Potsdam III

The following year,1991. things had changed completely when my friend Gabriele  Duvinage and I arrived in Potsdam, this time by car. The sleepy and rather dowdy little town of a year ago simply had exploded.  Cars were everywhere but no little  Trabis or Trabants. It seems everyone had dug deep into their savings and bought new cars. People in the streets smiled and even  laughed. And bought. It seemed they bought anything they could lay their hands on, just for the sake pf beong able to buy somehting. Whether they need ed it or not. But I may be wrong there.

We decided to stay in a bed and breakfast and were advised to go to Babelsberg, the parkland next to Potsdam which was now again  officially part of the town.After consult-ing  a map  we found the connecting streets, only to to be confronted with bumps in the road. The streets on one side were higher than on the other so that we ended up taking quite a few detours.But finally we arrived at the correct address where we were greeted by the couple who owned, and as it turned out, built the little house.Cement sack by cement sack, procured from his place of work.He told us that quite openly.. Legal or not legal seemed to make no difference to him.

But his pride was his large garden which he tended lovingly. And decorated. Smack  in the middle, more or less in front of the house, was a little pond in the center of which stood a small “Månneken Piss” a copy of the small sculpture attached to the corner  of a house in Brussles, right under he eaves which  spewed rainwater into the street. Somehow he had gotten hold of a copy and planted it right in the middle of his garden. His greatest worry, though, was: would the water department turn on the water for him? His second worry was, would the original owners of the property want the lot back?.This turned out to be the question number one all over Babelsberg. Would people be displaced again and have to move?

Our hosts were refugees themselves. Rural people from the Warthegau ,the strip of land between Poland and Germany,Hitler had annexed.  One of his first acts of enlarging  Germany’s  Lebensraum.(space to live)  The largest city of the Polish Corridor, as the area was called  then, was Danzig , now Gdansk.During the war one could hear sometimes a sarcastic remark when something unpleasant had happened, such as a bomb hitting nearby,” Heil Hitler, the main thing is, we have Danzig”.Sarcasm  certainly helps in times of stress and stress we all experienced  during many years

The next day we drove on an arterial road away from town, passing long rows of barracks originally built to house Prussian soldiers. Now they were occupied by soviet troupes who stood inside the fences, looking  longingly  at life now denied them, waiting to be transported back to Russia. Meanwhile citizens were busy planning to rebuild their city but first they had to rebury Frederick  to lie next to his beloved grayhounds which they had just done a day or two before we arrived. He now lies to the right of the castle on the top terrace where it is hoped he lies in peace.Now the town is completely restored and modernized. Now people come to see people rather than art or buildings which, of course displeases some people.