Back at the ranch

WHEN THE FIRST McDonald’s opened in East Germany, in December of 1990, the company was unsure how American food would be received there. On opening day the McDonald’s in Plauen served potato dumplings, a Vogtland favorite, along with hamburgers and fries. Today hundreds of McDonald’s restaurants dot the landscape of eastern Germany. In town after town, statues of Lenin have come down and statues of Ronald McDonald have gone up. One of the largest is in Bitterfeld, where a three‑story‑high, illuminated Ronald can be seen from the autobahn for miles.

During my first visit to Plauen, in October of 1998, McDonald’s was the only business open in the central market square. It was Reunification Day, a national holiday, and everything else was closed, the small shops selling used clothing and furniture, the pseudo‑Irish pub on one corner, the pizzeria on another. McDonald’s was packed, overflowing not just with children and their parents, but with teenagers, seniors, young couples, a cross‑section of the town. The restaurant was brightly lit and spotlessly clean. Cheerful middle‑aged women took orders behind the counter, worked in the kitchen, delivered food to tables, scrubbed the windows. Most of them had worked at this McDonald’s for years. Some had been there since the day it opened. Across the street stood an abandoned building once occupied by a branch of the East German army; a few blocks away the houses were dilapidated and covered in graffiti, looking as though the Wall had never fallen. That day McDonald’s was the nicest, cleanest, brightest place in all of Plauen. Children played with the Hot Wheels and Barbi that came with their Happy Meals, and smiling workers poured free refills of coffee. Outside the window, three bright red flags bearing the golden arches fluttered in the wind.

Life after Communism has not been easy in Plauen. At first there was an outpouring of great optimism and excitement. As in other East German towns, people quickly used their new liberty to travel overseas for the first time. They borrowed money to buy new cars. According to Thomas Küttler, the hero of Plauen’s 1989 uprising, thoughts about Friedrich von Schiller and the freedom of their forefathers soon gave way to a hunger for Western consumer goods. Küttler is disappointed by how fast the idealism of 1989 vanished, but feels little nostalgia for the old East Germany. Under Communist rule in Plauen, a person could be arrested for watching television broadcasts from the West or for listening to American rock ’n’ roll. Today in Plauen you can get dozens of channels on cable and even more via satellite. MTV is popular there, and most of the songs on the radio are in English. Becoming part of the larger world, however, has had its costs. Plauen’s economy has suffered as one after another, old and inefficient manufacturing plants closed, throwing people out of work. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Plauen has lost about 10 percent of its population, as people move away in search of a better life. The town seems unable to break free from its past. Every year a few unexploded bombs from World War II are still discovered and defused.

At the moment, Plauen’s unemployment rate is about 20 percent – twice the rate in Germany as a whole. You see men in their forties, a lost generation, too young to retire but too old to fit into the new scheme, staggering drunk in the middle of the day. The factory workers who bravely defied and brought down the old regime are the group who’ve fared worst, the group with the wrong skills and the least hope. Others have done quite well.

Manfred Voigt, the McDonald’s franchisee in Plauen, is now a successful businessman who, with his wife, Brigitte, vacations in Florida every year. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal , Manfred Voigt attributed his recent success to forces beyond his control. “It was dumb luck,” Voigt explained; “fate.” He and his wife had no money and could not understand why McDonald’s had chosen them to own its first restaurant in East Germany, why the company had trained and financed them. One explanation, never really explored in the Wall Street Journal profile, might be that the Voigts were one of the most powerful couples in Plauen under the old regime. They headed the local branch of Konsum, the state‑controlled foodservice monopoly. Today the Voigts are one of Plauen’s wealthiest couples; they own two other McDonald’s in nearby towns. Throughout the former Eastern bloc, members of the old Communist elite have had the easiest time adjusting to Western consumerism. They had the right connections and many of the right skills. They now own some of the most lucrative franchises.

The high unemployment rate in Plauen has created social and political instability. What seems lacking is a stable middle ground. Roughly a third of the young people in eastern Germany now express support for various nationalist and neo‑Nazi groups. Right‑wing extremists have declared large parts of the east to be “foreigner‑free” zones, where immigrants are not welcome. The roads leading into Plauen are decorated with signs posted by the Deutschland Volks Union, a right‑wing party. “Germany for the Germans,” the signs say. “Jobs for Germans, Not Foreigners.” Neo‑Nazi skinheads have thus far not caused much trouble in Plauen, though a black person today needs real courage to walk the city’s streets at night. The opposition to American fast food voiced by many environmentalists and left‑wing groups does not seem to be shared by German groups on the far right. When I asked an employee at the McDonald’s in Plauen if the restaurant had ever been the target of neo‑Nazis, she laughed and said there’d never been any threats of that kind. People in the area did not consider McDonald’s to be “foreign.”

Around the time that Plauen got its McDonald’s in 1990, a new nightclub opened in a red brick building on the edge of town. “The Ranch” has an American flag and a Confederate flag hanging out front. Inside there’s a long bar, and the walls are decorated with old‑fashioned farm implements, saddles, bridles, and wagon wheels. Frieder Stephan, the owner of The Ranch, was inspired by photographs of the American West, but gathered all the items on the walls from nearby farms. The place looks like a bar in Cripple Creek, circa 1895. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Frieder Stephan was a disc jockey on an East German tourist ferry. He secretly listened to Creedance Clearwater, the Stones, and the Lovin’ Spoonful. Now forty‑nine years old, he is the leading impresario in Plauen’s thriving country‑western scene, booking local bands (like the Midnight Ramblers and C.C. Raider) at his club. The city’s country‑western fans call themselves “Vogtland Cowboys,” put on their western boots and ten‑gallon hats at night, and hit the town, drinking at The Ranch or joining the Square Dance Club at a bar called the White Magpie. The Square Dance Club is sponsored by Thommy’s Western Store on Friedrich Engels Avenue. Plauen now has a number of small western‑wear shops like Thommy’s that sell imported cowboy boots, cowboy posters, fancy belt buckles, work shirts with snaps, and Wrangler jeans. While teenagers in Colorado Springs today could not care less about cowboys, kids in Plauen are sporting bolo ties and cowboy hats.

Every Wednesday night, a few hundred people gather at The Ranch for line dancing. Members of Plauen’s American Car Club pull up in their big Ford and Chevy trucks. Others come from miles away, dressed in their western best, ready to dance. Most of them are working class, and many are unemployed. Their ages range from seven years old to seventy. If somebody doesn’t know how to line‑dance, a young woman named Petra gives lessons. People wear their souvenir T‑shirts from Utah. They smoke Marlboros and drink beer. They listen to Willie Nelson, Garth Brooks, Johnny Cash – and they dance, kicking up their boots, twirling their partners, waving their cowboy hats in the air. And for a few hours the spirit of the American West fills this funky bar deep in the heart of Saxony, in a town that has seen too much history, and the old dream lives on, the dream of freedom without limits, self‑reliance, and a wide‑open frontier.