Very humbly and quietly, Chris and I wanted to say ‘I do’ for life. A small celebration in the circle of the family, which was the plan.
But the wedding eve already turned into a lavish celebration. Everyone came, the nurses from the university hospital, the many construction workers, the neighbors, my colleagues and, of course, my bride’s numerous family.
Festive mood and hustle and bustle in all rooms of the apartment. The celebration lasted until dawn. At some point I lost track of everything and fell into bed dead tired and not quite sober. Only Chris and her aunt Nina led the humid celebration to a happy end.
Then in the morning, the bride was decked out for the ‘big day.’ Chris looked beautiful, which I couldn’t say about myself. Despite the all-nighter, we reached the registry office in the afternoon with only a slight delay.
There is the next surprise: Ulli had rounded up all the helpers who had helped at his weekend house. Unexpectedly much honor for both of us. Unfortunately, the turgid speech of the registrar was below standard, Chris deserved better.
Nevertheless, we gave us the word of consent, and our unexpected guests, after all about 15 people, were already in a good mood in the registry office. There could be no more talk of a wedding in silence. Andreas and Kerstin had married a few months before us.
The young people visited us often, and sometimes Andi brought a postcard from Thomas. The content was short and usually very general, so we couldn’t conclude from it whether he was well.
When I read the cards, I was always pissed off because I couldn’t understand what would drive a young person to risk his life to break through the border.
I didn’t like a lot of things in the GDR, but I wouldn’t have thought of leaving because of it. I wanted to change social conditions for the better. But my hopes for positive change did not seem to be fulfilled.
Even when the shipyard workers in Gdansk in Poland went on strike in the early 1980s and fought for democratic conditions with the free trade union Solidarność, the powerful in the GDR remained unimpressed. But in the mid-1980s, the political climate in the GDR also intensified.
General living conditions and environmental pollution became increasingly unbearable. Many of the stately Gründerzeit houses had long since lost their luster and were decaying under the eyes of their residents. It was only with great effort that the historic city center of the trade fair metropolis was halfway maintained.
In the south of the city, the excavators of the open-cast mines had eaten their way up to the city limits in order to expose even the last lignite seams worth mining. On still nights, the incessant screeching and squealing of their huge shovels could be heard from the farthest corners of the town.
In the north of the city, too, villages and streets had to make way for a new, huge open pit mine that supplied the power plants, coking plants and chemical combines with environmentally damaging lignite. But there was one bright spot in the summer.
Then hundreds of blue-black birds crossed the hazy sky as swift as an arrow. The skilled flyers came to the city for one reason only: In the dilapidated houses and ruins, the swifts nesting in wall niches and roof boxes found enough nesting places to raise their young without competition.
It was always a special spectacle for us when they hunted for insects in a wild flock with open beaks and shrill cries. In the middle of August it became quiet again. With their young ready to fly, the birds took off for the sunny south, but we had to stay behind in our gray city. 𝓣𝓸 𝓑𝓮 𝓒𝓸𝓷𝓽𝓲𝓷𝓾𝓮𝓭…
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