Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: Germanness

  • cemetery days


    I just spent a few precious hours working in a greensward where I could be safely distant from everybody and they could be safely distant from me. Then a woman approached me. She was wearing uniform. It is not permissible to sit in this space, on the grass: you must sit on a bench.

    I gazed at her. “I understand you, but… isn’t it somewhat exceptional circumstances? I have hardly left my house in six days, I need the sun. People need a place to sit that’s not hard surfaces which can retain the virus for hours.”

    She repeated exactly, “Es ist nicht gestattet” I think it was – it’s not authorised. At home, on Twitter, I found two resourceful Italians playing table tennis, from window to window, one right-handed and one left-. They’re just going to keep playing until they lose the ball. I live for this sense of playful joy. As this lady approached me I was just thinking, ‘now: I have peace in my heart.’ It is hard-won. It’s mine. She cannot have it, no, indeed, I will not drop this ball, it is airy, it is light and it bounces.

  • German Corona: fascism vs panic

    In Berlin this early in the quarantine it’s ok, the sun is out and I would love to be out in it, I imagine people here might be finding it daunting at the end of a long low skied winter to have to stay indoors for longer. Seems to be one of those instances (unlike, say, individual freedoms) where German collectivism shines. Everybody is leaving plenty of toilet rolls for everybody else. We’ve been home four days apart from raids on the food store and I feel fortunate to have so much reading and writing I want to do. My partner’s college and all colleges have shut down, buses are running but their front doors are closed and the drivers don’t have to sell tickets. From Wednesday all clubs and bars shut down, restaurants not; because they’re purveying a service.

    Ludicrous given the scale of things right now but one of my preoccupations is making sure I come online in little sips, like a refresher or palate cleanser a hundred times in a day, and not just slump there like a barfly for hours. I’m guessing most people are dealing with that – the ultimate outworking of our collective and so recent addiction.

    I have learned how deeply Germans are conditioned to incline to potential fascism – that is, hyper conformity – but not really to panic. It’s impressive. When we all need to act in the common interest Germans shine, even if the sun does not.

    Meanwhile the macho flab of narcissist ‘leaders’ putting everyone so chronically at risk can do so that much more acutely right now. They’re really showing their sociopathy as well as their slackness. Johnson. Morrison in Australia. Tr*mp. Everyday people outshine them in every way, our common generosity and kindness is so moving. My heroes this week are people singing from their balconies in Italy. People offering shopping trips to their elderly neighbours. Nurses and doctors working at risk and through the night. We can be this. Thank god and hurrah.

  • bicycle fascist

    I was overtaken on the bike path today by a puzzlingly hostile man. He seemed to have a store of labels and insults saved up and was eager to put them to use. The sun had finally come out. I had ridden clear across town to collect my Ghanaian visa. I was thinking as I rode: honestly there’s nothing like crossing the first bridge to open between East and West Germany in 1989 in a sudden sharp hailstorm to make you want to leave the country for a while.

    Later on all the errands and grocery shopping were finally done and as I was cycling home – the clouds broke apart and a glorious sunshine lit the local world. I slowed down and looked about me, enjoying the pretty sky. Indescribable light at this time of year, sometimes. A pinging from behind warned of another, faster cyclist. I veered wobbling to the left, defaulting by accident to my Australian road rules, and the other rider pinged his bell furiously, with small intermissions, four or five times over. He called out to me. “Can you pull over to the right to let a person pass?”

    “I have pulled over to the left,” I said, “to let you past.”

    He pinged his bell again though he already had my attention. “Are you deaf?”

    I said, “What? Are you German?”

    “No,” he said, primly, as he passed me. “I am a Swiss. Keep your German fascism to yourself!”

    Fuck you, I said, reverting to English, and then the tail of my skirt jammed in the spokes and I shuddered to a stop. As I disentangled myself and set off home I was thinking how quickly we had skipped through the steps to the full apparatus: accusations of physical handicap, warning sirens, curt instructions, national identity and then – within a mere moment, it seemed – we were already arrived at the most unimaginative form of terrorism there is: Fascism.

