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12/10/2002: surreal surroundings
This evening I spent in a really, really strange room. I just feel the need to share its description. The RL context of why I was in this room and with whom would be very long and very tedious, and about the only redeeming quality was going there with a friend and laughing with her about the absurdities of the events, people and surroundings afterwards. Before, I thought the kind of communism which treats ideology as religion was truly dead, only referred to ironically, even among those few who hold strange and dogmatic communist opinions, unconnected to the current reality, and seem to be more relics of the past than part of modern, radical left.
Then I came into this: a meeting room, relatively large, long stretched with one side narrower than the other, a window in one of the smaller walls, inside a couple of tables, some chairs standing around them, some more chairs stacked near the walls, a small table with flyers near the entry. So much for the part you expect in the context of a meeting room. Now on to its unique flair: next to the door, in the corner to its right, stood a red flag on a pole, but leaning against the wall, and the flag was partly pinned to it, so that you could see it better, it showed a five-point, white-bordered star in a different red embroidered (?) on it, in that star was the b/w (or rather black on red in this case) portrait of a man I didn't recognize, but I asked someone later who told me it was Ernst Thälmann. Next to that was the small table with the flyers, and on this wall were a number of portraits, like a gallery. The upper row were three b/w portraits, the first was Karl Marx, the second (I think) Friedrich Engels, the third Lenin; a bit lower was a group picture, with the focus on someone with a raised, closed fist though, who might be famous, but I don't know who it was, looked more like it was taken in Latin America than in Europe; finally directly above the flyer table was a larger Che Guevara portrait.
The next corner contained the usual bar for the option of storing/selling beverages when you meet there, a small counter, a fridge, some stacked cases of beer, a cash box, a jar for donations, just that it was decorated with a lot of tacky memorabilia. This commemoration corner shrine had two FDJ (the GDR youth organization) pennants, one pennant with the GDR emblem, two small Lenin busts, one of them showing Lenin reading, a large red DKP flag, complete with a border of the black-red-gold of the German flag and with tassels (btw, the DKP is a marginalized communist party founded in the late 60s in West Germany after the original KPD had been interdicted in 1956).
On the long wall opposite of the door was a large ugly painting. I'm not entirely sure what it was supposed to show, it was mostly black and gray, very depressing, showed many schemes of people, I suppose some working class masses, some interlocking hands, some tanks, and in the foreground were scraps of papers with headlines about the anti-communist laws. I guess it was meant to show heroic struggle, or something, it didn't came across that way to me, it had more of an anti-propaganda effect. Ironically the only notable blotch of cheerier colors that stood out to me was an US flag, though I suppose the masses were protesting against it or something, though it didn't look like they were burning it. On the other hand the blotch was quite small, compared to the size of the whole thing, so really the not quite recognizable people could have been doing just about anything to it, it just stood out as one of the few places with little bits of primary colors.
Across that depressing piece of art, on the other long wall, was a wall tapestry, showing Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, woven larger than life in white and burgundy. Kitschy, but a step up from the painting.
At the remaining side, the wall with the window -- which had really awful curtains with a 70s sort of orange and whitish pattern -- were bookshelves, one of which was used to hang up a giant red banner on it with a Che portrait (I wondered if people take the thing off to get at the shelf behind it, or if they just sort of lift it...), needless to say that the shelves contained a lot of Marx and Engels editions and similar stuff.
Really, the arrangement of iconography in this room was so earnest and non-ironic, that it felt shrine-like. It was disturbing. And well, funny, in a bizarre way (at least for me, since growing up in the Western part, I never had much exposure to tacky communist memorabilia). Still disturbing, though.
