I remember very little about the sexual activity that was not precluded that evening (although I’m pretty sure the ludicrous ripped state of my tights was remarked upon with glee as they were dispatched), although I certainly don’t remember it being bad. But I mostly remember this: it was with sincere pangs of longing—perhaps even love—that, at the precipitously arriving hour of seven in the morning, I wrested myself from the embrace of the bourgeois down comforter, back into my gunmetal dress (which, alas, reeked of the Jack Daniel’s that had emanated from my pores) and faux-fur outerwear, and out into yet another razor-sharp late winter day. I showed up to the Stasi tour half an hour late, to see firsthand the various bleep-bloopy devices and medieval torture techniques favored by the very people I claimed to prefer over the uptight assholes who dared to furnish Charlottenburg hotels with luxury bedding.
It turns out I wasn’t the only one suffering from early-onset Ostalgie that might have come from a disingenuous place, or at any rate an unsavory one. In this I was joined by a rather sizable demographic—one that has, alas, all but disappeared in the intervening decades. This disappearance is not, as you might think, the natural result of twenty-first-century German capitalism’s sensible-suited dominance, but rather it owes to the relentless whims of Mother Nature herself. I speak here of the venerable extinct creature known as the East Berlin Oma, or granny: violet of hair, slow of gait, thick of dialect, crotchety of disposition. If, in the late 1990s, you happened upon a purple-coiffed Dame of Friedrichshain, Prenzlauer Berg, Treptow, or Lichtenberg and asked her about reunification, chances are she would tell you without hesitation she preferred things the way they were before.
I had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of just this sort of lady—her name was Frau Helga—during my third week in Berlin, after losing yet more of my personal effects on German public transit. This time it was the S-Bahn, on my way home from language class one Friday afternoon, when I got distracted by the East Berliner Oma’s diametric opposite, the Wessi pensioner with nothing better to do than inform complete strangers exactly how wrongly they are doing everything. She had been yelling at me for speaking too loudly to Diane. “Ruhe!” she cried across the train car. “Sie sind nicht auf der Bühne!” (“Shut up! You’re not onstage!”)
Despite the indisputable fact that I definitely could have taken that old broad, I found this incident rattling enough that I lost my bearings and skedaddled without my purse, sacrificing yet another handbag to the uptight, towheaded gods of German transit. When I returned to Gertrud’s that Friday afternoon with the irate West-German octogenarian surely in hot pursuit—my apartment key having mercifully been stashed in the pocket of my faux-fur jacket—and realized what I’d done, I nearly knocked myself unconscious smacking my own forehead. For in that purse, along with several extravagant MAC lipsticks, directions to the TestDaF I was definitely going to flunk that coming Monday, and an entire week’s budget in cold hard deutsche marks, I’d also been carrying my U.S. passport.
Even under the best of circumstances, it is never advisable to lose track of an important document in Germany—not because it’s particularly dangerous (although a genuine U.S. passport would, in 1997, have fetched a good price), but because Germans really lack empathy about this sort of thing. Germans simply do not misplace their stuff, like, ever, so the sneering superiority they display when an American admits to having done so is nigh on intolerable. Sure, we won the war, and the war before that, and the Cold War, too, but at least they never lose their goddamned car keys. I had only recently learned this when, just a few nights before I lost my purse, after dancing all night at the Metropol club, I reached into the pocket of my omnipresent black stretch trousers, only to find that my coat-check ticket had been sacrificed to the gods of the dance, or possibly dropped in the toilet. When I explained this to the coat-check woman, she looked at me like I was a cannibal.
“Verloren?” She snorted. “Wie ist das nur möglich?” (“Lost? How is that even possible?”)
“Well,” I said, “I had it, and now I don’t.”
“Gibt’s doch gar nicht,” she said, which means “I can’t believe it,” but literally means “That doesn’t exist at all.” The Metropol club literally did not have a protocol for lost coat-check tickets, because literally nobody had ever done it before in the history of the Metropol club.
