I was born here in 1983.

 

In Demmin.

 

We lived in a small flat directly below my great-grandmother's in a street called Südmauer. 

Later  we moved to Adolf - Pompe Strasse and with it the city enter of the Demmin became my "hood".

  

Here, on these streets I played badminton until the church bell chimed at 6 PM.

On the weekends I climbed over the fences of all kindergartens in town to test their slides and swings.

  Here I grazed my knees and elbows during the bicycle races along Goethestrasse.

Here I went to the local lido - basically from the first to the last day in summer.

And, after a long day swimming I visited grandma and grandpa in their allotment. They always had "something nice" in the fridge.

 

Handball became my sport. Einheit Demmin was my club and Herr Besch my trainer.

 

Oh and most importantly, nothing was possible here without a bike. 

 

 

Back to Demmin

  

At almost 7 years old I did not actually care about the political situation in my country nor did I fully understand it, but what it meant for me was that the four of us (I had become a big sister in 1990) finally moved back to Demmin - given that the GDR ceased to exist my dad was obviously no longer needed in the NVA.

 

That meant finally moving back to grandma and grandpa, to my family in Demmin and to the woods, playgrounds and streets that I knew.

  

So my "career in Demmin" continued after a short break. I went to primary school, first at Pestalozzi Schule, then the the Waldschule. Here vanilla, strawberry and chocolate milk were still delivered to our classes every day in glass bottles, and the delicious Wiener Sausages were available in the school kitchen in the basement. The Devener Holz (a huge local forest) was literally around the corner.  My word! The playground in that forest! A paradise for anybody younger than 10.

 

I did not like too many subjects. P.E. and Local History and English were the ones I enjoyed most. The subject of English was actually something special in 1993, because I was at one of the first elementary school classes in Demmin in which English was taught from the 3rd grade onwards. Most generations before me, including my parents had only been taught Russian, the focus on teaching and learning English was minimal.

 

The streets of Demmin were our hood. Our parents let us play, regardless of whether we lived in Bangladesh (an area of towerblocks on the outerskirts of Demmin), in Meisengrund, Thälmannsiedlung or in Adolf Pompe Strasse. We cycled to the playgrounds in the forests, and arranged to meet just to play. We knew the phone numbers of our friends by heart. So when you came home from school, you threw your school bag in the corner and called your friends, that's how it worked. These were calls to landlines of course, with telephones that had a cord. So when you reached the mum on the other side it was something like "Hello, this is Fritzi, I wanted to ask if xxx can come out to play?"  

 

House arrest and a pocket money ban were then real punishments.

 

Pretty much everything was played from hide in seek in the cellars of the  Neubauten (only in those buildings though because other cellars were too scary) to badminton, anything that involved cycling, running or climbing. Girls against boys? No problem. 

  

More often than not the odd ball landed on a car and left a little scratch and there were many days, the good days we came home with our knees bruised!

  

That's just how it was. Safe. Never boring.

 

 

We knew all the small shops and chewing gum machines in town. We knew were the best and cheapest ice cream was and when the lido opened and closed. We must have all been in the chlorine water for that long that we began to develop blue lips and started trembling. We have all come home completely drenched because the summer rain simply surprised us or we were so deeply focused that we simply did not hear the church bells chiming - a sign to come home.  That meant trouble - as one thing we were taught, was to be on time. Calling or texting to say you will be late, was never possible.

  

And we all knew how annoying it was when you had a friend in Bangladesh or on the Stadtrandsiedlung, because you always had to cycle up a hill to get to them! A real bugger.

 

Bad Weather Problems

 

When the weather was bad in the 90s we luckily had some friends that had a video recorder. I think there were only very few girls back then who would not know every single sentence spoken in "Dirty Dancing". But beside watching movies, we used these VHS recorders to record the films that we had previously researched in in the TV magazine. A big argument only erupted when dad needed to record something himself, or accidentally switched off the recording.

 

Oh and while we are talking about recording. We had cassettes. Walkmans. The Charts were played every Sunday evening on the radio. Take That. Backstreet Boys. New Kids on The Block. How else could you get hold of the music that was "in" at the time? You had to record it.  And everybody will probably remember those moments when the song isn't quite over and the presenter starts speaking, or the commercial starts. Or those times that the cassette ran out before the song was actually fully recorded.

 

There must have been many recording tragedies going on in the families at this time.

 

No Internet. No mobile phone. No Instagram. No facebook. Just being a child and getting to know the little world around you.

 

A carefree time that I enjoy thinking of and that for me is very closely connected to this city of Demmin, my hometown, its nature and its people.

 

More memories you can find here.