German novelists on the fall of the Berlin wall: ‘It was a source of energy we lived off for years’
Thirty
years ago, the people of Berlin brought down the wall that had cut through
their city since 1961. Here five writers, from both sides of the divide, recall
those heady days and assess their legacy
Heike Geissler was born in 1977 in Riesa in the former German Democratic Republic. She is the author of four novels, most recently Seasonal Associate, a highly acclaimed fictionalised account of a period she spent working in an Amazon warehouse in Leipzig.
Oh, it’s all so long
ago, isn’t it? When the wall came down I was 12 years old and crazy about
belongings and about the world. I was embarrassed about coming from the GDR. I
was embarrassed about going into shops in West Germany and being a grey and
dark-blue complex of drab timidity amidst all the colours. With my first
western money I bought myself a neon-coloured rucksack and a cassette recorder.
I was already more colourful when I travelled with my mother in a packed train
to Oberhausen in West Germany to
see the acquaintances who had for years been sending us parcels for feast days
and birthdays. I ate yoghurt for the first time, and liked it, and I draped
myself in colours. Autumn colours were chic at the time: purple, ochre, etc.
Maybe I’d just lost
interest in politics. If only I knew. At any rate Ernst Thälmann (the leader of
the Communist Party who was later shot in Buchenwald) had recently been my
hero, I’d wanted to be like him, and I’d thought about how he had managed to
fashion a little inkwell with the bread that a prison warder had given him,
fill it with milk and thus have a source of invisible ink that he could eat
straight away if he had to. I wondered about that, and a moment later I
wondered what it would be like to live with Martin Lee Gore (of synth-pop band
Depeche Mode). I papered my room with posters of him, I dreamt about him, I
was, even though I wasn’t quite a grown-up, Martin Lee Gore’s wife..... read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/03/berlin-wall-30-years-on-five-german-writers-assess-bernhard-schlink-franck-geissler-ohler