Casting an anchor into the future

HOW MANY ARE WE STILL 

That guy at the junction, 
wasn’t he one of us. 
He now wears rimless glasses. 
We nearly walked past.

How many are we still. 
Didn’t he have a Jimi Hendrix record. 
Now he’s an engineer. 
The full corporate veneer. 
We still agitate, he’s filled up to here. 

Who are we still. 
Should we leave. What do we want to find. 
What’s the name of that hole 
into which, one by one, we’ll all be consigned. 

Thomas Brasch, "Poesiealbum 89" (Poetry Album 89)

The art of staying many. The art of staying. The art of changing. The right to stay. The right to have a say. A question that an increasing number of people are asking themselves in an increasing number of places: ‘Should we stay or leave?’ And then some have to leave. The poor who are becoming more. Who cannot stay where or who they are. They are many, but there are only a few who make decisions. 

Where I come from, the abandoned tend to sink the ship. So as not to be left behind. Behind expectations. Whose actually? 

My friends and I, a small, radical minority of idealists, non-conformists and dreamers, stared for years at photos of the kinds of parades that are taking place again place today, which have never gone away. At the haters and scorners, of whom there are too many. Always. Pouring new gasoline on old fires. 

‘Good morning, how are we feeling today? Awful or nostalgic?’
 

It depends on what’s on the radio. Herbert Roth? Rammstein? Dirk Michaelis? Gundermann? Quietly emotional because of a shared memory. My heart closes off and my head wants to leave. Belonging like being in prison. Walled into a ruin. Alone with the question of where all those big emotions have gone when you need them. The shiver everyone knows. As well as the songs. Good old days. Drinking until you can’t feel anything. Blindness. Oblivion. I know that’s unfair. But what isn’t? And  you all – you’ve all bet your lives on it! Peace, friendship, solidarity, you remember?

Oh, holy simplicity of the heart! Simpleton, more like. Just dots on the horizon. You, yes. You, no. You, out. You, in. You lot don’t fit in here. 
 

What does the teacher tell her students in the morning? Why won’t Mina be coming back? Her mother was on the phone. Just yesterday. Even then, she couldn’t find the words. For what, actually? What’s it called when people are wrenched from their homes for no reason, forcibly put on an aeroplane and taken to a place against their will that they’re afraid of? A girl. In Afghanistan. Now. 
 

They passed a law to speed up repatriation. My nerves, I tell you (actually I can’t!)
 

Keeping things orderly.

They must have their reasons.

Those people with divining rods.
 

Pictures of bodies: BRISTILING WITH ENERGY or TIRED/INJURED.
 

Cases packed and ready to leave. Because of the police. Because of the Nazis. Because of the hatred. Becausebecausebecause. How is your home sweet home?

Winter is coming. / How winter kills.

Empty of thought. Too lazy to think. Lacking curiosity. BUT AGAINST IT, the concrete utopia:
 

The art of creating what does not yet exist.

The many are. There. Are poor despite work. Are old and out. On the run. Without safe land beneath their feet. Sitting down everywhere, quietly and persistently. Standing up for things. Dreaming of a beautiful world.

It’s expensive to be poor. No matter where you live. Those who were once hungry recognize those who are hungry. What do we reveal without showing that we recognize each other? To be recognized, marked, judged – there is no equality in this. No magic cloaks to camouflage ourselves. You can be invisible to kindness. And always visible for its opposite.
 

I only know this kind of hunger from stories. Family stories. Once upon a time, on the wide, shadeless fields of the Mark Brandenburg, my great-grandparents bent their backs to work. Until their never-changing daily work left its mark on their bodies and their backs stayed bent forever. Margarethe Papajeweski was older than my great-grandfather and already pregnant when they met. At work. Among the potatoes. Her parents had put their youngest daughter on the train to the west, because there was no more bread or room in their hut at the edge of the forest, right by the Russian border. Off she went to Brandenburg, where they were looking for workers to dig the fields. 
 

Their colourful shawls were always a source of ridicule for the locals. She couldn’t read but that wasn’t out of the ordinary. Of five births, only two babies made it. But they had a livelihood for themselves and their children, for pens and notebooks, so that a better life would begin. In the ‘new era’ that everyone was talking about. And in their heads, the turntable turned, playing ‘Lili Marleen.’ 
 

