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S T O R I E S F R O M T H E S E A S I D E →ally fulfilled its intended purpose, had never providedholiday respite to a single worker. That information mustbe included somewhere in the exhibition, but it is wellhidden, as if the museum’s operators want to downplaythat one disappointing fact. It was just a dream after all,a utopian fascist fantasy that collided with other fascistfantasies and lost. Never fulfilling its destiny of becominga workers’ paradise, the bleak, uncompleted buildingwas passed from military command to military command(after the Soviets, the East German military, theNVA, moved in, followed by the West German military,the Bundeswehr, who made use of the crumbling monstrosityuntil they in turn abandoned it in 1992). At leastthe Prora Seebad has the distinction of being the onlyKdF holiday resort to make it past the planning stage, atleast it exists, seemed to be the message of the display.We did notice a more reflective-looking exhibition inanother part of the vast complex, the government andfoundation-funded Dokumentationszentrum Prora, butby then we were KdF’d out and skipped it in favor of the“Wiener Kaffeehaus” on the top floor of one of the wings,where we had some greasy food in the company of wistfulformer NVA men who had come to show their sons andwives the section of the museum commemorating theirpart of the story. From there we continued our walk alongthe endless building, past the disemboweled section thatfell prey to the Soviets, where we climbed a fence andcut across the freshly planted lawn dotted with spankingnew restroom buildings belonging to a new youth hostel/campsitefacing the KdF structure. Pitch your tentshere, kids, your view of the sea blocked by the wreckageof history, graffiti-smeared and shattered, where yourgrandparents and great-grandparents would have frolickedtheir summers away if things had gone differently.Evenings you can party at the Disko Miami that inhabitsanother wing, set apart from the rest by the bright pinkpaint on the façade. It must be dankly cavernous in there,and drafty and perfect for hard industrial music and asreminiscent of Miami as the café upstairs is of Vienna.On our way back to Binz we fantasized about makinggood on the utopian promise of the KdF building. Whynot put it to use as a holiday resort for today’s “workingclass,” J. suggested for immigrants, illegals, the precarious,and the unemployed. “Imagine Prora crawlingwith Africans and Arabs and Slavs and Turks, vacationingin the house Hitler built for his Aryan workers.”The idea made me a little giddy. Paint and gardensand curtains and art could take an edge off the uglinesswithout canceling the egalitarianism, I mused. J. madea big, enthusiastic gesture with his arms. “Just picture it:self-exploiting ‘free’ (here he made quotation marks inthe air with the index and middle fingers of both hands)lance cultural workers like us could be given a holidayfrom their laptops, we could sit under the trees on theroof of the KdF building, letting the waves and the sunand the Baltic breeze unbend our hunched spines andloosen our creaky joints.”“And the welfare recipients,” I crowed, “they wouldlose the pallor in their faces and the hopelessness intheir eyes as they wander through the forests overlookingthe sea and scratch their initials and those of theirlovers into the trees next to the gouged names of thegenerations that went before.”We were walking faster now, both talking at once. Wecould see it in front of our eyes: children of all differentcolors running wild on the beach, getting in the way ofthe silvery sedate health spa patients. The mysteriouslifeguard tower we had noticed on the beach in Binz,looking like a space ship about to take off, another pieceof local architecture no longer fulfilling its purpose,could be reclaimed for parties and reading groups, itsenormous oval windows framing the view of the gentle,clear fading sea. There would be evenings of dancingtogether in the Disko Miami or on the sand, learningeach other’s languages, borrowing each other’s sunscreen.After a couple of weeks we would start feelingit, the strength, growing gradually out of our joy, and wewould be so full of ideas of how to use it and of motivationand we would exchange addresses and return to ourcities and towns and villages and asylum-seekers’ hostelsand we would be different and stronger and most ofall, we would know each other and the different thingswe needed and wanted which have nothing to do witha Volk or a war but with life in a million different facets and we would get to work right away. And when our energiesstarted to flag or the everyday worries of rent andchildcare and dealing with the bureaucrats threatenedto sap our energy, we would head back to Prora, whereevery room faces the sea.20
← S T O R I E S F R O M T H E S E A S I D E 〈〈〈〈〈Latvian Morning. Lettischer Morgen./ / / poem & translation: B e t t y Q u a s t , B E R L I Ngreen and green againin gentle birch leavesbreathes the winda wide sky spanning them aboveand from the blue streaks of the cloudsseeps early more and more the whitish lightin the car Latvian radio is onunder the bridge the foamof deep-blue wavessmall timber-houses are warmingin the swardlike many little suns - dandelionfrom the sea ships are washed uppromising distant shorespigeons in the tree-tops, and thousandsupon thousands of sparrowsdiving in, translucentthe air, like clear water, mirror-glassthus the veil is liftingand I make out your facein this strange, beautiful landgrün und nochmals grünim sanften Laub der Birkenhaucht der Winddarüber sich ein weiter Himmel spanntund aus den blauen Wolkenstreifen sickertfrüh immer mehr das weiße Lichtim Auto spielt lettisches Radioprogrammunter der Brücke schäumentiefblaue WellenHolzhäuschen wärmen sichim Grasteppichwie viele kleine Sonnen - Löwenzahnvom Meer treiben die Schiffe anverheißen FerneTauben im Blätterdach, und abertausendSpatzentauchen ein, durchsichtigdie Luft, wie klares Wasser, Spiegelglasso hebt sich der Schleier anund ich erkenne Dein Gesicht,in diesem fremden, wunderschönen Land21
Page 2 and 3: ~Content.p. 02 My Sea. Male or Fema
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