  • postcard torrent

    A few years ago I was living in Berlin and it felt indefinite. I had not made plans to stay and felt unable to leave. I felt homesick and unsure and one day I asked on facebook if anybody felt like sending me a postcard through the mail. I just love postcards. Occasionally I send them to myself.

    Weeks later I came home and opened my postbox at the door of my new sublet apartment with its old-fashioned sign, “Briefe und Zeitungen,” letters and newspapers. This torrent fell out. As we get closer to Christmas I want to remind myself and us all that this world is made up of seven billion diverse humans, and that by and large, humans are constituted of love.

  • East German joy

    Today I was in a tiny bakery in Brandenburg and laid a ten euro note on the counter. The bakery lady picked it up, her face spasming with disapproval, and shifted it 20cm south before dropping it in the special shallow plastic tray which is supposed to hold the money. Then she turned away to make me a cup of German tea: that is, boiled water with a tea bag sitting limply alongside. Then she picked up the ten euros again, took it and laid my change in the plastic tray.

    I said to the man queuing behind me whose hand was resting on a stack of newspapers, isn’t that a sad story? The full page story up front was printed on a black page – a cyclist in his seventies had been knocked from his bicycle by a car door and had died. This man shrugged. In astonishment I said, “Es ist Ihnen egal?” It’s all the same to you? He made a mouth. “Berliner Probleme.”

    These are just Berlin problems. We were an hour’s train ride from the city centre and standing on the platform of a Berlin train station. The train had ended early and we were all waiting for the official ‘replacement transport’, a big yellow bus. The bus driver looked me in the eye as I approached at the end of a small queue of people and then closed the glass doors in front of my face and drove off.

    I remembered suddenly that Berlin is an island, an island in the pleasureless wastes and Stasi prison camps of the former GDR. Eventually a new bus arrived, with a far friendlier driver, and only two other passengers, who befriended me and gave me careful, detailed instructions for my solo forest walk. As we drove through the little township I peered into people’s immaculate gardens, their kitschy window treatments and collections of tiny sculptures including various clothed animals and dolls made of clay or straw. Hours later the town’s only punk, who had given me directions to the town’s only affordable eatery which was not a snack bar selling mostly ice cream, stopped his matt black van beside me and said, “You must be tired of walking. Hop in.” His big caramel coloured hound loomed over the back seat and rested her head on my shoulder as we drove and he said, casually, “Yes. Hereabouts it’s pretty provincial. I came back because my Mother was ill.” We passed a beer garden crowded with big parties of bikers in their padded black jackets who had come out for the day while it’s still sunny. At the end of the street gleamed a beautiful lake. Shouts came from the sandy playground which had a large sign headed “Principles of Playground Conduct.” A swan stood among the ducks cleaning itself earnestly. I took a shot of rum in my hot chocolate and read my book, having lent the little boy next door in his pram my pen. A girl came out carrying a tray of unbelievably ornate ice cream towers in tall swirled glasses. She set out across the road in her perfect white sneakers. A large man came past toting a tiny bright eyed dog. The sun splashed the crumbling medieval town.

  • Ghanaity

    Had to change trains twice to get home and I was reading Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell, great, familiar, female, underrated. On the second train I glanced up when somebody laughed and saw a short, beautiful African man gazing longingly at me.

    It was so startling. I hurried back to Cranford, the village where the old ladies are not nearly so old as they were in Miss Matty’s own youth. At the next station I looked up, focussing between the heads of people sitting back to back all down the left side of the cabin, and saw that he was still looking at me. His eyes were soft and fond as though I were terribly familiar. We smiled. I went back to my book.

    Someone got off, occasioning the usual genteel German shuffling whereby everybody shifts their knees to one side saying, Bitte, Danke, Entschuldigung. All of a sudden the man who had been gazing plumped into the vacated seat opposite, he slung his bag down on the floor and had altogether an air of decision.