My grandmother fled from the East too, unwanted and destitute. An old maid, a leftover. A waste. From one starving family to another. But at least she’d finished primary school. 
 

She married my grandfather on 7 October 1949, paying honour and loyalty to the new state. So that it would be different, better, especially for us children. We grew up with the idea that this land belongs to all of us. How mistaken we were. Unswervingly so.
 

There are corners in Brandenburg where you can still find bones under the plough. Bullet holes in trees. But there’s little talk. No politics. Nothing onerous. Pop music in cemeteries. At the entrance of which is a sign that says: We have been as you are; you shall be as we are. 
 

East Germany, the ‘laboratory of democracy’, as sociologist Steffen Mau called it, is a frontrunner in some areas. For example, in the area of not keeping up. It’s a contagious feeling that drives people out of urban areas into the countryside. Those who have always stayed behind are surprised that their own children have long since been swallowed up by provinces in the West and spat out again into mortgaged, terraced houses, squished and shaped into modern consumers. Far enough away from the outskirts of the village where the children of other parents, escaping from bombed-out provinces around the world, sit in white corridors behind barbed wire, waiting for the court to decide who may clean the village pub toilets and who may not.
 

Many of those who left after the Wall fell were young, well-educated women. They had no choice but to find their place elsewhere. An excess of men. Excessive men. And so many that are missing. Who make their presence felt elsewhere. To exacerbate the imbalance even further.
 

Familiarity creeps up on people like poison, and the condition they end with is indifference. 

How many elephants fit in the space between Frankfurt an der Oder and Frankfurt am Main? In this country, people can still be murdered at will, whether they stand out for their skin colour, poverty, gender, sexuality or God knows what. Standing out is a deviation from a fantasised norm that only knows itself. Sameoldsameold. Sometimes they chase you because their own lives are so boring. Killing time, killing people. So that it’s no bother – the time or the people. It’s better to stick to: ‘Don’t stand out! Don’t be extra!’ You know what I mean. This was the law of the camps, as formulated by the communist and concentration camp survivor Erwin Geschonneck. Perhaps you know him from the famous film adaptation of Wilhelm Hauff’s fairy tale ‘The Cold Heart’, in which he plays a fearsome giant who replaces the beating hearts of humans with ones made of stone. Rock gardens. Don’t stand out. Don’t be extra. A law that still applies. A breeding ground for malcontents who perform land grabs. This doesn’t just start when the elections return the worst possible result. It began a long time ago. The land grab. The world grab.
 

This isn’t how we stop people fleeing. We can’t silence refugees’ voices. Their escape routes are like threads of interconnecting stories, swallowing each other up, and spitting each other out, untouched, pushing up into the open from underground and making it possible to rake over the smashed skulls once again. Poets, singers and storytellers talk, sing and write against all this. They build barricades of leafy green, bluetit down and cigarette butts to teach us to see differently. And despair of it.

I wish the sea was the sea and not a cemetery. I wish this country was like any other good country. I wish it were my country. The country of all of us. The country of all women. We leave behind what doesn’t belong to us. But the earth is the only planet we can inhabit. Interplanetary women. Stay messy. Stay many. In un-peace. So that things don’t carry on like this.
 

I wish the sea was the sea and not a cemetery. I wish this country was like any other good country. I wish it were my country. The country of all of us. The country of all women. We leave behind what doesn’t belong to us. But the earth is the only planet we can inhabit. Interplanetary women. Stay messy. Stay many. In un-peace. So that things don’t carry on like this.
 

I hear a lot of footsteps as people feel their way
lost people, lonely, tired and poor –
and no one knows how comfortable and warm they would be,
if we held each other’s hands.

Erich Mühsam 

Under the title “Poetic Positions” in the program of “THE ART OF STAYING MANY”, the writers and playwrights Sivan Ben Yishai, Anne Rabe and Deniz Utlu also took a stand on current events alongside Manja Präkels. The Fonds is now making their contributions available to read in its online magazine. 

Translated from the German by Jucy Jones.