

Eventually we got things sorted out, and I finally met President and Sister Schulze in person. He had been a Russian teacher under the old regime, he told us in our first meeting together, and had never learned a word of English. I asked him if he had met any Russian Church members yet. Before he could answer, Sister Schulze quickly corrected my grammar; she had apparently been a German teacher back home in Bernburg.

“By the way,” President Schulze said, “my wife, Inge, will also have a role as a member of the office staff.” From that day forward, she would get to apply her skills by correcting my letters until I got them perfect.

After this brief introduction, he shared some stories with us to give us a better understanding of their background. His stories of the post-war years struck me in particular. His father had been killed by American soldiers, and here he was leading an army comprising primarily draft-age Americans. The irony was obvious. But the story that enthralled me most was the tale of how he came to know the Church. In the destitution of the post-war years, his widowed mother had dragged him up and down the streets scavenging for food. At one point during their daily struggle for survival, his mother looked up to see a printed placard that read, “Will man live again?” along with the address of the Church. Having witnessed so much of death of late, this placard struck enough curiosity in her that she visited the church and eventually became a member.

It was a touching story, but for me the most mind-blowing element was to discover that the placard had been placed by none other than Herbert Schreiter, who at 41 years of age was serving a four-year mission away from his family to rebuild the Church in East Germany. The printed placard sounded vaguely familiar to me. So when I went back to the apartment that night I opened up the folder with the album pages Herbie had copied for me. As I went back through the album pages from his first mission, I found a photo of a printed poster right next to a photo of him with Hamp. And the caption read: “Here’s one of the posters Hamp liked to make.” So there lay yet another circle: Herbie had applied sign-making skills learned from my grandfather to convert the man who ended up as my mission president. Some might make the case for coincidence, but I certainly felt like a greater work was underway.

Over the following weeks, the days in Berlin became quite adventuresome. We prepared for an onslaught of thirty new companionships, which meant a nearly impossible task of leasing thirty new apartments, acquiring thirty sets of furnishings, opening sixty new bank accounts, and taking care of related legal matters like driver’s license conversions, visa registrations, and countless other logistical concerns. All of these things had to be done under a system that was still caught between expired East German laws and new West German laws that hadn’t yet taken effect. In the interim, legal solutions were being implemented arbitrarily, and our frustrations mounted.

Adding to this bureaucratic chaos, an influx of hopeful workers had claimed every vacant apartment. Costs were rising dramatically in the East but wages had not kept pace and jobs were scarce. As a result, many former East Germans sought the higher wages offered by West Berlin employers. I was experiencing the effect first-hand: As prices rose, I watched my own savings account disappear at twice the original burn rate; as a result my mother had to return to work to support the missing half of my mission funds. I felt indebted and at the same a bit more accountable for my work. I began to understand what Hamp, Rulon, and others might have felt, knowing that their loved ones were putting in the hours back home just to keep them there.

The influx of immigrants from around the globe caused racial tensions as well. West Germany’s constitution, which was now beginning to apply to East Germany as well, guaranteed every newcomer a job and a roof overhead. The policy – adopted in part to beef up the labor force but also to combat the label of intolerance earned by the Nazi regime – looked good on paper; implementing and maintaining that policy, however, was another story. Most asylum seekers and Gastarbeiter lived in specially constructed housing blocks. Though slightly more livable than their counterparts in the former East Germany, the West Berlin apartments were likewise overcrowded, and conditions were deplorable; their residents certainly were not treated like guests.

Berlin not only has the status of being the largest German city – with twice the population of runner-up Hamburg – it is also well known as the world’s second largest Turkish city. The Turks, even those who had been living in Germany for thirty years or more, began to feel the brunt of a growing level of discrimination. Even at Church, the Turkish members complained of perceived feelings of resentment and hostility directed their way from among the Germans.

With barriers falling in rapid succession, a flood of immigrants from Poland, Yugoslavia, Romania, and other neighboring countries added to the dishevelment. The flood wave crested as new families entered Germany in the hope of providing their children with a better life. Disenchanted with the news that their jobs and apartments were going to foreigners, many Germans began to question and openly protest the government’s immigration policy.

