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<\/picture><\/div>\nNovember 1989: Berliners congregate near Brandenburg Gate to celebrate the fall of the wall. Photograph: Andree Kaiser\/Alamy<\/p>\n
Heike Geissler: \u2018For the first few years, I fell into every single consumer trap put in my way\u2019<\/p>\n
Heike Geissler was born in <\/em>1977 in Riesa in the former German Democratic Republic. She is the author of four novels, most recently Seasonal Associate<\/a>, a highly acclaimed fictionalised account of a period she spent working in an Amazon warehouse in Leipzig.<\/em><\/p>\n Oh, it\u2019s all so long ago, isn\u2019t 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<\/a>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.<\/p>\n Maybe I\u2019d just lost interest in politics. If only I knew. At any rate Ernst Th\u00e4lmann (the leader of the Communist Party who was later shot in Buchenwald) had recently been my hero, I\u2019d wanted to be like him, and I\u2019d 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\u2019t quite a grown-up, Martin Lee Gore\u2019s wife.<\/p>\n You probably didn\u2019t know that before, but now you do. What I didn\u2019t 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\u2019t see what was being lost. I\u2019ve only come to see it recently. I could see only what I didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n 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 cardboard boxes that contained all kinds of wonderful and desirable-looking cheap clothes, and later the new branches of large chains, afternoon after afternoon, and looking, wanting, buying. In retrospect I hold my hand up in front of my nose, because it smells of smoke. I remember that the nearby block where the Vietnamese guest-workers lived was said to be on fire. It\u2019s clear in my memory that the fire had been started deliberately. I see people running, I see the excitement, I sense it, but perhaps it wasn\u2019t even on fire, I\u2019m not sure. But I remember very clearly that something was on fire somewhere for a while.<\/p>\n Forgive me, I wanted to talk about my behaviour as a consumer and how it changed, but I got distracted.<\/p>\n Forgive me again. I worked out that I didn\u2019t want to say anything more about my behaviour as a consumer, because what is there to say about it that you yourself haven\u2019t known for ages? So for the first few years after the fall of the wall I became a master at falling into every single consumer trap put in my way, over and over again. I am, and perhaps you need to know this, the child of determined players of the lottery. What we lived on, what fed us, was the hope of a big win, never the hope of political change. I am the daughter of a mother who rationalised herself out of her own job in 1992 whether out of negligence or honesty or both, I\u2019m not sure. I am the daughter of a father who dreamt of reaching the age of retirement years before he actually retired. I see my father sitting in the living-room in the morning. The living room in this low-rise on the edge of the forest looks like a diorama with a set that could have been made for a post-wall museum: Father (38) on short time sitting silently in his armchair. The armchair is turned towards the television. The television is off. There is no sound in the living-room. The father is the silent type anyway. The daughter stands on the edge of the diorama, between the dining area and the corridor, looking at the father; her mouth is half-open and she is dreaming about the world, and secretly of being a global star, although nothing came of it.<\/p>\n<\/picture><\/div>\n
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