Higher Ground, Anke Stelling [historical books to read .TXT] 📗

seemed to put an end to any doubt: Brigitte was excited, her mother chuffed to bits, and her father already planning Saturday: a trip to the beer tent was on the cards, and he hadn’t thought about dropping in at Neumaier’s, but now that his own daughters would be doing a show, of course he would. There’d be no riches, but fame and glory. His daughters were nothing to be ashamed of, pretty girls, both of them.

Only Marianne wasn’t sure. Did she dare walk down the catwalk? Who would be watching? Would she have to put on things she didn’t like? Wasn’t the whole thing just really embarrassing?

It was the 1950s: Marianne might have thought many things, but she couldn’t argue with her parents. Marianne might have felt ambivalent about the proposal, felt that fame was questionable and the whole event suspicious, but she didn’t have any framework for what she felt, and even if she had done — there was no way round it. Mum was excited, Dad was excited, Brigitte was excited, and only Marianne had a sense of foreboding that she couldn’t pinpoint, and even if she could, she would not have been able to argue. Marianne did what she was told. Full stop.

On Saturday from four o’clock in the afternoon, she modelled winter coats, tweed skirts, and capes on the podium from the shop window in Neumaier’s that had been turned into a catwalk. The showroom dummies had to stand in the corner for an hour. On that day there were real girls and music and free nibbles, and it wasn’t anything like in Paris, or perhaps it was, because it was all about walking with confidence. Brigitte did it better, that was obvious to Marianne; Brigitte smiled at the crowd, pushed her hands into the pockets of her winter coat and did a twirl. Marianne was glad when the whole thing was over, and she could go home.

Except that it wasn’t over.

Disaster struck on Monday morning when Marianne walked into the classroom. None of the girls would talk to her. Why? Ingrid delivered the explanation: ‘Because you’re vain and think you’re better than everybody else.’ Marianne looked at Sylvia, her very best friend. She knew she wasn’t vain: she’d seen how difficult it was for Marianne to model the clothes, because she’d been standing right next to her and had suffered with her. But Sylvia turned away. ‘I’m not taking sides. I don’t want to get involved.’

Her friends froze her out for a whole fortnight. Marianne kept wondering whether she might have deserved it after all. Arrogance and vanity were deadly sins! Hadn’t she been happy for a moment to think she was pretty? Hadn’t she basked in the warmth of the attention for a moment? Not in the shop, but at home, and the fact that even Dad had come to watch.

Marianne found proof of her guilt. And that, said Ingrid, was precisely the point of the exercise: they had wanted Marianne to take a look at herself. With these words, Ingrid declared an end to Marianne’s two-week banishment, and life at school carried on as usual.

I can’t begin to explain how angry this story makes me. It doesn’t just make me feel like slitting somebody’s throat; I feel like blowing up an entire crowd with rocket-propelled grenades. I want to find out where Ingrid and Sylvia live and confront those bitches. But here comes Freud again, telling me that this is mere projection, because it’s not about Marianne's pain, it’s about mine. And he’s right, of course.

Renate and Sigmund are clever and clued-up. I’d like to be too, but I’m not, and if anybody thinks I’m going to calm down, they’ve got another think coming because that would mean that you, Bea, won’t find out what makes your mother so angry.

I’m not going to find excuses for stupid old Sylvia, who really seemed to believe that not saying anything wasn’t taking sides.

Not a shred of understanding for poor, rich Ingrid, who was probably just frightened of being victimised herself for wearing fancy, overpriced clothes from Königstraße.

Everybody has a reason; nobody has what they really want.

If my mother had managed to stick up for herself, instead of numbing her pain with excuses and understanding for the others, then as a child I might have understood her.

But she wasn’t a victim, God no, she didn’t need to stick up for herself: she could keep her emotions out of her stories and take care of other people’s needs.

That’s wrong, Bea.

Please remind me of that, just like the stewardess reminds her passengers before take-off: in the case of a loss of cabin pressure, please place your own mask over your face first.

September 2013; Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin.

I received a commission. The editor of a magazine who asked me ten years ago to write about the baby boom in our hipster Berlin district remembered me, and asked if I could write about the boom in building groups.

‘You weren’t going to write for newspapers anymore,’ Sven says.

‘And our children want to spend the summer holidays by the sea,’ I reply.

And it wasn’t such a bad commission.

I could turn it into a personal story, the editor said, because that had worked so well with the story I’d written about being a mother ten years ago.

So I wrote two pages about how it felt to be the third from last person in my district not to be in a building group; about how it felt to live in a building without a name, how I still sat around on playgrounds instead of in communal gardens, and was envious of lifts, people who got to choose their own tiles, and being able to project onto a project.

On Friday, the article was published in the supplement of a national newspaper.

On Saturday, Carolina hosted a party for her fortieth, and at first, I thought, okay, she’s the hostess and has to set priorities, and she can count on my understanding as her friend, that she