Alcohol: Bye, you cool white wine!

Bottom up! Uncle Albert! Untie the ropes” – the clap-along hit of the rightly forgotten pop star Manuela has lingered in my musical memory for over 50 years. As a character, “Uncle Albert” offered just about everything that the television community in East and West wanted as a role model in the early 1970s. He had a boat and only modest dreams. He got so drunk on rum and tea that he forgot that he would never make it to Hawaii in his life.

The audience of the “ZDF Hit Parade” celebrated the uncle song, which was a must at any party. Not even in my home town of Mecklenburg, where people drank differently. The schnapps was served without tea, and there was hardly any sailing. At least not from the rural population. I don’t remember a single person in my childhood who was abstinent. Alcohol was normal, cheap, available everywhere and the comforter in every need.

If there was a GDR-typical shortage of clear schnapps, for example, Aunt Ursel was begged for 70 percent prima spirit at the pharmacy and domestic eggnog production was secured. What fun when the children secretly licked the glasses and then had such a sweet, staggering walk!

The official initiation then took place at the youth consecration. There, the 14-year-olds were traditionally given the first alcohol of their lives. Not legal, but normal and doesn’t matter. And it wasn’t the first time for any of us. As a teenager in the East German provinces, I had only read about weed. However, we stole colorful pills from our parents’ medicine cabinets or from holiday jobs in the hospital. It was tough stuff, the ingredients read like the secret menu at Berghain these days. For years, my war-traumatized parents were on speed during the day and on Valium at night. There was also the omnipresent alcohol as a social lubricant and an ever-available veil over a difficult everyday life.

My first pregnancy at the age of 20 and at the start of my studies in Berlin stopped all of my early addictions in their tracks. I no longer drank or smoked according to regulations. Later, as a young academic shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was more chic to switch to red wine. The agony of the late 80s seemed soberly unbearable. I was now a curator of photography at a museum in the province. Actually a dream job, but the place was full of the Stasi and cultural politics was in a coma. At 4 p.m. everyone took the bottles out of the desk. What saved me was that I was already standing in front of my son’s kindergarten at that time.

As an intellectual who had arrived throughout Germany, I switched to moderate consumption of white wine. This was interrupted by another pregnancy with my daughter and a long breastfeeding period. Alcohol hardly played any role in my everyday life anymore. But the impacts were getting closer. We lost our first friends, companions and childhood siblings because of drinking. They went crazy, had accidents, killed themselves or died quite mundanely from addiction, some of them barely 40 years old. We couldn’t believe it and toasted her well-being in heaven and hell at the funeral services. All the living continued to drink, but the excess of the dead began to frighten us.

With advanced age and a certain income, the most treacherous she-wolf among the faces of addiction crept up: wealth drinking. I found myself at home-style wine tastings. At receptions where the finest wines were free. Over meals where we no longer talked about our lives, but rather about hillside locations and Bordeaux vintages. I had long since given up smoking because I didn’t want to be a bad role model for the children. But with half a bottle of wine in my head, I certainly argued with my teenage daughter about untidy rooms and puberty bullshit. Which is not a good idea at all.

My husband uncorked the first bottle every day at 7 p.m., eventually he upgraded to 5 p.m. I more or less went along with it. We now drank wine every day. Not to the point of intoxication, but driving a car after watching the “Tagesschau”? Rather not …

When my husband fell in love with a younger woman one day and suddenly left me, I knew I was on very thin ice. Alcohol was really getting to me now. As a comforter, as a stubborn person, as a sleeping pill. During this time, I was unable to get up in the morning for the first time due to a hangover and was absent from work. I pulled myself together. It worked at first and I convinced myself that I had everything under control.

I’ve always loved disaster operations, the fast sprint. The long journey will be dangerous for me. Enduring frustrating phases in which nothing happens and I achieve little. Someone or something should compensate me. And if there’s one substance that promises that, it’s alcohol. He keeps his mouth shut, is there when women need him, and even promises something like emancipation. The fact that I was able to keep up with seasoned men on wine-filled evenings made me proud. At least until morning. I had a hangover and grief and a guilty conscience.

Menopause was kind to me. However, I was haunted by more and more splatter movie-like nightmares, which only became more vivid with the arrival of Corona in all of our lives. In addition, drinking alone at home during lockdown times seemed to have finally settled in, and not just for me. I did sports, therapy, my exercises, wise sayings. Like almost all of my friends. We sent each other funny films about stubborn mothers trying to survive the demands of homeschooling. If we had acute grief, we discussed it and finally toasted each other. We didn’t slur, we didn’t grumble, we didn’t puke. But we all drank too much.

In the middle of summer, the time when barbecue parties and cozy nightingale nights were allowed again, I had enough. I read – with my eyes half closed – completely different reports from women about their addiction careers and how they got sober, for example “Dry” by Christiane Koschmieder. And then I stopped. Bye, you cool white wine! I just knew I had had my last drink. I can be strong, but also romantically unstable. I need clear decisions.

This August, which was memorable for me, was now two years ago. A time without alcohol-fuelled dramas, Sunday hangovers and without the guilty conscience of having once again said, written or done something that, when viewed soberly, I would definitely never have said, written or done. And so an affair that wasn’t particularly intense anyway vanished into thin air. We had never met sober in bed, and now we no longer met. Which doesn’t speak against sobriety, but rather the nature of the affair. I mean to say: I’m cleaning up. I detoxify. Things will be okay. Feelings come back. Skin and mood improve. Account balance too. Old waves are smoothing out.

For me it’s all or nothing. Controlled drinking works for anyone who has never had a problem with alcohol. For me it could be a nasty trap that I definitely don’t want to try.

Yes, every now and then I miss a rush and I think back wistfully. But more like a toxic lover. The devastation that one has allowed to be wreaked on oneself sometimes falls into presenile oblivion, and one fantasizes about the famous “good times too”. No way! For me now tonic without gin.