“Hey, Rebecca,” said my classmate Diane on my tenth day at Gertrud’s, as we awaited a lesson on another suspect set of German idioms in preparation for the TestDaF, the German-for-foreigners language exam we were supposed to take before classes began in earnest in March. “Did you straighten your hair?” Diane was an old-school labor-rights Catholic from Philadelphia who went to Columbia and took zero shit whatsoever. I was glad that for whatever reason she seemed to want to be my friend, because otherwise she would have scared me.

“Is that, perhaps,” I asked, “your polite way of asking me why I’m so dirty right now?”

“I didn’t think it was that polite,” she said, taking out her homework, which was, as always, perfectly completed. She glanced at my own half-filled worksheet, which had both a coffee and a wine stain on it. I had been quite erroneously put into the “advanced” group for language immersion, because the placement test was written, and I wrote several measures better than I talked (and talked several measures better than I read).

“My hair,” I said to Diane, “is dirty all the time because I rarely bathe, because the bath in my Wohnung is a sink the size of a milk crate, and to use it I have to wait until my Mitbewohnerin is out with one of her gentlemen callers so that I don’t inadvertently spread-eagle her while I’m climbing in or out. But don’t worry,” I said, “I have a system.”

“I don’t know if smoking so many cigarettes that you can’t smell anything counts as a ‘system’ per se,” she said.

“Here’s how it works,” I said. “If my clothes are clean but I’m dirty, then I put on my clean clothes and my clothes clean me. But if I’ve taken a shower, then I clean my clothes.”

“This system sounds infallible.”

“You live with Wessis in Wilmersdorf, so you wouldn’t understand.” I surreptitiously sniffed my armpits, then cried quietly inside while I daydreamed of saunas and hot springs.

It wasn’t until later that week, however, that I hit peak fake-Ossi hypocrisy: I went home with a British tourist I met on the U-Bahn, almost entirely because he was staying at a posh hotel—in Charlottenburg, a bourgeois enclave I affected to despise—and therefore in possession of central heat, a massive bathtub, and thick down bedding. Peter—I never learned his last name—was a restaurant manager from Bristol who had recently expatriated to Prague to run a chain of golf courses. (This was the first I’d heard of anyone golfing in Prague, and it depressed me.) He was in town for a golf-course-management trade show, and was out to sample Berlin’s legendary nightlife alone. He accosted me when he heard me speaking English on the U-Bahn with my friends and demanded I help him locate a club called Delicious Donuts Research. His hobbies, I would soon learn, included ripped jeans and women of all ages with “eyebrows that go up,” whatever that meant (my own eyebrows have a distinctive peak, so I guess I qualified). He proclaimed that, judging by my clothes (a gunmetal shift dress from the Gap that was meant to evoke Shirley Manson from Garbage, but for tepid suburbanites), makeup (the usual), and demeanor (the affected worldliness of an unworldly twenty-year-old), I could have been anywhere from eighteen to thirty. He was twenty-nine, and as the U-Bahn slid into the stop I helped him locate, he said, “I think it’s only fair that you should escort me to this club.”

I got out with him and was halfway down a dark alley before I thought to ask: “Any plans to kill and dismember me?”

“Not that I can think of.”

The club had a velvet rope and a furious-looking woman working the door.

“Bist du auf der Liste?” she asked. (“Are you on the guest list?”) Never one for confrontations and always the rule-follower, I prepared to turn around.

“I’m sorry,” said Peter. “We don’t speak German. And we’ve come all the way from London just to come to this club.”

“All right,” she said in English. “But only because you’re from England. I thought you sounded American walking up.” Her face looked like she’d swallowed a hedgehog.

I clamped my mouth shut as we scuttled in.

“So you’re a poor student then,” Peter declared as I winced at the subsequent ten-mark door charge, as that would effectively use up my two-falafel food budget for the following day—a day when, it merits mentioning, I was due at 8:00 A.M. sharp to tour the old Stasi headquarters with the study-abroad program.

“I’ll buy your drinks,” Peter offered, improving the evening immediately. “Do you like Jack Daniel’s?”

