Summer camp America in former GDR

I’m 11 years old, running in Jan-Benedict’s garden near the Alster, trying to convince him to let me fly his RC Helicopter. The garden could probably fit an actual helipad in case of an emergency, behind the huge villa with a veranda on the west end and direct water access on the east end. Suddenly our mothers’ voices cut through our excitement like a knife.

“Jan-Benedict, Dennis! We need to talk to you about summer camp. Have you decided where you want to go?” my mom asks, hands on hips, looking serious. Usually she is light, she likes to laugh and talk a lot–blonde with red lipstick. I’m afraid to get kissed when she has that lipstick on, it’s not really cool to have red kissing stains as an 11 year old. But I don’t think she knows that. She loves to give hugs, express warmth and always gives me the feeling she would do anything for me. Her love makes me feel like the whole world revolves around me.

“Mhhh, no! We don’t really want to go.”

My friend’s mom leans over the veranda, talking to us like a bunch of babies. Both my mom and her share a love of Hermés scarves. She’s a trained lawyer who knows how to get what she wants.

“Well, you have to. We leave the brochures in Jan-Benedict’s room. There’s an America camp that looks fun,” she adds before leading us there.

So this is what collusion looks like. They want to get rid of us for part of the summer. Annoyed that I am not going to fly the helicopter, we go to Jan-Benedict’s room filled with a TV, Nintendo 64, steering wheel, a high bed with a slide–a paradise I’d rather explore than browse through camp options.

We sit in the middle of the room on a road playmat, the brochure in front of us, surrounded by Hot Wheels on our left, an RC car that can go above 50 km/h in front of us, and a U.S. fire truck on our right. We skim the brochures, but nothing stands out until we see “America Camp.” The photo of teenagers playing Cowboy and Indians beside a totem pole reminded me of Disneyland, a picture perfect Hollywood style summer camp with Mickey Mouse and his friends. I envision Jan-Benedict and me cruising in one of those fancy Mercedes SL electric toy cars that you can sit in, bouncing between the ice cream session to the lake to do some sailing. Maybe they’ll have a real U.S. fire truck we could play with. Why not? We tell our moms, “Fine, we’ll go to America Camp.”

Nine weeks later, we’re driving in my mom’s 1981 VW Golf without AC — is was matte red from sun exposure and whining like a chalkboard thanks to a production error. I don’t know why we didn’t take Jan-Benedict mom’s car. I am sure it had an AC.

But here we are driving on the Autobahn eastbound, a joy for most and a dread for my mom who gets antsy whenever she has to drive faster than 50 km/h. As a proper city person most of her driving is done between Alsterdorf, downtown Hamburg, and then to Wellingsbüttel where my grandparents live. I am sweating, so I screw on the manual window crank to open the window and I enjoy the fresh breeze of air.

“Please close the window, Dennis.” My mom said. She adds her usual explanation that I hear at least once a week, “I am very sensitive to the draft and will get a cold from it.”

We take the exit from the Autobahn and enter a landscape that feels like no man’s land. Every now and then Plattenbauten crop up, brown concrete growths along the landscape. Our final destination is Camp America in the Harz region. Finally the heat in my mom’s Golf is cut by the shadows of some trees, dense on our left and our right. I feel small between them, but despite myself I’m excited to arrive at America Camp, where I’ll be shooting balloons like on the Hamburger Dom, and riding the roller coaster like in Disneyland Paris a few years back.

Then my mom slows down the car until we get to a full hold. I crank down my window to get a better look — at a rusty old wooden building with green single-frame glass windows, no American flags, no totem poles, no roller coaster, no saloon. Just a hell of a lot of trees surrounding a run-down building and a brown lawn. Where is the ranch, the prairie, the air of possibility that comes to mind when I think of the land of the free? Where is the swimming pool? This better not be it.

But my mom takes out the car key and opens her door. Jan-Benedict’s mom follows step and touches the ground of this unholy land. I see dust stirring up and truth settles in. This is our final destination.

I crank up the window turn by turn, I close my eyes hoping that by the time the window is up, this nightmare will be over. I crank and crank, until I hit dead-lock, and open my eyes again. But nothing has changed! The dense forest looks even darker, the isolated sad building could be a good location for a low budget horror movie.

Why don’t I see anybody? Maybe this is not the camp after all. Shouldn’t there at least be kids running around? So I get out of the car, turn around, and discover an old abandoned garage towards the left end of the main building, then on my right an overgrown path leading to a long two-story building with peeling paint. A squeaking sound cuts through the silence, I look towards the main building and the door opens.

A middle-aged dude with cropped gray hair, unkempt beard and a washed-out green t-shirt comes out, walks down the stairs and carries himself like an old tumbleweed drifting through the desert our way. I cross my fingers behind my back, hoping that he asks our moms what the hell we’re doing on his property and we should leave immediately. But that does not happen. Turns out this is the camp, and he is the camp leader. He certainly fits well with the buildings.

