Off-Topic: Day of German Unity
Oct. 3rd, 2008 10:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
labricoleuseIf 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.
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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.
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no subject
Date: 2008-10-04 02:48 am (UTC)Thank you very much for this post. As a dabbler in history I realized how foolish and absurd that question was and felt quite angry about it, but I was born in 1984, so I was only ever peripherally aware of the U.S.S.R. or East Germany while they still existed. I truly appreciate your insight as a witness to the inhumanity of the period.
Again, thank you.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-04 02:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-04 02:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-04 03:02 am (UTC)I visited East Berlin while i was there, and i also went to Prague when Czechoslovakia was still an Eastern Bloc nation, but it was my memories of Rudower Hohe that stood out the most when considering life in the Cold War and what it was like back then.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-04 12:02 pm (UTC)It's completely understandable when you consider that LiveJournal is owned by a Russian company with ties to the Kremlin. It seems that the leadership of both our countries would be very happy to return to the political situation thirty years ago.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-04 03:13 pm (UTC)You're right: given LJ's ownership it's more likely that it was written by a Russian person. I know no Russian and can't speak to its translation, but it does make me ponder on how, if it were written by a German, then the original word was probably Sehnsucht, which is usually translated as "nostalgic" but which i always understood as having a rather different connotation--"nostalgia" is usually something we think of as a fond, rose-colored remembrance, whereas when Germans talk about having the emotion of Sehnsucht, it's got a bit more depth, complexity, and fatalism or resignation about it. If you translate it literally, it means something along the lines of "languishing while searching," or "yearning while searching," perhaps.
I know Germans who feel Sehnsucht for the days of the DDR; it doesn't surprise me. The DDR days were their punishment and absolution as a people for the perpetration of the Holocaust, if you will. In fact, I think the similarities of the Holocaust/two-Germanies with slavery/Reconstruction made pairing my Southern American high school with a German Oberschule for an exchange program a particularly interesting cross-cultural experience.
Again, i have no experience with Russian culture or language, so i won't speculate on their take on the prompt, though i'd be interested to read some Russian responses...except that i can't read Russian! :)
Thanks for your comment, which spurred me to think more about Germanic perspectives on the prompt.