In the Berlin nights of the early 1990s, I met a young, wild and very pretty punk rocker called Eike Neumann. She walked the catwalk as a model for Jean Paul Gaultier, but found her true calling as an editing director for film, television and theater productions.

She has since demonstrated her talent in films such as “The Bourne Conspiracy”, “John Wick”, “Monuments Men”, “Babylon Berlin”, “The Matrix Resurrections”, “The Pianist”, “Around the World in 80 Days”, “Enemy at the Gates” and “V for Vendetta”.

You could and had to love everything about her. Her chummy, funny nature, her pure heart, her sense of family, her creativity and her penchant for special vehicles. Her lively friend and roommate Ilanit M.H., who now also works very successfully as a fashion designer at Adidas’ headquarters in Herzogenaurach, was also something to fall in love with.

The only thing to fear was Eike’s big pitch-black dog, who rolled his bloodshot eyes back like a great white shark at every opportunity, baring his teeth and getting ready for a murderous attack. He was also the one who greeted me, snarling and barking, when I first pressed the bell on the garden gate in Reifträgerweg to introduce myself to Eike’s family.

Opposite poles and Olga Purps

I embarked on a journey to the opposite pole and discovered a new, enticing world. The Neumanns still live in the posh southwest Berlin area of Schlachtensee – in a villa not far from the Wannsee waters in the Zehlendorf district. All around are 54,000 inhabitants, a St. Paul’s Church, an incredibly beautiful and shady stand of trees with Zehlendorf oaks, chirping birds, the “Krumme Lanke”, the Bauhaus estate “Onkel Toms Hütte”, the Schlachtensee S-Bahn station, the delicatessen “Butter Lindner”, the “Spinnerbrücke” and a maze of cobblestone streets whose characteristic sound still rings in my ears when I drive along them.

I, on the other hand, lived on the border between Kreuzberg and Berlin Mitte, near the Engeldamm, between the former East and West zones on the former death strip in the middle of the foreland and hinterland wall. Due to Berlin’s many historical upheavals, the ownership of a number of buildings, plots of land and apartments there was completely unclear.

After two successive dictatorships, it was not so easy to determine who owned what – those who had been deported during the Nazi era or those who had been expropriated under real socialism. In any case, in these cases, the city administration allocated housing very cheaply on the condition that it would be professionally revitalized and, if necessary, come to an agreement with the new or old owners themselves.

For me, enjoying these conditions meant being able to call a self-built, 39.5 square meter temporary apartment on the third floor of a very sparsely populated building my own. Only the very elderly Olga Purps and I lived there on different floors and in different worlds for the current price of 102.26 euros “warm”.

The apartment had two rooms and a “kitchen”. In the living rooms there were very ugly tiled stoves made in the GDR, which were sometimes heated with wooden pallets from the street and garbage. In the long and very narrow kitchen there was a typical gas oven, which helped to create some comfort in this part of the apartment when the oven was open. The communal toilets were located under the gable of the house on the fifth floor. However, they lacked roof shingles and electric light, but there was plenty of corrosive rat and bird droppings and a view of the furrowed Berlin sky.