Panzer

A while ago I was going through old photos. Can’t get enough of them – the older, the better. Whether it’s to look at old fashions and laugh about them (and be secretly ashamed to have partaken in them), or marvel at how skinny we used to be, to trigger memories or to wonder at our innocence/ignorance at all the things to come – the people we would become, and the gap between our expectations of the future and what actually happened to us).

I also love looking at other people’s photos – somehow it makes your friends more three-dimensional and even more loveable to know what they were like when they were kids, and how they came to be the people they are now, which is why I pester them at every opportunity for photos and childhood stories. You then don’t just bond to the few years you have known them. It makes you feel like you have known them all your life.

I have some pictures that seemed pointless at the time they were taken. Why get a shot of the view from your bedroom window? You see that every day! It amazes me now, though, to see how architecture has changed, how the East German standardised children’s playground has changed into something adhering to health and safety laws and how the scrawny saplings behind our house have turned into thickly foliaged trees. Some of these photos I merely took because I wanted to show my host family in Texas 12 years ago what it was like where I lived, not knowing that these would be the remnant documents of my childhood I managed to salvage before mother could run off with the rest of the household.

And then there are a handful of photos that strike me as plain bizarre. Almost alien. Parts of a past that is so opposed to everything we live and believe now that it seems entirely like someone else’s life, and although I used to live in the middle of all this, I now remember it like an independent observer… as if my kid self was just a character in a story. If I didn’t have those pictures, I might not even remember at all. They are little pieces of conserved past, pinning down memories that would otherwise dissolve and be forgotten.
Like this picture of a Soviet Panzer rolling past our living room window.
(Whoops. I lied. It was German. Dad told me that according to the Four Power Agreement, Soviet tanks weren't allowed to drive on German soil. They could be transported, but not driven.)

Dad remembers the exact day. It was 30 April 1984, the day before the International Worker's Day, and the tanks were moved closer to the city centre to be ready for the parades the next day. The tank came from neighbouring Berlin-Karlshorst, which was the district housing the Soviets, heading towards Strasse der Befreiung, now called Alt-Friedrichsfelde.
It was the same street our school was on, and the same street Gorbachev came driving down when visiting Berlin in 1989 or 1990, the street we lined up along, shouting “Gorbi! Gorbi!”, which infuriated our fiercely communist Russian teacher.
We had quite a few Panzer parades back in the days. It was always cool and exciting, but in retrospect I wonder why they organised those parades. It was always treated like a celebration, a celebration of East German and Communist power, but now I can’t help but think (what may be a statement of the obvious to those who were older and more aware of the political power play in those days) it was also meant to serve as a reminder to us who held the reigns. In the end, we were only the Soviets’ buffer.
There were Panzer parades on regular occasions. We already heard them when they were miles off, a deep rumbling which would, when drawing near, start shaking the glasses in our cabinets. The Panzer chains plowed over the asphalt and left white tracks, like a car’s skid marks in reverse. Sometimes they would carry medium range missiles, which was equally impressive and terrifying (as a Bomb child, I was in permanent fear those things would go off in front of our house, and I always naively let out a sigh of relief when it had passed us, even though they would have still done considerable damage exploding a few miles down the road.

We lived near a big intersection, where our street crossed Strasse der Befreiung, which, in the direction of Berlin’s city centre, would turn into Stalin/Karl-Marx-Allee, a majestic boulevard with a Stalinist architecture intended to impress. At that intersection, the tanks would turn and rumble towards the town centre.
Strasse der Befreiung was the road the Soviets entered Berlin from Poland, the B1 that directly connects the two. The Soviets, depicted as our soup-supplying, chocolate-distributing, child-hair-smoothing Big Brother, while our grandmothers repressed stories of how they hid in basements from getting raped and pillaged by those same soldiers. (Not that you can blame them… after all, we practically flattened their country.) Strasse der Befreiung, which earned a bitter twang of irony because of the kids it killed like stray cats, when they tried to cut their way to school short.

