Real socialism: flag on a holiday | nd-aktuell.de

“Red flags are easier to see” is the obvious title of a documentary film by Theo Gallehr from back in the day. When I was in East Berlin for the first time in the mid-80s, I stepped onto Alexanderplatz and saw young people standing in the fountain in front of the Centrum department store waving red flags like in the film. They were wearing leather jackets and were about my age, 16 or 17. So this is socialism, I thought. Was the “red morning of the final time” dawning here, which Franz Josef Degenhardt sang about when he demanded at the end of the 1960s: “Join the new front”?

I asked one of the flag wavers: “What kind of action is this?” He said: “None at all. We’re on a school trip.” They came from Stuttgart or something, he said. And where are the red flags? “In that department store over there.” I went in and bought a red flag with a black pole that looked like a broomstick with a yellow tip. “The last one in size,” I was told. You should hang them out the window. I shouldered them like I was at a demonstration and walked around the area. As soon as I left Alexanderplatz, a police officer stopped me and checked my West German identity card. He asked me to roll up the flag. “How come? We are in socialism here.” – “Flags are only shown on public holidays,” was his announcement. So I rolled up the flag.

I unrolled it again in front of the Brandenburg Gate. I thought I recognized that Russians were patrolling there. In any case, they said nothing. “Thanks to you, you Soviet soldiers,” I could have shouted with Ernst Busch, “the world is flooded with light.” If only I had known the Busch songs. But I only heard this after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when communism had already “drained itself like old bathwater when the plug was pulled,” as Wolfgang Pohrt would later state.

Subscribe to the “nd”

Being left is complicated.
We keep track!

With our digital promotional subscription you can read all issues of »nd« digitally (nd.App or nd.Epaper) for little money at home or on the go.
Subscribe now!