There are still no other kids around, but when he walks us to our room. I see three other beds. He assures us this is the right place, and Jan-Benedict and I start to get scared. I feel alien in this place far from home. I was expecting to experience the best of America, but it’s hard to believe we’re still in Germany at all.

To my right sits a girl on top of her bunkbed, with long, curly dark red hair. If I had to guess, she’s probably 11 years old, like me. To my left stands a boy, slim, military style machine-cut short hair, dense dark slightly wild eyebrows (leaning towards a mono brow), gray t-shirt and dark blue jeans with a hammer loop. He seems to be around 12. They say hi and tell us their names, Sandra and Steffen.

We say hi and tell them our names, then Steffen asks:

“Na wo kommt Ihr her?”

“Hamburg. Und Ihr?”

“Berlin wa.”

“Ah cool, mein Papa wohnt in Berlin.” I immediately thought of the Berlin trips with my mom and grandparents. We usually stayed at the Interconti in Charlottenburg. My mother and grandmother loved to do window shopping on Kurfürstendamm (which I hated, although I loved the street for its toy stores). My grandfather usually took me to the Zoo (with lions and elephants) or to Europa Center for ice cream. Often I got cool presents like that one time where my grandfather gifted me a batman sleeping suite that I was really proud of. The Berlin I knew was awesome–I wish I was on holiday there right now!

“Echt, wo denn ditte?” the boy cuts into my daydreaming.

“Zehlendorf.”

“Zeelendorf is nich Berlin. Dat is West-Berlin. Bonzen-Vorort.”

I’m taken aback–to the best of my knowledge there is just one Berlin. But who cares, he’s probably crazy. And I’m distracted by the unmade beds in our room! How could this be a vacation if we have to make our own beds?? But, I have some pocket money and know just what to do with it.

So I offer Steffen and Sandra 5€ to do the beds for us.

But the kids do not drop it. They can tell they know something we don’t know, and they decide to taunt us with that all the rest of the day.

That first day at America Camp, I learn that there were two Berlins, and a wall had once stood between them. I already knew there had been a wall, but I didn’t ever think about it, not once. Have you ever built something in the sand and then removed it? That’s what I had thought about it before. We didn’t even learn history in school until fifth grade, but these kids gave us a stiff education. By the time our moms had made it back home to Hamburg, Jan-Benedict and I learn that we are Wessis, which means we were the spoiled brats from Hamburg, in Western Germany. The rest of the kids at the camp are Ossis, from East Germany, and that means they are tough. They tell us about how rough it was to grow up in the GDR, where this camp was, and how it’s our fault–the Wessis–that their parents didn’t have proper diapers back in the day.

At least they have blankets, so I can dream of pampers that night. But by the time I wake up at America camp, I’m feeling as trapped as the Ossis say we Wessis made them.

The next day, a hike takes us past an electric fence that separates us from the cows and I wonder what would happen if I peed on the fence. Instead I just touch it with my finger. “Ouch, that hurt.”

As we trudge along the trail on the way back to camp, Jan-Benedict and I hang back and make a plan. We’re going to buy some sweets and call our parents. We will tell them how terrible this camp is. It has nothing to do with America. In fact it’s the opposite, it’s a bunch of kids who call us “Wessis,” there are dangerous electric fences around us, and we don’t like it one single bit. We’ll tell them to pick us up immediately. My mom will storm out of our apartment, hurry down the stairs with her car keys in hand to come rescue us. And we’ll eat M&Ms and gummy bears while we wait for them.

When we arrive back at the camp, we go to the common room in the main building, a room as depressing as that entire camp. High ceilings, a single layer of thin glass (I’d be afraid if I knocked on it, I’d get hurt), dark greenish vintage wallpapers, little lighting–it all reminds me of a hunting place, but not well kept. Right next to the bar in the common room there is a metal coin-operated telephone with a pink Telekom receiver. It’s a Clubtelefon 5 from 1995, probably the most modern thing in this entire camp. And we are grateful it’s there. Because this is our ticket to freedom, our ticket to leave this terrible fake-America camp (that doesn’t even try to be American) and the mean kids behind.

After all, this is our summer vacation, we cannot waste it here. We have to be back in Hamburg to play Zelda on N64 and do something useful with our valuable time. And we know our mothers. They love us. So they will understand and pick us up. I confidently go to the bar and buy two packs of M&Ms and Coca Cola (the only American things in this camp), smiling at the lady behind the counter, knowing that we’ll be out of here by the end of the day. We have to pay for the sweets, but at least that gives us coin change, because we also have to pay for the phone call.

I call my mom. I tell her about the uncomfortable beds, the mean kids that call us Wessis and blame us for everything that was bad in their upbringing and their parents’ suffering. And how much the camp sucks, because there is nothing that remotely would justify calling this the America camp. So I close with:

“Mom, I know you love me. Jan-Benedict and I cannot stay another night here. Can you please pick us up today?”

