It's just a jump to the left...

Many who know me are familiar with my interest in East Germany. This slight obsession dates back to the few months in 2000 when I spent lived in an apartment in Friedrichshain, a neighbourhood that was part of East Berlin. I shared this apartment in an altbau with the French-German owner of a health food store and his dog Paula. Across the street was another altbau that was filled with squatters. They had painted the entire front of their 5-storey building–a tank, gas canisters, skulls, a wrecking bomb. (This photo is not that building. All my photos are still on paper. One day I will digitize). There was a mud sculpture park next door. The front of my building was covered in graffiti and looked somewhat abandoned, but the apartments were beautiful. The heater in my room was a ceramic coal heater–there was a bucket of coal and a shovel next to it. There was a Trabant collectors club nearby. Ah, the glamorous East!

There was an interesting mix of old and new then and plenty of reminders of the recent DDR past. So of course a headline like this would intrigue me: East German Time Warp. This is a short article from the International (read: English) version of Der Spiegel. An architect who was working on a building in Leipzig opened the door to an apartment long shut. It seems this apartment was very hastily abandoned sometime in early 1989–so hastily that there are still ashes in the ashtray, dirty pots, and old–really old–bread on the counter.

Of course, I can afford to treat these matters with curiosity and a certain level of amusement because I didn’t have to actually live through them. The people I know who did have direct experience with the East have, how shall I put it? a slightly different take. For anyone who wants an idea of what it was like, I highly recommend the 2006 film Das Leben der Anderen/The Lives Of Others.