The ideal situation would have been simply not to tell any Germans what had happened, go straight to the U.S. embassy, and wait for four hours to get a replacement passport, with nobody to see my transgression but a fellow American witness (to swear under oath about my citizenship), and a giant smiling portrait of Bill Clinton. But that wasn’t possible, because German offices—even the American embassy—go dead to the world beginning about 2:00 P.M. on Fridays (and on every made-up-sounding holiday in the Gregorian calendar). I had no way of rectifying the situation until at least Monday—when, of course, I would be required to present said passport as identification at the DaF exam I wouldn’t be able to find and would certainly not pass. For the entire weekend, I was a stateless person, dependent upon the kindness of strangers, or at any rate having to borrow money from a bemused Gertrud, as soon as she was able to wrap her mind conceptually around such a bizarre and unthinkable act as the one I had committed.
“What do you mean you lost your passport?” she asked.
“Well,” I said, “curiously, what I mean is that I had it, and now I don’t.”
“Gibt’s doch gar nicht.”
On Monday, I showed up to language class ready to beg someone to come spend the day with me at the embassy (and lend me two hundred marks)—only to find a genuine Deutsche Post snail-mail letter addressed to me, care of the study-abroad office, in German handwriting:
Esteemed Frau Schuman
On the night of 25 February 1997 you left your handbag on the S3 train. I recovered it and brought it home. You may telephone me and set up an appointment to come retrieve it between the hours of three and five in the afternoon on Tuesday or Wednesday.
Regards
Fr Helga Haider
Although exceptions certainly exist, when a German finds something that doesn’t belong to him—even if that something is a wallet, with credit cards and a passport and cash—he methodically and calmly tracks down the original owner and returns it, cash included. That’s not to say that Americans are inveterate found-wallet thieves—I once managed to drop my wallet onto the New York City subway tracks, and it was recovered by an MTA worker who dutifully went through every business card in it until he found someone who could call me. But when I finally shuffled to the Union Square police station to recover my possessions, the forty dollars or so in cash was understandably gone, and I didn’t even care, because any cash in a found wallet is due reward for the finder. It’s the American way.
What blew my pomade-crusted little head off about the whole debacle was how unsurprised every German I told about it was. “Of course someone found it,” they all said. “Of course she’s returning it to you.” Natürlich!
“It was very stupid of you to leave your purse on the train like that,” said Frau Helga, when I finally worked up enough courage to telephone her. “Very, very, very stupid.”
“Danke schön,” I said.
“You really shouldn’t have done that. You’re lucky I found it. It’s a purse, I told myself when I saw it. A purse! Who leaves a purse sitting around? What a stupid thing to do.”
“Jawohl,” I said. “Danke schön.”
“And then I saw that you were an American exchange student, of all things! Do Americans often just leave their purses on the train?”
“Danke,” I said. “Vielen, vielen Dank.”
Frau Helga eventually gave me directions to her apartment and implored me to come recover my possessions as soon as possible, and I obeyed. Her building was a sooty concrete number in an even more distant part-of Prenzlauer Berg than Gertrud’s. The place was substantially larger than ours, with an actual living room and an
actual sofa, upon which the plump, mercifully slow-talking Helga welcomed me to sit, and upon which my purse waited for me—with, unsurprisingly, all of its contents, down to the pfennig. Everything in the apartment kind of matched my vintage purse, since it had easily been there since 1962. The furniture, the tchotchkes, even (especially) the tin of wafer cookies Helga graciously served me were aged; I didn’t nibble on them so much as gnaw. It occurred to me that Helga, living alone as she did, probably didn’t entertain much, and I wondered with a bit of sadness how long that tin of cookies had been waiting for company.
“So,” Helga said, “was machen Sie hier?”
“I have come in order to pick up my purse,” I said.
“No,” she said, “I mean here in Berlin?”
“I am a student of German literature at the FU.”
“That’s nice,” said Helga. “I don’t like to read.”
“Ja,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say.
“Your German is very good,” she said. Aw. I liked her.