    So I looked up and said, How are you? Good, he said, and you? Good, I said. Thank you. Then we all travelled along in a kind of noisy trainside silence for a while.

    What are you learning?

    O, it’s not really study, just rereading a book I have read so many times before. I turned the cover to show him.

    You have a very nice face, I told him, and he smiled. You, too. Thank you, I said. In fact he was beautiful, with a pointed cat like chin and slanting eyes and in the middle of his forehead he had an asterisk-shaped scar as though someone had shattered him with a mallet and then put him back together again.

    The moon, upstairs, was rounding white and only slightly eroded down one side like an aspirin in water. I hadn’t seen it yet but later it led me right home. The man said, My name is Maxwell. And so I stuck out my hand and said, Cathoel. We shook hands and I said, Are you new in Berlin?

    Three months. Ah, I said, welcome. He had lived four years in Italy. So I speak Italian. But no Dutch.

    Ah, I said, again. And then he began talking to me about Jesus. Jesus knows how many hairs you have on your head. He took hold of a lock of his hair and tugged it.

    Well, I said, that must be very comforting. I am getting off here. Good luck in Berlin!

    But as I was standing on the platform he appeared beside me, standing too close. Are you married? No, I said. Why not? It’s not my way. I stepped away a half pace and he stepped up close to me again, in my shadow. Can I ask you a question, I am not a bad man.

    Thanks, I said: I don’t want to marry you.

    Ok, he said. But can I give you my phone number, friends? Friends. I am lonely and it’s good to have a friend in Berlin. Berlin is big.

    The train pulled in and he said, ingeniously, I can get on the train with you. I can always ride back again after I give you my number. Oh, well, I said. Okay then. But I am going to be reading my book.

    We sat opposite a lady with a fiery head of hair and a warm wrinkled smile. She was holding up a magnifying glass on its stalk to read some tiny photostatted text closed printed across an A4 page. She listened to our conversation, smiling at me over the man’s head, and when he got off, as promised, at the next station and I folded his phone number and put it in my pocket I said, in German, He wanted to talk because he is lonely, I think.

    Her smile grew warmer. She reached into her pocket and handed me a card, much creased, printed in black and white. This is a church where people get together, she said, plenty of African people go there, he can make friends.

    It was evident neither of us were native speakers. Oh, I said, then I am glad. I will pass it on. I got out at my own stop and walked up the stairs into the night and the incomplete moon made me gasp. If you are Ghanaian and you come here over Italy, you cannot access refugee services because you have Italian papers. The trees on either side of my road have bloomed and lost their bloom and though the forbidding Germanic cold has now returned still it seemed to me something warmer, something Springlike was afoot, a pussyfoot, an affair of the filigree trees, afar.

  • hand to hand

    I went to a new physiotherapist today for my injured hand, and experienced all the Germanness. Me and the therapist, who is 23, have to call each other Mrs So and So, Mrs So. Her first name is not vouchsafed on her nametag and the surname was very German and unfamiliar to me. I thought of the writer friend whose multilingual office reverts from “Tom,” “Iris,” “Nancy” etc in English to “Herr Geltrausch, Frau Petersilie, Fräulein Kartoffelpuder” when they switch to German again.

    I am learning, with reluctance, the kinds of boring German words which mean “cancellation fee” and “referral” and “health insurance.” She measured the ring finger whose persistent swelling since it was ‘ausgekugelt’, that is, the marble popped out – dislocated – in Brisbane in July, makes it difficult to bend and refrained from making the insensitive joke other hand therapists have made, which is that if I want to marry I will have to wear the ring on my thumb.

