Learning the Violin - The Early Years

 Learning the Violin - The Early Years

I started to play the violin in Grade 5 when I was about ten or eleven years old. Many kids start a lot earlier on very small, impossible to tune instruments. It looks cute and sometimes a tune can be recognized. In conversation with many music teachers, they suggest a later start. At least knowing the alphabet can help when learning to read music. I had a bit of a head start. I already knew how to play the piano and could read music pretty well by Grade 5. I don’t have a lot of memories of those first lessons. It is not easy to learn the violin and even harder on the parents who have to listen and keep the faith that it will get better. Maybe my brain has buried those memories as too painful. When I listen to kids on their instruments, I try to be encouraging. I sounded like that once, I think. Really, I don’t remember. Some days, when I haven’t played in a while, I still sound pretty bad. The instrument itself gets grumpy and has to be coaxed back to life. My muscles screech at the unnatural position I am putting them in. I tend to practice in ten-minute chunks with breaks in between and a glass of water beside me. I have always needed that glass of water. I remember my mother commenting on this from her work in the kitchen while she listened and cooked. Anyway, the sound eventually does get better.

I had a series of violin teachers. Mrs. Stella Peters was a fantastic first teacher. She taught me in Grade 5 and 6 in a group at Queenston School. She had a striking blonde, finely spun beehive and wore bright pink lipstick. She was garrulous with good humor and a light heart. Mostly, I remember her laugh and her energy. She would bluster into the room and tune every violin. What a chore! I always looked forward to the lessons because she made them fun.

The first thing you learn is how to hold the instrument and the bow. We did many exercises waving the bow in the air and using our thumb and fingers to climb up and down the stick. The cheeky thing about the violin that you quickly learn, is that bowing is way harder to master than all that fancy finger work.

Once you know how to hold the violin, you play open strings. G, D, A, E. Screech, squeak, scratch. Long bows, shorts bows. The bow bounces and stutters and slides too close to the bridge and then drifts over the fingerboard. Hell on wheels! How did she stand it? I’m pretty sure she smoked.

I progressed from Manitoba Hot Dog on open strings to Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. We played everything in a group. Short individual lessons were had with Mrs. Peters at the piano. I remember standing beside her holding my violin, with the colored strips of tape for my finger placement and the fat kitchen sponge attached to the back by a rubber band that served as my shoulder rest. For two years, this was my introduction to the violin.

Playing on my first violin: A Stradivarius according to the label glued inside. These are not as rare as you'd think and they don't all sound amazing!

There are two things in music that I found hard to learn:  Playing on the offbeat or syncopation. The syncopation makes the music come to life. It is what makes the most sense in classical music. Otherwise, it would be boring. But, when in the second violin section of the Winnipeg Youth Orchestra and you are faced for the first time with a bar that starts with an eighth note and then a series of quarter notes of equal measure and ends in another eight note tied to an eight note in the next bar, your brain freezes after two notes and you cannot find your way back. Mostly because everyone else is playing on the beat. The conductor stops and tells you you are wrong because you have started playing on the beat. It happens every time, until finally it doesn’t. Your brain cannot read this music. Your brain has to hear it. When you hear it, it makes perfect sense.

Rhythms got a lot trickier than that later on (Gilbert and Sullivan!!) and I still am best off hearing it before I can play it properly.

An artist friend of mine recently recounted to me trying to teach portraiture to a group of grade five students. It surprised her to see how they struggled with the most fundamental, mathematical formula for drawing a face. I asked her to teach me, as she did the kids. With great confidence she guided me through it. You draw an upside-down U. And then you extend it beneath but slightly tapered, so you have an egg and not a perfect oval.

Then you divide this shape in half and that’s where the eyes go. In half again below and that’s the nose and half again, that’s the mouth and a half again that’s the bottom lip and the ears are not beside the eyes, but more by the mouth.

Now, make two small upside-down U’s for the eyes. Add the pupils in the middle – pupils have to be round. Know, that she is doing this while I try to follow. You’d think it would be a matter of just copying what she is doing. If it’s just math, these two faces should look identical. But her face looks like art and mine does not. This experiment clearly reveals that art is more than math. Otherwise, my portrait would not look like it has been punched in the nose. Unless I am Modigliani. I assure you, I am not.

I thought I knew where ears went: in the middle. Halfway. But no. “The top of the ear aligns with the top of the eye/lower eyebrow line and the base of the ear aligns with the bottom of the nose. The total area is larger than one thinks.”  Ears are huge!

The dotted note in music is a difficult rhythm for students to learn. They can hear it. They can clap it. But when it is written, it is hard to decipher. When I asked a group of beginner violinists how they understood the dotted half note one of them said: three plus one. A dotted note is long. It equals three. It’s longer than you think. The ear also equals three and takes up a lot of real estate on the side of your head.

There must have been some sort of a violin class recital, because again a conversation was had between Mrs. Peters and my mother about private lessons. I was about to leave my elementary school and enter French Immersion at River Heights Junior High for grades 7-9. My friend Nancy was my lifeline in this period of transition. Our life paths were thankfully in synch. Nancy has been my friend since Kindergarten. She was in the group lessons with Mrs. Peters.  Her parents signed her up for French Immersion too. Mrs. Peters was pleased to be sending both of us to River Heights Junior High because Carlisle Wilson was the music teacher there. He was a professional violinist and also conducted the Winnipeg Youth Orchestra and the Junior String Orchestra.

Playing with my Onkel Detlef in Germany at Christmastime. The violin was a gift. More on my violins in another post.

