The socialist model village Mestlin

Where exactly does the memory sit? In front? In the back? Deep inside? I hold the head in my hand. It is cut in the middle and you can see the brain. The red windings run up and down, to the right and to the left. But where does the memory sit?

I am not alone here. Karl and Vladimir are also there. And Erich is peeking out from behind the pile of books. And then there is an eye, an ear, a hand. The scattered anatomy of a human being. A human being made of plastic. Or ‘plaste’, as they used to say here. You can take the head apart and see what it looks like from the inside.

The room is full. Display boards, maps, map stands, textbooks, red and white wooden spheres for chemistry class, and disassembled body models, it's all stacked up to the ceiling here. "We were able to save at least that," says Claudia Stauss from the association "Denkmal-Kultur-Mestlin e.V.". It's only a fraction of what flew out of the Kulturhaus library right after reunification and out of the Schulspeicher in 2013. "That was tantamount to burning books," a former teacher later told me. Benches, tables, pictures, statues, books. They just flew through the windows into the container on Marx-Engels-Platz.

The monument association brought some of the things to safety. And so now the framed portrait of Erich Honecker stands here, behind children's books and charts. The text "Lenin's cause conquers and lives" is on top and "My Life" by Karl Marx is also there. I stand in the Kulturhaus in Mestlin and marvel at the dusty treasure trove. I have been living here for three days now, in this small village in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. And I'll be staying for a few more weeks. 24 years after the fall of the Wall, I want to know what's left of the GDR. And in my search I came across this place.

Mestlin, the first and only socialist model village in the GDR. Between 1952 and 1957, a socialist country dream was built here: The gigantic house of culture for the people, at the other end of the huge square the Konsum, next to it the industrial and food HO, on the right the school, next to it the kindergarten and the nursery, on the other side the "Landambulatorium", the hospital with maternity ward, ophthalmologist, operating room, physiotherapy. A village with all the comforts of the city. 180 such model villages were to be built. But the construction of Mestlin cost three million East Marks and so it remained with this one village. The backdrop still stands, even if it is crumbling. But what does it look like inside, in the people?

My address: Marx-Engels-Platz 6. A room in one of the apartment buildings built in 1953 for the workers and farmers of Mestlin. Six square meters of GDR, the walls as thin as paper. Below me, the Konsum, which then became "Quelle" and has now been empty for years. Above me, Conny, mother of four children. Conny works at the Arbeiterwohlfahrt, Marx-Engels-Platz 4, right next door. Behind the AWO rooms used to be the municipal administration, the post office, the savings bank.

The old days are now behind a red curtain. It is completely closed. I ask Agnes, Conny's colleague, if I can take a look behind the curtain. Agnes rises and slowly pushes the red curtain aside; behind it is a door. When the key finally turns and the door opens, it suddenly becomes very cool and dim. A musty smell hits us. On the right, at the end of the corridor, a fresco is visible. We move closer to it. "All with the people, all by the people, all for the people" is written above the painting, which shows a tractor, a construction worker and two students with spades. "It's nice, isn't it?" murmurs Agnes, more to herself than to me.

Oddly, we whisper as we continue down the hall. Agnes stays three steps behind me as I carefully open more chambers. "This is where Mrs. Kalkhorst sat," Agnes whispers "the lamps, they are still original." The old orange curtains still hang in the mayor's office. "And the smell, it's still the same too," whispers Agnes. To the left and right of the window are two large safe deposit boxes, the keys still in them. Both are empty. Only the typewritten stickers of Mrs. Jörres, the registrar, are still stuck on the boards. Stickers that have neatly divided life into "banns", "marriage matters" and "death matters".

A little later, as I stand in the glaring sun on Marx-Engels-Platz, I meet Alina, 14, at the bus stop. "What do you remember about the GDR? I ask her. “No idea," Alina replies. Anything? "Oh dear... ok... They lived in cramped quarters...and.....hmmm.... they didn't have as much to eat as we do," she says. " And they even had to cut their own hair”.

Mr. Schulze beckons me closer. He was a school principal until the fall of the Berlin Wall. Then the party comrade was disposed of. A few years later, he is the mayor of Mestlin. Since the municipal administration was closed, the mayor has his office in the school. And so fate has it that Mr. Schulze is sitting again exactly where he was before: in his old principal's office, in his old seat.

The school stands next to the Kulturhaus and is also a socialist model building of collective dimension. In the past, 500 students studied here, but now there are no more than 50. The fresco on the outside facade shows a teacher explaining a corn cob to inquisitive children. Above it are industrious reapers. As I enter the building, following the mayor's call, a girl with a Lillifee satchel and a boy with a baseball cap approach me. They walk under the clock, which has been ticking away for 50 years, and past the socialist wall frescoes showing children from all over the world. They walk past the motto at the entrance, which today reads in cursive: "Knowledge is a treasure that accompanies the owner everywhere."