When a new law guaranteeing German citizenship to anyone born on German soil – including those born to foreigners – took effect, flares erupted under the mounting tensions. Some German youth, no longer willing to do penance for their fathers’ historical intolerance, opposed the policy – ironically enough – with intolerance of their own. Neo-Nazi bands of skinheads roamed the streets of Berlin, wielding clubs on a discriminating hunt for immigrants. News reports covered beatings, stabbings, and fire bombings of the housing projects by violent street gangs.

Just as had been the case in the former East German cities, missionaries in West Berlin had sometimes been targeting foreigners in their proselyting efforts, and the German ward members sent numerous complaints to the mission office. We had been called to serve among the German people, they claimed, not the Africans, Afghans, Asians, or Turks. Again, there were no simple answers, but in light of the recent violence, the proselyting ban already in force in the East was applied to the worker housing complexes in West Berlin as well.

In the midst of a housing shortage and this tumultuous atmosphere, however, we still found ourselves on a desperate search for thirty new apartments around Berlin. I typed up an appeal from President Schulze to the Church’s Missionary Department to reconsider the numbers or hold the missionaries a bit longer in Provo. Managing Director Herman Crumb – MD of the MD – replied himself. It turned out the MTC was overcrowded as well. An expansion of the MTC was underway, but it wouldn’t be completed in time to alleviate the problem. The sixty flights were already booked, we were told, and he had faith that we’d find a way to accommodate the arriving missionaries. So the greenies were coming whether or not we were ready for them; and some executive in a suit, sitting in his high-rise office overlooking Salt Lake, thought a positive attitude ought to do the trick. Perhaps I hadn’t portrayed the gravity of the situation well enough in my letter. I drafted up a more detailed and pointed response, but President Schulze tore it up and told us to get to work. We were up against an insurmountable deadline, and I certainly had my doubts regarding our chances of success.

This period was an absolute blur; on some days, we would get up at 3 am and line up outside the Ausländerbehörde – the immigration office – in the dark. If we were lucky, they’d call our number before shutting down for the day; if not, we’d come back again the next day to find an even longer line of immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. Frustrating and chaotic as this scene was, we had the opportunity to strike up conversations with a captive audience. We met people from every corner of the planet – people who certainly added some perspective to our woes. Our complaints about the bureaucracy’s red tape paled in comparison to the medieval tales we heard from others standing in the same line. Political refugees told stories of pursuit, monitoring, and reprisals by their governments; economic refugees told us about empty shelves and unpaid wages from their employers; religious refugees told us of banishment, disownment, and dowry deaths dictated by their religious leaders. We had been whining to Salt Lake, cranky about missing a few hours of sleep; now our troubles seemed trivial.

Over the following weeks, one by one, apartments began dropping into our laps. The local Church members joined us in the hunt and spread the word; a friend of a friend would call the office with a lead, and we’d rush out to secure the lease. Housing applications that had been placed among huge stacks on some bean counter’s desk somehow managed to float to the top. Other Church members came forward with their own offerings, sometimes renovating their houses with new entrances and other upgrades to allow missionaries to live with them. Somehow – through mostly legal, though at times unconventional methods – the housing fell into place. By the time the last big batch of missionaries arrived two months later, sure enough, everyone had a place to stay. All was well, I wrote to Missionary Department. Within the Church Office Building, I could imagine Elder Gordon B. Hinckley poking his head into the board room where Missionary Department was meeting and asking if there were any problems with the troop surge in Germany.

Having read our report, Brother Crumb replies, “Not anymore.” Elder Hinckley smiles and goes about his other business.

As he files the report away next to my previous letter of grievance, I could almost hear Brother Crumb mutter under his breath, “I told you so.”

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When we finally got a chance to breathe, I realized that I had fallen in love with Berlin; interspersed with all of the craziness, we had managed to see every corner of the old capital, a metropolitan city if there ever was one. We saw the Reichstag that had sparked Hitler’s rise to power; we passed the Tempelhof airport that saw a cargo plane land every two minutes during the airlift; and we chiseled souvenir pieces off the few sections of the Wall that were still intact.