Nancy and I walked to school together and dodged snowballs pelted at us by two of our classmates (boys) from the other side of the street. We played in the second violin section of the school orchestra. The music room had violins and violas all along one wall and cellos and basses on the other. We got to borrow these instruments and take them home in their hard, black plastic cases and crumbling rosin in the hatch. I think it was Mr. Wilson who taught us how to tune our instruments. He wasn’t about to waste any time tuning each instrument.

There was one concert, where Nancy and I had progressed to the front desk of the second violins, and there in the front row was our old teacher, Mrs. Peters, beaming at us. “I remember you,” she said, moments before the concert was to start. It made her happy to see we had carried on. I think we played Wildwood Flower, a piece that can be played loud and confidently. The melody immediately comes to mind and a memory of sawing happily on my violin.

I’m not sure, thinking back, if I ever heard Mrs. Peters play the violin. Surely, she must have stood beside me, with her violin, ready to play along with me. I remember the smell of cigarettes and perfume. Without her, I never would have launched my career as an amateur musician. If anyone had told me in Grade Five that music was math I would never have asked for lessons. But one thing stands true to this day. You can never get away without counting!

End note: If I were starting on my music lessons today, there would be thousands of photos and videos of me and my violin. However, I had a hard time finding any of me in those early days.

Looks like I stuck with it! Mrs. Peters would be proud!

 

 

 

My First Piano. The Journey Begins

My first piano was a cardboard keyboard folded at the back of the Leila Fletcher Piano Course, Book One that I needed for the piano lessons I took at lunch hour at school. I was in Grade One at the time. We were meant to practice on these while each student got a turn with the teacher to play the actual piano at the front of the room.

The dining room table was the only table long enough for me to unfold the keyboard. I laid the music out, propped up against the typewriter and practiced. It might seem strange to be playing music on cardboard keys, not having the proprioceptive feedback of depressing the keys or hearing the sound, for that matter.

The typewriter was in constant use as my mother’s entire family lived in Germany. I remember the lightweight airmail paper and envelopes my mother typed her letters on. She would place a regular sheet of paper behind the air mail paper so the keys wouldn’t destroy it. The piano is just another keyboard, I thought. If you have any doubt about this, check out The Typewriter, by Leroy Anderson.

 The arrival in our home of the Heinzman Upright Grand piano was met with great excitement. A beautiful, glossy dark brown instrument, with smooth ivory keys and a quick action that made it easy to play. A matching bench for books of music. The piano had to be on an inside wall. Winnipeg winters are freezing. I used to place the soles of my bare feet up against my bedroom wall in the middle of the night to check the degree of cold. Has to be experienced to be believed!  Owning an upright grand was a point of pride. Just shy of owning a true grand piano, which would never fit in our dining room. But, equally as serious.

The piano had been played by an accompanist for the Royal Winnipeg Ballet and cost my parents 220.00. Probably about the same it would fetch today, if that. There are a lot of free pianos to be had. This piano has landed on an inside wall in my sister’s home so I still get to play it every year at Christmas and it still sounds fantastic.

There were a few records in my parents’ collection featuring the piano. I remember Philippe Entremont plays Listz and of course, Van Cliburn playing the Tchaikovsky Piano concerto in B flat – his winning performance at the Tchaikovsky Piano competition in Moscow at the height of the Cold War. Apparently, this big win in Moscow came hot on the heels of Moscow’s big win with Sputnik. In chess as in piano, as in outer space, the Cold War was fought in any available arena. This album, with the twenty-three year old Van on the cover, became a household staple among record stacks. 

Apparently, the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto is the most requested piece when audiences are allowed to have a say. I had the opportunity a few years ago to play with an orchestra accompanying a pianist playing this work. For all is gorgeous lines and recognizable swells and arpeggios, it’s an unexpectedly complex and weirdly orchestrated work. The second most requested work is the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto, also performed at the same competition by Van Cliburn and also released by RCA records in the 1950’s. I doubt the popularity of these pieces a coincidence, given these two recordings were among the first classical records to sell millions of copies. Van Cliburn became a hero and a celebrity by playing classical music. Imagine that!

I did! I practiced the piano in the dining room while my mother cooked supper in the kitchen. There was only a swinging door between us, so she heard everything I was doing, as did I hear every crack of the spoon and hiss of the water boiling over onto the stovetop.

Whenever I slowed down at a tricky few bars, she would point out that I always stopped at the same spot. She was listening and my screeching to a halt every time the notes got messy, disrupted her enjoyment. She was used to hearing Entremont plays Listz, not Bettina plays Bach from the Grade Four Royal Conservatory Book. My mother had to quit piano lessons as a child. There was a war that came between her and her musical pursuits, although she admits that it did not come easily to her. She is a believer in music being a gift.  I think she delighted in the belief that I might have been bestowed this gift. How far it would go, nobody knew.

Greatness in the making, on the Heinzman Upright Grand.

There were a series of piano tuners who came to our house twice a year. One of them screwed plastic margarine tubs into the sides of the piano and filled them with water. This was meant to keep the humidity levels up (dry cold Winnipeg winters).

A subsequent tuner immediately unscrewed them, admonishing the fool who dared mar such a beautiful instrument. Instead, plastic containers were placed inside on the base of the piano. I don’t know if more sophisticated humidifiers existed, but it was my job every week to dust the piano, clean the keys and fill those containers without spilling any water into the piano. My mother liked the top of the piano for some of her plants and some white rings formed that to this day have not been erased. No plants on the piano!