I did not, because Jack Daniel’s is vile, but I accepted one with Coke nonetheless. This is because I could normally never afford a cocktail, or a Longdrink as it was known in German, one of those great expressions, like das Handy for mobile phone or ein Messie for a hoarder, that is nominally English but succumbed to the charming German tendency toward literalism in the translation process. Anyway, Longdrinks at a club cost upward of fifteen marks apiece, which was usually more than I spent in an entire day. I managed to get two free glasses of Jack to burn their way down my gullet before Peter suggested, with more English politeness than I have ever heard, that I might like to accompany him back to his hotel.

“But that wouldn’t necessarily preclude sexual activity,” he cautioned.

“I would not want to preclude sexual activity,” I assured him, trying my best not to let my visible excitement show—excitement, mind you, partly at approximating my latest idealized movie tryst (Mark Renton and sexually liberated schoolgirl Diane in Trainspotting), but just as much at adjourning to a place I was pretty sure was not currently freezing and possessed a shower I could stand in. We left immediately.

“So,” he said, once I’d made my way past the disapproving gaze of the front desk clerk, “what do you like? Sexually?”

“Well,” I said—and then he opened the door to his room. “Holy shit, is that a down duvet?”

“Obviously,” he said. “Now, as far as oral sex, I find it blinding, and I can’t get enough. Do you share a similar proclivity?”

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but can I just get under that comforter for a second while we talk? Wait,” I said, peeking into the bathroom. I saw a stand-up shower, presumably connected to a giant hotel-sized hot-water tank. “I’ll be out in forty to forty-five minutes.”

I remember very little about the sexual activity that was not precluded that evening (although I’m pretty sure the ludicrous ripped state of my tights was remarked upon with glee as they were dispatched), although I certainly don’t remember it being bad. But I mostly remember this: it was with sincere pangs of longing—perhaps even love—that, at the precipitously arriving hour of seven in the morning, I wrested myself from the embrace of the bourgeois down comforter, back into my gunmetal dress (which, alas, reeked of the Jack Daniel’s that had emanated from my pores) and faux-fur outerwear, and out into yet another razor-sharp late winter day. I showed up to the Stasi tour half an hour late, to see firsthand the various bleep-bloopy devices and medieval torture techniques favored by the very people I claimed to prefer over the uptight assholes who dared to furnish Charlottenburg hotels with luxury bedding.

It turns out I wasn’t the only one suffering from early-onset Ostalgie that might have come from a disingenuous place, or at any rate an unsavory one. In this I was joined by a rather sizable demographic—one that has, alas, all but disappeared in the intervening decades. This disappearance is not, as you might think, the natural result of twenty-first-century German capitalism’s sensible-suited dominance, but rather it owes to the relentless whims of Mother Nature herself. I speak here of the venerable extinct creature known as the East Berlin Oma, or granny: violet of hair, slow of gait, thick of dialect, crotchety of disposition. If, in the late 1990s, you happened upon a purple-coiffed Dame of Friedrichshain, Prenzlauer Berg, Treptow, or Lichtenberg and asked her about reunification, chances are she would tell you without hesitation she preferred things the way they were before.

I had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of just this sort of lady—her name was Frau Helga—during my third week in Berlin, after losing yet more of my personal effects on German public transit. This time it was the S-Bahn, on my way home from language class one Friday afternoon, when I got distracted by the East Berliner Oma’s diametric opposite, the Wessi pensioner with nothing better to do than inform complete strangers exactly how wrongly they are doing everything. She had been yelling at me for speaking too loudly to Diane. “Ruhe!” she cried across the train car. “Sie sind nicht auf der Bühne!” (“Shut up! You’re not onstage!”)

Despite the indisputable fact that I definitely could have taken that old broad, I found this incident rattling enough that I lost my bearings and skedaddled without my purse, sacrificing yet another handbag to the uptight, towheaded gods of German transit. When I returned to Gertrud’s that Friday afternoon with the irate West-German octogenarian surely in hot pursuit—my apartment key having mercifully been stashed in the pocket of my faux-fur jacket—and realized what I’d done, I nearly knocked myself unconscious smacking my own forehead. For in that purse, along with several extravagant MAC lipsticks, directions to the TestDaF I was definitely going to flunk that coming Monday, and an entire week’s budget in cold hard deutsche marks, I’d also been carrying my U.S. passport.

