Last night, the balance tipped from sweetness to bitterness and I had a bad night. There are rules I have to follow.
My only way out is into the past. So speak, memory! Pancake has begun to remind me of my erstwhile close friend and comrade in the antiwar movement, Gregg Gauger. Same long hair. Same physical enthusiasm when speaking of the quirks and oddities of politics. How important it was and is to have a comrade you can rely on and work with. Gregg took pleasure in the layout and production of our antiwar publication. I was the content guy in charge of writing and editing articles. We both collaborated in distributing the paper at the gates of Chanute Air Force Base on Fridays and in meeting dissident airmen on Saturday nights. I hung out at one of the cafeteria tables frequented by leftist students in the Illini Union. Later, we repaired to the Wagon Wheel, a slender dark space of a bar where the outcasts gravitated: radical students, gays and lesbians, hippies, bohemians, and assorted weirdos and misfits. There was always something to rage against or ridicule. The Left was freer and had a better sense of humor. The countless Verboten! signs hadn’t yet constricted our mental landscape. For anyone interested, I wrote a blog entry with illustrations from the paper about “Remembering the G.I.-Student Antiwar Movement.”
There are other moments that glow in my memory such as my arrival in West Berlin in September 1972. It had been four years since I first studied in Hamburg. During that time, I had finished my BA and MA degrees, taken part in the antiwar movement, spent the better part of a year working (and reading) as a dormitory night clerk, traveled widely in Mexico, and worked in a truck trailer factory to save up for another year of study in Germany, this time in West Berlin. Arriving there at Tempelhof Airport in September 1972, I was like a cowboy at the end of a trail drive. I’ve never felt freer.
The airport bus left me at Bahnhof Zoo. Vis-à-vis, I spotted an antiwar demonstration and joined. With impressive discipline, well-adorned banners, and thundering chants, we marched to the Amerika Haus, listened to political speeches, raised our fists, sang the Internationale, and then dispersed. I walked a few blocks up the Hardenbergstrasse to the Technische Universität (TUB), and found my way in, since I was hungry, to the student Mensa. Unaware of the proper procedure, I found myself at the cashier’s without the requisite token. She suggested that I ask the student behind me if he had an extra. The student (whose name I learned was Gerd Martens) did have one. We introduced ourselves and sat down to eat together. Eventually, I would visit him and, after a couple of months, move into a spare bedroom in his WG or communal apartment. Because of Gerd and the other German students in the WG, I experienced one of the happiest and most fulfilling years of my life.
Everyone went about under the big tent of oppositional politics. But it wasn’t the politics that made the year memorable. After that first march, I realized that the same demonstration would be repeated every week with minor variations. I came to see this as a German trait. If at first you don’t succeed, just keep flogging it over and over. It was the people I met and the time we spent in the atmosphere of our Wohngemeinschaft that made my year in Berlin unforgettable. I’m what you might call an introvert, but the most significant junctures in my life all turned upon the people I met. The most important took place at the end of the summer of 1987 in Elfie Monsberger’s apartment in the Ottakring district of Vienna. Elfie and Veronika had been swimming at a nude beach on the Danube. Elfie had gotten hold of a package of choice meats from a Schlachtfest in Kärnten. This turned out to be a feast to begin the best years of my life. How easily I could have missed out on it! Nothing else counts as much. Nothing but that we met in those last days of summer in 1987. Every few days we declared to be the last good weather of the fall and took advantage of it. I drove from Baden around the Wiener Gürtel to the Währingerstrasse so we could spend the evening in some pleasant Heuriger. I’m still hoping for that last evening together.
Signed,
Andrew (Weeks)
Normal Thoughts 