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The Presence of the Past
It is hard to believe that it is exactly 25 years to the day when I left the green goodness of Germany to come to the wide brown sunburnt land of Oz.
So much has happened since and I never ever imagined in my wildest dreams that an Ossie could ever become Chanceller of a united Germany since they were definitely regarded as second class citizens while I lived there.
Especially memorable was the reply from one of them when asked why so many of East Germans were going to the Wild West rather than staying in their own country.
She said that she spent the first 40 years of her life in the poor house of Europe and she was damned if she was going to spend the next 40 renovating it.
When I was there even after Berlin was no longer a divided city, the Dead Zone running along Potsdamer Platz, the Reichstag and the Brandenburg Gate was still very dead. The infamous Fuhrerbunker was in the general area but not marked in an manner for fear it would become the German equivalent of those statues of Robert E Lee
Especially fascinating for all the wrong reasons was the hideous city of Dresden with the ugly socialist realist architecture and statues of Lenin and Marx and the absolute classic state museum where everything was told with the official DDR government spin.
Most magical were the cities of Hameln of pied piper fame, Lubeck and Quedlinburg. Quedlinburg was the Salem of Germany with a very dodgy past and some dubious visitors in their local castle
I was glad that I did get to see quite a bit of the East before it got all prettied up and kitschy. It really was like stepping back into a time machine to the 1950s. Especially the train stations and shops.
I arrived there in February 1989 so got to hear about the old DDR while it still existed. One other thing I remember vividly almost as if it were yesterday was September 1989. I was at work. First of September was a Friday and at 9am suddenly a bunch of air sirens started wailing as if the place was going to be bombed. Apparently it was some ritual to observe the 50th anniversary of the start of the Second World War. I don’t remember hearing them ever since then. It was kind of creepy to think that 1st September 1939 had also fell on a Friday.
At that stage there were more and more people getting in hot air balloons and flying from Czechoslovakia to West Germany. Who would ever have imagined that in less than 3 months the wall would come down and East Germany would be consigned to the history books?
But that was then and this is now. So today in honour of the day, I paid a visit to the local Aldi store which opened just over 3 weeks ago.
It is so very different than the original German version. Here the Aldi stores are clean, simple and attractive while the original German versions are cheap and nasty. Always a bit messy and chaotic with stuff in piles and boxes especially the specials in the middle of the stores.
The only disappointment is that they don’t have Gruyere, Appenzeller or any of those other tasty Swiss or German mountain cheeses. Real Swiss cheese is definitely a Christmas tree. With prices starting from at least $50 per kilo, there is simply no justification for buying the stuff except for very special occasions.
I managed to catch only snippets of the Armistice Day centennial commemorations. Or Celebrations as Agent Orange so crassly called them. But watching Angela Merkel and Emmanual Macron holding hands and hugging was seriously moving. I never thought I would see such a thing in my lifetime.
So it looks like now they have two common enemies. Twitter was full of the juiciest morsels. Especially where Putin turns up late, lords it over all the others like the cat who has eaten the canary and then gives the thumbs up to Don the Con much to the disgust or was it amusement of Macron and Merkel. If looks could kill.
The amazing cartoons of David Rowe will have to wait. Too busy sharing them as replies to Agent Orange that I have not gotten around to posting them in Dreamwidth land.
Twitter has a feature call Moments where you can put tweets with a theme together in the one spot. So I created one specially devoted to political cartoons and nearly every single one of them is from David Rowe.
If there were a Nobel prize for political cartoons, he would need a palace sized trophy cabinet.
25 years on I am still so glad that I took advantage of the opportunity to live and work in a completely foreign country. Even though I met monsters like Heil Hilde and was often poorer than a church mouse, still I have no regrets. I just wish that I had spent more time in the spooky and magical places like the Harz mountains.
