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EVEN TIMO can see this is a moment that will change everything, and he is only eleven. It’s five minutes to seven on the evening of Thursday 9 November 1989 and the East German government has just declared its citizens free to travel into West Germany. Until now, East and West have been part of a make-believe symmetry. The Berlin Wall has been the world’s dividing line for 28 years and now it’s gone. Timo and his parents spend their earliest hours of liberty driving to Hamburg, where they reunite with half of their like-minded neighbourhood. His parents park near Speersort and take Timo to see the shops of Neuer Wall and Mönckebergstraße; their opulence is too much for him, the sheer choice makes him dizzy. The family exchanges a laugh with their neighbour when they bump into him on Jungfernstieg, walking around the chilly banks of the Alster. A record company promoter, on her way to deliver the latest releases to Radio Hamburg and amused by the sight of a tiny, glacier-blue Trabant parked between Mercedes, BMWs and Porsches, stops to leave a gift of CDs on the car’s bonnet. It’s an unusual gesture; the stereotypical Hamburger is characterised by cold, northern “Arroganz”, but unfriendliness and prejudice are taking the day off; today, for one day only, Hamburg is Love City. When Timo and his parents return from their brief pilgrimage to Capitalism they can’t believe their eyes. Their car has become an icon, an altar sagging under the weight of random acts of kindness: there’s a cardboard box filled with bananas and other fresh fruit on the roof; bags of crisps, nuts and a chocolate Santa Claus surround the CDs on the bonnet; carrier bags hang like earrings from the wing mirrors, filled with Milka chocolate hearts and salted liquorice. A crowd of shoppers gathers and begins applauding the startled “Ossie” family. Timo is confused and his parents, for all their awkwardness, can’t hold back their tears. In a new century, the 28-year-old Timo still finds it hard to believe that this happened in his own lifetime. One of his souvenirs of Die Wende, “the Change”, is a yellowed copy of the Hamburger Morgenpost, its front page dominated by the headline: “Die Mauer ist weg!”, “The WALL is gone!” Those words have always seemed surreal; and yet even more startling, he remembers, was his guilty discovery on page 31 of classified advertisements for prostitutes, transvestites and sex shows. There had never been anything like this in East German newspapers, and the colourful language still makes Timo blush slightly and his heart beat faster. On another page, a photograph of the grinning Baghwan Shree Rajneesh accompanies a story about his unfulfilled dream of transforming East Germany into a “paradise” West Germany and the USA would envy. Paradise is hard to find and life hasn’t always been as bountiful in the years that followed. Timo’s father, who was unemployed for ten years following German reunification, never recovered from his depression, didn’t live to see his son complete his university degree and died in the first year of the new Millennium. The East Germany he loved as a child came to be characterised by incompetently designed products and a Cloud-Cuckoo-Land mentality.
—0O0—
(A Glacier-Blue Trabant is previously unpublished in print.)
Email me the title of this short-short and I will send it to you as a PDF file, free of charge: chrisb[at]xtra[dot]co[dot]nz |
The plastic chassis of that glacier-blue