"We Are All Talking More"

By Susan Tifft

The Felix Dzerzhinsky School in Erkner, a suburb of East Berlin, is named after a Russian of Polish descent who founded the dreaded Cheka, the forerunner of the Soviet KGB, in 1917. Two months ago, half a year after the Berlin Wall fell, the teachers asked the town council to drop the name. They are still awaiting action, but they are patient and confident -- with some reservations. "It would not be proper to ignore our entire history," says Barbel Dudelitz, an English-language teacher who has yet to take down portraits of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in her classroom.

At Dzerzhinsky, as at other East German schools, the shift from a communist to a democratic government has caused euphoria as well as anxiety. With unification promising yet more change, teachers and students are content to move cautiously as they adjust to the new political realities.

Even so, Dzerzhinsky, with its 270 pupils ages six to 16, is not the school it was a year ago. The first class of the day still opens with a student announcement: "Attention!" Andre Berndt, 16, two tiny hoop earrings glistening in each ear, bids his classmates. "Mrs. Dudelitz," he continues, "Class 10 is ready for the English lesson." Before the revolution, the students replied with "Friendship," the official greeting of the Communist youth organization. Now they simply say, "Good morning."

More substantive changes are afoot. The ouster of Margaret Honecker, wife of deposed leader Erich Honecker, as Minister of Education put an end to a compulsory "civics" course heavily freighted with Communist Party dogma. In its place is a social-studies curriculum called Gesellschaftskunde, which encourages teachers and students to range over all sorts of topics. Recently, pupils spent an hour pondering "personal happiness." "It's such a new situation," says Uwe Klauke, 22, a trainee physics teacher. "We know so little about self-reliance and developing your own values. But I think inhibitions are breaking down. We are all talking more."

That openness is yet to be reflected in textbooks, which have not been replaced. Modern dictionaries explaining high-tech and slang words are not available; geography teachers complain about a lack of up-to-date maps. "We learned about the working classes' victories over capitalism," says Annegrit Wernicke, 16. "But we hardly knew anything about Napoleon."

Religion, banned as a subject of instruction under the Communists, is no longer off limits, although there are not enough trained teachers or texts to make such study practicable. Anja Meixstatt makes do by introducing the concept of religious differences to her German literature class through discussion of Nathan der Weise, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's work about religious tolerance. "They may understand Lessing," she explains, "but they don't know about Israel."

There are troubling touches of xenophobia at Dzerzhinsky. "I don't think it's right when the Vietnamese here get so many motorcycles and we don't have any left to buy," says one pupil, prompting exclamations of "Fidschi!", a derogatory term for Vietnamese guest workers, from the back of the room. No one seems to know that the Vietnamese, under an agreement between East Berlin and Hanoi, get half their wages in the form of goods, including motorcycles and bikes, which they can ship to their families back home.

Teachers are grappling with gaps in their own education. Since Russian- language study will be made elective rather than compulsory on Sept. 1, Russian-language instructors are expecting little demand for their services. Once a week teachers from neighboring schools come to Dzerzhinsky to learn a more popular tongue: English. "One day our qualifications may not count," frets one of the Russian instructors.

Economic insecurity only adds to such worries. Dudelitz, 39, who has 16 years of teaching experience, receives a net monthly income of 1,100 ostmarks, or about $655 at the 1-to-1 conversion rate that went into effect July 1. That is roughly a third of what a West German counterpart is paid. "We will be earning even less when rent subsidies disappear and pension contributions rise," she says.

Whatever the fears and doubts at Dzerzhinsky, they are overshadowed by new freedoms. When the town council named a woman with ties to the Communist Party as replacement for the retiring headmaster, the faculty rebelled and put up its own candidate: Barbel Dudelitz. The embarrassed appointee withdrew, and Dudelitz handily won in a balloting of teachers that excluded council members. As soon as she is confirmed, Dudelitz, who under the old regime was not allowed to travel abroad, hopes to make a lifetime dream come true: a language-study tour of Britain.

With reporting by Rhea Schoenthal/Berlin