German novelists on the fall of the Berlin wall: ‘It was a source of energy we lived off for years’
Heike Geissler: ‘For the first few years, I fell into every single consumer trap put in my way’
Heike Geissler was born in 1977 in Riesa in the former German Democratic Republic. She is the author of four novels, most recently Seasonal Associate, a highly acclaimed fictionalised account of a period she spent working in an Amazon warehouse in Leipzig.
Oh, it’s all so long ago, isn’t it? When the wall came down I was 12 years old and crazy about belongings and about the world. I was embarrassed about coming from the GDR. I was embarrassed about going into shops in West Germany and being a grey and dark-blue complex of drab timidity amidst all the colours. With my first western money I bought myself a neon-coloured rucksack and a cassette recorder. I was already more colourful when I travelled with my mother in a packed train to Oberhausen in West Germany to see the acquaintances who had for years been sending us parcels for feast days and birthdays. I ate yoghurt for the first time, and liked it, and I draped myself in colours. Autumn colours were chic at the time: purple, ochre, etc.
Maybe I’d just lost interest in politics. If only I knew. At any rate Ernst Thälmann (the leader of the Communist Party who was later shot in Buchenwald) had recently been my hero, I’d wanted to be like him, and I’d thought about how he had managed to fashion a little inkwell with the bread that a prison warder had given him, fill it with milk and thus have a source of invisible ink that he could eat straight away if he had to. I wondered about that, and a moment later I wondered what it would be like to live with Martin Lee Gore (of synth-pop band Depeche Mode). I papered my room with posters of him, I dreamt about him, I was, even though I wasn’t quite a grown-up, Martin Lee Gore’s wife.
You probably didn’t know that before, but now you do. What I didn’t know for a long time: I was a torment to my parents, because capitalism now gripped me as firmly by the hand as the Pioneer Organisation had done before. As soon as it was there I was its willing talking doll, its passionate advocate, and I was right at the front of the queue of people buying and coveting consumer goods. I appropriated externals as if nothing else existed, and spent all my time observing who had what, and who had more, and established without much difficulty that we had less. To be precise, that was how things had seemed to me even before the wall came down, but now the differences were getting bigger. I couldn’t see what was being lost. I’ve only come to see it recently. I could see only what I didn’t have, and I was busy making demands and seeing those demands become reality. I never made any political demands, so for example I never complained in a public place about the new and much more visible distribution of money and opportunities; instead all my demands were made on my parents.
So I think I spent the years of growth after the fall of the GDR shopping. I barely knew how to do anything else but seek out those swiftly erected tent constructions full of
