Tagesspiegel People Newsletter Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg

Anecdotes from Fidicinstraße: The journalist Michael Schmuck takes his coffee breaks there on a wooden bench and learns stories from people passing by - the "open bank secrets". Here he tells two of them.

Lockdown attacks lungs

A regular passerby is the wiry one. He stops by the bank about every week on his way to the gym. He is – at least that's what he claims – already 76. But you wouldn't give him more than 65. You can see that the wiry guy does sports regularly. About six feet tall, alert look from young, blue eyes, clear voice, four-day beard, blue baseball cap on almost full brown hair, sports shoes and quite slim - but not as slim as two months ago.

At the moment, in the Corona era, he is not doing so well. His lung disease COPD has made itself felt, he has been missing the gym since the lockdown. Corona hit him, the lung patient, in a completely different way. "A lot of people are dying now because they're sitting around at home. Am Nixtun.” Whether that is statistically verifiable is something the clever heads should discuss – at least the wiry one noticed it that way for himself.

He probably inherited the wiry thing from his mother. She helped build the republic back then, he says proudly. She cleaned bricks, rubble woman during the construction of the first nursing home on Fidicinstrasse in the 1950s and during the construction of a building on the corner of Friesenstrasse and Bergmannstrasse. “Without my mother and the other women we wouldn't have made it back then. The women, they were the ones!” The son of this rubble woman then became a bricklayer himself – a handy man.

Thoughtfully, he detours back to Corona and at the same time makes a detour to the USA: "What stupid times these are. Corona and then now in America with the unrest because of police violence. Why are they like that, what do they have with the blacks? bad times With Corona, everyone has to stick together. Just like the women back then. But what am I talking about the USA, we have these idiots too.” The wiry guy then goes on to the gym – not to train, but only to pay his dues.

Stuttgart meeting on Kreuzberger Bank

A woman from Stuttgart is resting on the bench. To be more precise, she comes from Schwäbisch-Gmünd, has only recently been living in Fidicinstraße and came to one of the coveted apartments here through an apartment exchange. The Stuttgart native is probably in her late 20s, a special education teacher and works in Teltow. In Teltow because she is not allowed to work in Berlin with her Baden-Württemberg degree. For Brandenburg, however, the degree is “good enough”. Apparently, Berlin schoolchildren have special requirements for special needs teachers.

When the Stuttgart native talks about her origins, two boys, maybe around 14 years old, call from the bank next door: "Hello, we are also from Stuttgart, visiting Berlin." (It must be said here that it two communication benches of the same design.) When asked what Berlin is like for them, one of the two herrings, the more slick one, replies: "It's dirty here. The soles of my new shoes quickly got dirty here in Berlin and I couldn't put them on anymore. That doesn't happen in Stuttgart.” Well, Berlin is a dirty place in places. That's exactly why other boys feel comfortable here and love it when Kreuzberg dirt sticks to their shoes.

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Photo: Sönke Tollkühn

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