And then a past came upon us. We had not expected that. And just when we thought the future began. When the who-is-we question had already been decided in favor of me and you and you and me and me because nobody wanted to play WIRSINDDASVOLK with us anymore. When the one-way street widened to the highway just after the seventh mountain and there was no longer any speed limit. When we were stuck in a traffic jam and the traffic reports only reported the increasing length of the traffic jam, but no detour no way out, we began to remember: Overtaking without overtaking.
I remember one morning sometime in the mid-eighties. The date doesn’t matter. At that time the seasons were already blurred and it was mostly autumn. I wasn’t in love, nobody left me. The previous evening was irrelevant, the news said nothing unusual. I didn’t remember a dream. I remember the light exactly, it dulled things, looked faded gray and worn. But that wasn’t really anything special either. I woke up in the middle of an incredible void and there was no reason for it. I had the feeling as if the future had stopped and I knew I would have to live with that. I was composed.
I still say we: you and you and you and me, as if generation meant too much for a couple of years around 1959, friends who avoid the word fate: we don’t want to exaggerate. A we that describes the defensive of the ego, our we against general agreement, the one-way street FROM I TO WE, against contestability the incontestability a small plural of assurance. The contours of the land are lost in the rearview mirror. Before us the plain, a past that is ours. DO YOU KNOW THE COUNTRY WHERE – Where did we live. We lived
In the land of once and for all behind the seven mountains, where the good guys were good once and for all and the bad guys bad, where the German fairy tales were made true. Where we were enchanted and whenever we wanted to conquer half the kingdom, this voice came in from the off, whining like a conscience: RUCKEDIGUH BLOOD IS IN THE SHOE. And we jumped off, went to the ground, on our maimed feet. We dreamed of going too far, but we didn’t know where it could have been. The borders were incorporated into us, we were innocent, spared and cursed.
Cover of the cruiser 1/91
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I remember one night on the way back from the summer Bulgaria Tramp, in Poland, two years before the Solidamosc uprising. Pretty much all the guests at Anna’s party believed in a coming revolution and the world-changing role of art and argued in three or four languages about how. Someone named Andrzej Janusz or Krzysztof told me a long, serious story in Polish. I told him my only Polish sentence: Nie rozu-miem po polsku, he smiled, went on talking. We danced all evening.
During the night we were very alone, outside of the languages one can use, lost in our bodies and our forgetful names. Beyond yesterday and tomorrow, very close. We held out, endured the other. It was the only present I remembered.
THE EARTH IS A DISC: experience of two-dimensionality. The wall was only a vertical plane, just like the television screen, the screen in the cinema, the pages of the books. This is how images of the world were created, ideas that have no space. On smooth surfaces, not even Braille. Who should UNDERSTAND that.
Once upon a time there was a childhood called ALWAYS WAS SUMMER. Nothing came to an end, there were only beginnings and promises, coconuts and woodruff, Gagarin’s smile. Our one-way street led to the cosmodrome, we wrote essays on the topic: “My city in the year 2000” and in none of these cities did snow fall.
We believed in LA REVOLUTION as we did in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny in the children’s rituals, which we insisted on when we knew better: WE WANT TO BUILD THE GOLDEN BRIDGE, THE LAST IS CAPTURED WITH KNIFE, FORK, SHEAR AND LIGHT
WHEN HE FALLS HE SCREAMS. We played heaven and hell it was sixty-eight when our hero fell from heaven, Gagarin died. That summer, between news of barricades and tanks, our childhood must have been lost.
I remember one morning; it was in the 6th grade, I had been delegated to a training camp, as an award: holidays with roll call and political discussions. It was a privilege, I think I was proud of it. I also believed that my parents were proud of me. I thought they were philistines, their declared goal of upbringing was adaptation and inconspicuousness. And that I will become SOMETHING BETTER.
That morning, we were asked to OPEN FREEDOM OF DISCUSSION, a girl asked: What do I do when my parents watch western television. The suggestions ranged from ostentatious refusal to ideological fundamental debates to switching. Every bet that everyone did what was frowned upon, over which there was long unofficial agreement, in silence. Nobody admitted it, everyone hated each other for it. We stared at each other like monsters, we didn’t know any words for what we were doing, we just had this gagging in our throats, we got a grip on us.
