To Mr. Joly, who liked the anecdote.
According to the short film Kaputt, women in the former East German prison Hoheneck had to work incessantly on sewing machines making clothes that later were secretly sold to Western companies. Political prisoners were also held there. One of the infamous punishments for misbehaviors was known as »The Water Cell«: a sealed square that slowly filled with water until it covered most of the prisoner, who was locked in there for an unbearable amount of time. Many of the inmates stopped menstruating during the time they spent in Hoheneck, many of them lost their hair. As the failure to fulfill the daily requirements for the job also resulted in punishment, the success of today only led them into the anxiety for the possible failure of tomorrow.
While sewing, the prisoners couldn’t know the time by any means. The civilized sense of time was a privilege that was withheld. Thus, the passing of the hours was only measured by them by the pain in their hands: a bearable pain meaning the afternoon and a hard pain indicated the journey was about to conclude.
At the DDR Museum, without warning, I ran into my childhood. I found it in the strong plastic dolls we used to play with, in the old cartoons we used to watch repeatedly, in the plastic hair curlers, in the plastic harmonica we used to annoy the whole world with…
I went to Berlin last September with the conscious and unconscious purpose of coming across their communist past (which is my present). I also wanted to know about the Third Reich or other periods of the long history of this nation, but, spontaneously, I always found myself walking to some Stasi headquarter, to some old brown building, to some piece of the Wall that nourished my hopes…The outcome of this wandering of mine was similar to traveling through Time – but through a Time that operates in a really relative way: coming forward and going backward in its own logic.
At the DDR Museum, without warning, I ran into my childhood. I found it in the strong plastic dolls we used to play with, in the old cartoons we used to watch repeatedly, in the plastic hair curlers (all communist plastic is really hard, we still have some good pieces back home), in the plastic harmonica we used to annoy the whole world with, and although the decorative communist’s style could be known as »the ugliness«, in memory little things used to regain its beauty.
The furniture and the ambience of the Stasi’s Museum also carried me to the many days I spent playing in the Digital Research Institute my parents worked for. That Institute had strong ties with East Germany (in fact, my own mother came to a course in Leipzig back in the 80s), and its décor was considered in its moment as the most advanced pieces of industrial design we could know.
Unfortunately, there, I also found my present surviving in the slogans of triumph and arranged State’s demonstrations we still suffer. I found it in the Stasi’s eagerness to monitor its own population and to »decompose« all possible hostiles to the Party – a knowledge they pass to our own Secret Police, which is still fully functional and devoted to its dubious duty, back at home.
Unfortunately, there, I also found my present surviving in the slogans of triumph and arranged State’s demonstrations we still suffer. I found it in the Stasi’s eagerness to monitor its own population and to »decompose« all possible hostiles to the Party – a knowledge they pass to our own Secret Police, which is still fully functional and devoted to its dubious duty, back at home.
At the DDR Museum, I collided with my present also in the form of the sewing machine. The very same that grandma keeps in her room, the one I use today to fix anything: an old, heavy, and complicated machinery, that nobody understands how it hasn’t broken yet – although we lack replacements in the country. Probably the same brand also the inmates of Hoheneck prison knew so well.
Contrary to a current belief, Cuba is not a big place for changes. The government is afraid of any modern dynamic, of any sudden movement that could shake it out of power (which explains their reluctance towards the Internet, along with the free flow of information that would bring it to us). For this reason, a slow pace is imposed onto Cuban’s lives, making our sense of time very diverse from the perceptions of the outside world. As if the whole thing has been conceived to assure the notion that »nothing different is, or will be, happening« anymore, we also don’t have the privilege of a civilized sense of time. Like the inmates of Hoheneck we also feel the pass of the years by the pain in our hands and the loss of the hair. Sewing slowly back and forward, surrounded by water.
Solitude, November, 2016
