What the GDR has to do with my favorite bar in Erfurt

When I was young, so a lot of time ago, a television series ran in a bar and almost never anywhere else. For the people who met there, she was a central place in her life. The fact that they drank a beer (or five) or smoked a cigarette (or a box) came to the minor matter. It was possible, beyond the well -timed dialogues, about something different, deeper, existential.

“Sometimes you wanna go, where everybody knows your name / and they’re always glad you come”. Sometimes you want to be where everyone knows your name and where they are happy that you came. That was the chorus of the title melody of “Cheers”.

“You Wanna be where you can see / our troubles are all the same.” You want to be where you can see that we all have the same problems.

If I turn on some or less problemed days from the Erfurt government road to the monastery course, and then enter that small house, the ground floor of which is almost completely hidden behind a high hedge, then not only to drink a tapped light from local brewery production, but rather to meet the people that I cannot find exclusively, but above all at this place.

The Kathrin, from which I snork on a cigarette, or Glachche, as it once called me in the village. The Jana, who is sitting in the city council and can be wonderfully animated, tell what the mayor is again nonsense. The Ludwig, which almost combines great trace and state of mind. The Stefan, who reads the clever books and speaks over it. The Fabian, who has more original ideas in a minute than I do in one day.

And then, of course: the Gunter, who looks like a well-mature mixture of roadie, punker and major writer, with his artistic tattoos on the right arm and the Heiner-Müller memory glasses on the face. He is the owner, the head barkeeper and yes, the essence of the restaurant he called CKB when he opened it exactly 20 years ago.

CKB – According to the self -description that can be found on the network, this is standing for “Café / Kunst / Bar”. But in truth, the abbreviation is the cipher for something that is very personal that has changed Gunter, which made him what he is today.

We humans, at least most of us, struggle with our mistakes, our character, our beliefs, our limits, our mortality. This can be done deliberately, at best self -reflected. Or it happens unconsciously, with all the associated displacement and compensation mechanisms. Haders are particularly strong in that area that – yes, I know, always the same singing – ended almost 35 years ago than to exist as a state. A region that, as Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk says so cleverly, was a common room for experience. A space of collective and politically exploited memories, but also a room full of un -gone trauma.

When Gunter Harms was born in Erfurt in 1962, the Berlin Wall was just built. At school, he found friends with whom he did not go the authorized path, but resisted the discipline by the system. He was in the Protestant youth, debated with dissidents, wore “swords-to-plants”. He denied the army service.

The GDR-OBRITY reacted with the repression pattern that is practiced many thousands of times. Gunter was not approved for a high school diploma, but was assigned an apprenticeship as a mason. After a few years on the building, of course, he was still moved into the army, without a weapon, but with all the more harassment.

As a so -called building soldier, Gunter was in for a year and a half Bitterfeld barracked, seven days a week, almost without exit. He performed his service on the aluminum melting tanks of the chemical industry, in rolling layers, in the midst of scorching heat and constructionxite damps. Some workers had already failed their teeth, everything smelled of decay. The machine park still came from 1919.

The factory in which he worked was part of the Chemical combination Bitterfeld. The ckb. Many years later, nightmares had plagued him, says Gunter. “It was a bad time.”

But it got better. Shortly after the end of the Bitterfeld frond service, the rule of the SED ended, and Gunter no longer had to be bricklayer. For a crazy turning year, he worked in the gallery of the state art trade until the company, like so many other things, was completely handled. After that, Gunter made up what the GDR had refused and studied construction technology through a few detours. With his girlfriend with whom he had a son, he worked in a landscape and horticulture company she founded.

Then, a good 20 years ago, the renewed break, with the woman, the company. Gunter moved back to Erfurt. The apartment he found was above a café that had not been in operation for years.

What now? Shortly after moving in, old friends came to visit, a lot of vodka was drunk, and suddenly everything that Gunter had experienced and experienced until the beginning of 40, how Bitterfeld aluminum was a great crazy idea: How about converting the café on the ground floor, into a real bar, with good music, honest prices, with exhibitions, lectures, readings. The Ckb.

And so it came. The construction technician Gunter planned, the bricklayer walled, the gallery owner set up. Within half a year he stood behind his own counter, every day, from 5 p.m. to night. There were no rest days as a vacation.

It took three years before the CKB had built up a regular audience and generated moderate sales. Gunter employed students as mini -jobbers who brought their fellow students with them. The customers rejuvenated, the exhibitions changed, photography, painting, enamel. The games were shown on a canvas in large football tournaments. It was running.

Then came the pandemic, and in the catalog of the Corona aid measures there was no bar whose owner had employed himself. Gunter suddenly had no more income, just rent editions. Without the two donation campaigns organized by the regular guests, the CKB no longer existed.

Okay, of course, if you can’t sit outside, it is not necessarily health -promoting to spend several hours in the lovingly smoke -out bar, especially since the clothes then have to go completely into the laundry. But it doesn’t matter. The CKB is one of those places that reconcile me with what is otherwise commonly said about the so -called east. It is sorry, now it becomes pathetic, a place that means at home, which gives hope that creates identity.

Perhaps it is kind of a couple of us looking for what he is. A few days ago I turned on my bike from the government road to the monastery course. We sat on the long bench between the hedge and the cash entrance. I hired a cigarette of someone who was sitting there and drank, it was a working day, a non-alcoholic bio-pier, while Stefan reported on the new Christoph-Hein-Buch and told Gunter about how Olaf Schubert once used the guests and Ute Freudenberg was sitting on the bench in the corner. What we have Ossis for celebrities.

Then the building soldier, who became a bar owner, listed the four cool punk bands, which appeared on the street in front of the CKB this weekend, for the 20th anniversary of pubs. I couldn’t do much with the names, and I said that too. I was just a ban, I tried my ignorance of coquett more. Then Gunter put on a mild smile, let it discreetly oscillate, looked at me and replied: “I know, Martin. I know you.”