Road movies can also create the feeling of movement. We sat in the cinema and saw THE STRAWBERRY STATEMENT for the fifth or seventh time, a film about the 1968 revolt at an American university, which we called Bloody Strawberries. When the National Guard finally cleared the hall where the students were on their knees and sang “Give Peace a Chance” by John Lennon, we still had tears in our eyes the fifth or seventh time, tears of longing. We didn’t fit in the picture, on the posters, all the advertising spaces that surrounded us. We did not get into the coordinate system of good and bad, something hindered us, perhaps the sadness of our abandoned bodies, their helplessness in space with no direction. In a room that didn’t exist.
I remember one evening three weeks before the wall came down. It was the first time I was in West Berlin with this unlikely blue passport in my pocket. Friends had picked me up from the checkpoint and brought me to the theater, where I was supposed to watch a play about the French Revolution. I sat alone in the auditorium full of fear and uncertainty. As the seats around me filled, I was amazed at the other theater-goers, the ‘Wessis’: completely normal people who moved naturally. It seemed so strange to me that I finally wondered what I was expecting. The answer made me shudder, even if it was just a mocking question: class enemies?
BLOOD IS IN THE SHOE: The middle sister, the second of the three brothers, to whom the German fairy tale does not grant a fate of their own, so that nothing endangers the uniqueness of the good. Speechless, they are turned to the side of the wicked, one more justification for the ruthlessness of the victors. We were proposed to the WINNERS OF HISTORY, for whom we could not help. So we got lost, got strangers in affairs, liaisons, relationship boxes in the status quo in a circle: MOVEMENT IS EVERYTHING. We lived within the possibilities of our limits, described designated areas.
The other hands, the other bodies added the space to us, left us, held us tight. There was no feeling for in-between spaces, we were too close for that, there were levels and the strangeness in between. Our dream of LA REVOLUTION, of dancing on the gray streets, the endless beginning of the sad carnival of happy despair, is intangible.
I remember the year seventy-six, the death of Ulrike Meinhof, Wolf Biermann’s expulsion, the year seventy-seven, Mogadishu and Stammheim. The RAF was the last executor of our impotence.
Then when our friends left, one by one, they took our reasons for staying with them. We understood them and felt betrayed. We got used to the fact that everything just came to an end, but the end was not in sight. We stayed BECAUSE IT HAD NO SENSE because we couldn’t remember because the future was already over – maybe those were the last reasons for those who left.
In the autumn of 1989 the half-forgotten pictures began to come to life, stood tangible and incomprehensible in a suddenly real space: police officers with truncheons, helmets and shields, water cannons, armored cars. The crowd with their hands raised in the sign of victory and happy faces. The banners with their own language, every joke worth cheering. It was like in the cinema, only that we had left the rows of blocked seats, the creaking folding armchairs the shabby plush; It was our film, we playfully tried out the heroes’ gestures, our hopes that were stale. For a couple of weeks we played LA RÉVOLUTION as we used to do with robbers and gendarmes and missed the credits, the beginning of a different scenario. We bravely claimed our dream roles, but we were only played along. Our gestures went nowhere: that’s how we understood that the film is over. It’s cold and pretty empty in between. So that we don’t freeze, we move: we stay on the route, on the highway, which is also just a one-way, borrowed from another film, flanked by large-format billboards that level longings into fairy tales. Some people are in a hurry in the fast lane: FORWARD AND NOT REMEMBER.
We travel through lost time in search of a future. There is a present, the horizon rushes towards us. Tom Waits sings I’M GOING STRAIGHT TO THE TOP UP WHERE THE AIR IS FRESH AND CLEAN on the car radio and that sounds like the story of one last collapse. A human voice, a living space. I remember.
A scan of the version in kreuzer 1/91 you’ll find here: Kreuzer 1/91 Barbara Koehler
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The text was taken over in its original version, including old spellings.
