A Journey of Coincidence

By

Tom Reissmann

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2011 Tom Reissmann

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A Journey of Coincidence

Prologue

Everyone around me was murmuring in prayer. I assumed it to be the Lord’s Prayer, but really I had no idea because they were speaking Portuguese. But even if they had been speaking German, English or Spanish, I would not have known the words. Where I grew up I had always been told that religion is opiate for the people and thus hadn’t really spent much time in prayer school. Did I believe in God at the time? Well let’s just say that I didn’t exclude the possibility and I did believe Alanis Morissette, who incidentally played God in the movie Dogma, when she sang that life is ironic. Because wasn’t it ironic that I was now here in Northern Bolivia, with a group of Christians, about to take their own sacred opiate, which supposedly would unlock the door to the kingdom of God.

They stopped praying, passed Santa Maria, neatly packed into a joint, and began serving the reddish liquid from a corked wine bottle, in total silence. The surrounding jungle was anything but silent as an array of noises poured into the open windows of the small wooden church, which was only slightly lit by several candles on the table in front of us.

“Like someone playing a synthesizer in the jungle,” Andrew the German had said. Funny how we Westerners compare nature to electronic gadgets, given that he jungle had certainly been there before the synthesizer, or it wouldn’t have had anything to synthesize. And wasn’t that the same fallacious argument science made when it explained everything through chemicals and formulas, which supposedly proved the non-existence of God, when obviously something a bit bigger than ourselves had created nature that we were now explaining through numbers and concepts, using a brain that we had also been given by nature. It’s not like we created it, we’re only explaining it and just because there is evolution does not negate a higher power, because that higher power had designed that process of evolution - we certainly haven’t. It had been done for us, we’re only sitting here all smug and self-satisfied, explaining how it works, but not why it works the way it does.

“The Daime is Jesus Christ liquefied,” Andrew had said. I was about to find out what that meant. One by one the twelve women and men were given their holy sacrament. When it was my turn finally, I walked up to Jose to get my serving of Daime from one of their self-made pottery cups. This was my last chance to bail out. ‘But it’s kind of too late now. I can hardly run out of the church now.’ My heart was pounding as I traced the cross over my chest, holding a cup full of liquid, red Jesus.

‘This is the point of no return; there’s no going back after that,’ I realized and poured the sour-tasting liquid down my throat. I could almost hear the eerie metallic sound of my liquefied mirror image disappearing inside, just like in The Matrix, as Neo starts to feel the effect of the red pill. The voice of Morpheus was ringing in my ear: “Have you ever had a dream that was so real, that you could not tell the difference to the real world? What if you were unable to wake from that dream?”

I walked back to the table and they began singing. Someone had lit a stick of Palo Santo, and the sweet-smelling scent gave the atmosphere an almost holy air. Once we were all served, we sat down again — woman on one side of the table and men on the other. Someone pointed to the book in front of me, indicating the verse they were about to sing.

“Dai-me forna e Dai-me amor para eu poder trabalhar.”

As I became engaged in the lyrics I somehow lost my grasp of time. The concept suddenly appeared strange, because it presupposed change, while I had the distinct feeling that nothing was actually changing. I looked at my body and to my surprise I could not fully identify with it; in fact it felt rather alien. A thought entered my mind: ‘That’s not me, but then who or what am I?’ The question is usually purely intellectual in nature but in this state it became almost existential and I felt like if I really wanted to know then this was the time to find out, thus I gave it my fullest attention. I could not concentrate on the lyrics anymore and my head became heavy, so heavy in fact that I had to lay it down on the table in front of me, while my arms were dangling loosely beside me. Not exactly standard etiquette in those sort of circumstances, but then I had just lost sense of time and self, so social etiquette was certainly not on the forefront of my mind either. In fact there wasn’t anything on the forefront or back of my mind, thoughts were simply running amok in there. ‘What was I doing here with this crazy sect?’ ‘What would my dad have to say about all this, about his son getting fucked up with Christians?’ ‘Oh great, he’s completely lost it now.’ Something along those lines probably. I remembered the words of my girlfriend: ‘I have learned so much from you already. You have given me so much optimism.’ That thought made me smile. Someone tapped me on my shoulder.

“You have to do some more work my friend,” a voice said to me in Spanish, though I wasn’t sure who that voice belonged to. ‘Oh, that’s why you call it work,’ I thought. ‘This stuff ain’t easy.’ At that very instant a fluorescent green grasshopper landed on the table right in front of me, which startled me in a very nice way. I felt like I had just received a message from the forest creatures. ‘Just hang on in there buddy,’ the little fella said and hopped on off the table. I slowly sat up straight again and then someone started playing the flute. I had always liked the flute, but on that occasion I was literally in love with the sound of the flute. I could feel it inside my body. The sound seemed to wander up my spine and I was suddenly filled with energy again. I managed to stand up, along with everyone else. I heard the American vomiting noisily out the window and, I know this sounds bad, but it actually made me smile, not only because vomiting out of a church window is funny, but also because I knew I was not alone in my weakness. I began formulating the words I read in the book I held in my hands, after my eyes had slowly adjusted to the letters.