By the way, that street is not called Strasse der Befreiung (Liberation Street) anymore. It was one of those things that were eagerly changed, almost with a sense of shame, not just about the Nazi past, but also about that we fell straight from a brown mistake into a red one, repeating our past just in different colours, like a teenager swaying from one extreme fashion to another.
Most of the past is a mere memory now, a fleeting image, because hardly any hint of the past remains, everything having been demolished or being derelict now or turned into discount shoe shops.
There is a debate about whether removing cultural artifacts is a good or bad thing, if they are artifacts of a totalitarian regime. I can understand demolition as an act of liberation, but somehow, the place where I come from hasn't got historical markers... the ones we've got are displayed with a sense of guilt, or hidden away in museums. It wasn't a good history per se, but trading it for the pretense it never happened can't be the right way either. All I really got are some old photos... but they do the trick.

It just feels like a significant period ended, well, as an anticlimax. But then maybe, so does life.

On Великая Октябрьская социалистическая революция, or the wrongs and rights of history

They say history is written by winners. But how often do you get to experience a changeover of winners and a shift of historical truth?

When I was young, I found history tedious. That was mostly due to my history teachers being clichéd, talentless bores. I remember one particular one, I forgot his name, who incorporated every history teacher stereotype you can imagine. He was an elderly, stocky bastard with his shirt sleeves rolled up, the top buttons of his shirt undone to proudly display an impressive and equally gross greying chest wig, wire-framed glasses balanced on the tip of his nose, over which rim he would inspect us with suspicion. And oh, he killed history for me. Even an incredibly fascinating era like the French Revolution he would mentally mummify by reciting dates and facts with a monotonous voice that would have put a can of Red Bull into a coma. The man was a walking sleeping pill. The amounts of times I physically (not proverbially!) fell asleep in his class, I cannot count.
Needless to say, I just about managed to scrape through the exam and pass his class with 99% of me hanging over the abyss of indifference and ignorance.

It wasn’t until I met Herr Pommer in senior high that my interest perked up. Herr Pommer was a legend! We called him "Pom-Bear" because he was so “cuddly” and fun. He always laughed, and his classes were a riot. He had nicknames such as "Leonardo Pommer" because he always used drawings and scribbles to illustrate his classes, and "The Guru", because he was simply the best teacher anyone could have.
Our high school paper had a section including quotables from teachers and students, and Pom-Bear would crop up in there on a regular basis. The way he taught his classes was fascinating: history became alive, historical figures became humans with motivations, which turned the subject into what its name suggests: an exciting story.
All of a sudden it wasn’t a list of dates and events anymore… it became a continuous making and breaking of the world that made sense and interconnected.
But he didn’t just tell one-sided stories. He always encouraged us to form our own opinions, especially when he started teaching Modern History and Political Science, to critically view all sources, question their circumstances and motivations and view any documentation in that light. It was the first time I became aware that history is not a set fact but a subjective, circumstantial matter of experience, something that picked up again at university, when we read Swift’s Waterland… an amazing book that might have been lost on me without Pom-Bear.
I went from a near-fail in history and political science to all As and Bs.

Before Pom-Bear, however, there was The Bitch. I forgot her name, I just remember that she shared her name with a German supermarket chain that eventually went bust (which filled me with a little glee). The Bitch was just that: a middle-aged, embittered hag that wore foundation like a brown face-mask ending at her sharp jaw line. She had The Glare which made students duck and hide behind each other, The Glare that meant once you locked eyes, she’d inflict a report or a test or something on just you. It was like she couldn’t see you, unless you looked at her. Or unless you were trying too hard not to be seen. Somehow she would sense that and shoot down like a hawk on a trembling mouse.

