W.Once the mood has changed, no one can say so precisely. Perhaps on Gentlemen’s Day the year before last, when the men from the village came with their carts and the newcomers found it completely wrong. “We are the men from Gerswalde”, they would have shouted and asked for beer. They were pretty drunk. And then there was this terrible music from the speakers.
The Gerswalder remember it differently. The fathers and sons wandered around peacefully, perhaps they would have had “one or two beers too much”, that’s a gentleman’s day in the country. What right do you have to wrinkle your nose? “They don’t want that kind of clientele,” says Eva Meister, deputy mayor and an important woman in the village. “That of course stirs up anger.”
Eva Meister wears short hair and dark glasses, everything about her radiates energy. She lives in the Ziegenwinkel, and “some say, this is where I fit in well,” she says with a laugh as a greeting. There is coffee with a view of her large garden, next to the showcase with the fine crockery her son is smiling from the picture frame. The most important thing you need to know about Eva Meister, she says right at the beginning, with such a conspiratorial twinkle in her eyes: “I’m an enthusiastic German citizen.”
Meister “got married wrongly” in the GDR, someone who was loyal to the line and reported everything, but her time began after the fall of the Berlin Wall. She went to West Berlin, to the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau, and came back with 2.3 million marks. Then she brushed the whole GDR smell out of the village.
“Hipster, eco, everyone according to their own style!”
Master looks into the garden and beyond, to the horizon. She has taken care of this village all her life. She’s been through a lot, but now it’s serious. Master speaks of a riot in the village. The anger is directed primarily at one woman: Lola Randl, the neighbor from the pink house across the street. Master says: “If he wants war, he can have war.”
The problem is that their little village in the Uckermark has become something like Berlin’s hipst suburb. House prices have exploded. Any rotten yards suddenly cost 200,000 euros instead of 20,000. Young villagers, says Meister, could no longer afford houses here.
Meister explains what all of this has to do with Randl: It must have been around 2009 when the young director showed up here. Master first thought it was great that she bought a ruin on the church square and renovated “the eyesore”. “I took my hat off to them.” Even when Randl bought the large castle gardening business a few years later, Meister supported her.
But Randl had a lot of people with him who did “elite workshops” and suddenly formed something like a village within a village. Gradually it seemed to Masters that they and the other locals were just a backdrop for their self-realization projects.
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