“Well, I think you look nice.” I excused myself to mountaineer down to the commode.
Unlike the building, the door to the toilet-room—moist, pitch-dark, unpainted, with a greased-over window and a scratchy roll of Klopapier—absolutely did lock. This last fact was impressed upon me particularly acutely at seven thirty-five on my third morning in the place, when, tampon groggily placed into the hand where the double-ended key usually was (one for the toilet, the other for the apartment, which locked automatically behind me), I arrived at the decrepit water-closet only to realize that while tampons are indeed miracles of modernity, they do not open doors.
I hot-footed it back upstairs—in my plaid flannel pajamas, my unmet biological needs now transitioning from pressing to emergency—and buzzed the apartment’s doorbell for five straight minutes, until a severely perturbed-looking Gertrud answered, roused as she was from either slumber or intimacy with Sebastian, the hunky ponytailed thirty-five-year-old who was the current favorite of her three suitors. As soon as I told her what happened, however, she burst out laughing.
“Ein Tampax statt ’nes Schlüssels!” she yelled. “A tampon instead of a key!” “Who does that?”
Because, of course, forgetting a key is just the kind of thing that Germans simply do not do. It would be like an exchange student in the United States setting his bed on fire and then explaining, chagrined, that that sort of thing happens back home all the time.
While Gertrud definitely possessed her genetic allotment of efficiency—she was punctual everywhere she went; she never ran out of or misplaced anything; she traveled everywhere by bicycle, even in the dead of winter, and knew how to maneuver through traffic with a deft mixture of caution and aggression—her four-week tenure as my mentor, cultural ambassador, and only German friend led me to the greatest epiphany about the Germans of my short life: It wasn’t that Germans didn’t like me. It was that West Germans didn’t like me. East Germans (Ossis) like her were patiently curious about the way I did certain things—walked around barefoot, answered the phone “Hello?” instead of barking my last name into it, failed to stand up and move toward the train door a full stop before I was due to exit the U-Bahn—whereas West Germans (what we would now consider “Germans”) could be mortally offended if I kissed them on the cheek hello the wrong number of times, or changed from my outdoor-shoes to my indoor-shoes (Hausschuhe) five minutes too late for their liking. According to Gertrud, this was not because, as I had assumed before, I was a patently offensive person—it was because Wessis were spoiled pains in the ass, who outright assumed they were better and more cultured than their Eastern counterparts just because they’d had uninterrupted access to Coca-Cola for the last half-century.
Gertrud, born in 1972, was part of the second generation of native Ossis who actually grew up in the GDR, with the Berlin Wall falling only in their late adolescence or early adulthood. They’d grown up in the Pioniere, the East German scout troops, singing chipper Socialist anthems and staying for weekends in their state-allotted cabins. They’d played games in apartments provided by the state and ridden to school on Soviet-installed streetcars. Sometimes they’d been enlisted by the Stasi, the secret police, to spy on their parents—and sometimes their parents had been enlisted to spy on them.
These snippets of GDR culture have, along with the state-appointed vacation cabin, disappeared, and are available today only in ironic form via Ostalgie-themed hotels, stores, and parties—and that’s kind of a shame. Look, I’ve seen Good-Bye Lenin! and The Lives of Others more times than I can count. I’ve taken a tour of the Hohenschönhausen Stasi prison led by a former inmate, who described in excruciating detail the time she was made to sit in the water-torture machine for seventeen straight hours. I am fully aware that the division of Berlin ripped families apart and sometimes even killed people. I know the Stasi were among the most brutal surveillance forces ever to exist (and they did it through the admirably low-tech methods of medieval torture and coercing one out of every two people to spy on each other). But I’m just saying: there were things about the Ossi mentality that I very much preferred—and in 2009, 57 percent of former East Germans agreed with me, answering in the affirmative a survey in Der Spiegel about whether the GDR had “more good sides than bad.” Of course, for me it had less to do with guaranteed employment and lack of toxic late-capitalist morality than people being way less uptight about all of the things I did wrong, such as eat Nutella after 11:00 A.M. or drink water from the tap.
I was, however, also a huge hypocrite. Because of the threat of carbon monoxide poisoning, I never made a concerted effort to light my bedroom’s coal oven, so I was miserable and freezing all the time and dreamt only of cozy quarters with modern radiators and scalding showers. Gertrud worked her own Kohlenofen spectacularly, but the mile-thick cinder-block walls in the apartment meant that I could not leech off her ambient warmth, and so I lived the end of that biting winter sleeping on the floor of an unheated concrete room. Once, when I caught a cold, in order to stop shivering for long enough to fall asleep, I had to put on every article of clothing I owned.
There was also the matter of the shower.
“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.