“Eu canto aqui na terra. Oh amor que Deus nos da.

Para sempre. Para Sempre

Ah minha ma que vem com migo

Para sempre. Para sempre.”

I closed my eyes and let the sound of sempre reverberate within me. It found its way into my head first and then began moving down my spine, somehow filling my entire body with the vibration of eternity and then I lost any sense of reality. Every sensation; touch, smell, balance, taste and vision melted into one: a bright white light of eternal, I suppose you could call it; bliss. An immense electric current of peace and joy overcame me and I knew without thinking that this is where we came from and where we will return to. Well, eventually.

Chapter 1

Behind the Wall

Growing up in East Germany was like living in The Truman Show. We didn’t have to worry about putting food on the table and having a roof over our heads, all that was provided by the State, but they also planned out our lives as they saw fit for and someone was always watching us, including our neighbours, our teachers, the Stasi and even our relatives, just to make sure we didn’t misbehave. But above all we lived in a restricted area and going beyond it meant danger, both real and psychological. The psychological danger was maintained by State television that reported on such topics as unemployment in the West, drug abuse, homelessness and poverty, all of which didn’t exist under socialism. In addition there were the real dangers like land mines and snipers to ensure we stayed within the predetermined parameters. Meanwhile we were made to believe that in fact we owned all of the factories and were essentially in charge, and that it was all for our own good, that it was safe here in East and that our party would always provide for us. It was an illusion of course, and when that illusion fell away, some people couldn’t deal with it and actually committed suicide others never fully adjusted to capitalism, always suffering from Ostalgie, the notion that under socialism everything was somehow better, while some people, like myself, began to see any society, media, culture and the world in general as an illusion.

For the most part life was surprisingly bearable in East Germany. People always ask me what it was like growing up under socialism, and they frequently have this genuine look of pity in their eyes. I always feel like I should indulge their preconceived notions of socialism and tell tales of rationing and scarcity, marching in line ahead of tanks and rocket launchers and being moulded into athletes at the tender age of five, but it wasn’t like that at all. In fact food was dirty cheap and plentiful and the state provided free child-care, after-school-care and even holiday camps, because two of the main tenants of socialism were equal rights for women and supporting families. Women were encouraged to find jobs and leave the raising of children in the hands of the state, though I imagine that there was an ulterior motive involved because that much of a cliché is true; we were quietly being brainwashed into loving our party leaders, the socialist revolution and our friends in the Soviet Union, while fearing the imperialistic endeavours of capitalist society. We were constantly surrounded by propaganda, billboards, people, television, books and radio announcing how great the SED (Socialist Union Party) is, how grateful we should be to our Soviet friends for liberating us from the Nazis and most of all how we should despise the evil Imperialist Empire of America and its affiliates, like West Germany. But you could ignore all that if you wanted, what was more difficult to ignore was the constant imperative to participate in activities that somehow contributed to the advancement of the Socialist State.

But as kids we were blissfully oblivious of all that, it was natural and just the way things were, and at the time we also didn’t know that other children played with Legos, Nintendos and Fisher Price. So we really didn’t miss any of it, because how can you miss something you don’t even know exists? There were always ample amounts of food and a good number of days set aside for holidays, thus we had plenty of time to spend with our parents. My parents were very young, twenty-one to be precise, because my mom was really keen on having babies. My dad was less inclined to raise children, after all he had only just started university and felt like living it up, but was forced to change diapers instead. Two more boys followed in a neat succession of three years, which makes three boys separated by three years. My parents seemed to have developed a liking for threes and given that we all had biblical names, Thomas, Andreas and Martin, I wonder if there was some kind of subconscious religiosity at play, even though they were, like most people in East Germany, atheists.