Though old news by now, the buzz surrounding the Berlin Wall’s collapse continued. On a P-day we toured the Checkpoint Charlie Mauermuseum, which still remained one of Berlin’s top tourist attractions despite the absence of its namesake next door. The museum was operated by a group called the August 13 Consortium, named for the dark day in history when the Wall went up in 1961. I was born on the 10-year anniversary of that infamous day; by the time I first crossed Checkpoint Charlie myself on a Cub Scout trip in the late seventies, the Mauermuseum already honored hundreds of victims killed during crossing attempts. When my mother sewed the commemorative patch – depicting a strand of barbed wire crossing a German flag – onto my Cub Scout uniform, I could hardly have imagined the Wall’s collapse.

Even though the Wall was essentially gone now, pieces of the Wall were still being sold everywhere, some genuine, some merely concrete rubble posthumously sprayed with paint. The whole city seemed to be abounding in ideas for what to do with the newly available open space in no-man’s-land. Should it be used for museums, for parks, or – far-fetched as the idea sounded at the time – maybe the seat of a new government?

Coupled with this excitement for the future was finally some unprecedented pride in the recent German past. Burdened by the guilt of sparking two world wars, for years Germans had not had much cause for pride on the international stage. Though their grandfathers were still unapologetic for their role in the Great War, the current generation still couldn’t forgive their fathers for the cataclysm of the Second World War and its hundred million casualties. With few exceptions, an entire generation had in some way been embarrassed to be German. Now this rising generation had something to be proud of: where their fathers and grandfathers had instigated war, they had ended one.

The Cold War – which is by any measure quite a misnomer, particularly if one happened to live in Afghanistan at the time of the Soviet invasion – had seemed to be an endless imposition just a few years before; most people with any sense of realism, echoing Einstein and supported by the opinions and projections of the day’s experts, felt that the only plausible end to the Cold War – if there were ever to be an end to it – would be in the form of an endless nuclear winter . In absolute contrast, a peaceful uprising in Leipzig had beamed courage and hope to the belligerent forces, spreading a wave of peace around the planet. The Germans people held their heads high, candles and pickaxes in hand, swaying with rock ballads epitomizing the Wind of Change. Hungary and Czechoslovakia likewise claimed the credit for themselves, but regardless of the origins of this perpetual chain of events, this generation had managed a tremendous feat: to end history’s most expensive conflict without bloodshed.

The excitement seeped into every aspect of life, penetrating pop culture in particular, which, in turn, propagated the frenzy. We got to see it first-hand as we made our way back and forth across the now-defunct checkpoints, trying to keep the missionaries on both sides of the old border supplied and legally resident. On one occasion we picked up extra furniture from a missionary apartment overlooking Potsdamer Platz, a massive public square. The missionaries there were still buzzing over the chaotic night when they had been confined to their apartment while hundreds of thousands of people flooded the grounds to watch Roger Waters perform The Wall live. Years before, I had heard an interview in which Waters claimed that the fall of the Wall would be the only condition on which the epic Pink Floyd piece would ever be performed again. At the time, I never expected it to occur in my lifetime. That the impossible had actually transpired right there was an awe-inspiring thought.

Symbols of the Wall’s collapse were abundant on billboards and other media. Posters for U2’s Zoo TV world tour, for example, were plastered everywhere, drawing heavily on already nostalgic communist relics. Their traveling concert stage featured the Trabant – the miniature East German car model that hadn’t changed in thirty years. The little vehicles were hoisted up, packed with spotlights that shone through their head light sockets, and spun around as stage lighting. One was even used to house the DJ who spun records between acts. Though the Ossies – as the East Germans were called – ridiculed the Trabants just as harshly as did their Wessie counterparts, the Trabant nonetheless held a cherished place in their hearts, and some were offended at the apparent mockery of their past. In any case, the cars made enough of an impact on the tour to earn themselves a permanent berth at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

We had our own little brush with rock and roll fame as well. At one point during our logistical escapades across Hamp’s old stomping grounds, we ran into a little old lady in a decrepit East Berlin apartment block. In days past, the only people who had dressed in suits and traveled in pairs were agents of the now defunct Stasi. Old pensioners, who were not quite in touch with the daily news developments and sometimes mistook us for agents, would scurry away from us if we approached. This particular lady looked right at us with suspicious bewilderment; I introduced myself when I passed her. She gave me even more of a puzzled look, so I repeated myself, much louder, “We’re with the Mormons!”