“Ah Dennis, I understand. But look, it’s really far away and I am sure it will get better.”

“No! Nothing will get better. It sucks. It’s boring. I want to play Nintendo and I don’t want to be here. Please pick us up now.”

I grasp the phone to my ear, looking intensely around the room, when I meet Jan-Benedict’s eyes that turns into a desperate look and he looks back clueless. My mom sighs:

“I cannot pick you up today. But give it another day. If you still don’t like it, I will pick you up tomorrow.”

“Really mom? Why can’t you pick us up today? I already know it sucks. And it will suck tomorrow as well.”

“No, cannot. Give it another day.”

And that is that.

Jan-Benedict sees my head drop like a marionette whose straps are dropped by the puppet master. We look at each other in complete disbelief. How can they do this to us? Clearly they don’t understand how precarious this situation is. Who else can we call? My grandfather, he will pick us up for sure. No, he is in France. My dad? No, not really, he’s not around. Damn. So one more night. But then tomorrow we will hold them to their word. Tomorrow night we’ll be at our couch with pizza, chips and two N64 controllers helping James Bond save the world in GoldenEye.

Jan-Benedict and I look at the big, round table in the middle of the room, tablecloth with lace on top, I sit down first, I spread out the M&M and Gummy Bear packages in front of me and I sigh. I notice light shining through the window onto the table, it covers three quarters of the table and I move the M&Ms out of the sun’s rays to protect them from melting. Because we will have to stay longer and we need to protect ourselves. Jan-Benedict sits down to my right, he takes off his Polo cap and puts it onto the table and I wonder, “How did we end up here?”

But there is no answer, we are just there and we don’t have enough money nor the balls to call a cab to get us out of here. So we decide to sit it out. As the evening sets in, we go upstairs to our room.

I enter the room and to my left Sandra sits on her bed, moving her legs in excitement, “Do you guys know who my dance teacher is?”

“No,” I go and fortunately keep the rest of my thoughts to myself.

“Detlev D. Soost,” she goes smiling from left to right. Now I know that dude, he is the host of a popular German TV casting show called “Popstars”.

Sandra goes on to tell us that her dad drives a Ferrari and I begin to wonder what these people are whining about. I think she tried to impress us and counter the story about Ossis being poor. What she didn’t understand, Jan-Benedict and I had no clue that there was such a thing as Eastern Germans up until yesterday and the only thing we knew was based on what they told us.

But then a 13 year old boy jumps into the conversation with his Berliner Schnauze:

“Wat kikt ihr so?” (“What are you staring at?”)

“Wie bitte?” (“Excuse me?”)

“Eh wat kikt ihr so blöd?” (“Hey, what are you looking at?”)

“Entschuldige, was möchtest Du?” (“Sorry, what do you want?”)

“Eh ihr Wessis. Ik bin aus Marzahn. Ihr würdet nicht mal ne Stunde bei uns überleben. Bei uns is et richtig Gefährlich.” (“Hey you Wessis. I’m from Marzahn. You wouldn’t survive an hour in my hood. It’s really dangerous”)

“Aha,” I go, like some adult that just listened with one ear to a teenager saying something excited, while glancing over their Sunday newspaper at the breakfast table, shortly considering whether this requires my attention, but then deciding no, I will continue reading the classified section.

But, he does plant a seed in my mind. That night, I see Marzahn in front of me, people with AK-47 patrolling the streets, Zebra stripes in full control of youth gangs that patrol the neighborhood with pitbulls aggressively spreading saliva on the street. I wake up Jan-Benedict quietly and whisper in his ear, “Let’s call our moms, so they can get us out of this nightmare.”

But we couldn’t be more wrong. They talked behind our backs. They made a plan themselves and they would not pick us up before the end of the camp.

I cannot believe it. I thought my mom would do anything for me. Her not picking us up was never an option.

We cried and called them again, but the answer stayed the same: “We cannot pick you up before the end of the camp, we already have other plans.” Reality started to sink in. And it sucked.

We had to spend an entire week with these lunatics.

But the absolute highlight is on the last night of the camp. There is a big party in an old barn, they have lots of chips, gummy bears and Dickmanns. I already loved parties at a young age. But that wasn’t the highlight. The highlight was a 15 year old boy pulling Jan-Benedict and me away from the candies, asking us to go outside and look at the sky. What a romantic dude.

“You guys see this? You see the red moon and the red sky. You know what that means?”

“No.”

“It means a lot of people will die tonight. This has happened a few times in history and many humans die. It’s really sad. I hope you don’t die, but just in case, I wanted to warn you.”

“F***.” I look at Jan-Benedict in terror. Jan-Benedict didn’t buy it. But I wasn’t sure, not only was this camp terrible, but now we’re also at risk of dying. So we made a plan to protect ourselves that night, just in case.

But nothing happened. The only thing that changed were Jan-Benedict and me. Our moms picked us up the next day. And we knew we could survive.