The Guy from the DDR
He had experienced my fears and understood my feelings, he had lived my obsessions much more than I had done so far. He is a colleague of mine and comes from Erfurt, from the former so called DDR.
It is now just a videogame, one of the funniest one, the Disco Dance Revolution. Also quite outdated, almost as much as the Deutsche Demokratik Republik, or even more, given the fast development of the digital entertainment. The German Democratic Republic was however not even remotely comparable to a form of leisure.
Generals and politicians assembled for decades, on a huge board, the fate of 16 million menschen. Those unfortunate human beings found sometimes that even the tiniest details of their own private life had already been decided by the Party.
A Renaissance theologian would have started a debate about the effect and consequences of the free will of a citizen within the frame of a similar Democratic institution. What would have been his own merits? Provided that he could have dared to proclaim himself safe outside the supervision of the communist clergy. They had no clerics, they did not even need them, but just subservient bureaucrats who carefully followed policies and directives set by the leaders of the Party.
That guy is quite a funny one, not really elegant, not a schickimicki one, some sort of fashionable upstart quite common among the Munich finance underworld. Keeping the videogame quotations, he is apparently anonymous as most of the basic characters out of the Sims or any other simulation. Yet he is real and is not paid with Lynden Dollars. He conceals quite well his personality along a well developed sense of humour. Sometimes caustic, as Germans are, but far better developed than the jokes about a brown bear killed because of the colour of his skin.
I have never fully appreciated whether he is really helpful to my position or is just cunningly looking for allies, but he has proved so far to be one of my most reliable supporters. By having survived the inquiries of the police more than once, most of the time for nothing more serious than an effective witz heard by the wrong hears, he has become quite a tricky opponent of the project management. Despite many attempts, nobody has already been able to make him guilty for something he has done or not done. He is simply spotless when summoned to the judgement of the internal bureaucracy.
How well adapted to the structure of a modern financial institution is the a survivor of a communist society, sounds like a strange paradox. My colleague from Erfurt seldom expresses a political opinion, but I have so far understood that, being a social democrat, he does not like the red flag of the soviet revolution nor the stars and stripes from Wall Street. He does not however enjoy to intermingle with the life of others, that is highly appreciable on the workplace, and I have never tried to argue about his thoughts.