“Oh, that’s what I thought you said,” she answered, “I love the Ramones. Come on in!”

My companion and I laughed at the misunderstanding, but sure enough, her apartment was fully adorned in Ramones regalia. And right in the middle of the oversize posters on her wall was a framed picture of her holding a bass guitar. At her side, with his arm around her, was Douglas Colvin, a.k.a. Dee Dee Ramone, a founding member of the band and, as it turns out, her dear grandson. We didn’t get any concert tickets or autographed memorabilia out of the meeting, but we certainly took home a story we would wear out in retelling time and again.

For us as missionaries the most notable celebrities were, in contrast, those of the lesser known LDS microcosm. There was a tremendous interest in East Germany from Thomas S. Monson, Gordon B. Hinckley, and other members of the Twelve at Church Headquarters. Each General Conference included numerous references to the East German Saints and the miraculous chain of events in Eastern Europe. When Elder Oaks, Elder Wirthlin, and Elder Packer attended a regional conference in Berlin, we certainly felt like the focal point of the Church’s missionary efforts. When they dropped in for an intimate meeting to check up on the missionaries, the office staff was visibly nervous at the potential scrutiny and overcome by a tremendous sense of accountability.

In addition to our duties keeping up the mission finances, supplies, and paperwork, we began to find another task filling our time: printing tickets and organizing the accompanying firesides for other LDS personalities who were likewise making the rounds. Foremost in the public eye was Steve Young. The America Bowl – an attempt to spread “gridiron” football around the globe – featured a sold-out contest in Berlin, and we organized a gathering to capitalize on the event. After Brother Young addressed a standing-room-only crowd at the Tiergarten Chapel, countless prayers were heard as his faithful 49ers crushed the loathsome Chicago Bears. Lamanite Generation, the Young Ambassadors, and other traveling musical groups likewise passed through to see the breathtaking political changes for themselves.

A popular pilot named Uchtdorf dropped by on a layover to address a small crowd – I had never heard of him, but as Lufthansa’s Chief Pilot he was already a bit of a celebrity among the German Saints, who were proud to see one of their own promoted to a prominent position. Lesser known, but equally motivated LDS scholars, authors, and dignitaries also made the rounds, each with their entourage and accompanying firesides.

We felt like the backstage crew with an all-access pass; despite some of these perks of office life, though, I had a nagging feeling inside that this wasn’t what I had signed up for. Providing logistical support seemed more like a job than a mission. As I sat in my office chair printing up baptismal certificates and mailing off new membership records to Salt Lake, at times I envied the elders on the streets. We did get a limited amount of time to pound the pavement at the end of the day, but for a good chunk of my office time, we only had a single investigator. Although she wasn’t a member of the Church, everyone called her Sister Schröder. She was a widow who would invite us over for dinner once a week. She had heard all of the discussions at least three times; by all appearances she enjoyed the discussions and even seemed to accept most of the doctrinal points we covered, but she didn’t feel ready to commit to being baptized. I asked President Schulze what we should do about our ewige Untersucherin – our “eternal investigator.”

“Tell her it’s time to get baptized,” he said, “or you won’t be coming back to see her.”

We promptly followed orders, and – equally promptly – found ourselves without any investigators at all. I never did feel that a missionary’s success ought to be measured numerically in terms of converts to the faith, but this loss of our only glimmer of hope did make me wonder about the fruits of my labors. If nothing else, though, during my stint as an office elder, I had learned a brand new language called Beamtendeutsch – agency German. I had found evidence of every accusation Mark Twain alleged in his scathing review of The Awful German Language. In the process, I had grown used to conversing and writing solely in the passive voice, throwing in endless words I had chained together at will. Buried within the legalese documents at my fingertips, I had actually run across words longer than Twain’s iconically purported, longest word in the German language: Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän.

Sister Schulze’s red pen strokes on my draft letters had gradually subsided. Either my German was improving or she was tiring of the corrections. Finally one day, a letter came back from her review entirely ink-free. The letter was addressed to me. It was, perhaps, redundant to print my own transfer letter, but I brought it in to President Schulze for his signature just to prove to myself that I’d actually be leaving the office.

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