At Mr. Schulze's, I meet the former chemistry teacher, Mr. Peters. He is 87 years old and the memory of Mestlin. Mr. Peters started at the school in 1951 and taught here until he retired. He lives right next to the school, in one of the first model apartments on Ernst-Thälmann-Strasse. He must have done his job well, because later I get to talk to many white-haired students around seventy who still rave about teacher Peters.

Mr. Peters has saved every event, every date. He has written a chronicle about Mestlin. We sit in his archive in a room of the school and talk and talk. In the 70's, he says, he realized it couldn't work. "It's a pity," says Mr. Peters, but people just don't put selfishness aside. And then this pointedness. You couldn't have been happy there. This eternal looking around, whether there is someone listening who should not listen....

He collected posters, photos, documents, letters. Cabinet after cabinet full of treasures from times gone by. There are the plans of events in the House of Culture in April 1975, the anniversary of the victory of the glorious Soviet Army! Citizens of Mestlin! Decorate your houses with flags and garlands!

I ring the doors of the citizens of Mestlin. I want to know if they still have something from the GDR. Some object, something they couldn't part with. Nope, say most of them. Everything gone. Gone. Everything thrown away. We have everything new, don't we? Yes. Haven't we? Wait a minute. Yes, we do. The medal. It still could. But where? You have to look for it first. Come back tomorrow.

The next day, more doorbells. Now there's coffee and cake, freshly baked cookies, smoked pork with home-grown vegetables. And there are strange things on the table: Party ID cards, NVA ID cards, ID cards with "invalid" stamped across them, Pioneer neckerchiefs, FDJ shirts, gold sports medals, letters signed "with socialist greeting", photos, youth initiation certificates, honorary SED banners. There are pins from the DKP, SDAJ, DTSB, DFD, FDJ. And there are words that I have never heard before: Spartakiade, activist, Sobotnik, section representative, Volkssolidarität, pioneer leader, group council. And with these words, the hidden memories, the memories that have been packed away, also rise up.

For example, Mrs. Frank and her husband. There are two sitting at the kitchen table who could not be more different. She was a teacher of German, history and civics. And party secretary. "A red sock, if you will," she says and laughs. Well, and he? "They always wanted me, they already had enough intelligence," says the electrician with a wry look at his wife. "But it was just too much gobbledygook for me." What now? Not always all in line in the family? Now they're both laughing. Mightily they would have quarreled.

Kevin and Liza hang out at the bus stop on Marx-Engels-Platz. "What do you actually know about the GDR?" I want to know. "GDR?" asks 17-year-old Kevin, surprised. "Holy shit. That's what we had in school.... Wait a minute.... They didn't have cars, only horses and carriages." And Liza, 16 groans, "Old. Old clothes, old hairstyles, old movies. Black and white." And then she remembers the name of an old GDR actress: "Marylin Monrow was her name."

Sabrina is 28 and has only lived in Mestlin for a few years. She is currently repainting the fence of the kindergarten and her tattos shine in the sun, covered in sweat. "I still fully experienced the GDR," she says. How so? "Well, I still had all the Stasi teachers." And the fear, just won't go away, she says, is still there. "When someone drives into the yard, you stay behind the window. You don't know who's coming," she says. The old mentality simply lives on in some people.

The LPG has always been the largest employer in the village, which now has just under 800 inhabitants. And it still is today. There used to be 300 partners, but today there are only 20. But it still works, and not so badly. On the way there, I meet the man who used to be called "Shit East". He has a carpentry shop in the former premises of the "Kreisbetrieb für Landtechnik". It went bankrupt. An overgrown plot of land right next to the LPG. "Shit East" was called "Shit East" because he used to say "Shit East." Now he's called "Shit West.

Mrs. Nörenberg-Kolbow is a resolute woman and the head of the LPG. She studied plant production in Rostock, at the "Wilhelm Pieck University, but it's called something else today”. Mrs. Nörenberg shows me the LPG, where the old tractors, brand "Aktivist" and "Brockenhexe" stand next to the ultra-modern 10 times as wide mowing machines. But the old ones are still in operation. "Indestructible," says the LPG manageress.

Is there anything left in the attic? I ask again. We climb the narrow wooden stairs, Mrs. Nörenberg in front. We pass the hall for celebrations, which is permanently decorated with garlands, and climb one more. Then it gets dark and the stairs become narrower. "I haven't been here in 20 years," murmurs Mrs. Nörenberg. A little light falls through three small windows at the front of the large storage room. It falls on the logbooks from 1975; it falls on a box of light bulbs from the nationally owned company Berliner Glühlampen-Werk; it falls on large wooden sticks tied together with a belt. They are from 1945, the sticks with which the big farmers were expropriated, the sticks with which the land was measured for the land reform. Half of it is covered with thick dust, the other half is covered by a German flag. "But I think this is the West flag" says Mrs. Nörenberg, lifting it briefly. Yes, it is. "Och," says Mrs. Nörenberg, as I point backward into the darkness. There are more flags, carefully rolled up: the GDR flag, and two red flags.

