Follies Of Communists A Hot Ticket German Entrepreneur Pokes Fun At Past, Plans To Take Show On Road Along Route 66

More than six years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, making light of eastern Germany’s communist past is good business.

At least that’s what advertising executive Ralf Heckel has found. He has organized more than 30 “Ostalgie” - “Eastalgia” - festivals across Germany, drawing thousands of people to theme parties in night clubs and town halls that are part spoof, part homage.

The people who attend the parties seem to have come far enough since reunification to take a light-hearted trip down memory lane. At the same time, the parties evoke a common identity for a part of the country struggling with legacies of its past, including high unemployment and western Germans’ resentment that so much state aid is being pumped into the east.

Heckel’s show carefully avoids political commentary while toying with familiar images from communist times.

At the entrance, employees dressed in old military uniforms require party-goers to exchange their Western currency for old East German marks to buy drinks.

The “Easty Girls,” a quartet of young singers, dance around a dead ringer for former East German communist boss Erich Honecker, who smiles, gives speeches and plays a harmonica.

The parties are popular across Germany - even in the West, where many people had little or no contact with what lay beyond the Iron Curtain.

Heckel is even planning a U.S. tour. This month he will travel from Chicago to Los Angeles along old Route 66 with his show and a fleet of 14 Trabants - the tiny, sputtering two-cylinder cars that were the mainstay in the East.

But the parties are most popular in eastern Germany, where revelers come mostly out of curiosity, to meet friends and dance.

On a recent Saturday in Leinefelde, 185 miles southwest of Berlin, more than 3,000 people paid $8 on a recent Saturday for a little Eastalgia.

As elsewhere in eastern Germany, capitalism has been a shock for this community of 37,000 people. The town’s textile mills have closed, and unemployment hovers around 17 percent.

At the party, 16-year-old Gerhard Arndt abandoned himself to the thumping grooves of communist-era rock anthems and Western music, three youth competition swimming medals he won in the drab old days draped around his neck.

“Back then, they wouldn’t have allowed something like this,” Arndt shouted over the music.

Heckel, 27, said he realized a few years ago that fellow eastern Germans were ready to have some escapist fun with a socialist past that was quickly swept away after reunification took shape in 1989.

“In this new era, the lifestyle of the typical east German has been turned on its head,” Heckel said. “A totally new society has taken hold, and some of the aspects of the old, like a sense of community and team spirit, have been lost. I decided maybe I could fill a void, to show how it was back then, like you look at a photo album at home.”

At the Leinefelde party, older patrons surveyed the proceedings from along the wall or from rows of folding chairs arranged in the back of the gym. Few of them expressed any interest in turning back the clock.

“I came out of curiosity, but I don’t want to go back to the old days,” said Edith Glorius, 38, who helps her husband run a cement company. “There are probably people who are worse off than they were before, but we’re better off.”