For my first piano recital, on the stage of Queenston Elementary school, I proudly played a two-page piece with two hands. For anyone who remembers piano lessons, this is a great milestone. A piece that spans two pages and requires hands together playing. It was called The Train. I have no recollection of melody, but there was probably a crescendo and a decrescendo marking the passing of the train. I do remember my mother allowing me to wear jeans. There was a conversation that happened beyond my hearing where the teacher suggested to my mother that I continue on with piano lessons beyond what the group lessons could offer. Private lessons. It sounded very classy.

Across the street a family had moved in. The Funks. Alice Funk just happened to teach piano. And I happened to be on the road to piano greatness. So, it was set up. We were a great match, student and teacher.

 Alice Funk ushered me through the Western Board of Music exams and then the Toronto Conservatory. I studied with Alice up to my Grade 8 exam. A cold, rainy day, where my ride to the exam fell through at the last minute and I had to walk a block and a half to catch the bus downtown. I was freezing cold and barely made it in time. I presented myself soaking wet to the people in charge and they gave me a few minutes to try to get my hands warm.  My nerves jangled with the rush. They called out the scales to play, then the studies I had prepared, followed by my pieces. I had done this many times before. I don’t remember my mark, but it all turned out ok.

Same piano, years later...more books with fewer pictures.

For Christmas one year I received the piano music for Elton John’s Greatest Hits Volume One. I took it with me to my lesson and quickly realized that pop music was no piece of cake to learn. Complicated chords and accidentals and impossible key signatures meant to be easy to sing. But I did manage to learn some popular music. Bridge Over Troubled Water and I Don’t Like Mondays by the Boomtown Rats. I used to love crashing around on the piano with that one. Piano Man was also manageable. I took lessons long enough to be able to finally enjoy it. So many people quit their lessons at about the Grade Four level. It seems so out of reach, to be able to play Your Song or The Homecoming by Hagood Hardy (1975). Musicbox Dancer (1978) was heard all over the radio in the seventies and I got the sheet music to that one as well (super easy).

In my teens, I took up the guitar and played my way through the Cat Stevens songbook and some Simon and Garfunkel hits. 59^th Street Boogie. Slow down, you move too fast. Gotta make the morning last. I sang along to fill out the accompaniment but never felt very confident with my voice. I sang in the school choir but was asked to fake it whenever there were high notes. Our teacher, Mrs. Martin, used a pitch pipe to get us to find out notes. She was a tiny, bird-like woman with gray-blue hair. We learned Pussy willows, Cattails, Soft Winds and Roses for the Winnipeg Music Festival, where choirs compete for the coveted first place spot. There is one song every choir sings and then they sing a selection of their choosing. Mrs. Martin focused a lot on the emotion of the piece, coaching us to sing softly here and with a plaintive swell there. I couldn’t find all the high notes, but I sure could emote! People love the sound of children’s choirs. But after hearing ten choirs all sing the same song, I imagine the parents who took time off work to come and listen heard enough for a lifetime.

On Saturdays, I stayed after German School and sang in a German choir. The thing I most remember about German choir was that I had to bring a lunch. My mom got me a pickle lunch case. We all sat in the choir room after being bored to death in German School. Prisoners of our heritage, we ate our Schinkenwurst sandwiches to get us through two hours of German songs. If our choir director was in a good mood we would convince her to yodel for us. We found this utterly hilarious, but she did it anyway. Memories…

What I remember of German choir:

It was in Grade Five, three years into my private piano lessons, that a notice was sent home with all the students about free violin lessons. Students would be given a violin and lessons and be allowed out of class (no staying over lunch). I simply insisted. This was clearly too good to be true, with none of the usual caveats that it may not be. I’m not sure what it was that excited me so much about playing the violin, but I knew I had to do this. This was beyond anything the piano could give me. At the age I was in grade five (ten or eleven) the feeling of potential was intangible, inexplicable to me. It presented itself as an undeniable surge. My parents relented. My mother, on the condition I did not give up the piano. When I brought my violin home, I could not put it down. Maybe it was the challenge of pulling some nice sounds from the instrument, or the way I held it under my chin, like an extension of my arms. This was my instrument.

Early days: The first known photograph of me playing the violin. I was by no means a natural, but I loved that outfit!

The journey into music is infinitely rewarding. When I hear the instruments of the orchestra all around, playing the notes written so long ago, my heart stops. To play the music of Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, is a privilege beyond measure. How did I come to be here, in the violin section, creating this music? It started with that Heinzman Upright Grand. It’s not over yet.

This Journey is a Silent One – by Bettina von Kampen Available NOW!!

 A friend asked me once if I got sad when I finished a novel. An interesting question. I do, in fact, tear up every time I read to the end of one of my novels. Even if I have read it over many times, the ending always gets me.

Perhaps it’s the completion of a monumental undertaking – years, it takes me to finish a novel. Or that I have invested so much brain power and emotion in creating and getting to know the characters. I have seen them through thick and thin and with the completion of the story, I won’t see them anymore. I won’t spend all that time stressing and fussing and sorting out their lives and situations. I will be moving on to new, unformed characters that only I can coax out of their shells. It’s not easy getting to know someone, especially when you are making them up.

The idea for this book came from a story, possibly apocryphal, of a young man who had fallen onto the subway tracks and the train landed on him. The paramedics talked to him and told him as soon as they lifted the train off his chest, he would die instantly. I thought about this and wondered what would happen if a family were faced with such a situation, prepared for the death of their loved one and then the person didn’t die.

This became a short story: For Each a Space Among the Stars: Descant Magazine; 122; Fall 2003. This gives you some idea of how the germ for a novel stretches through time. In the short story it is the son who doesn’t die and the father who is dealing with this outcome. In the novel, I put the father in a wheelchair and his family have to adapt to his current, passive state, in need of total care and oblivious to their attention.