The Bitch taught maths and political science – my two weakest subjects for which I had not the slightest comprehension, interest or patience. Maths with its pointless formulae and rigidity was a mind-rape to my escapist imagination, and political science just rubbed my face in the historically recent misery I tried so hard not to think about or escape from. Both subjects just incorporated everything that made me want to curl up into a ball under the duvet. I hated it because I didn’t understand it and because I was bad at it. I was never the popular kid in school. I wasn’t pretty, or fashionable, or amusing, and consequently had to deal with quite a bit of bullying, my only consolation being that I was smart, got good grades and could hope for a future, whereas the bullies would get their dues as soon as they went into the real world. But these two subjects just took away the last pillar of my self-esteem, and it made me miserable. Now I was dorky, ugly, unpopular AND stupid.
Chances were that there were a lot of kids like me, but teenagers are by definition too self-absorbed to notice. The Bitch didn’t have patience for any of them. She had her small circle of pets. And hell, I wasn’t one of them. A wrong answer, and she, an academic Darwinist, would sigh, roll her eyes and make snide remarks questioning one’s intelligence.
I used to sit in the last row, in the very corner, trying to be as invisible as possible. That must have been back in 1994 or 95. The Bitch sat on her throne in front of the class, getting ready to assign a presentation on the Russian Revolution, and you could tell her pause meant that she was mentally scanning the class. I ducked. I almost held my breath. I willed her to pass me over. And it seemed that all this energy going into getting her off my back actually attracted her.

“Patricia!”, she said, and it hit me like an arrow. “A report on the revolution, by Friday, if you please, 20 minutes maximum, marked.”
Fuck! It wasn’t just the report, it was that I had to present it in front of the class, full of people I didn’t know, who thought me the weird newbie. I was petrified.
But I got down to it. I went home, grabbed an encyclopedia (no internet, guys, we used actual books!) and got to work.

But when I stood up in front of the class, I barely got past the first paragraph.
Suddenly the class started grinning, and The Bitch interrupted me, announced that this was complete rubbish, I got a fail and could go sit down and could someone please point out what was wrong with it?
One student raised his hand and snickered smugly. “She called it the Great October Socialist Revolution.”
“Correct!” said the Bitch. “What on earth did you use for research?”
“An encyclopaedia”, I said, barely audible.
“Written by Lenin himself?” she mocked, and got a few appreciative laughs from her petting zoo. “Time you updated your bookshelf, young lady!”
With that, I was written off. It had never even occurred to me that our encyclopaedia could be wrong.

The thing that still gets me is the hypocrisy of all this. It was just a few years earlier that this encyclopedia was perfectly acceptable. Yes, it may have called that event the Great October Socialist Revolution and not the Russian revolution, because the state I lived in happened to support the revolutionaries, and the textbooks available supported their stance as well. No history book is unbiased. Then, all of a sudden, the East Bloc collapsed, and everything was rewritten. Schools were cleared of the pro-communist books. Suddenly what had been drilled into us for years was no longer valid. Dissent had always been heavily discouraged in East Germany, and that puts it mildly. The entire East German mindset was one strategically formed not to form independent and critical opinions. Before that we had Nazi Germany, which embraced the same policy. Basically, for decades and generations, dissenters were an endangered species. And all of a sudden they turn around and expect a bunch of kids to grasp and accept an entire inverted worldview, not just that it was inverted, but also why. It doesn’t even make sense to me now.
There were two versions of history, each correct in their own way, each just an angle on an event, but in the end the winner makes you choose.

The thing that really irked me, however, was that the same teachers who gave you crap if you got it wrong after the Change were the most indoctrinated bastards back in the communist days. They were the loudest proclaimers of the Soviet glory, the first to spy on kids’ conversations about their home life to find out if anything contra the state was going on, the harshest to punish state-critical glitches (we never even got to the point of forming a view), and the first to pretend they always secretly disagreed or had never believed in the Red Truth when it all was finally over.
In other words, if I had used anything else like a modern history book 6 years prior, if I had not called it the Great Socialist October Revolution, The Bitch would have called me an enemy of the state and sent me to the headmaster.

But that's history. A blur. Not even winning is set in stone.