The Baltic Sea as a Baltic Bathtub

By three o’clock in the afternoon, there isn’t a single seat left at Café Wiegand. A siege ring surrounds the terrace. The owner, Carmen, guards the kitchen pass. The Saxon woman is married to the aristocratic Ahrenshoop native Waldemar von Tillwitz. At the moment, that is enough to be escorted past the crowd into a restricted area. The café could easily be expanded in that direction, but then other areas would have to be enlarged as well. On a small veranda enclosed by fly screens, Elena and Marek are not the only privileged guests. The others exchange deliberately casual greetings, as though trying to conceal an embarrassment. Elena has no interest in such behavioral fuss. She enjoys preferential treatment, even if she has no idea how she came by the honor.

Things are piled up everywhere. The café used to be run on a much grander scale, with considerably more energy. Back then, coconut crumble cake was the big hit. After 1990, it disappeared from the menu.

Now it’s back.

Marek advises Elena against ordering it because he doubts she would enjoy it. In actually existing socialism, coconut largely replaced almonds. Memories of scarcity probably still provoke a certain stubborn resistance. Even so, I would very much like to tell that story now—hello there, it’s the omniscient narrator speaking. I won’t.

Marek orders an almond-honey slice so he can critically compare it to the bee sting cake of his childhood. His Western palate makes him grumble. Marek is so narrow-minded, in fact, that he considers himself free of prejudice.

The couple at the next table gets up to leave. Elena catches a dismissive glance. She senses a rebuke. The classic Ahrenshoop vacationing couple carries themselves differently from Elena and Marek. The people up here by the sea—the Baltic bathtub—still gnaw on the stripped bones of old behavioral conventions.

Scenes in the floodlight of summer. Elena sits on the terrace of Café Boddenblick in front of her Dell Precision 7540. She is doing her homework, diligently following the instructions of her writing mentor. Marek is currently being filmed at a particularly striking location. Elena had no desire to be caught on camera, even accidentally. She is being unfaithful, burdened by guilt but also captivated by the sensations of the moment.

Only now does she notice what had escaped her attention for several minutes. Half hidden behind a sun umbrella, Denis Scheck is sitting just a stone’s throw away. Elena remembers, with a trace of malice, how omnipresent he once was in the media. A few years ago, he seemed to appear constantly on breakfast television; he even turned up in American TV series. He discussed literature with corpses. His ears were an event in themselves. He once described the setting of a novel as “an eros center of the mind.” The cunning Swabian still draws from the arsenal of seductive rhetoric.

You chatterbox from Stuttgart, Elena thinks.

In her imagination, the TV personality is wondering where he knows the intriguing woman at the next table from.

That is simply the effect Elena has. It always has been. On almost everyone. Even on Bill Bazzuka. Ever since the days of the friendly peeing contests among the local fishermen’s and farmers’ sons, Bill has pursued people. For most of his life he stalked on behalf of the Stasi; now he profits from the same vice as a spy for the Nord Stream mafia.

The Stalinists orbiting former HVA Major Geronimo Mansfeld know things that no West German could even begin to suspect. The Soviet Union, together with the entire Eastern Bloc, continues to exist as a deep-state KGB federation. Its complete restoration remains a clandestine objective of statecraft. The West German Social Democratic obsession with “change through trade” is being cynically weaponized against the class enemy.

Otfried Vrunt appears. The construction magnate, mayor, and bosom friend of Geronimo Mansfeld is one of the men who turn the big wheel around the Bodden lagoon. I call this a feudal order, and I take pleasure in how completely Elena fails to notice any of it.

Already she is strolling through the rooms of the art association. Standing before Vasily Nikolayevich Yakovlev’s portrait of Marshal of the Soviet Union Georgy Zhukov, she quotes the art historian Boris Groys:

“After Stalin’s death and the eras of ecstasy, an all-encompassing boredom immediately set in.”

The exhibition is titled Communism: Dream Factory. Following Good Bye, Lenin!, there is Naked for Stalin. Elena could also have contributed Comrade God.

“In Moscow, however, the dictator awaited the symbol of victory—thus Stalin on Zhukov. When Zhukov reported to him on June 19, Stalin asked whether he had forgotten how to ride. Zhukov replied that he had not.

‘Good,’ said Stalin. ‘You will take the salute at the Victory Parade. I advise you to ride the white horse Budyonny will show you.’

Zhukov is said to have resisted at first, but at three minutes before ten on June 24, 1945, he rode across Red Square to the sounds of Glinka’s Glory March, advancing toward the celebration of victory—his victory.”

— Der Spiegel, April 28, 1969

Undergrowth threaded with blackberry brambles closes off the garden of the Johannes R. Becher Artists’ House from the Bodden lagoon.

Johannes R. Becher (1891–1958) was one of the most contradictory figures in twentieth-century German history. He was an Expressionist, a Communist, an anti-fascist, and the Minister of Culture of East Germany. He wrote the lyrics of the GDR national anthem, “Auferstanden aus Ruinen” (“Risen from Ruins”).

The grounds have been optimized for easy maintenance. The border planting consists of hawthorn, blackthorn, rugosa rose, and barberry. A few flower beds and shrubs interrupt the monotony of the lawn. Then there is a barbecue seating area that looks like a complete hardware-store package solution.

The arrangement is unique far and wide. The restored Bodden farmsteads to the left and right, renovated by women from Berlin and Hamburg, boast orchards full of gnarled cherry trees and picturesquely bent birches. Harvesting, preserving, pressing cider, and distilling spirits belong to the countryside folklore these city dwellers cherish.

In front of the house rises the sledding hill—also known among us as the molehill. Halfway up, Marek stands waving.

How beautiful, Elena thinks.