My dad had a healthy dislike for authority and expressed that by letting his hair grow long and sporting a fuzzy, Fidel-Castro-style beard, which was almost unseen in East Germany at the time and even more frowned upon. He had cut his long hair by the time we were born, but the beard remained and it was curiously entertaining to us kids, because it was big enough to hide things in there and when you pulled on it you’d get varying reactions depending on the mood he was in. It was like a mood ring of sorts. You just pulled on it and knew if he’d had a good day or a bad day. He also liked listening to Jazz and not really going along with the whole party dogma and he passed that on to us as we grew older and was probably a bad influence on my mom as well. He wanted to become a schoolteacher when he was young but wasn’t really considered a good role model by the state, so getting a teaching degree was not an option for him, he simply wasn’t allowed to. The way it worked in East Germany was that everyone had a so-called Kaderakte, a personal file that essentially determined your life in the GDR, because it was consulted before any decision was made for you, including choosing a course of study, and given his rebellious character becoming a teacher was not an option. He studied maths instead, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise because he became a software engineer, which later secured him a good job in West Germany. Without knowing he had paved a way to living very comfortably once the Wall came down, simply by being contrarian. So there you have it, a healthy disrespect for authority can go a long way. The disrespect probably stemmed from growing up under an overbearing mother and episodes like tying his left hand down to force him to learn how to write with his right hand, because being left-handed was simply being way too different and in East Germany everyone was supposed to be the same. His father sat in a wheelchair after having lost his right leg in the battle of Leningrad. I remember that the task of strapping on his ‘fake’ leg sometimes fell on us, and that wobbly stump of flesh really freaked me out, plus Grandpa Otto had a bit of a short temper, so if we didn’t get that damn thing on there fast enough he’d get a bit annoyed and shout at us. But he was a lovely old man otherwise and he’d lost the habit of throwing things at people, when he got mad. My dad once had the pleasure of dodging a deodorant can during one of his fits, and according to him it left a considerable dent in the wall. I suppose sitting in a wheelchair does fill you with impotent rage at times. But he was also extremely intelligent and loved playing chess. Even in his late years when he started falling asleep in the middle of conversations, he’d still be alert during a game of chess. The only game of chess I ever won against him was also the last one I ever played with him. I should have been elated but I was really sad instead, because I knew that it was the beginning of the end, and indeed he passed away the next day. I haven’t played chess since.

The East German authorities never gave up their attempts to mould my dad’s character and shape him into a more obedient citizen of the GDR. Trying to persuade him to become a reservist sub-officer in the NVA, the East German Army, was one of their more serious attempts. Every male had to serve in the army but my dad just wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible and with as little hassle as possible, so becoming a sub-officer was the last thing on his mind. But when he thankfully declined the offer, he was asked to write a Stellungsnahme, a justification for his decision. My dad felt like he didn’t have to justify his decision, it was his to make, after all. But the relevant person in charge of his particular case insisted. Not complying would have serious consequences for his future, such as never being given a job of any relevance, which was any job that required a look at the Kaderakte, and excluded only positions like mortician, grave digger, or assistant to the old and the insane. Naturally the old, insane and dead were the only ones spared from socialist indoctrination. It was this style of Bevormundung, the constant attempt at controlling your behaviour and the decisions in life so as to fall in line with what the state considered to be best for your character development, that was the most suffocating aspect of living in East Germany. And there was a completely arbitrary nature to how every case was handled, if your case was in the hands of someone who was merely an opportunist and who really couldn’t care less about what you dit and what you thought, then you got lucky, but if you’re assigned to some, bleary-eyed idealist, who has bought into the socialist idea lock, stock and Stasi file, then your life could become extremely miserable, unless you obliged. So even though my dad was a rebel he was not a revolutionary, and he wrote his Stellungnahme, which was based mainly on the fact that the army did not agree with his character and general aspirations in life, and from there on did his best to fly below the radar and not upset any of the Stasi officials, which unfortunately he didn’t always succeed in doing.

