7 - “So what's changed? Patriarchy hasn't disappeared …”

Summary

I suffered from this “Wall syndrome” a long time, always felt hemmed in. I lived for years with the feeling that something amazingly important was being kept from me. I dreamed, I fantasized, I felt an indescribable longing. Intellectually I knew: that's unreal, excessive, utter nonsense. The West is no “savior,” nor is it “paradise.” But I couldn't make headway against this longing for the “other.” I tried to fight it, I suffered, I was torn apart, I made my life difficult. I envied everyone who came over from the West, no matter what kind of a person they were. Why did she or he have something I couldn't have, just because she or he had a different passport? I was ashamed of myself for having these feelings, this longing and this envy. But I couldn't rise above it.

I often dreamed I was in West Berlin. I would walk through a supermarket and would see all the things I had wished for from time to time. But also a lot of kitsch, junk, useless stuff. Really realistic, you know. Or I would be sitting in a bus, traveling endlessly through West Berlin, but I wasn't allowed to get off. I didn't see any of the streets that were familiar to me from TV, and the scenery was also very strange. West Berlin was like a village; there were a lot of one-story houses, and it was always evening. I would see the neon ads, a lot of lights, and the houses were all tiny.

In another dream I went through huge, ancient gates. I ran and ran and I knew in my dream: “Now I'm in West Berlin!” That was as clear to me as if I were awake in my dream, and I knew while still dreaming that a train station would be coming up that I had to go through and then I would be in East Berlin again. But the station looked nothing like the one at Friedrichstrasse, the “palace of tears,” as we called it, where I had so often taken friends to the border.