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I love... The Soviet Union is my second home.
And I love it the way it was.
But I'm not crying a single tear over that home
and I don't want it back.
I don't think it will, that's unreal.
Nothing ever comes back.
That's due to transitoriness
of people and of nature.
Yaneq from eNtR Berlin.
We want to interview you. You know?
We'll do that.
Great.
My wife really wanted a garden.
So my wife searched and found one online.
Proper gardens, huge gardens,
out in Brandenburg. 70 km outside Berlin.
You need to drive.
There, I started doing garden philosophy,
I came to the conclusion that basically
that people, after they were expelled
from the mythical paradise garden,
they try to recreate that paradise,
more or less successfully.
They are very different concepts of gardens,
but they are all gardens.
And that's the subject of my new book.
Give us a clue, I'd like to find a garden.
What you said about allotments
I've heard from other friends, too.
Those are bourgeois Germans
who tell you or their kids when to play football,
what music to listen to, et cetera.
I don't want all that.
My tip is Brandenburg.
That's an incredibly huge area...
which is as unagitated now
as Berlin was in the early '90s.
It was also... it was a free zone.
I remember my first feeling here - freedom.
People...
You arrived in 1989? Or in '90?
In 1990. By law, the GDR still existed,
but de facto the wall was gone.
And lots of people who were scared
that the wall would possibly go back up
left their flats and took off to the west.
At the same time, lots of people
arrived from the west, too,
not just from the east.
Young people from provincial towns,
from Munich or Cologne, in order to put
their own ideas of life into practice.
There was space for that in Berlin.
And we always grew up with this feeling
of never getting a chance
to get to know the big wide world first hand.
It would come to us in the shape of books
we had copied ourselves, of music cassettes
which were re-recorded a thousand times.
The world was a fairy tale.
Suddenly, this chance was up for grabs.
It was impossible to say no.
I see.
That's...
I was young, I had no money,
I was lazy, I couldn't be bothered
queuing up in front of some embassy
for a visa. I didn't have an invitation
and I didn't know anyone.
I did have some relatives in America back then,
but I never wanted to go to America.
East Berlin was some kind
of secret tip for lazy tourists.
It was nearby,
Soviet citizens didn't need a visa back then,
but the wall had already gone.
The state had withdrawn.
I mean, the old state was in decline
and the new state
was about to arrive, so to speak.
And in this gap between the state powers...
there was a huge flow of people.
They brought enormous creative energies.
And the end was a big story,
the Berlin of today.
It was a tiny moment in history like you said.
The old state imploded,
the police didn't know if they'd still have a job.
Anarchy was possible.
I think stuff like that
doesn't happen a lot in human history.
I witnessed it twice.
Once my fatherland, a large empire,
went down from one day to the next...
When was that moment in the Soviet Union?
Would you say between Gorbachev and Yeltsin?
It started in the late '80s.
The state was getting nowhere.
Before then we... I was a theatre producer.
I was organising underground rock concerts.
We always worked under the constant pressure
of the state.
At the theatre workshop,
the effect of the imperial breakdown
that everyone left.
Suddenly they would have an invitation
from all sorts of countries, America, Austria,
from Canada. I was almost on my own
in the office,
there were pieces of paper
all over the place, from accounting.
And the accounting window was closed,
the one where you get your money every month.
Then I realised something was happening,
everything is in motion.
In 1990, there was a Russian punk band
called Pogo who toured here.
I saw them, they were selling tapes.
Were they known in Russia?
I thought punk rock had been
in New York in 1975, and in London in 1977,
and in 1980 it arrived in Germany.
And I had the feeling it went to Moscow,
with *** Riot and so on.
Can you use the simple means of punk rock
to be provocative? I mean, those girls
were jailed, so that's relevant for others.
Here, if you'd gone into the Berlin Dome
and said...
*** Riot was...
Nothing would have happened.
They were... very political in that church.
Our punk rock was at best disorderly conduct,
basically. No-one was bothered by it.
And the biggest punk band in the Soviet Union
was The Automatic Satisfiers
from St. Petersburg.
In Moscow, there was Chudo Yudo,
and I knew them both.
Moscow was better, because I am from Moscow.
The Automatic Satisfiers
would smash bottles on their heads on stage,
the singer was the son of a KGB officer
and got the music from his dad.
Dad had been abroad on a KGB mission,
he went into a music shop, probably in London,
and brought back the Sex Pistols record
and their son turned into a punker.
That's how it was.
If Dad had gone to another music shop
and bought ZZ Top...
He'd grown a beard.
Exactly.
And his friends copied and covered the record.
What *** Riot did, in this society,
in young Russia
which was desperately seeking a new ideology,
*** Riot grabbed
this pubescent young society
in a very sensitive place, by its balls.
And the groups around her, Voina,
those groups are fantastic.
With very simple performance art means,
if you have the balls to do it,
and they are anarchists...
Heroes.
Yes. They believe in their thing.
I shiver thinking about it.
I wouldn't have messed
with this totalitarian state.
I'd be scared of that.
Also, I don't think it's worth it.
The world is big.
Just go somewhere else.
Life is standing still.
It only starts when you go travelling.
But that's normal. People who...
I wrote this at the beginning of my new book
which is out in August.
The migration background all people have,
basically. They all get displaced
from the place where they feel at home.
Be it an old building or their parents' home
or their home town or home country.
That's normal. Sure, you have to love
and honour your parents,
but you won't sit in your parents' kitchen
all your life.
After a while you'll project back
to that quasi paradisiacal state of being
which may not have been so nice. If you look
at Russia today the way you look at the '80s,
it seems it was a paradise.
People make it nicer than it was.
People have a very short memory.
They...
They actually live in a very unstable world.
It and the people change every day.
After one day people think very differently
and forget what they thought yesterday.
Their memories, everything in this world
perishes quickly.
People forget everything. They die.
Their houses turn to dust.
I don't know, I wanted to write a story
one or two weeks ago.
And I didn't have time. And I notice every day
that the story changes in my head.
Yes, terrible.
It won't wait for me forever.
It's one moment, and when it's gone... Yes.
Like a cat, it runs away and disappears
in the gaps between time and then it's gone.
The only thing that remains
are the stories
I or someone else has written down.
Only what has been written down will persist.
As long as it's written with suspense
and in an interesting way
so that the next generations want to read it
and tell it to others.
And that the content is rich enough.
You can interpret everything into the '80s now
and if you...
are honest to yourself,
the '80s will be your personal work.
It's written that it's true.
That's why people write books.
I have the feeling
this is the only meaning of our existence.
All the rotating around the sun
needs to be distilled into stories which...
maybe serve as some sort of good night stories.
Anyway, I'm very interested in continuing.
That's right.
Subtitles by Stephanie Geiges