https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/11/_the_new_new_normal.html
Crossing the rather grim Grenzübergangsstelle on my first visit to communist East Germany, two things struck me with uncommon force: the gun-emplacement towers every few kilometers along the Hanover-Berlin autobahn, and the comportment of East German drivers. The towers were certainly intimidating, constantly reminding us that we were at permanent risk and convincing us never to drive eccentrically or conspicuously.
But I found the conduct and “positioning” of drivers in their Trabants and Wartburgs even more disconcerting. I noticed that many of these drivers did not adopt the 10-2 grip on the wheel, and almost none practiced the more casual and relaxed one-handed style. Instead, they tended to place their wrists on the top of the steering wheel and let their hands hang limply behind it, like laundry on the line. An inveterate list-maker and note-taker, I began keeping count and found that of the 100 cars I tallied, 32 drivers exhibited this slack or droopy posture, as if they were somehow resigned, enervated and spiritless.
This was, for me, a kind of Joycean epiphany of what life in a socialist or communist regime must entail—it was all in the wrist. As Jan Morris wrote in Fifty Years of Europe, recounting her visit to East Germany,
“Travelling from west to east was like entering a drab and disturbing dream, peopled by all the ogres of totalitarianism, a half-lit world of shabby resentments, where anything could be done to you, I used to feel, without anybody ever hearing of it, and your every step was dogged by watchful eyes and mechanisms.”