I studied her face as she sipped her coffee out of a tiny, delicate cup. She was ruddy and small-eyed, not graceful but definitely resolute. I looked down as I sipped my own coffee, then realized she was studying me, too.
“Sie sind so schön,” she said. (“You’re so beautiful.”)
I ventured an awkward Danke and clawed my coffee cup in one hand and the Lucite handle of the purse in the other.
“When you’re beautiful, life is easier for you,” she mused, which brought another underwhelming Ja from me.
“I was never beautiful,” she said, “and I had a hard life.”
I wanted to know: How hard, and why? Hard in what way? I thought it would be rude to ask, though—and I also didn’t know how to say “in what way” yet. So instead I just looked at the nicely framed picture of a teenage girl that Helga had placed on her mantel.
“Meine Tochter,” she said, following my eyes. (“My daughter.”) “She wasn’t beautiful, either.”
This also wasn’t a lie—Gertrud was right about Germans’ bluntness, and I really could have asked Helga about the difficulty of her life and she wouldn’t have found it offensive—but I just couldn’t bring myself to say to this sweet old lady, Yes, your daughter is really unattractive. Even though I guess it was true, at least in that photo, which showed a young woman, about eighteen or nineteen, with squinty eyes, a bulbous nose, squishy cheeks, and an unfortunately prominent snaggletooth. As I mulled the linguistic nuance that would have enabled me to say something palliative (she had, for example, very nice hair), I realized that Helga had used the past tense about her daughter. Meine Tochter war nicht schön. My daughter wasn’t beautiful.
Only then did I start to notice that gazing at me from every available surface in the apartment was the same picture of the girl, which looked like a standard-issue class portrait, likely from her last year of school. It dawned on me, as Helga talked and I understood about a third of what she said, that when there is a framed picture of a girl on the mantel and that same picture embroidered on a pillow, and indeed all the pictures of that girl stop at a certain age, that girl is dead. And she was. And it was awful.
“An accident,” Helga explained. The daughter, with the homely face and the hard life, had been killed in the early eighties. Helga didn’t have any other children. As I did my best to chew her wafers and gulp down her coffee, she looked at me like she wanted to swallow me whole, a grief-stricken witch to my poorly comprehending Gretel. I don’t know if I would have been able to say the right thing to her even if I’d been a native speaker of German. In my present state it was hopeless. I looked at her and nodded solemnly with a mouthful of wafer.
“But you,” she said. “You’re so beautiful and you’re still so young.”
“Danke,” I said, because I couldn’t say anything else.
Eventually the conversation turned to something that didn’t make me want to hurtle myself face-first into a river of my own tears: die Mauer, the Wall, as in, nostalgia for. The veritable ease of life for the beautiful, and whether or not I belonged to that demographic, and the anguish of grieving one’s own child—those would have been beyond my meager, self-absorbed little skill set even if I’d been able to sustain a conversation. But the relentless encroachment of crass Western capitalism into the helpless Eastern districts, and its veritable steamrolling of the elderly population, which was just minding its own damn business—this I could get behind. I perked up immediately. “Everything’s so different now,” Helga said, “with the Mauer gone.”
Nod.
“Worse.”
Another vigorous nod.
Oh boy.
I froze and one of those infernal wafer cookies, never making good progress to begin with, lodged itself in the back of my mouth. Not particularly loquacious before, I was now rendered 100 percent mute. My experience with blatant American racists (as opposed to the passive-aggressive or dog-whistle kind we all know and probably don’t love) was limited to my maternal grandfather, who used the n-word in front of me once before my mom read him the riot act. And my German acquaintances were limited to progressive-minded younger people. What I would soon find out from my program directors upon relating this anecdote, though, was that the Frau Helgas of the former East were not anomalous, and their sentiments unfortunately extended to some of their grandchildren, who had taken up with neo-Nazis. For several years after reunification, in fact, the Berlin guide books warned Jews and people of color to avoid the more remote eastern districts altogether, for fear of violence against “foreigners.”