Even under the best of circumstances, it is never advisable to lose track of an important document in Germany—not because it’s particularly dangerous (although a genuine U.S. passport would, in 1997, have fetched a good price), but because Germans really lack empathy about this sort of thing. Germans simply do not misplace their stuff, like, ever, so the sneering superiority they display when an American admits to having done so is nigh on intolerable. Sure, we won the war, and the war before that, and the Cold War, too, but at least they never lose their goddamned car keys. I had only recently learned this when, just a few nights before I lost my purse, after dancing all night at the Metropol club, I reached into the pocket of my omnipresent black stretch trousers, only to find that my coat-check ticket had been sacrificed to the gods of the dance, or possibly dropped in the toilet. When I explained this to the coat-check woman, she looked at me like I was a cannibal.

“Verloren?” She snorted. “Wie ist das nur möglich?” (“Lost? How is that even possible?”)

“Well,” I said, “I had it, and now I don’t.”

“Gibt’s doch gar nicht,” she said, which means “I can’t believe it,” but literally means “That doesn’t exist at all.” The Metropol club literally did not have a protocol for lost coat-check tickets, because literally nobody had ever done it before in the history of the Metropol club.

The ideal situation would have been simply not to tell any Germans what had happened, go straight to the U.S. embassy, and wait for four hours to get a replacement passport, with nobody to see my transgression but a fellow American witness (to swear under oath about my citizenship), and a giant smiling portrait of Bill Clinton. But that wasn’t possible, because German offices—even the American embassy—go dead to the world beginning about 2:00 P.M. on Fridays (and on every made-up-sounding holiday in the Gregorian calendar). I had no way of rectifying the situation until at least Monday—when, of course, I would be required to present said passport as identification at the DaF exam I wouldn’t be able to find and would certainly not pass. For the entire weekend, I was a stateless person, dependent upon the kindness of strangers, or at any rate having to borrow money from a bemused Gertrud, as soon as she was able to wrap her mind conceptually around such a bizarre and unthinkable act as the one I had committed.

“What do you mean you lost your passport?” she asked.

“Well,” I said, “curiously, what I mean is that I had it, and now I don’t.”

“Gibt’s doch gar nicht.”

On Monday, I showed up to language class ready to beg someone to come spend the day with me at the embassy (and lend me two hundred marks)—only to find a genuine Deutsche Post snail-mail letter addressed to me, care of the study-abroad office, in German handwriting:

Esteemed Frau Schuman

On the night of 25 February 1997 you left your handbag on the S3 train. I recovered it and brought it home. You may telephone me and set up an appointment to come retrieve it between the hours of three and five in the afternoon on Tuesday or Wednesday.

Regards

Fr Helga Haider

Although exceptions certainly exist, when a German finds something that doesn’t belong to him—even if that something is a wallet, with credit cards and a passport and cash—he methodically and calmly tracks down the original owner and returns it, cash included. That’s not to say that Americans are inveterate found-wallet thieves—I once managed to drop my wallet onto the New York City subway tracks, and it was recovered by an MTA worker who dutifully went through every business card in it until he found someone who could call me. But when I finally shuffled to the Union Square police station to recover my possessions, the forty dollars or so in cash was understandably gone, and I didn’t even care, because any cash in a found wallet is due reward for the finder. It’s the American way.

What blew my pomade-crusted little head off about the whole debacle was how unsurprised every German I told about it was. “Of course someone found it,” they all said. “Of course she’s returning it to you.” Natürlich!

“It was very stupid of you to leave your purse on the train like that,” said Frau Helga, when I finally worked up enough courage to telephone her. “Very, very, very stupid.”

“Danke schön,” I said.

“You really shouldn’t have done that. You’re lucky I found it. It’s a purse, I told myself when I saw it. A purse! Who leaves a purse sitting around? What a stupid thing to do.”

“Jawohl,” I said. “Danke schön.”

“And then I saw that you were an American exchange student, of all things! Do Americans often just leave their purses on the train?”

“Danke,” I said. “Vielen, vielen Dank.”