Der Kater Otto

I spent a wonderful first two months in Berlin staying with my best Berlin girlfiend, whom I have known for twelve years now. She has a small space – just two rooms, but quite elegant. In German you’d describe it as “klein aber fein,” or “schnuckelig” – cute and cosy. She was away visiting friends for a week, and so was I – for my German host father’s 80th birthday – and then she was on vacation for 16 days in France. I took care of her plants and of Otto, her big black-and-white tomcat. Otto is a “Schmusetier” – he loves to cuddle and collect “Streicheleinheiten” – literally: units of affection, or petting. When I arrive home and unlock the door, he’s right there to greet me, and flops over on his back to offer up his belly for petting.

Ich lebe hier

Now it is time to settle in: to make the transition from spending the summer here to living here, and from vacationing here to working here. After the exhausting week with three premieres and a birthday, I have begun writing. The first chapter is about film director Andreas Dresen’s youth as a child of two parents involved in theater work, his amateur films, and the application process at the Academy for Film and Television. There is excellent source material in the form of interviews in the daily press, videotaped interviews, and essays written by Dresen himself. I am able to write the “skeleton” of the text, as well as everything about the creation of the amateur films and their reception. I will save an interview with Dresen himself until later in the year when I know exactly what I want to ask. I sent my “Konzept” to Dresen a month ago, and just this week he called me on my cell phone to say it looks wonderful and he’s 100% behind it. When I asked if he knew where I could see the amateur films, he said “They only in my possession. We’ll just have to have a showing at my place.” I have the text mostly completed, and will share my first draft with my advisor, the Film Academy President, next week.

Filmstadt Berlin

In days before and right after my birthday I went to three film premieres. The Hochschule for Film und Fernsehen, with which I am affiliated here, educates for all aspects of film production. It the former East Germany, it was the only route to work in the film industry. Graduates of the Academy often have their premieres at the Kulturbrauerei in Prenzlauer Berg, an old brick brewery complex converted to a location with galleries, bars, restaurants, clubs, cinemas and performance spaces. I saw premieres of “Am Ende kommen Touristen” by Robert Thalheim, and “Fata Morgana” by Simon Groß. At the Freiluftkino (Open Air Cinema) Friedrichshain I saw “Ostpunk – Too Much Future” by Carsten Fiebeler. Thalheim’s film, based loosely on his own experiences, tells of a young German who completes his civil service at the former concentration camp at Auschwitz, Poland. There he is charged with taking care of a former resident of the camp who still lives on its premises and makes appearances as an eyewitness in discussions with groups of youth who visit the camp. Its various threads treat German-Polish relations, a young man’s growing into maturity, his confrontation with his nation’s past and with the aging process, as well as a love story. “Fata Morgana” is a dark thriller, set in motion when a young couple vacationing at a beach resort in Africa take a jeep into the desert and decide to leave the paved road – for the sake of adventure. “Ostpunk,” a documentary about punks in the former East Germany, was, as I should have anticipated, well-attended by former members of the same movement and/or friends of those featured in the film. It was the liveliest audience I have ever experienced!

Mein Geburtstag

August 17, 2007. Is how you spend your birthday indicative of the coming year? I spent mine with a new acquaintance, a video artist I met through an art history professor at Smith College on the Berlin Scholars list. She and I started the evening at the beach bar at Monbijou Park, across from the Museum Island, and then had dinner in the garden at Clärchens Ballhaus in the Auguststr. When they closed the garden to dinner guests at 11 pm, we went inside, where there was dancing. The video artist said many of the people here come all the way from the “Plattenbausiedlungen,” the high-rise neighborhoods of the former East such as Marzahn and Hohenschönhausen. We hadn’t been standing at the edge of the dance floor for more than 10 minutes when a man asked me to dance. Sure enough, he came from Marzahn. A former officer of the National People’s Army (East Germany) I met at a dinner party the next night said “you were where?!” That place is notorious! It used to have telephones on the tables!” Presumably it kept its pre-war character even in East Germany, and its décor has changed little even today. But the table telephones are gone. The librarian at the Film Academy explained further: “the people who go to Clärchen’s Ballhaus are the ones who used to live in the immediate area – before it became really artsy and too expensive for them in the years after the Wall fell. They’ve been driven out into the high-rises, but they come back to dance.”