All of my insistence about the superiority of the East was suddenly threatened: They might not be keen on yelling at me for walking in the wrong direction on the sidewalk, but were they racist? Because even someone as self-absorbed as I was knew that was worse. One of the many unfortunate side effects of the Eastern Bloc’s isolation was a near-total lack of immigration from any noncommunist country. The West, on the other hand, had instituted a “guest worker” program after the war, which had brought in a massive influx of cheap labor from Turkey and North Africa. This program was, of course, exploitative—but at least it meant that folks in Düsseldorf, Cologne, West Berlin, Frankfurt, and Munich had at least seen a person of color before 1990.
In 1997, despite the confusion of my Jewish grandpa—himself the son of a man who’d escaped from pogroms on foot at the age of eight, bribing the guards at the Polish border to fire their guns into the air and deliberately miss (basically the Jewish emigration tariff of 1884)—as to why I’d want to devote my undergraduate years to German Studies and set foot in the Fatherland to begin with, and indeed, despite my own selectively Jewish righteousness and insistence that everyone around me feel guilty all the time, there were still more neo-Nazis in my own Fatherland than there were in Germany. But what neo-Nazis there were lived in my precious East Berlin and fed off the xenophobia and fear engendered by five decades of communism, fomenting the very resistance to reunification that I had found it so charming to adopt.
I finally managed to swallow my wafer cookie, washed down with the last of the now-tepid coffee. “Once again,” I said, cradling my purse safe in my lap like a little baby, “I thank you so much. But now I must be going.”
“Of course,” said Helga. “But be careful out there. It’s dark now, and this neighborhood—it’s terrible. You’ll walk an entire block without seeing a German anywhere.” (Including, of course, myself.)
I took one last glance at the needlepoint pillow of Helga’s daughter and let the heavy door of her apartment shut behind me. I heard three locks click as I shuffled down the pitch-black hallway, fumbling for the thirty-second-long light switch I knew was somewhere.
6.
Wohngemeinschaft
n. apartment share, abbr. WG, from dwelling and community.
ex. Triangular room in WG for illegal sublet, DM 300. Near transportation and entertainment
. Electricity, hot water, ceiling-swing, some cigarettes, cultural metamorphosis, unlimited petty tyranny incl.
Boooooop. Boooooop. Boooooop. Boooooop. Boooooop.
The German landline issued its disconcerting monotone beep as I held my breath on the other end of the receiver. It was my worst exchange-student nightmare: calling a German stranger unsolicited; failing to be understood—or, worse, being sure that the German stranger was silently deriding my language abilities. Please don’t pick up, please don’t pick up, please don’t pick up. A rather counterproductive prayer, to be sure, as one doesn’t find a new place to live by letting the phone ring, hanging up, and then talking to nobody. On the fifth or six boooooop, a sharp voice answered.
Come on, Schuman, I told myself. Sei tapfer! Be brave! There was no way I was getting stuck out in the Freie Universität dorms, twenty-five miles from anything interesting, with only a bunch of dorko international students to keep me company in my dingy complex that was basically prison with beer. What the fuck was I going to do out there? Study? All the cool kids in my program had taken our possibly misguided directors’ offer to refund our dorm fees and search for housing independently in correspondingly cool Berlin WGs (Wohngemeinschaften, literally “living communities,” the German name for an apartment shared with someone who isn’t one’s family). And since I already lived in a WG with Gertrud, I couldn’t be expected to stop now and be subjected to such indignities as rules and not being cool. What the fuck use was living in the coolest city in the world, at its second-coolest time in its history (after Weimar, natürlich), if I wasn’t going to be cool? This was a potential tragedy. Too bad the only way to find a WG was to step directly into the gaping Nietzschean abyss of terror that was subjecting random potential roommates to my halting, phlegm-filled telephone Deutsch. This I did by answering ads placed in the Zweite Hand, a free weekly that was like Craigslist, but in print and with slightly fewer dick pics.