Oz is just so so far away from Serpent friendly places. It is a major operation to travel anywhere that is not icky, sticky, muggy, humid and crowded. Except New Zealand which has the most amazing Swiss chocolate scenery but East German standards infrastructure
So much has happened since and I never ever imagined in my wildest dreams that an Ossie could ever become Chanceller of a united Germany since they were definitely regarded as second class citizens while I lived there.
Especially memorable was the reply from one of them when asked why so many of East Germans were going to the Wild West rather than staying in their own country.
She said that she spent the first 40 years of her life in the poor house of Europe and she was damned if she was going to spend the next 40 renovating it.
When I was there even after Berlin was no longer a divided city, the Dead Zone running along Potsdamer Platz, the Reichstag and the Brandenburg Gate was still very dead. The infamous Fuhrerbunker was in the general area but not marked in an manner for fear it would become the German equivalent of those statues of Robert E Lee
Especially fascinating for all the wrong reasons was the hideous city of Dresden with the ugly socialist realist architecture and statues of Lenin and Marx and the absolute classic state museum where everything was told with the official DDR government spin.
Most magical were the cities of Hameln of pied piper fame, Lubeck and Quedlinburg. Quedlinburg was the Salem of Germany with a very dodgy past and some dubious visitors in their local castle
I was glad that I did get to see quite a bit of the East before it got all prettied up and kitschy. It really was like stepping back into a time machine to the 1950s. Especially the train stations and shops.
I arrived there in February 1989 so got to hear about the old DDR while it still existed. One other thing I remember vividly almost as if it were yesterday was September 1989. I was at work. First of September was a Friday and at 9am suddenly a bunch of air sirens started wailing as if the place was going to be bombed. Apparently it was some ritual to observe the 50th anniversary of the start of the Second World War. I don’t remember hearing them ever since then. It was kind of creepy to think that 1st September 1939 had also fell on a Friday.
At that stage there were more and more people getting in hot air balloons and flying from Czechoslovakia to West Germany. Who would ever have imagined that in less than 3 months the wall would come down and East Germany would be consigned to the history books?
But that was then and this is now. So today in honour of the day, I paid a visit to the local Aldi store which opened just over 3 weeks ago.
It is so very different than the original German version. Here the Aldi stores are clean, simple and attractive while the original German versions are cheap and nasty. Always a bit messy and chaotic with stuff in piles and boxes especially the specials in the middle of the stores.
The only disappointment is that they don’t have Gruyere, Appenzeller or any of those other tasty Swiss or German mountain cheeses. Real Swiss cheese is definitely a Christmas tree. With prices starting from at least $50 per kilo, there is simply no justification for buying the stuff except for very special occasions.
I managed to catch only snippets of the Armistice Day centennial commemorations. Or Celebrations as Agent Orange so crassly called them. But watching Angela Merkel and Emmanual Macron holding hands and hugging was seriously moving. I never thought I would see such a thing in my lifetime.
So it looks like now they have two common enemies. Twitter was full of the juiciest morsels. Especially where Putin turns up late, lords it over all the others like the cat who has eaten the canary and then gives the thumbs up to Don the Con much to the disgust or was it amusement of Macron and Merkel. If looks could kill.
The amazing cartoons of David Rowe will have to wait. Too busy sharing them as replies to Agent Orange that I have not gotten around to posting them in Dreamwidth land.
Twitter has a feature call Moments where you can put tweets with a theme together in the one spot. So I created one specially devoted to political cartoons and nearly every single one of them is from David Rowe.
If there were a Nobel prize for political cartoons, he would need a palace sized trophy cabinet.
25 years on I am still so glad that I took advantage of the opportunity to live and work in a completely foreign country. Even though I met monsters like Heil Hilde and was often poorer than a church mouse, still I have no regrets. I just wish that I had spent more time in the spooky and magical places like the Harz mountains.
Oz is just so so far away from Serpent friendly places. It is a major operation to travel anywhere that is not icky, sticky, muggy, humid and crowded. Except New Zealand which has the most amazing Swiss chocolate scenery but East German standards infrastructure