(Our friend Glenn sent this:)
Fragment, fragment...yes, here, cool, from Michael's essay, My Childhood Ruined, which tells about his youth in the suburb of Berlin-Grunewald:
Halfway
experiences are also fairly common, I believe, and it took me some time to get
over the shitty first sex of my teens, like when Amy, another classmate, him
from Armenia, living alone with his father in one of the villas not bombed out,
took me to the plot opposite his home which had been cleared of the rubble and grown into an orchard of sour apples with an undergrowth of stinging
nettle—-and then suggested that we’d play doctor. We had barely started when
Evelyn, whom I hated, and who was officially my friend, turned up and sent us scampering
into the stinging nettle.
Fruit
trees and cleared plots weren’t typical, however. Roughly half the splendid
villas of the Grunewald, by reputation Berlin’s most residential area, had
gotten hit by air raids during the war and burned down to black skeletons of eternal
stone and reinforced concrete, with rusty steel rods sticking out and begging
for accidents to happen like when you were chasing an Indian under fully-feathered
headdress up to the fourth floor of the rubble and trip and fall to your death.
Yes, fourth floor, or fifth even, since these structures had been built by the nouveau
riche in the ’70 and ‘80’s of the nineteenth century when Berlin became the
capital of the Second Reich. Falls from ruins never happened, though, or
were never reported in the West-Berlin of the ‘50s, an insular place so devoid
of news that nothing ever happened—-save for a world-shaking crisis when Nikita
Khrushchev, the leader of the Communist World, threatened to take us by
force and unclench WW3—-so the press had to play along and beg any visiting
celebrity to confirm with his/her own eyes that—-yes—-Berlin was still the Hauptstadt,
even though the government resided in Bonn and anything of consequence had decamped to Munich in Bavaria, including Siemens, the founder of local
Siemensstadt (don’t ask).
How
about the fruit trees, then? Well, if you’d trip while aiming your pistol at this
Indian, you wouldn’t land on an apple tree, but on an Acacia. Nobody ever
remarked on it, or explained it, but newly grown Acacias dominated the ruined plots,
whole forests of them, until Khrushchev’s ultimatum was forgotten, investors
regained confidence, and reconstruction got under way.