There was a program on TVO – Big Ideas that caught my attention one afternoon. Dr. Michael Persinger was discussing his research into the temporal lobe. His experiments elicited a religious experience in the subjects by stimulating the brain with magnetic waves. Dr. Persinger pointed at two sides of the brain and the interconnecting fibers – the corpus callosum. He spoke with great fervor about the presence of God that people described when they emerged from the experiment. It is essentially a sensory deprivation situation upon which magnetic fields are introduced to the temporal lobe. Subjects sit in a darkened room with a helmet on their heads. The helmet has the transmitters glued to it. It became known as the God Helmet.  

I have long been interested in neurophysiology and spent some of my university days studying this stuff. The connection between ‘God’ and the brain has always flummoxed me. For me it seems an absolute impossibility to have a god to believe in without a physiologic brain to do the believing. God is a man-made construct. Here was someone with something to say on the matter. I read through all the published papers and the idea for this story grew.

I have tried, in my own words to explain the science and its manifestation in the mind. But, this is ultimately a family story. A story of individual journeys and unavoidable intersections.

The novel is available on Kindle Direct Publishing here:

Amazon 

 

And on Rakuten Kobo here:

Kobo

 

 

 

 

Komm Lieber Mai und Mache...My First Encounter with Mozart

 When I was a child, I was gifted a picture book about the life of Mozart: Komm Lieber Mai und Mache. It referenced a popular German song about the spring and the flowers and birds. In a few colorful pages Mozart’s life was described and follows quite accurately the well-known details of his life. His father, Leopold, as teacher, his sister Nannerl, a companion and his mother, his champion.

                      

The story chronicles Mozart's talent for the piano; his early attempts at composing; the travels by horse-drawn coach across Europe, the performances for royalty.

The piano they take with them on the road;

               From the book:   

               

                         Mozart's road piano in the Hungarian National Museum, Budapest:

                                                     

                                                                                             

When he had scarlet fever:

And other well known moments: playing the piano with the keys covered, improvising variations on a theme. Professing his love for Marie Antoinette.

Then he dies. The end comes pretty fast. I remember feeling an unbearable sadness that this celebrated child, a child like I was, died at the end of the book. I was face to face with the arc that spans a life for the first time. Characters don’t usually die in children’s books.

Komm Lieber Mai und mache, die Bäume wieder Grün. Come dear May and make the trees green again.

Mozart wrote this song on January 14, 1791. His birthday would have been coming up. (January 27). The author stresses his poverty and poor health and yet he wanted to bring joy through his music. His melodies, wonderful melodies that bring us joy. He composed this piece in the winter, near the end of his life. Hear, how he longs for warmth:

Komm, lieber Mai, und mache die Bäume wieder grün, und lass mir an dem Bache die kleinen Veilchen blüh’n! Wie möcht’ ich doch so gerne ein Veilchen wieder seh’n! Ach, lieber Mai, wie gerne einmal spazieren geh’n!

Come, dear May, and make the trees green again, and by the brook, let the little violets bloom for me! How I would love to see a violet again - ah, dear May, how gladly I would take a walk!

 

For him, the spring would not come again. He, who shared his gifts with us all, died young and poor, in the ungrateful,  Emperor's City (my translation). The city was Vienna. This book was written in the DDR in 1971. Anti-western sentiments ran deep. There may well have been a rule to slip some anti-western ideas into a children’s book.

            Credit where credit is due:

Mozart died on December 5, that same year. Age 35. That would make this song, one of the last pieces of music he wrote. He would have been working on his Requiem Mass. Wrestling with all those themes of death and torment. January – we all know how that feels. It is a plea founded in a dark winter’s night in Austria. Sitting at his writing table and staring down the Requiem Mass. Everything will be better in the spring.

          The house where Mozart died:                             The view from his window:

               

I read this book over and over. I identified with this boy, born in the middle of winter in Salzburg, Austria. We were both German and winter babies. And I had recently started piano lessons. (I still despair at how difficult Mozart is to play. I thought my early connection with him would make playing his music a breeze.)

In 1971 I was seven years old. I practiced on a cardboard keyboard from the back of the Leila Fletcher Book 1 for piano. I took piano lessons at school, at lunch hour, in a group. We each had a short lesson with the teacher while the rest of the group scratched out key signatures and intervals in those tiny, multi-colored Rudiments of Music books.

The arrival in our home of the Heinzman Upright Grand piano was met with great excitement. We all took turns tapping and pecking at the keys. My father could play some melodies, his fingers rippling up and down the keyboard. No music in front of him, everything in his head.

My musical journey began at home, listening to my Uncle Peter and my father play Russian and Ukrainian folk songs on the piano and mandolin. My father did not read music, but he played both the piano and the mandolin without effort. Uncle Peter was accomplished on the piano. Uncle Peter loved a grand flourish, and my dad would strum the mandolin in equal measure. The impact of watching and listening to them play music together for the sheer joy of it was not immediately apparent to me, but it proved to be most profound.

I continued with piano and then the violin. I learned some Mozart. I’m still at it! Stay tuned...

If you want to hear German pop sensation Nena sing this song, it is here:

 

bvk writes

 I’ve been reading for a very long time. Trips to the library with the book bag sewn by my mother filled with the maximum number allowed, I walked to and from the Brock Corydon Library buzzing with anticipation. On the way there, scanning shelves in my mind and on the way back, deciding what to read first. My reading at an early age was mostly the monthly Highlights Magazine and Enid Blyton mysteries. Any mystery, really – there was Trixi Beldon, Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys. These books pulled me into worlds much different from my own. I never stumbled upon a mystery to be solved, though how I longed for it.