My mom was probably the complete opposite to my dad in many ways, because she was quite well behaved, and liked to please the people around her and she even believed in the benevolent nature of the socialist regime to some degree. For example she refused to believe until the end that the Stasi would be willing to hurt people if they had the audacity to protest in the streets. Her dad had pursued a decent enough career in the East German army and was completely sold on the socialist experiment, which was a smart move, because he came from a modest background and had four children to feed, so being active in the party considerably increased his chances of doing well under the current system. But he also had a bit of a temper and a violent streak so it was best not to cross him. My mom did become a schoolteacher but as time progressed she found it increasingly difficult to stick to the prescribed curriculum and participate in extra-curricular activities because there was a considerable amount of brainwashing to be done. Every work of literature she discussed came with a socialist message she was urged to drill into her students, but she simply did not believe it herself and thus found it hard to convince her students. She tried to wiggle her way through but she was continuously asked to participate in activities like 1^st of May demonstrations. She tried to use her role as a mother of three to get out of these obligations, or opted to tend to the school vegetable garden because at least vegetables did not require brainwashing. She continuously felt like a pawn of the system and eventually resigned on the grounds of being a busy mother. What she had not anticipated was the fact that from now on she had a serious blemish on her file and found it impossible to find a job of any relevance. She was finally reassigned to senior care, because they were seen as somewhat less valuable assets to society than children. First of all bed-ridden seniors don’t start revolutions and secondly they don’t produce much in terms of benefits to society, they were more like the old work horse in The Animal Farm, all useless and worn out. I’ve always had my reservations about George Orwells’ books, because it seemed to me like those in power just used his books as instruction manuals. I imagine there was a bunch of fat Party Bonzen, sitting in the politburo, reading his book, banning it for the general public, of course, and then writing a nice little internal memo, that went something like this: ‘All Peasants and Workers of the German Democratic Republic are equal, but we the party functionaries are more equal because we have to run this great socialist state of ours. So we shall build ourselves our own little community in the woods and drive shiny Western Cars, because we all know that Trabants and Wartburgs are a very sorry excuse for a car. We shall also stock only Western goods in our shops, because they do make groceries that tend to be quite pleasing to the palate over there, even if they are exceedingly capitalistic and imperialist in their convictions, not too mention exploitative and oppressive of the working class.’ And that’s exactly what they did, they built their own gated community in the woods and consumed only Western products. Of course we didn’t know that at the time, it was all very secret and well guarded, but when the Wall finally came down, all the secrets came down with it, and a few people’s illusions as well. Some were so disillusioned and they ended their lives voluntarily.

So my mom was in charge of allocating nurses to old people from now on but also began to look after the needs of old people, even though she wasn’t a nurse as such, more like an assistant and someone to talk to. Naturally seeing people deteriorate, and slowly lose all of their bodily functions, is somewhat less inspiring than helping to raise bleary-eyed youngsters, which meant she regarded her job mainly as a punishment. But again it was a blessing in disguise because it became one of the main reasons she encouraged my dad to get a job in the West once the Wall came down, because she just wanted to get away from it all and start a new life in the West. She had nothing to lose anymore, and as Janis Joplin once said: freedom is another word for nothing left to lose. So again a negative experience in my parents’ lives had extremely positive repercussions for the rest of us.

But generally I think we were all pretty happy and we got along quite well, my brother was even one of my best friends back then. I really liked him and I thought the little one was really cute when he was a toddler, all tubby and giggly. Though like most brothers we could be real arseholes at times, we once made him urinate on my parent’s pillow and eat paper soup, yeah that’s right soup, made out of pieces of paper floating on water. Terrible I know, but then you got to entertain yourself when you don’t have Fisher Price and Legos, plus my parents really shouldn’t have left us on our own without a babysitter. Come to think of it, they really must have trusted us, and specifically me to just go out and leave us without supervision. I think they didn’t do that again, after the pillow incident. Eventually we did get Legos too, because my mom started taking care of an old woman who had relatives in the West, and because she wanted to do something nice for my mom, the old lady ordered Legos and Nutella from her relatives. I loved Legos and Nutella, I still do, that stuff is ingenious, and it represented a more plentiful existence in the West and was probably the first seed that was sown for my desire to live in that magic world of toys and spreadable chocolates. I do have quite a few fond memories of holidays spent together at lakes and the North Sea, playing with my brothers, going on holidays camps with friends and watching Charlie Chaplin on TV, acting out the various characters with my brothers afterwards. Yeah he was a funny chap my brother, and that Charlie Chaplin too. I loved watching his crazy antics. Evidently East German Television did too, he was on prime time television all the time. They probably liked how he poked fun at the letdowns of capitalism. He was quite socio-critical, I suppose, but I just liked the way he moved, and I suspect if it hadn’t been for the jerky, black and white film, used in the 1920s, it wouldn’t have been half as funny.

