Euridice

Y., a man from West Berlin.

1970, it was maybe March. I was six years old, in Istanbul, with my mother and my brothers, I took a train to Berlin. After three days of travel we arrived at Zoologischer Garten station. I remember a woman with a colorful face offering me a chocolate, I ran away scared. It was the first thing I saw in Berlin.

For Germany it had been years of crisis in the labor sector, the economic boom demanded manpower, men to be engaged for low-skilled, labor-intensive jobs. As early as 1955 the German State implemented a government program to facilitate the entry of foreign workers into the country, recruiting those who took the name “Gastarbeiter,” to perform the shittiest job that Germans didn’t want to do. So the Germans arrived, watched the teeth, touched the muscles to find the man, the condition was that they were in good health. Like horses, believe me. Paying medical care to precarious bodies was not in the premise, the prerogative was that the guest workers were healthy bodies. In one room lived six to seven people who were asked to surrender their passports, signing a contract in which for two years they could not leave Germany.

Y.’s father moved to Munich, then to Berlin, a couple of years and then you can go back home, they said. The main idea was to earn money and go back to build a house. But then my parents had to wait for children to finish school… When we left Turkey we were five children. Then the next three came in Berlin. And most of them died here.

We came from the poorest side of east Turkey. At that time, Germany had planned a school program that included the language of the Turks, but not the Kurds. At school I sat and wait, I couldn’t understand what they were saying. My class was made of kurdish people, but the lessons were in German. After three years I started to speak German. Y.’s parents, on the other hand, never really learned it; there was no time.

From the poorest side of east Turkey, east of Anatolia, in a village in the mountains, where Y. and his brothers hid from bears, killed snakes, and hard winters and intense snowfall that blocked the entrance, we jumped out of the window and cleaned in front of the door to open it. On the way to Germany, I saw cars and electricity for the first time.

The place for Gastarbeiter was West Berlin, clearly they could travel to the East, as tourists, somehow it was easier for them than for Germans to move between the two lands split by the wall. The East was a place where it was forbidden to be, an open-air prison with a nonexistent currency. The West, on the other hand, appeared like a big village, in West Berlin you didn’t have to serve the army. In the late 1970s, Charlottenburg became the place of revolutionary ideas, hippies and punk rock. That was the time when clashes with the police began, fighting for the good people. There was a pub, what is now the “Clash”, at that time called EX, it was a very political space, a Kneipe inside which revolution was made, it was the place for anarchists, socialists, communists… It used to pog, I was about sixteen years old when I went for the first time to the first punk rock concert at EX, someone brought the genre from England. And it was from 80s that huge fights started with the police, who didn’t show up in the streets, cause they were scared, there were parties all over. People threw the bottles against them, they defended the State, that for us was fascist and we had to defend ourselves. Some call them conservatives, I call them fucking fascist.

1987, 1st of May, there was a big demonstration. The police surrounded Kreuzberg, no one was allowed to enter or leave the neighborhood. Many shops were set on fire, the supermarket in front of Intertank (Goerlitzer Banhof) was completely burnt.

In the 1980s everything went to Kreuzberg. It was the neighborhood through the wall, the apartments were empty, no one was interested in investing in East Berlin. So people began to occupy the houses there. And it was the beginning of that current and fascinating idea that has been built around Berlin, artists began to populate the Oranienstrasse, the street of ateliers and art cafes, the place where the Berlin subculture was shaped, with its own style and footprint drawn from the shadow of history.

Then came the fall of the wall. 1989. It changed everything. Kreuzberg without the wall meant Kreuzberg in the center of Berlin. Before it was just at the edge. But now it became a place of interest for big investors, who started building houses, rents went up, apartments became nice. This was just the biggest thing that changed. And artists continued to populate Oranienstrasse, the difference being that now they had money.

As a Kurdish person, I can say that Germans were nice to us, but they changed very quickly, because we stayed and the economy went down. November 9, 1989. Y. went to Check Point Charlie, he was there at the time of the fall. He cried out for the wall to be raised again, and this time stronger. My friends couldn’t understand. There was a lot of racism, people from the east came and told us “now we are here, you can go home.” That day, two million people from the East came to the West to celebrate the fall. The next day, three questions were asked by former DDR people to the West: where is ku’damm? Where is the next puff (the whorehouse)? Where is the next bank?

Ku’damm (Kurfuerstendamm) was the heart of West Berlin, its center, its pulsing vein. The social, economic and cultural life of the West was based in this area. It was a symbol of the freedom, modernity and prosperity that East Berlin was deprived of. That’s why they asked for it.

About the Puff, they just wanted to fuck. It was illegale in the East.

And then there was the issue of banks. West Germany promised one hundred DMs (Deutches Marks) to every citizen of East Berlin. As a present, cause their money didnt’ work. So on the day when the East was allowed to move freely in the West, there was a stampede. The supermarkets were empty. The trains were coming… And they were full. So we waited for the next one. And that one was full, too. And so was the next one.

To this day, Berlin is much shittier than before, but it is still better than other cities. Most of my friends agree with me. Cause now it’s a big city. Capitalism ruined everything. Before, people came for art, now for carrier.

Everything is more expensive, the quality of life has changed dramatically. Before capitalism ate the city, there were not as many homeless as those who inhabit the streets today, rents were reasonable, my first apartment was 45 euros a month, that was 90 DM.

What Berlin taught me is that nothing is lasting forever. If you think to change something politically, it will change then with the next generation and everything will start again from the beginning. In Kreuzberg you can see how capitalism fucked up the city. And, perhaps most of all, East and West still exist. People who have lived through both times of the wall know a physical presence and a metaphorical absence of it. They are still there. I’m still living in the west Berlin.

Alessia Savoini