    

The gap between my reality and those thrilling reads was bridged when I discovered Harriet the Spy. Here was a character that resonated with me so soundly, that I reread that book at least six times and      still flip through it to this day. I started playing Town and writing things in a scribbler. This book taught me that my imagination would always keep me company.

When my interests veered towards the lives of writers, reading their biographies, I found an unexpected connection there. Maybe, I could write. My first attempts were terrible. I read through my stories and couldn’t figure out what was wrong with them. I went back to reading, studied for a career and became a working adult.

But the seed had been sown. I wanted to write. At the first opportunity, I took a class. I took two classes. I started submitting short fiction to literary magazines and have an envelope filled with rejection letters to prove it. One day, the unimaginable happened. Descant Magazine (sadly no more) accepted a story of mine. Define euphoria!

I kept at it. Descant accepted two more of my submissions. I started a novel. Finished it. Rewrote it about ten times. Sent it out. Filled another envelope with rejection letters. Until one day, a publisher asked to see the whole manuscript. I zoomed through it once more, not wanting to take too long to send it. Their response was humbling but encouraging. It was not ready. The manuscript needed a lot of revision. If I was willing to work on it, they would consider publishing. I had spent so long on it already and thought I was done. However, what else would I be doing? There was no point in not working on it, so I buckled down and rewrote. Blue Becomes You went on to be nominated for a Best First Novel Award sponsored by Amazon Canada. More chills and thrills!

I wrote two more novels with Great Plains Publishing:

 

Then I wrote two more that I have been unable to place with a publisher. One of these, I made available on Kindle Direct Publishing. I pulled it and have reworked it and am about the relaunch under a new title. The other I am still waiting to hear. Those first three novels landed in bookstores and had their turn of a few weeks in the spotlight and then faded away. This happens. It is not unexpected. 

Readers’ appetites have changed, publishers bottom lines have moved. Risk is no longer worth it. Self-publishing is exploding. I am sitting on two homeless novels. No more letters to stuff into my envelope. Just unanswered queries. After a year or so, I can safely guess it’s a no.

                                                    Holding a finished draft brings great joy!

I’ll probably place the fifth novel with Kindle Direct as well. The sixth novel is underway and the seventh is percolating in my brain. Writers write. bvk writes.

 bvk reads                                                                  bvk writes

                     

East West/West East

 

East/West West/East

First Published in Descant Magazine Issue 166 Fall 2014

 

I was three years old in 1967 when I first visited East Germany. My mother had family there – her mother and two sisters. There were also two brothers in the West. Over the course of my childhood, we travelled to Germany every three years or so to spend six weeks of the summer among my aunts and uncles and cousins. Most of this time was spent in the East and a week or so in West Berlin. It was an education to have the political history of East and West Germany explained as I traipsed along behind my mother and sister, trying to keep up in this foreign land. The politics and historical context were often beyond me. A more obvious difference to me, by the age of six, was the quality of the ice cream. The ice cream we ate in East Germany was most often eaten by the sea with the sun beating down, after a swim. But the waffle cone was like cardboard and not very sweet and the ice cream was gritty, as though the sand from the dunes had worked its way in. In West Germany the ice cream was exquisite. Eaten at a sidewalk cafe on a busy city street with cars honking and stylishly dressed pedestrians rushing by. Crunchy cones and ice cream that felt silky smooth on my tongue. There was even gelato and one summer I discovered Zitrone gelato. When I asked for this in East Germany, they were most apologetic but no, I could not have a lemon gelato here. I understood then, that these two countries, though both inhabited by German people, were utterly and entirely different. One was privileged and one was ruled. It was not fair. This was one family and yet they inhabited such different present realities. What I understood was that a wall divided the two Germanys and this was the cause of the differences I observed. Everything I found unfair, absurd and random...all this was due to one unanimously agreed upon factor: The Russians.

 

Flying from Frankfurt to Berlin, the planes lowered their altitude over East German territory. My mother explained to me that the guards in East Germany had to be able to see that the plane flying overhead was a commercial airliner and not a military plane that may have the intention of attacking or spying. This meant that if they could not make out the Lufthansa logo, they may well shoot at us. I looked out the window at the East German farms and roads and soon we landed in West Berlin. West Berlin was occupied by British, American and French forces. As my aunt and uncle tried to make this clear for my sister and me they made it sound like there were no Germans in the mix at all. Their city was occupied. I looked around for signs of these forces and couldn’t see anything to indicate that West Berlin was inhabited by anything but Germans. To me, East Germany was the occupied country. Guards, Volkspolizie, government officials and paperwork everywhere we went. I heard a lot over those summers about the ‘crazy’ Russians, the policies and attitudes that were driving a wedge between East and West Germans.

The West was much like Canada. Everything was vibrant and current and abundant. One of the first things that changed upon transitioning from West Berlin to East – usually at the train station – Friedrichstrasse, was the instant desaturation of colour. Within 100m of the passport check, all colour drained from the landscape. There were no advertisements for chewing gum or laundry soap. No signs other than ones giving directives or listing rules. Every surface was painted gray. No graffiti, no colourful clothing, nothing seemed animated. The people we saw all wore drab and muted clothing. They moved slowly with methodical steps, as if their feet needed specific, separate directions to where they were going.

The trains were old and cumbersome and moved like aging cattle. Big green cars and humorless officials and train conductors. Nobody took much interest in us as my mother, travelling with two children and two large suitcases (no wheels) struggled up the long flights of stairs to get to the checkpoint. The rules changed frequently. One year we could check our baggage through and the next time we had to schlep it ourselves. We searched for a luggage cart, but no such luxury was available.