At the bus stop on Marx-Engels-Platz, Michi is bored with his buddies. They are 14 years old. What do you actually know about the GDR? "Nothing!" they all shout in unison. I point to the street sign, "And Marx and Engels, any ideas?" Michi shrugs, "I don't know, I don't know him." And he adds apologetically, "But then, I haven't lived here that long."

The longer I'm there, the more I immerse myself in everyday life in the village of Mestlin, the more I become a village photographer. The theater group rehearsing in the Kulturhaus needs a poster. And then quickly for the announcement photos for the Schweriner Volkszeitung. School starts and Mr. Bölsche, the village reporter who used to be called VK Bölsche, Volkskorrespondent Bölsche, is not there on this Saturday of all days. Can't I? I can. For one morning I photograph children in Sunday dresses with much too large school bags in front of a flower arrangement.

I go swimming in the lake with the youngsters, fishing with the anglers, and spend my afternoons with the hospitable Mr. and Mrs. Biermann, drinking Turkish tea and telling stories about the old days. What was going on here in the past! In our beautiful house of culture. Who was not all here: Bärbel Wacholz, the Gert-Michaelis Choir, the police orchestra from Schwerin. Even Karat and the Puhdys. Downstairs in the large hall, theater was played, lavish parties were celebrated. People sat together in brigades and sang: "The corn, the corn, as everyone knows, that's a strapping boy, the corn, the corn, that's the sausage on the stalk". That was the corn festival. And then the pioneer carnival, the naming ceremonies, the youth dedication celebrations! The Kulturhaus was bursting at the seams. For this, a few extra portions of foamkisses were put aside in Rita Staats' consumption. And the baker Melchert made 70 cakes more and in addition cream puffs, Schillerlocken, love bones and yeast snails.

The March 8 celebrations were held in the small hall. There the carnations were presented for Women's Day. And the women sat together at long tables and let the men serve them coffee and cake. Then they drank Bulgarian red wine and danced until dawn. At the end of the small hall, like in a cathedral, light falls through a glass plate window. Shining scenes of an ideal socialist everyday life, field workers, locksmiths, carpenters, nurses. All part of the big picture. The window is now missing its lower half.

That is part of the other story of Mestlin. A kind of collective trauma that I hear again and again. It starts with the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Westerner came and with it the first large disco in the region, in the Kulturhaus Mestlin, of all places. A perhaps not so naive mayor made it possible. They poured sand on the parquet, painted the walls black and painted over a fresco of farm workers at the entrance. They tore down the chandeliers and let them shatter on the stone floor. Mestlin, the model socialist village, became the destination of thousands of disco-goers from Hamburg over the weekend. They pissed on Marx-Engels-Platz and defecated in Ernst-Thälmann-Strasse. At some point, the Westerner made off, taking everything with them that wasn't nailed down. The people of Mestlin were literally sitting in front of the ruins of their history.

Time. How long have I been here now? A week? Two? Three? Time seems to pass more slowly here. Why? Because there's more of it?

You have to drive ten kilometers to Goldberg to do your shopping. Because the last "Konsum," as it is still called, the Edeka in Mestlin, is now closing down as well. One of the young people has already photographed the empty shelves. "It looks like peacetime here," says a man at the checkout sarcastically. To Goldberg. Past Lidl, past a UFO of a gas station that must have landed here after reunification.

In the main street of Goldberg hangs in every second store a sign "for sale". Only in one store hangs the sign "I buy". "I buy GDR watches of any kind". When you enter the watchmaker's store, you rush with the time machine to the year 1881, because since that time the store exists and is almost unchanged since then. And then you're shot forward again, but not quite to the present, only to the year 1989. And there you stop, only the clocks keep ticking.

"I sell only watches made until 1989" says the watchmaker. He is 63, has gray-white hair, a beard and looks exactly like you would imagine a watchmaker to look. No China watches and no Western luxury watches here. "Only GDR watches and from Russian production." The demand would be enormous, he wouldn't even be able to keep up. Do people want the old days back?

At the bus stop, 20-year-old Nicole is standing with a stroller, her three-month-old daughter in it. She is waiting for the bus to Schwerin. On Nicole's pants is a black patch with a fist smashing a swastika: "Against Nazis" is written underneath. What does Nicole actually remember about the GDR? She moans: "My parents talk about it so often, I can't hear it anymore. It's all in the past. And me, I live in the here and now."