Berlin’s historic Kaufhaus des Westens (Department Store of the West) with its front gate up. C.Suthorn, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

The border opens, and people from the West bend down from the tailgates of their trucks and give presents to their poor sisters and brothers from the East: Christmas is coming, and they’re giving wrapping paper away for free in the joy of reunification. But now here they come, the evil sisters from the East, the well-educated girls who took piano lessons at home, who know Faust’s final monologue by heart, and they stuff the West into their pockets, they slip sunglasses from Schlecker into their sleeves and music cassettes between the buttons of their jackets, they tie sweaters they haven’t paid for around their waists and even walk around the store with them on, while these things that don’t belong to them slowly absorb the heat of their bodies. Well, that’s just outrageous, these young ladies don’t know what gratitude is (clearly they were completely ruined by the Russians), they come along and just toss cheese, sausage, and coffee, even champagne bottles and chocolate, into their shopping bags, maybe they pay for the three rolls at the top, but then they stroll out of the shopping hall, which is called a supermarket nowadays, with all those other, stolen things bouncing around underneath, and those girls don’t even blush. At home they practice drawing in perspective, but on the Ku’damm they put on expensive fur hats and then leave the store with alabaster faces. These same girls used to have to line up at dawn to get hold of even one copy of The Aesthetics of Resistance by Peter Weiss—and now that they can buy any book they want, they start stealing! The factories in the East are so dilapidated that those people can be happy if someone buys them for one mark: if you want to be able to afford expensive underwear, you have to work first, work until you turn old and gray, until you turn black if you have to, don’t just stuff a bra down the front of your pants until you have a belly, nothing is free anymore, Christmas is over, but they don’t listen, those brash young things, they drive out of the hardware store on riding lawnmowers, right past the salesman, and even give him a friendly nod, if we’re not careful, they’ll rob the West blind. Anno 1990.

Translated from the German by Kurt Beals.

From Things That Disappear, to be published by New Directions in October.

Kurt Beals is an associate professor in the department of Germanic languages and literatures at Washington University in St. Louis. He has previously translated books by Anja Utler, Regina Ullmann, and Reiner Stach.