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Big in Berlin: Annett Gröschner

© Philipp von Recklinghausen

Going Dutch with German Writers (13): Storyfinder Annett Gröschner

Beer and a funeral musician in a smoky Prenzlauer Berg bar – who else could it be but Annett Gröschner, a fine discoverer and writer of stories about Berlin and its more eccentric inhabitants? Katy Derbyshire goes drinking with the journalist and writer, and finds they have more in common than she expected.

Who?

Annett Gröschner is a writer, journalist, researcher, teacher, and has published two outstanding novels, Moskauer Eis and Walpurgistag, along with numerous other books. The latest is Backfisch im Bombenkrieg, the wartime diaries of a teenage stenographer, which she discovered and co-edited. I contacted her because I had her email address and thought she’d be an excellent person to go out drinking with.

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Where?

Rumbalotte continua, Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg

What?

Annett drinks red wine and water and I drink Berliner Pilsner (and a vodka).

What did we talk about?

We’re both a bit shy and uncertain to begin with; this is the first time we’ve met in person. I ask her about the group blog Ich. Heute. 10 vor 8, on the website of the FAZ newspaper, a project she’s involved in. It came about via a network of women who were angry about how invisible women still are in the German media. All those old men on TV discussion panels! And then Zeit Online started a blog called Fünf vor 8:00, in which five old men explain the world. The idea was to find a newspaper that would host women writing about topical subjects or whatever else they wanted, as a counterweight. So it’s not supposed to be about “women’s issues”? I do air quotes and Annett winces slightly – I’m not sure whether in reaction to the air quotes or the phrase. No, it’s about whatever interests the women who write there. I was confused, I try to explain politely, because it seemed to be about women’s issues and at the same time I really get the feeling that the FAZ (and especially its blogs) is very male-dominated, with women covering the soft subjects like pets and dance. Isn’t she worried they’re creating a little women’s ghetto with the project? Men do seem to be reading it though, she says, because several have left angry and insulting feedback in the comments section. And maybe they have to take things one step at a time, we agree.

Our drinks have evaporated and I get the next round. The barman fills Annett’s wine glass very generously and we have a quick banter about which of us ought to take a sip, but then we turn around and Annett is looking. So the barman comes out from behind the bar and carries the glass over to our table for me. He knows Annett; she seems to come here often and feel fairly comfortable here. She’s amazed that he’s being so nice to me though; they’re not usually nice to women here, apparently. I mumble something about it being my first visit because I’m not sure what she’s getting at, or in fact I have a suspicion but I don’t want to go there. I’m not quite relaxed yet; I should have drunk wine instead of beer. I want Annett to like me and I may be trying too hard. But our edges soften over stories of (single) parenting. Annett says it made her son more independent but she had to kick him out of home in the end. I say women have made progress; we’re doing well enough to live without maintenance from men, if need be. But she says that was already clear in the GDR. You only made a decision to have a child if you knew you could support it. In passing, I mention that my daughter’s dad trained as an electrician. Annett smiles – she’s not been looking directly at me much, and now she’s still looking away and her hair is falling over her face, but it looks like a genuine smile – her son’s father used to be an electrician too.

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I ask her how she came to writing. In the GDR she wrote poetry and was published in official and unofficial magazines, she says. Later she tells me she did lots of readings in churches, although she’s an atheist, because the people in the churches were the only ones offering space to non-conformists of all kinds. And then after 89 she got into journalism because that was something that had been out of the question for her beforehand, but suddenly it was an exciting option. “Like looking through gaps in a fence,” is the phrase she uses. She worked for all kinds of publications that no longer exist, often unpaid but that didn’t matter at the time, and she worked in projects with old people and young people, and in the early 90s there was a phase when people were suddenly open to telling their stories. Old women, mostly, who hadn’t talked about their experiences in and after the war, including rapes by Soviet soldiers, which were of course taboo in the East. Once she sent two young school students, girls, to interview a local woman, and she opened up and told them the story of her rape, for the first time in her life. They were fourteen or fifteen, the same age as she’d been at the time.

She worked with old people in a “story-telling café”, she tells me. This is totally fascinating and I can’t wait to tell my sister about it because one of the best things about her job with old people is listening to their personal stories. The trick, Annett tells me, is to set a certain topic so you don’t get ten people going off on random tangents. Go to a particular place with them, like a former dance hall, and the stories will come tumbling out, or have someone come in to talk about a certain subject. She tells me how someone came in to her sister’s group in Magdeburg with a gym wheel – my mouth is agape – and talked about this German proletarian sports tradition of trundling around the room inside a gigantic double-hoop, and then a few of the old ladies had a go because they’d done it in the old days.

Entirely true fiction

Smoky inside view: The "Rumbalotte continua" in Prenzlauer Berg.
Smoky inside view: The "Rumbalotte continua" in Prenzlauer Berg.

© Privat

Anyway, she wrote down their stories and condensed them so much that they became like fiction, except they were entirely true. And that was how she got into writing prose. Did she take the three old ladies in Walpurgistag from real life? Well, they’re a quintessence of all the women of that generation she met in Prenzlauer Berg. And the three young women: Sugar, Cakes and Candy? They’re made up of Turkish-German girls she met through projects in schools. She tells me how much she admires their approach to life – wearing headscarves with teetering high heels, following the letter of the law but getting away with all sorts of things. It was similar with her ugly old FDJ shirt, she says, they all used to wear it because they had to, but it just made them all the more creative about the rest of their outfits (and their lives, I infer). I’m delighted because we did the exact same thing with our school uniforms in England.

