The unwitting East German millionaire

From our People are People series.

During the recent German celebrations of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the melting of the Iron Curtain, we saw the power of memory, and many "Then and Now" comparisons flooded the media.

Every story of then and now had its own rationale, of course. Some were blatantly partisan along the lines of bad then - good now. Others seemed to seek to reassure readers that their memories were indeed correct, that there had been a huge wall with guard towers, mines, razor wire, and that you would be shot if you crossed into the plowed fire zone.

To us, the stories of everyday life were more interesting than the iconic imagery.

The ever present reports of East Germans not owning much, of having to wait 20 years for a car, had left such a deep impression that the term privately owned business seemed odd in the context of East Germany.

Didn't people work in these huge firms that were all state owned? Turns out, they did not. Most of them but not all. Many small business owners were allowed to keep their companies, so that when the Wall came down, this country of about 14 million people still had around 90 000 small businesses, out of some 300 000 in 1949.

Mind you, they were strapped into the tight bureaucracy of the land. They couldn't set their own prices, they couldn't freely pick and choose their customers.  As tolerated but certainly not loved holdovers of an old system, these companies were under greater scrutiny than the collectives and mega farms.

When it was all over, the generous, rich West sent in armies of advisers to help in the transition of these small cash strapped outfits.

So, one day, a Western chamber of commerce person arrived at a private window making and glazing company and was baffled after the owner had showed him the premises with a huge stockpile of supplies.

You guys are....millionaires, the Western man finally said.

25 years later, the company still does business. Asked if there was anything he missed, the old owner told the reporter: We were so used to doing business by just shaking hands, we were ripped off to the tune of more than 100 000 marks before we rigorously stuck to written contracts.