![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Off-Topic: Day of German Unity
Oct. 3rd, 2008 10:23 pmIf you blog on LiveJournal, you know that when you log in, there's a prompt on your screen, often some question intended to give you a topic to write about in case you don't have a post topic in mind. I never use this blog to write about my personal life--it's strictly on-topic about costuming production topics related to my career.
However, today's question really got me thinking; i have a piece of personal history that really applies and which i'd like to share because i feel it is important to speak of such things, so indulge me this complete digression. I promise to return to the regularly-scheduled programming in my next post.
[Error: unknown template qotd]
Whoever wrote this question must never have spent any time in an Eastern Bloc country or near a border, or else they never would use a phrase as insipid as "nostalgic for the seeming simplicity of the Cold War."
For a couple months in 1988, i went to the Albrecht Durer Oberschule in what was then West Berlin. I lived in an area of the city called Rudow with the Mianowiczs, Dieter and Ilona, who had a daughter my age named Tanja. Rudow was at the very end of a U-Bahn (subway) line in the lower east corner of West Berlin. In fact, every day, riding that subway to school, we passed through two closed stations that went under East Berlin. The U-Bahn would slow down enough for us to see the empty platforms and an occasional armed patrol soldier, but of course it never stopped.
Two blocks from my house in Rudow was a public park called Rudower Hohe. In the center of this park was a hill. The land had once been flat there, but during the war, large sections of Rudow had been bombed, destroying whole city blocks. When the city was rebuilt, those blasted sections were bulldozed into a huge pile over which sod was laid. Trees were planted and flowers and paths put in, and the park of Rudower Hohe was created very literally upon the ruins of the city. I often went walking there, in that park, with my German friends from the Oberschule and other American exchange students. Sometimes when we were out of school for hitzefrei, we would take boxes of Schultheiss beer, drink and cut up and play music and joke around. (Hitzefrei is like a snow-day for heat--in hot weather, they'd let school out because they had no air conditioning and it was "too hot to concentrate on learning." Being from the American South, we thought this was hilarious, since hitzefrei happened whenever it got over about 90 degrees.)
At the base of the hill at the entrance to the park, you could see the Berlin Wall, die Mauer. Several of my classmates risked arrest to spraypaint graffiti on it. One of the Americans, Mike, wrote in green spraypaint, "Hi Mom! Having a great time in sunny West Berlin. Wish you were here!" and had his photo taken in front of it, which he sent home to his family. (This was well before cell phones with cameras and Facebook and Flickr, of course.)
On top of Rudower Hohe's hill, you could see over the Mauer, into niemandsland--no man's land--and beyond that to East Germany. Ostdeutschland, the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, which was of course anything but democratic. You could see the successive fences of razor wire, and the dog runs with dobermans pacing their length. You could see the guard tower, and sometimes, you could see the guards carrying their machine guns. We would wave at them vigorously when we saw them looking out at us. They never waved back.
Tanja's father, Dieter, told me that people often tried to escape East Germany into Rudow because there was a turn in the Mauer there, a place where they thought they had a better chance of making it across the niemandsland, the razorwire, the dog trench, a quirk of the architecture that seemed like perhaps the guards might be less likely to notice, if only long enough to get across. Dieter said he'd never heard about any of them making it across there though; all they heard when it happened was the barking of the attacking dobermans, the screams, and the gunfire.
So while i will always value my time spent as an exchange student in West Berlin during the late 1980s, no, i don't feel "nostalgic" for any misplaced "seeming simplicity." I can't forget the casualties of the Cold War, people shot down in cold blood mere blocks from where I and my friends lived, simply because they wished to leave the nation in which they were held prisoner.
However, today's question really got me thinking; i have a piece of personal history that really applies and which i'd like to share because i feel it is important to speak of such things, so indulge me this complete digression. I promise to return to the regularly-scheduled programming in my next post.
[Error: unknown template qotd]
Whoever wrote this question must never have spent any time in an Eastern Bloc country or near a border, or else they never would use a phrase as insipid as "nostalgic for the seeming simplicity of the Cold War."
For a couple months in 1988, i went to the Albrecht Durer Oberschule in what was then West Berlin. I lived in an area of the city called Rudow with the Mianowiczs, Dieter and Ilona, who had a daughter my age named Tanja. Rudow was at the very end of a U-Bahn (subway) line in the lower east corner of West Berlin. In fact, every day, riding that subway to school, we passed through two closed stations that went under East Berlin. The U-Bahn would slow down enough for us to see the empty platforms and an occasional armed patrol soldier, but of course it never stopped.
Two blocks from my house in Rudow was a public park called Rudower Hohe. In the center of this park was a hill. The land had once been flat there, but during the war, large sections of Rudow had been bombed, destroying whole city blocks. When the city was rebuilt, those blasted sections were bulldozed into a huge pile over which sod was laid. Trees were planted and flowers and paths put in, and the park of Rudower Hohe was created very literally upon the ruins of the city. I often went walking there, in that park, with my German friends from the Oberschule and other American exchange students. Sometimes when we were out of school for hitzefrei, we would take boxes of Schultheiss beer, drink and cut up and play music and joke around. (Hitzefrei is like a snow-day for heat--in hot weather, they'd let school out because they had no air conditioning and it was "too hot to concentrate on learning." Being from the American South, we thought this was hilarious, since hitzefrei happened whenever it got over about 90 degrees.)
At the base of the hill at the entrance to the park, you could see the Berlin Wall, die Mauer. Several of my classmates risked arrest to spraypaint graffiti on it. One of the Americans, Mike, wrote in green spraypaint, "Hi Mom! Having a great time in sunny West Berlin. Wish you were here!" and had his photo taken in front of it, which he sent home to his family. (This was well before cell phones with cameras and Facebook and Flickr, of course.)
On top of Rudower Hohe's hill, you could see over the Mauer, into niemandsland--no man's land--and beyond that to East Germany. Ostdeutschland, the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, which was of course anything but democratic. You could see the successive fences of razor wire, and the dog runs with dobermans pacing their length. You could see the guard tower, and sometimes, you could see the guards carrying their machine guns. We would wave at them vigorously when we saw them looking out at us. They never waved back.
Tanja's father, Dieter, told me that people often tried to escape East Germany into Rudow because there was a turn in the Mauer there, a place where they thought they had a better chance of making it across the niemandsland, the razorwire, the dog trench, a quirk of the architecture that seemed like perhaps the guards might be less likely to notice, if only long enough to get across. Dieter said he'd never heard about any of them making it across there though; all they heard when it happened was the barking of the attacking dobermans, the screams, and the gunfire.
So while i will always value my time spent as an exchange student in West Berlin during the late 1980s, no, i don't feel "nostalgic" for any misplaced "seeming simplicity." I can't forget the casualties of the Cold War, people shot down in cold blood mere blocks from where I and my friends lived, simply because they wished to leave the nation in which they were held prisoner.