While my dad had a really long fuzzy beard, my mom wore a boy’s haircut because she allowed my dad to cut her hair, not sure if that was to save money or to make her less attractive to other suitors, but probably the former because my mom only ever had one boyfriend, and that was my dad. They met at school, and they’re still together, quite romantic in that way, I guess. Of course they went through some rough patches but at least I’m not all cynical about marriage and relationships. But I am shopping around for a wife a bit more than my dad, in fact I’m still shopping and I’m putting off the whole baby-thing for little while, because I think my dad wasn’t ready for it, and I kind of picked up on that a bit. I mean they really loved us and they always made great efforts to make us happy, like building a whole model railroad from scratch, with mountains and trees and everything, but I sensed that it was just way too early for him, he didn’t like the responsibility of looking after three rug rats, and who can blame him, I wouldn’t either. It was sort of thrust upon him because my mom really wanted babies. And when they would argued about that, it sometimes didn’t make me feel too fuzzy about life, because even as a kid you know that they are arguing about whether you ought to have been born or not. I remember once being accused of being a parasite, when I was a teenager, and responding that I didn’t ask to be born, that they had made that decision without my input. And maybe that’s where my general low self-esteem came from, I kind of felt not all that welcome here in life, at times. But it was only at times and at others they really loved us, so maybe that explains my split personality too. East Germany also had a perpetually depressing vibe to it, because we were surrounded by very old buildings in various states of disrepair, cobble stones streets that shook your car like a paint-shaker, smouldering old factories and in some cases piles of rubble, like the ruins of the Frauenkirche, intentionally left unmoved to provide a reminder of the atrocities of the allies. In case you’ve never heard of Slaughterhouse Five, a book by Kurt Vonnegut, later turned into a movie, Dresden was firebombed by the British in 1945. My grandparents still recall the attack, which was visible even in Radebeul, a town 10 Kilometres North-West of Dresden. The sky reddened into a sunset glow that lasted for days, people were burned alive as firestorms ravaged the city, and about 20,000 to 40,000 people lost their lives, in some cases reducing people to the size of children as they were cremated by incendiaries packed into the bombs. It was a very controversial attack, because much of Dresden’s infrastructure like bridges and railroads were left intact and extensive industrial complexes outside the city were left standing, implying that they simply wanted to destroy an historic and cultural landmark known as The Florence of the Elbe, as an act of revenge for flattening Coventry. But it should also be noted that 60 bombers mistakenly dropped their load on Prague, so the argument of not destroying it all stands on shaky ground. Dresden still is a beautiful city and many historical buildings like the Zwinger and the Semperoper as well as the newly rebuilt Frauenkirche, sitting next to the Elbe river, give it the feeling of a city rich in cultural heritage and architectural and natural beauty. The trouble was when I was young the Elbe was a stinking flow of industrial refuge, the ruins of the Frauenkirche gave the city a sense of having just emerged from a devastating war and the architectural aspirations of Russian-style high rise buildings were purely functional in nature, to say the least. But on a sunny day with the wind moving in the opposite direction and an ice-cream in my hand, Dresden could be quite attractive, even back then.

We lived in Radebeul, once the domain of the rich and famous, with grandiose villas, grape-vine covered hills and massive oak trees lining the streets. It was once the home of Karl May, a fantasy-novel writer, who is to blame for my liking of Native American culture. Karl May wrote fictional stories about North America in the 1800s as well as adventure stories set in the Orient. He claimed at the time that they were non-fiction, even though he had not set foot on American soil until later in his life. But he did read anthropological reports about Apache customs and ritual, when he sat in jail for fraud, as a way to escape the tedium, I suppose. And since he had a knack for making up stories, which is what had landed him in jail in the first place, it was a natural progression to invent grand tales of courage and adventure set in far-away lands. And if you’ve watched Inglourious Basterds by Quention Tarantino then you might have even heard of him and his most famous character, Winnetou, the Apache chief, because they mention it in the basement scene – remember when they play a guessing game with cards stuck to their foreheads and later someone gets his balls shot off – that’s the one. Otherwise you’ve most likely never heard of him because while Karl May was extremely popular in continental Europe he never became widely known elsewhere, probably because it’s children’s literature and his stories bear no relevance to real life in the Wild West of the United States. In Germany he remains incredibly popular to this day and every young kid reads at least one of his books. Indeed his works had an influence on Albert Einstein, who evidently spent his entire childhood under his spell, and even Hermann Hesse who considered his work as wish-fulfilment. It is also widely known that Hitler was an admirer of Karl May and that he was obsessed with his works, to the extent that it caused a notable decline in his grades, when he was a young pupil in Austria. Hitler even attended a lecture by Karl May in Vienna, and defended the author against critics in the hostel he was staying in, when it became apparent that Karl May had not in fact experienced the adventures that he claimed were non-fiction, and it came to light that he had spent time in jail and never set foot on American soil until years after writing his books. In Hitlers’s view this only made him a better writer and there are even historical accounts of Hitler drawing strength from the works of Karl May during his more insane years of attempted world-domination, like others would from the bible. Just like Nietzsche, Karl May was exploited heavily by the Nazis, who used it as examples of what can be achieved even by the average man. The East German government initially discouraged people from reading his books, and officially considered him a chauvinist, but because it didn’t break his popularity, they eventually published his books freely and even opened their own Karl May museum, located in his villa.