 

In the washroom of the train station sat a woman in a smock (anyone who worked anywhere wore a smock – in the Konsum, in the bakery, the women in the street who shovelled coal – I hadn’t even read any Dickens yet but knew this to be an endeavour that belonged in another era). This washroom attendant sat on a stool preparing squares of toilet paper for the people who came in to use the facilities. Upon entering she would ask: “Wollen Sie Papier?” There was no paper in the stalls and so, yes, everyone would want a couple of squares. I have never found, in all my travels, toilet paper that even approaches the consistency of this East German hybrid of cardboard and paper maché. For two, tough grey fibrous squares of this stuff the woman demanded fünf Pfennig.

Shovelling coal:

 

There was a dull resignation to the Communist regime by the time I experienced it. There were so many rules and everyone complained about them, but there was no fight anymore. The rules may have been arbitrary, but everybody abided by them, no matter how idiotic they seemed.

You were not allowed to photograph trains or the officers working on them. No photos of guards or police. Nor any buildings like factories or schools. No bridges. And absolutely no photos of the border. When I was older and defiant at the age of thirteen I made a point of photographing anything they said was forbidden. The town of Forst where my grandmother lived was right on the Polish border. There was a bombed out bridge spanning the Neisse River. The bridge used to lead to Poland. I have pictures of that. Polish guards patrolling their side used to answer our calls of dzień dobry. I found this unusual as the German Volkspolizei would never do that. They were a dour bunch. There were uniformed Volkspolizei everywhere and I did not take any pictures of them because they did scare me and they were authorised to take cameras from people caught breaking the rules.

My cousins at a playground - blown out bridge in the background.

 

One afternoon after we had gone for a hike, we stopped at a restaurant for cake and coffee. There were about seven of us. The restaurant was empty. The tables were set for four. We asked if they would mind pushing two tables together to accommodate our group and they would not do it. They were not allowed. By some punishable Communist rule the staff was not allowed to push two tables together. Diese Schweinerei – was what this kind of behaviour was referred to by my aunt. This piggishness – it doesn’t sound nearly as infuriating in English. When my mother hung her sweater over the back of her chair she was told that this was not allowed either. This was indeed a strange land.

In West Berlin I ordered a pepperoni pizza at an Italian restaurant. The pizza was covered in green chilies and nothing else. I guess they were pepperonis in some other language but not what I wanted. I told my aunt what I meant to order was meat – sausage, so they took the pizza back and brought me one with salami on it. Much better. What would those East German waiters have done? Consulted the rule book, no doubt.

 

When we visited East Germany we stayed at the house in which my mother was raised, a three story Italian style villa with a big yard, a small sunk-in swimming pool, a wall around the perimeter, pear trees, apple trees, cherry trees, gooseberry and red currant bushes. By the time I saw the house there was extensive shell damage on the outer plaster. (The family had to flee during the war as the front advanced). In the middle of the large front hall, covered by a rug, was a large scorch mark where Russian soldiers had started a fire to keep warm when they occupied the house. I stared at these crumbling gaps in the plaster and could not fathom bombs dropping right here in the garden where I had been dispatched with a pail to pick fruit. There was a lot of damage done all over Germany. But in West Berlin it seemed they had managed to clean it up by the 1970’s. The ruins that remained were deliberately preserved as memorials.

Space was at a premium in East Germany. The upper level of my grandmother’s house had been let to a young, single man and the second level served as offices for some government department. My grandmother was given no choice. A senior citizen with no other occupants in the house doesn’t require a three story home. The main floor remained hers to occupy, but the rest of the house she was forced to rent out.

My grandmother's house in Forst, Lausitz, DDR circa 1976. Steps to the pool on far right.

While staying at my grandmother’s, it was my job every morning to walk to the bakery three blocks away and buy buns. I was instructed to bring back six Kaiser rolls and six Semmeln (wheat rolls). There was always a line up. The bakery did not open before 7:30am. They baked only a certain amount of buns and bread daily and once this was gone they closed shop again until the next day. In line with me every morning was the teacher for the local Kindergarten. She had to buy buns to feed the children in her care. There was no special provision for her to have an order set aside. If she happened to miss out on the buns then the children would not eat. They were equal too, I suppose, these young children. I don’t remember if there was a quota for the buns, but they always did run out before the last person was served and I would stand there nervously every day wondering of one day I would be left with nothing to carry back home.

This kind of thing was unheard of in West Berlin. We still went in the morning for buns but there were always lots and many different kinds to choose from and even delicious cakes and sweets to buy for our afternoon coffee.

 The Bakery: No line up.

 

In West Berlin we frequently ate out and enjoyed Italian or Chinese. It sounded so strange to me to hear Chinese food ordered in German. Eine Frühlingsrolle – a spring roll. The grocery stores were much like the ones at home where multitudes of brands vied for the consumer’s attention. There were never any line ups outside the grocery store and you pretty much knew what would be inside and that you would find everything on your list and little extra treats found in the aisles.

In the East: line ups. Always line ups. At the bakery, at the butchers, at the grocer. People stood there holding their nylon or canvas shopping bags because the stores did not provide the customers with bags, something I found to be very un-advanced, compared with the limitless plastic bags available for free in the West. The customers stirred and shuffled. While they waited they discussed what they might find inside. Nobody knew, but they lined up anyway. Maybe sour cream or herring. The shelves often were bare. No brand names, only food stuffs. Mustard was mustard. Ketchup was ketchup. Toothpaste was toothpaste. There was one kind, one choice. It was either on the shelf the day you wanted it or it was not. A bushel of mealy apples pecked at by birds were now picked over by people. I remember helping my aunt select some of these apples, thinking, at home, none of these would make it out of the store. They all had bruises and nicks. Not one perfect apple among them.