Rumbalotte regulars keep passing our table on the way to the gents. They stop and say hello, and shake both our hands in that warm Berlin way that I really miss nowadays. Some of them say thanks to Annett for one thing or another, and she says, oh no no, no need to thank me, as people do who are naturally generous with their time and resources. One man comes and joins us at our table briefly, and tells stories about smuggling tortoises across the border in the 1950s, before the Wall was built. He has to go again though – huge grin – because he’s signing his book at the bar. That was Gerd Schönfeld, Annett tells me, the last Bohemian in Prenzlauer Berg. He’s a funeral musician. He turns up at the chapel and plays whatever they ask for. Wait, that sounds familiar – don’t you have a character who… Yes, he’s based on Gerd. Wow.

We talk a bit more. About how writers have to make a living and aren’t saving the world, but at the same time a society needs people with the time and capacity to think about big questions and address them in fiction and on stage. About being atheists and how people are embarrassed to admit they’ve had their children baptized but do it anyway. How religion is becoming ideology. How kids have appallingly conservative taste in art. How schools shouldn’t segregate children at all. The effect of the financial crisis in Greece on literary translators. How 1960s urban planners ruined the social fabric of Berlin-Wedding by pulling down perfectly good buildings to get rid of the communists, and made a profit in between by crowding in Turkish tenants, who became the scapegoats. There was more but I’ve forgotten it. We are agreeing about everything, which makes me happy.

Annett warned me beforehand that it gets very smoky at the Rumbalotte but it hasn’t been too bad so far. Then Gerd comes back. He is followed by two other younger gents who don’t introduce themselves, so presumably they just want to sit next to Gerd. They pass him a constant stream of cigarettes and roll-ups, and all three of them smoke and smoke and smoke. One of the men gives Gerd a literary magazine, of which I assume he’s the editor. I take a surreptitious look at the contents page: one female contributor. The ceiling mural of many, many big sharp knives pointed at contorted women’s genitalia starts feeling threatening. I comment on it to Annett – yes, that was a crazy Russian artist, and yes, it’s difficult with men and women here. Do I want one more for the road? Foolishly, I answer yes, I can take it. I can’t believe I said that. Not another beer though; I want a small schnapps. Vodka? Yes. Gerd gets a coffee. The mysterious gents are drinking water, I think.

Gerd starts telling me stories. Apparently there are people who write in their will what music they want played at their funeral. How bizarre. What if you chose Britney Spears and regretted it later but got dementia before you changed it, wonders Annett. It’d be like an embarrassing tattoo, except you’d be dead so you wouldn’t know; it’s not like you’d be looking down from heaven. Does Gerd think they are looking down from heaven when he plays at their funerals? No, he smirks, but don’t tell the church that. I promise to come to his reading on the 29th. He and Annett talk about what used to be where in Wedding, where Gerd was born. Cinemas for visitors from the East, a department store on Brunnenstraße where they gave the people they moved out vouchers for curtains for their crappy new homes as compensation. Does that make sense? Annett tells me a way to find out exactly what was where in an online database but sadly I’ve forgotten it now.

I’m getting used to Gerd’s way of speaking. He assumes I know the people and places he talks about but then I tell him I’m English and he switches to his family history. His grandfather fought in the Franco-Prussian War (or was it his great-grandfather?) – that must make me happy, eh? I’m confused until I work out I’m supposed to be glad his ancestors and my ancestors were all against the French in the 1870s. There’s talk of a Turkish man who got eight women pregnant somewhere in long-gone Prussia. I can’t remember if he was a relative of Gerd’s. That reminds me of the WWI novel Schlump, which is being republished in the spring. I ask Annett if she knows it and she says no, and I tell her she should read it. Anyway, Gerd says he had black curly hair as a baby and we look incredulous. He has grandfatherly white tresses now. At some point I enquire discreetly as to whether he’s read Annett’s novels, wondering how he feels about being a literary model. He has, he says, and he loves the parts about him. Annett smiles a shifty smile. An invisible DJ is playing the kind of records I don’t pay attention to. Two bald men are dancing with the only other woman in the bar apart from us. It feels like time to leave. It has been a good evening.

It seems like Annett Gröschner is the kind of person to whom stories find their way automatically, and I’m very glad she’s so good at making them into literature. And she’s so interested in Berlin and its people and its history, and how people can help uncover the layers of history in each place. I think she’s doing great work. Naturally, I forgot to take any photos of us. But the Rumbalotte is not the kind of place where you’d feel comfortable whipping your phone out for a quick selfie anyway. Very kindly, Annett sent me a photo of herself reading at the Rumbalotte. It pretty much captures the atmosphere of our night out too.

Hangover?

Oh yes. I wake up way too early and a bacon-sandwich breakfast combined with a soak in the bathtub and an Alka Seltzer on top have very little effect. About a five on the Richter scale. I’m going back to bed now.

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