The reason I had a particular connection with May’s stories was that his villa was situated only a couple of houses from our apartment block, which was located right next to the Karl May park. He was essentially a neighbour, although he was dead by the time I was alive, of course. The Karl May museum was filled with life-sized Apache mannequins -- face paint, tepees, weapons and all -- even a giant painting of the battle at Little Big Horn. But the museum wasn’t so much an anthropological attempt at displaying customs and dresses, but rather enveloping his fictional characters in a sense of authenticity and romanticism. I spent a quite a bit of time running around in there as a kid and I actually wanted to be like Winnetou, who just travelled around on a horse and had a couple of white blood-brothers, named Old Shatterhand and Old Surehand. All of them got themselves into all sorts of sticky situations but naturally always emerged victoriously. I guess if I had a role model at the time it was Winnetou. I wanted to be a Native American, and when I later read about how badly they were really treated I got pretty upset and sort of rethought the entire idea, because they really did get a rough deal. About 25 years later when I was in one of the countries with the largest Native American population in the world, and with the worst modern-day abuses against indigenous people, namely Guatemala, where I attended a meditation camp at Lake Atitlan, and engaged in so-called past life regressions, I would learn that whatever we want to be when we are really young, is an indication of our past lives, because we still remember. Whereas when we get older we generally think that’s a load bullocks and want to be the CEOs of a Fortune 500 company and make a six-figure salary. Well, I never really forgot, although my future aspirations aren’t necessarily that of being a noble savage on a horse with a silver-studded rifle, but I still want to be just as free and live into the day. I also felt an affinity for Karl May, and once, in fact in Guatemala, while writing the first version of this book, I even dreamt that I was him in a former life, so perhaps the memory was not that of being a Native American but being Karl May. Karl May was an interesting character, in that he was diagnosed with dissociate identity disorder, which was brought on by the experience of having lost his teaching degree, because he was accused of having stolen his roommates’ pocket watch, although he always maintained that he had been lent the watch with prior consent. Once he could not teach anymore he started inventing alternate identities, such as that of a doctor, and as was custom at the time, doctors were often given food and drink for free and even received generous gifts and clothing, as a form of gratitude towards the profession. It was these bouts of fraud that landed him in jail where he began reading about reports from travellers to North America and started writing his fantastical stories. But because he still suffered from the same disorder he wrote in the first person and claimed that these stories were in fact true accounts of his adventures in America, while assuming the character of Old Shatterhand, who meets the noble Savage in the form of the Apache chief, Winnetou. The interesting part about his history is that having lost his teaching license eventually led him to become a writer and as you know, if you’ve been paying attention, both of my parents had their lives irrevocably altered by not being able to teach and it is most likely that because of that sequence of events I ended up in West Germany and also started travelling and eventually writing. Let us assume that I share some kind of karmic connection with Karl May, then it would seem almost like I’m making up for the untruthful nature of his character as well as his stories by truly travelling all over the place and only writing about actual accounts, while trying to uncover an authentic sense of adventure and mystery in the real world.

I also loved Mark Twain’s stories of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, so travelling to the US was always very high on my list and being an adventurer was definitely an aspiration very dear. But even as a kid I also had this split personality where I would be pretty courageous, like climbing up into trees or onto old ruins, to the annoyance of my teachers, just to test my character, and show off, but on the other hand I could be really timid and shy and be shitting myself about going down a waterslide or facing up to a big dog and even bees. Well, as far as bees go, I once got stung in my arm pit, but because I was holding a cup of lemonade at the time it was also pretty amusing for the people around me, except those standing right behind me.

I do remember that it would really get to me that my dad would be disappointed and even ashamed of me when I was being a wimp, so that next time around I would show him that in fact I really was a fearless warrior, and that’s probably why I still do really stupid things just to prove it to myself and some kind of virtual dad. I was also lucky in that my parents liked to move, and pretty frequently at that, because, mainly my mom, liked moving to bigger and better apartments. That helped me overcome my shyness and introversion to some extent because I had to make new friends all the time and adjust to new and unfamiliar surroundings, and it probably set the stage for me to become a traveller and craving change all the time.

The older I got in East Germany the more I became aware that I lived in a rather large prison with very strict rules and if those rules were not adhered to it would have serious consequences. If for example someone wanted to cross the so-called “Anti-imperialistische Schutzwall” (the anti-imperialistic protection-barrier) to the West, also known as the Wall, they’d be shot, which is why the name is a bit of an Orwellian joke because it didn’t protect us from no Imperialists, it protected us from ourselves, because so many of us wanted to run and surrender to the imperialistic powers of the West. Numerous people still tried in all sorts of devices from sail-planes to Hot Air Balloons, canoes and even rafts, and occasionally some of them did make it, from what I could hear on my crackling AM radio, on a day with good reception. My radio was a timber box, the size of suitcase and dials shaped like baby octopus. I think it was an antiquity from the 1920s, but it still worked, and hearing commercials and Western news, was like listening to pirate radio from behind the enemy lines. It was ridiculously exciting and magical.