 

Life was basic in the East - no frills living. Herr Kielon had a small farm across the street from my grandmother. Herr Kielon was old world. He wore faded blue shirts and pants and a hat with a dirty brim. He cut his grass with a scythe. He didn’t even have a lawn mower. Such was life under the Communists, I thought. I spent my mornings there feeding the chickens and rabbits. He let me hold the baby rabbits and one day gave me a freshly laid egg that my grandmother whisked up in a cup for me with some sugar while it was still warm. I drank it down bravely, as it was meant to be something special. The first and last time I drank an egg.

We ate rabbit stew made from a rabbit from the farm. Nothing like this would have occurred with my relatives in West Berlin. Such an old world idea. In East Germany I ate peasant food. Sausages and potatoes. Lentil soup. Cabbage soup. Cauliflower soup. Lots of soup. Everything was home made. Whatever was available, we ate. There was not much choice. The jam was homemade. They had to eat homemade jam because they couldn’t get anything better at their sorry excuse for a grocery store. Eating it in my grandmother’s dining room on those fresh buns, I didn’t appreciate it one bit.

Nothing came from a farm in West Berlin – it all came from the store. And, there were no pets in East Germany. They served no purpose and so were unnecessary. It somehow added to my bleak impression of the place. My cousins in Berlin had pet guinea pigs and a dog and cat. No such thing in the East. Other than my aunt. She had a canary named Charlie. Herr Kielon’s rabbits and chickens didn’t count since he ate them.

On the street. My mother, my grandmother, my aunt.

 

In West Berlin our attention was drawn to the way they treated West Germans at the border when trying to cross into East Germany. Common stories: They kept us there for five hours. They took the entire car apart. Seat covers, floor mats, ashtrays. They checked the undercarriage with mirrors. They whole time we waited. They took the coffee we were bringing over and they found the Bunte magazines and took those as well.

My uncle said he didn’t bother to hide things anymore. When the guards looked into the car he showed them the newspapers on the back seat beside the good chocolate and bottle of brandy. “There is it. Take it if you must.” Sometimes they took it and other times they waved him through. Nobody knew what the guards did with the confiscated goods. There were likely rules to follow. They surely would have wanted the items they found and I wonder if any of them dared sneak some home for their families, as my uncle was trying to sneak it over to his.

As Canadians travelling the same route, we were not subjected to this kind of treatment. We still had to hide things just in case, but the guards never looked. We made sure we brought what we could. Clothing for my cousins, books, magazines, coffee, chocolate. We hid things in socks or behind a carefully constructed row of books at the back of our suitcase. I always celebrated a small victory over the oppressors at having smuggled an Abba cassette over or some teen magazines or a pair of jeans for my cousins.

We brought Westmarks that could be spent in the Intershops. These were shops stocked with Western goods. Clothing, chocolates, candy, coffee, cookies. Mostly what my cousins bought there was chocolate. It was a way for more Western currency to make its way into the East German coffers.

Money was a big thing for the East German Communist government, I was told. The Russians needed Western currency and so they sought every possibly avenue of obtaining Westmarks. We paid a certain amount for our visas and then for each day we stayed in the East we had to exchange 25 Westmarks into Eastmarks. Then there was the matter of spending this money. We tended to stay in the East for at least three weeks so we had a lot of Eastmarks to spend. But, in a Communist country, things don’t cost very much and I remember my mother trying to spend all this money before we left because you couldn’t exchange it back to Westmarks again. I bought a lot of toys, clothes for my dolls and later on sheet music and classical recordings on the Eterna label. My grandmother used to joke that the Russians would surely take the wall down if they were paid enough to do it.

KDV Foodhall. Opulence of the West:

 

I loved spending the summers with my cousins. The Russian my cousins learned in school I found hilarious and useless. Not like my cousins in the West who learned English, a perfectly sensible language to learn. When I told them I was learning French it seemed hilarious and useless to them too. But, we chattered to each other in our rudimentary second languages and had a blast regardless. It was summer, so we went swimming in both East and West Germany. Up at the Baltic Sea in the East, and in the Glienicker See, a small lake in Kladow-West Berlin, close to where my cousins lived. The border crossed right through this lake and was denoted by a string of buoys. “What if you swim across the buoys?”

“They will shoot you.” They kind of rolled their eyes when they said this. The Russians had put up the wall and now they had to employ these extreme measures to protect it. West Berliners had become pretty blasé about it as though the shoot to kill policy was one more quirky Russian thing they had to put up with. My relatives had endured these trigger happy guards for years and their presence at a beach where children swam and families picnicked simply raised their threshold for irony.

 

From our relatives in the East we heard about the injustice of the travel restrictions. Travel to the West was strictly forbidden and one of the main reasons the wall even came into being was because of the flow of people from East to West in the early years after the war. People had to apply for a permit to visit relatives in the West for special occasions (weddings, funerals). Sometimes their request was granted, sometimes not. Once a person reached 65 years of age, it was easier to get a permit.

One year, my uncle neatly arranged for my grandmother to obtain a temporary West German passport. The passport was good for one month and would allow her to visit her son. At the end of her visit, she would have to surrender the passport. Communism really only requires the efforts of the able bodied. My grandmother got her visa because she was over 65 – a retiree and therefore no longer of any use to the state. If she fled to the West, what did it matter?

