I remember learning German—so beautiful, so strange—at school in Australia on the other side of the earth… . I liked the sticklebrick nature of it, building long supple words by putting short ones together. Things could be brought into being that had no name in English—Weltanschauung, Schadenfreude, sippenhaft, Sonderweg, Scheissfreundlichkeit, Vergangenheitsbewältigung. I liked the sweeping range of words from ‘heartfelt’ to ‘heartsick’. And I liked the order, the directness that I imagined in people. Then, in the 1980s, I came to live in West Berlin for a while and I wondered long and hard what went on behind that Wall.
[…] I think about the feeling I’ve developed for the former German Democratic Republic. It is a country which no longer exists, but here I am on a train hurtling through it—its tumbledown houses and bewildered people. This feeling needs a sticklebrick word: I can only describe it as horror-romance. It’s a dumb feeling, but I don’t want to shake it. The romance comes from the dream of a better world the German Communists wanted to build out of the ashes of their Nazi past: from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. The horror comes from what they did in its name. East Germany has disappeared, but its remains are still at the site.
— Anna Funder, Stasiland (2002)The Novel as Manuscript, by Norman Dubie
—an ars poetica
I remember the death, in Russia,
of postage stamps
like immense museum masterpieces
patchwork
wrapped in linen, tea stained,
with hemp for strapping…
these colored stamps designed for foreign places
were even printed during famine—
so when they vanished, so did the whole
Soviet system:
the Berlin Wall, tanks from Afghanistan
and Ceausescu’s bride before a firing squad.
It had begun with the character of Yuri Zhivago
in a frozen wilderness, the summer house
of his dead in-laws, his
pregnant mistress asleep
before the fireplace
with flames dancing around a broken chair, piano keys
and the gardener’s long black underwear.
Lara lying there. A vulgar fat businessman
coming by sleigh to collect her for the dangers
of a near arctic escape…
But for Yuri, not that long ago, he was
with celebrity,
a young doctor publishing a thin volume
of poems in France, he was writing
now at a cold desk
poems against all experience
and for love of a woman buried
in moth-eaten furs on the floor—
while he wrote
wolves out along the green treeline
howled at him. The author of this novel,
Boris Pasternak arranged it all. Stalin would
have liked to have killed him. But superstition kept him from it.
So, the daughter of Pasternak’s mistress eventually
is walking with a candle
through a prison basement—
she is stepping over acres of twisted corpses
hoping to locate her vanished mother…
she thinks this reminds her of edging slowly
over the crust on a very deep snow, just a child who believes
she is about to be swallowed by the purity of it all,
like this write your new poems.
(Source: poets.org)
Wall of words: the Berlin Wall fifty years on | OxfordWords blog
“Like the concrete wall, the word walldivides Europe linguistically. Some European languages, like German and French, form their words for wall from the Latin murus. So the German for Berlin Wall is die Berliner Mauer. English, Irish, and other languages use another Latin word, vallum, a more military word which means a rampart. In Irish it became fál, and its possessive form has found its way into the name of the political party, Fianna Fáil.
During the Cold War era language often emphasized our differences. In 1961, the year the Berlin Wall was built, Yuri Gagarin and Alan Shepard flew into space for the first time. They did the same thing, but we found different words to describe them: Gagarin was a cosmonaut and Shepard an astronaut.
But if we look a little more widely we find how much the European languages share. English language newspapers reported that the East Berliners had beenimmured, and, later, they carried pictures of the murals that spread across the Wall on its western side. Both words, immure and mural, come from the Latin root murus that the Germans use. In the East the Wall was known as theAntifaschistischer Schutzwall—the Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart: German has retained its own traces of ‘our’ Latin word for wall.
In 1989 the division between the Berliners became so unabsolute and absurd that the people tore it down and so the Berlin Wall is not here for its fiftieth birthday. What remains are the vestiges of murus and vallum with which we can all trace our common heritage.”
Czechoslovakian book cover design, c.1962 (via A Journey Round My Skull: Czechoslovakian Expose VI)
Czechoslovakian book cover design, c.1965 (via A Journey Round My Skull: Czechoslovakian Expose VI)
Czechoslovakian book cover design, c.1964 (via A Journey Round My Skull: Czechoslovakian Expose VI)
After the Fall – Europe after 1989 - A Theatre Project of the Goethe-Institut
“Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the cross-border theatre project After the Fall investigated the repercussions of the ensuing fundamental changes in Germany and Europe. The Goethe-Institutes in 15 European countries commissioned 17 playwrights to produce works reflecting the social and political changes in their own countries.”
Russian Girl On Pařížská, by Justin Quinn
At twenty, you hold this street’s attention
better than the Bolshoi could—
the boots, the perfume, not to mention
the bling and ermine on your hood.
The way you walk is slash and burn.
Like understatement’s now a crime.
You leave a wake of men who turn
to make sure they were right first time.
They’re like small countries who betray
their old allegiances awhile.
Bound over as your vassals, they
blame others when they go on trial.
You yawn, head for a brasserie—
all gold and mirrors, lit like Christmas—
and join the two men drinking tea,
dressed in black suits, who mean business.
From the series Winter Berlin, by German photographer Matthias Heiderich (via Le Blog de Bango)
From the series Winter Berlin, by German photographer Matthias Heiderich (via Le Blog de Bango)
From the series Winter Berlin, by German photographer Matthias Heiderich (via Le Blog de Bango)
By the nineteen-seventies, the neighborhood [of Brighton Beach, NY] had become heavily Russian, and, like Chinatown and Curry Hill, “Little Odessa” was as much a sentimental construct as a place. “Fuck the Russians in Brighton Beach, mobster thugs sitting in cafés, sipping tea in little glasses, sugar cubes between their teeth,” Edward Norton’s character says in Spike Lee’s film “25th Hour.” A couple of weeks ago, the producers of “Brighton Beach,” a reality show in the making, posted on their Facebook page a picture of a klatsch of fur-clad women. “Classic BB—babushkas chillin’ on skameyechkas,” the caption read. One of the prospective show’s 3,954 fans wrote, “Blyat, I’m SO EXCITED for this.”
The model here, you will have guessed, is MTV’s “Jersey Shore.” The way the producers—Elina Miller, a Minsk-born twenty-five-year-old, and Alina Dizik, a twenty-six-year-old from Kharkov, Ukraine—tell it, they were at dinner a few months ago when it occurred to them “how great Russians would be for a show like this.”
[…] The producers do not yet have a deal to make the show, but, so far, they have received hundreds of audition videos. “Yesterday someone posted a twenty-two-minute-long tape,” Dizik said. “He was showing off his Russian motorcycle, and his mom kept interrupting. He went downstairs to show us his dad, and his dad’s like, ‘Get the fuck out of here.’ Then he drove to his grandparents’ house, and they tried to sneak candy into his pockets.”
— Lauren Collins, Casting the Russian Snooki, in Brighton Beach, “Spin-Offs Dept.”, New Yorker
easternblocparty: mitfordesque:
Scan from a really interesting series of National Geographic features on Berlin through the 20th century reposted at cityscapes on LJ
PRIOR Department Store and Hotel Kyjev, Bratislava. Ivan Matúšik, 1961-1973.
(via EASTMODERN Architecture of the 1960s and 1970s in Eastern Europe)
PRIOR Department Store and Hotel Kyjev, Bratislava. Ivan Matúšik, 1961-1973.
(via EASTMODERN Architecture of the 1960s and 1970s in Eastern Europe)
