Strange feeling. 12 years back I saw the city crazy high on freedom, the whole squatted districts, graffiti walls, first Kaisers supermarket fool of freaks in torn color (or just dirty) rags, fuck the capitalism and anti-Nazi slogans everywhere, dirty, half-destroyed, free, colorful underground Prenzlauer Berg. Now it is construction here.
– triumphant West – clean, one-color walls (few graffiti spots – the last attempt), noisy pneumatic hammers and turkish workers. I am not much into all that alternative stuff and blah-blah (I dont care about any ideas, I know that there are people that counts, not the ideas), but I had a real protest feeling – this place used to have more beauty than that!
a lot of unusual faces here. The same people but older – and touched by worries. They belong to the back-side alleys still grey-walled and old, but the facades are of the new Prenzlauer Berg – tourist kiosks and expensive new age shops – «bohemian» and as dead as Monmartre…
… So I got stuck to them little alleys, went to some old hinterhofen, where something Eastern still hides. The strangest feeling I had when I went into the house of my first night in Berlin(remember I told you the story – in 1989 I asked the guy (just because he looks nice): “Hey, can I sleep at your place?” – he said: “Yeah, sure”, and I spent with him 3 weeks). Now the house (which was so cool before, old, with a huge oak tree in the zweite hinterhof where we used to make parties) is pretty deutschy yellow, fresh painted, clean, no funny mess: I found the mailbox with Stephan Mauersberger on it – can you imagine young German living at the same place for 12 years? – but I also found the information board of some communal service messages – with notes about (as far as I understood in my intuitive German) «Something (blah-blah) was stolen from the yard, so please liebe freunden keep the gates shut for the night so no suspicious bastards will ever come inside. Gruss, Stephan Mauersberger» and something about the garbage and cleaning etc. I changed my mind and didn’t go to see Stephan.
Instead I went to the square right in the Pr.Berg center, bought a Schultheiss and drank it at the bench watching the ping-pong players – the last ones of Schliemannstrasse squatters, now old bearded junkies, gathered there with their beers, and dogs, doggie hordes running around wildly.
As a result of my beer sitting I got fucking cold, went to the «Humana» second hand store, put on a sweater and went out unnoticed.