My grandmother travelled all the way to Canada on that visa for my sister’s confirmation. Nobody in her home town was allowed to know. In our letters to her preceding the trip, we were not allowed to mention it. It was top secret. We were not allowed to say: “I can’t wait to see you. It will be so awesome for you to see Canada for the first time since your eldest daughter fell in love and decided to stay here and get married and stay in Canada! at the age of twenty-two.” The letters most certainly would be read. Anybody in the East with ties to the West was under suspicion. Suspicion of what? There was no good answer. If we mentioned that she would be visiting us she probably wouldn’t get her visa.

A few years later, when my aunt turned 65, she was granted a travel visa and came to Canada for a visit. I remember her reaction at a shopping mall. After about an hour of browsing and feeling the garments, she sat down, exhausted on a bench and said, “I don’t know whether to cry for joy or weep for despair.” She was talking about the abundance, about the variety, the choices and the immediacy of the possession. In East Germany people waited for everything. For a one bedroom instead of a bachelor apartment. (One person doesn’t need all that space.) Months for a telephone, a washing machine, years for a car.

The idea that she could just swoop through this mall and have whatever she wanted had become unfathomable to her. This place, with all its colourful clothing, advertising and smells of delicious foods, clean and bright, did not in any way resemble the drabness she was used to, reminding her of the sameness of each day, present and future.

The vibrancy that colour adds to a landscape can be taken for granted. This was one of the most noticeable differences to me, between these two countries – worlds apart by the time I experienced them. Even the wall looked different depending on which side you stood. The Western side was covered in graffiti – more colour! And on the other side – nothing. Just a blank, heavily guarded wall.

The West was what I knew, growing up in Canada. The landscape we survey everyday is bright and filled with some attempt at attracting our attention. In East Germany there was no such effort. Nobody was expected to be happy with their life, but they would be provided for. Everyone was tended to via the same set of rules. This ideology discourages any kind of personal effort. There is no getting ahead and so there is no sense of accomplishment. There is no need – the state will provide. If the state will provide, then nobody helps each other. Everybody worked even though this meant the workforce was full of redundancy. People were assigned mundane and often meaningless tasks with several people doing a job of one. No unemployment meant no poverty and so there was no charity and very little goodwill.

People spied on each other and were rewarded for it. My aunt and uncle found out after the fall of the Berlin wall that their good friends and neighbours who had lived next door for years had been informing on them to the Stasi for all of those same years. I had met them too. They seemed like nice people and we were always invited to their home for coffee and cake whenever we were visiting. Who knew what they had to report on my aunt and uncle. I never heard. But the relentless gathering of information for the sake of gathering information may have started in East Germany.

 

The war had been lost. All of Germany blamed Hitler. The East was saddled with the Russians and the West with the blame for the horrific atrocities. The wall divided the country. An attitude of shame and helplessness grew in the West while resignation and disgust ate at the East. The Russians kept the country divided for twenty-eight years. I remember during those early visits, the adults discussing the East/West situation late into the evenings. Unless there was a soccer game on, this was the topic of discussion. They explained to me that while there was a wall dividing them, they very much considered Germany one country. But I could tell with each subsequent visit that these feelings were fading. While the West advanced, the East stood still. That wall was going to be there forever. These were clearly two different countries. This was obvious as soon as you turned on the television.

In the East, you could sometimes obtain weak signals from Western broadcasters and everybody who could would watch those programs, particularly the news. There were shows broadcast by the East German government but they were unduly boring and colourless with poor production value. I was always happy to return to West Berlin because the picture was so much clearer and the shows less gloomy. Even the commercials were cheery and corny.

There, nobody ever fiddled with the antenna to try to find a weak signal from the East to see what was going on. That never happened.

 

During my grandmother’s visit that one summer, my mother took her British Columbia to see the Rocky Mountains. One day they set off on a hike in Banff, with their knapsacks and sturdy shoes, looking forward to finding a spot with a view to sit down and eat their picnic. All of a sudden to the left of their path, about eight feet away, they saw a grizzly bear, up on its hind legs. Its front paws were up against a tree. The bear was over six feet tall. When they realised what it was they decided to turn around, not wanting to walk past it. There were no other hikers on the path. Before turning back, my grandmother had a good long look at the bear. Maybe she wanted to stare it down, like she would have those Russian soldiers who set up camp inside of her house while she fled with her five children to the countryside. That bear, symbolic of the invaders and conquerors of her homeland stood before her, a hulking and clumsy animal, blocking her path.

My mother and grandmother started back and after a short time they encountered two ladies from England who were headed in the direction from which they had just come. Together they decided to join forces and make enough noise to scare the bear away. They tried to think of songs they all knew and finally came up with The Happy Wanderer. My mother and grandmother sang in German and the English ladies, in English. They all hiked back towards the bear, singing this enthusiastic Wanderlied as loud as they could:

I love to go a-wandering,
Along the mountain track,
And as I go, I love to sing,
My knapsack on my back.

Val-deri,Val-dera,
Val-deri,
Val-dera-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha
Val-deri,Val-dera.
My knapsack on my back!  

The four women marched along the mountain trail, singing lustily and with bravado. My grandmother, no doubt delighted at the opportunity to thwart this Rocky Mountain grizzly bear, to bring him down from his hind haunches and send him lumbering back into the woods.

Mein Vater war ein Wandersmann,
Und mir steckt's auch im Blut;
Drum wandr' ich flott, so lang ich kann,
Und schwenke meinen Hut.

 

Val-deri,Val-dera,
Val-deri,
Val-dera-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha
Val-deri,Val-dera.
Und schwenke meinen Hut.