Of course East German state television wouldn’t report such incidents of escape, but terrestrial television from the West would, which served most of Germany, except Dresden and surroundings. The problem with Dresden is that it’s a valley and thus terrestrial signal is hard to pick up. The valley of Dresden therefore became known as the valley of the Ahnungslosen (the clueless), which ironically resulted in the highest numbers of emigration applications in the whole of East Germany. You see, while you might get shot while trying to cross the border, or even step on a mine, you could apply for emigration, if you had relatives in the West. Emigration for Easterners had become available in the early eighties, after some negotiation with the West, who had given generous loans to the East, without which East Germany would have most likely collapsed even earlier. The first wave of emigration was in fact forced immigration of infamous figures that had become embarrassing and uncomfortable for the politburo, such as the folk singer Wolfgang Biermann and later the actor Manfred Krug. These people had become famous but were also non-conformist and caused embarrassment for those in power, so they were forced to leave the country, other less famous artists were forced to stop creating, through Arbeitsverbot, which is discussed in detail in the movie The Lives of Others. Thus instead of listening to the legitimate complaints from people the state reacted with a self-protective defensiveness that only alienated people even more. And upon the urgings of the West German government there was a second wave of emigration that allowed families to reunite. Many families had been separated during the division of Germany, which came about because of the bad timing of the allies, who had occupied only half of Germany, while the other half had gone to the Russian troops.

Berlin had somehow been partly occupied by the allies and partly by the Russians, which created the rather silly set-up of an area within a country belonging to another, which also happened to be ideologically opposed. The Americans and the Russians were united only briefly by a common enemy, but remained ideologically opposed, because American industrialists, who incidentally did extremely well out of World War II, had witnessed the nationalization of factories in Russia and considered socialism as clear threat to their survival, so the American government, which is essentially in the pockets of corporations, decided to build an economically strong West Germany as a buffer zone against Eastern Europe, now controlled by the Russians. They poured billions of dollars into West Germany, despite the protest of their European allies, who would have much rather seen Germany turn into a purely agricultural zone, because quite frankly they were getting fed up with Germany’s expansionist tendencies, while the Russians, on the other side, couldn’t give a damn about the East German economy and disassembled factories and even railroads, to use the scrap metal to rebuild a devastated Russia. It was for those reasons that East Germany was in a rather miserable state, compared to its Western counterpart, and it had not changed much over forty years because the Socialist planned economy simply didn’t work all that well. Thus, understandably so, families from the West had no inclination whatsoever to move to the East and live with their relatives in the Russian-occupied zone, except for some socialist dreamers perhaps, so that Eastern families were finally allowed to rejoin with their relatives in the West at the end of the eighties. But the conditions were tough — and the application process could take years, with endless papers to complete, frequent interrogations of relatives and friends, and even secret monitoring as well as Arbeitsverbot, which basically meant that one could not pursue any occupation that required a viewing of the Kaderakte. Also there was never any guarantee that emigration would be granted, because processing was completely arbitrary and not covered by any rule of law, it simply depended on the mentality and mood of the person who was in charge of looking at your application. And if they felt that someone harbored resentment towards the Socialist State there was a good chance that those people would end up as a political prisoner in Bautzen. And even though the movie The Lives of Others - which is historically quite accurate – made interrogations look all cute and cuddly; they weren’t always that subtle, from what I heard. But none of us knew exactly what happened to political prisoners, and none of us wanted to find out either. Even though we did manage to appear on the Stasi’s radar, at least that’s what we assume, because we once came home and found the front door to our apartment had been forced opened while no valuables had been taken. So we assumed that they had installed bugs to listen in to our conversations, which was standard practice with people who were seen as contrarian. I suppose it all was a bit too obvious, because if they really wanted to listen in they would have found a more subtle way to install them rather than to force the door open and take nothing, so I think it might have been a warning, because unlike people with influence or real activism they knew that we were never the revolutionary kind. There were plenty of people who ended up in prison or had their lives irrevocably changed but we weren’t willing to suffer such harassment and essentially abided. We never found out what information they had compiled on us, although we could have by viewing our Stasi files, after the system collapsed, but my parents were of the opinion that it’s best not to, because it might only creates conflict and resentment towards family members, since relatives were often used to provide information to the Stasi.