    She asked what do I do, and I told her, I used to play guitar, and we both looked down at the swollen sore knuckle and I started to cry. Germans are often so compassionate. But they’re formal. In the waiting room a special chair for children was piled with comical stuffed animals, each in its own way an expressive beast. The sun shone through the window like the first day of Spring. It is cold but the ice cream shops have opened and as I walked home I passed junk shops which have laid out their junk for the first time since September. In the waiting room of the physiotherapist practice numerous framed notices began, formally, “Very Honoured Patients and Patientesses…” then invited us to help ourselves to coffee and tea, therapeutic toys and basins of lentils to sift through, heat pads and cold pads, filtered water, and biscuits.

  • cigarette break

    A lot of noise round the house today as the Hausmeister – Deutschland brims with masters – has called a gang of workmen in to saw back the thorny bushes round the huddle of bins. Our bin system is complex because everything gets recycled – everything but, puzzlingly, aluminium and steel. The thorny bushes make it hard to access the bike racks without scoring one’s skin and I welcomed the intrusion, but after a couple of hours of swearing and sawing I took refuge in a cafe I love, to try to do a bit of writing.

    I miss Brisbane but I’m not missing having to google “cafes open past 2pm” when I want to work later. This place is groaning with shelves of books and they let me sit on a sagging couch with a single coffee in front of me for nearly three hours. I came out into the lissom afternoon and joined the slow streams of people heading down to the underground station. A man was playing the flute, with his eyes closed. He was entranced.

    The first flush of leaves has hit the ground and to me it feels too soon. I’m not ready! I rode home via train and bus and train because the middle section of the line was being repaired and in Berlin everybody files in orderly fashion from the ‘replacement vehicle’ back onto the interrupted line and sits down. When I had left, two tree surgeons were standing at the street entrance of my house in boiler suits, smoking by the big glass doors. When I came back hours later they were still there. As I came up to them, I had started to laugh. “Sie waren beide hier,” I explained, “als ich rausgegangen bin. Und es scheint meinetwegen zu sein, als ob es eigentlich eine sehr sehr lange Zigarettenpause war.” You were both here when I went out. From my point of view it is tempting to assume this was a very very long cigarette break. They looked uncertain. Were they being criticised, by a stranger? Then one man smiled. “So viele Zigaretten können wir gar nicht rauchen,” he said. We can’t smoke that many. “Wir schaffen es gar nicht.” We just wouldn’t manage it.

  • four years ago today

    Walked into a Turkish convenience store late on Friday night, they sold water pipes as well as a dazzling array of alcohols and sundry sweet snackettes… behind the counter stood a very untall & wizened woman wearing a scarf, her hands on the counter at chest height in front of her, and beside her a large, slightly slavering dog, standing on his back legs with his forepaws folded on the counter. I said to him, “Excuse me. Do you sell yoghurt?” She said to me, “Sie haben eine so schöne Stimme, eine richtig wunderschöne Stimme. Bitte singen Sie weiter.” But I was too self-conscious to keep singing under this barrage of compliments. We talked about the dog and his jolly helpfulness & how tidily & sweetly she kept her shop and then as I was leaving, she called after me, “Keep singing! Always keep singing!”

    ~ beginning of my second month in Berlin, second date. We held hands and took it in turns to walk blindfolded round the city. Later that week I wrote:

    Tomorrow I am moving ~ boldly! ~ into a sublet apartment of my very own, here in Berlin! I was only here for a week but I have staid & staid ~ and so it is the last day in the sweet sunny breakfast room with its big basket of soft-boiled eggs, tucked in a cloth ~ the man who serves coffee came in to clear and I went over to him and touched him on the arm. “I’m moving out tomorrow, and I just wanted to say, thank you for the ~” ~ floundering in my early-morning German like a shallow foaming surf ~ “the service?” he suggested ~ “the um,” I said ~ “the table service?” he wanted to know. “The love,” I said, finally. And then ran away back to my table. Every morning he brings me a pot of hot water & some honey, my life in Berlin has been far cosier since I discovered that chai tea is called “yogi tea” and that you can buy it in bags at a Bio Store.