A Trip to the Former GDR Countryside

On Friday I volunteered for a last day before the organization's summer break. Fellow volunteers ordered in pizzas for lunch, and there were quite a few visitors as well as a mountain of donations. The only things missing were the new supplies that are sometimes ordered in: the towels that are donated to the organization are not always in the nicest condition, and the visitors love the fresh individually wrapped ones that are sometimes available upon request from the storage room.

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Saturday was busy as well!

In the morning, I met with two former teammates in the basement restaurant of Kulturhaus Dussmann. We ate cake and talked beside the pool at the base of the waterfall, then passed by the granite? sphinx — I noticed for the first time that the edge has been nibbled off the rear — on its bland white plinth. And we re-familiarized ourselves with the layout of the shop. Roaming through the rock and (in M.'s case) jazz CDs, briefly the vinyl records where I looked at the classical music including a 1960s recording of Martha Argerich and Glenn Gould's later recording of the Goldberg Variations. And then the DVD section.

After I cycled home, J. and I took the train to the town in Brandenburg where Gi. lives.

It wasn't the long trip I'd been dreading. The fields and woods were quite charming especially as the summer golds were mingled with the green grass and foliage preserved by the copious rainfall lately. I also felt that botanical re-wilding initiatives in Berlin and Brandenburg are figuratively bearing fruit: yellow-flowered mullein stalks and other native flower species were beautifying the disturbed areas beside the railway tracks.

We rattled over the cobblestones from the railway station, and then pulled up in front of Gi.'s 1950s 'Plattenbau,' an East German apartment building with slender walls and staircase and props at the entrance, but in my subjective view still something of the idealism of the early 'communist' phase. Red teardrop street lamps offered a pop of colour, as did the leafy trees that had partly likely been planted when the apartment buildings first went up.

Gi. served us cake and coffee, and we looked out onto the treescape and buildings from his balcony. A tall, beige apartment building from before World War I bore the faded grey outline of a painted Persil laundry detergent advertisement: as I was musing, it either had to post-date the reunification of Germany in 1990, or pre-date the occupation of the Soviet Army in 1945. The second option is likelier. The sky was reasonably overcast, but we didn't fear imminent rain or thunderstorms.

Then we toured the town: its medieval and Renaissance core, through its Prussian town buildings and older one-story residences and pompous school with sun dial and busts over the entrance, to workers' terrace housing from the Twenties and industrial architecture also from the Weimar Era. Then, of course further GDR-era housing complexes.

It's like shooting fish in a barrel to criticize GDR architecture as barren-looking. But the public architecture from the early 1990s had in my view — but I don't want to be too mean — a depressingly questionable aesthetic as well. As if a young and naive architect who'd been raised in a concrete box had looked at a triste fast food drive-thru off a highway in western Berlin, and decided that these cheap materials and garish kindergarten colours were the aptest design reference for the new capitalist era, regardless of their building's intended use or surroundings.

Of course I was also intrigued by the deserted houses where the weathered wooden blinds were rolled all the way down, for example. They looked like they were either going to wrack and ruin, or waiting for renovation.

We wound up at a boba tea café. So I had boba tea for the first time: milk tea with gel capsules, instead of tapioca bubbles.

Then J. and I travelled back to Berlin.