N. 46/47 Palomar : voyeur, voyant, visionnaire - ViceVersaMag

LUISE VON FLOTOW
NIGHTS 1ST MEHR SO WIE ES NIEMALS WAR
BERLIN 1993
NOTHING IS LIKE IT NEVER. USED TO BE
This graffito on a Berlin wall says much of what both East and
West Germans are feeling these days: in the past, i. e. sometime
before German unification, life was easier, more affordable
and more predictable. There were clear answers to questions, or
just fewer questions. The bad guys were easily identified: fascists or
Communists or consumers - good and bad Germans, regressive and
progressive Germans, depending on which side you were on. And th.
good guys were either the "free" Wirtschaftswunder
had made West Germany the luxurious and rather ar
was by 1989, or they were the modest and
unassuming anti-fascists, the "better"
Germans, who still embodied the German
work ethic and had become the most successful
East Bloc nation. Again, depending
on your affiliation.
The German sigh "nichts ist mehr so
wie es friiher war" underlies this graffito:
nothing is like it used to be (in the good
old days), everything has changed (for the
worse). But when you read "nothing is like
it never used to be", this mystic past of the
good old days is destroyed. The word
"never" gives a bitter ironic twist that
wrecks nostalgic retrospection implying
that memories have been skewed by disappointments,
uncertainty, fear and a sense ot impendin
social disorder. Indeed, it queries the very existence of the past?
contradictory formulation accentuates the social paradox that underlies
much of contemporary German life and is located in its dissymmetry.
The West has annexed the East, and is labouring under the
"burden" - financially, politically and socially. The East feels usurped
and colonized, devalued and humiliated, a state of affairs that has
called forth diverse responses: while certain sections of society are
responding with hopeless depression, others are producing moralistic
verbiage, and still others taking recourse in brutality. Some have, of
course, developed the enterprising business sense kept under cover
during the communist period and are flourishing, body guards in tow.
The caustic Berlin humour that sums up these difficulties brings no
^
real relief for the unconfortable climate dominating Germany these
days.
Life in East Berlin and the countryside beyond is in a state of constant
change, as though vast energies had accumulated after forty years
of quiet fairy tale sleep - an image that East Germans writers Martin
Ahrends and Jens Sparschuh have both adapted to describe the situa-
- or after forty years of stagnation, a predominantly western view.
^pfeg^^nges are largely one-sided, imposed by West Germans, in
t Klaus Schlesinger, East German writer in western
exile, recendy described as being akin to
marital rape pie Zeit 4.6.1993).
My meeting in Mecklenburg-
Vorpommern, the provinces north of
Berlin, with a West German investor and
speculator in the late winter of 1993
revealed some of the more scurrilous
aspects of these changes. Herr Heser, from
Bremen, is the new and proud owner of a
country manor and the surrounding park
land. The property was expropriated by
Soviet forces in 1945, and was later managed
by the village council. A permanent
financial burden on the local council, it
went up for sale in 1990. By this time, the
25-room house was inhabited by only
jj^ widows, all refugees who had ended up there at the end
foTTd War II. They each had one room subdivided by makeshifts
walls into Kiiche una Kammer (kitchen and "chamber") and they shared
a toilet somewhere along the corridor. The rest of the house was
empty, except for one room on the ground floor near the entrance that
was the village grocer)' store. The former Saal, a formal reception
room, where 10 refugees from farther east were housed in 1945 had
had a new coat of paint and been turned into a public space for village
events; its original parquet flooring, ripped out for firewood in
1945, had never been replaced. The rest of the place was quite gray.
Moreover, it was damp, urgently needed a new roof, new windows and
doors, complete wiring and plumbing jobs, repairs to the foundations
as well as new stucco throughout. Why would Herr Heser, smart West
NUMÉRO J6-47 • VICE VERSA 51