Having read Jules Verne as passionately as Karl May, I decided that a Balloon would be the best way to escape -- and that I wanted to escape was pretty clear to me – because they were very classy and not detectable by radar. The only problem was that a Balloon is sort of big and glows in the dark, because of the rather large flame, but that could be remedied by flying during a clear day and painting it sky-blue, I thought. I did have a pretty vivid imagination and liked reading and by now I had developed a healthy disregard for socialist party rule. Which I felt compelled to express in class, even though I didn’t really get too much backup from my friends, except that half-Hungarian dude, who knew he was going to be in the West soon anyways. I sort of went a bit too far during a 1^st of May Labour Day demonstration when all the party functionaries sat on stage and waved to us like benevolent royals, and we waved back with our red flags and red tulips and appreciative Arbeiter und Bauern hands to show our gratitude for running the country into the ground. Being the idiotic clown that I was, I decided to wave with my hand turned backwards, which pretty much means: you’re all a bunch of morons. When my friend nudged me and pointed out that these Stasi-looking guys were watching me, I made the mistake of looking back so they could get a really nice shot of my face. Bloody stupid really.

The next day I had chat with my red-haired, head-teacher, who could be a really nice person when she was not in a bad mood and had a headache, trouble was that she suffered from chronic migraines and was very quite indoctrinated in the ways of socialism plus she had a highly developed authoritarian streak. But then again she had to be; she was our head indoctrinator. She sat me down and looked at me sadly, massaged her forehead and then asked me politely if I could keep my political opinions to myself in the future. I mentioned that I hadn’t said anything at the May demonstration, I had merely waved at the party functionaries in an unorthodox way because I am a bit uncoordinated. I thought I was being clever but then I realised that I was just being an idiot because I had just confessed. “Thomas, I would like you to join the Army,” she suggested calmly. I was a bit gobsmacked by her suggestion to say the least. I couldn’t imagine a greater indignity than to take orders all day while crawling through the dirt and defending our great socialist state by shooting at people trying to get out. Plus I wasn’t sure whether she could make me go or whether I had to volunteer. As usually fear turned to into anger and I said: “I’m not going to join the Army so that you can kiss ass with the Stasi.” She didn’t respond well to that at all. In fact she dragged me out of the room by my ears, like a naughty toddler, and into the hall, shouting at the top of her lungs that they would teach me in the army and I would learn how to keep my big mouth shut. She then dragged me into the principal’s office and explained what an arrogant little shit I was. The principal seemed somewhat less perturbed and mentioned that he would deal with it shortly. And then I just sat there for an hour. I think he was busy and had better things to do, but eventually he explained that at the next school meeting I would be publically reprimanded, but that joining the army would be my decision. Oh, public humiliation, the crown jewel in every child’s education. The problem was that even though I was an introverted kid, I did love getting into trouble and I was proud of it, so to be reprimanded in front of the entire school meant everyone would know that I’m a bad ass. Well that’s how I felt anyways, because the other part of me felt like I was a wimp of course, nicely reinforced by my dad who did like putting us down a bit, when he got a chance. My teacher decided to change strategy and keep my occupied with various projects, like organising the recycling days. You see, because resources were scarce in East Germany, we were encouraged to recycle, and even had a recycling day every month, when we would bring all our recyclables from home to school. It sounds quite progressive and I suppose it was, but it had nothing to do with environmentalism, as evidenced by the stinking Elbe river and smokestacks surrounding Dresden, leaving the valley in a perpetual cloud of smog. I also became responsible for organising school discos and even liked to play the host with a microphone, announcing songs in a Barry-White-voice, to the grin of my fellow pupils. We did enjoy the whole dancing with the opposite scenario though and started having our own discos, in someone’s basement with a tiny stereo from West Germany playing Michael Jackson, Die Ärzte, Wham, George Michael and all the other 80s music. I kissed a girl, who was a year older than me, for the first time during one of those slow-dance numbers and even though I found poking my tongue into someone’s mouth a bit odd to begin with I soon got the hang of it and even enjoyed the ritual to some degree. She decided that I would be her boyfriend and then we just started hanging out and walking around holding hands, since she was quite attractive, the older guys from her class really didn’t appreciate me pissing in their territory and shoved me around a bit on various occasions, since I simply started acting like a demented clown in such situation, they figured that I was a nutcase and stopped feeling threatened by me, and just accepted the fact that I was now going out with one of “their” girls, who had a liking for nut-jobs. We also started to enjoy hanging out at the local lake, not least because it was a nudist beach. The East German government sought to differentiate itself from the West by being more open-minded and less puritanical about sex and FKK (Freikörperkultur – which literally means Free body culture) was one way of showing it. Naturally we enjoyed going there because we got to see girls from school in their full naked splendour. The only trouble was that you are also very excitable as a teenager and that could mean sudden and prolonged swims in the lake to cool down from all the visual stimulation, or shivering girls of the shy persuasion being taunted to exit the waters by classmates. All in all it was good times, we certainly made the most of what we had and just as I realised that there was also a whole wide world I would never get to see, the wind of change was in the air and I could smell the freedom.