The Village of Repnitz is situated in the northeast of Germany in the county  of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, about 20 miles south of the Baltic Sea and the  larger waterfront city of Rostock.   During East German times, Repnitz existed  as a farming community and made up part of the breadbasket of East Germany.   It had a very low population and one of the highest alcoholism rates.  I was  invited to Repnitz by an artist named Malte Brekenfeld who grew up in the area.   After the Berlin wall fell, Malte bought an old mansion in Repnitz where he  could paint and live as an escape from the city life of Berlin. When I arrived  in 1990, roughly one year after German re-unification, the entire village of  about  forty  people  was  unemployed.    Malte  was  respected  in  the  village  because his father was a well-known veterinarian for the region, and also  because he could drink a lot, he worked hard, and was smarter than everyone  else in the village.  I was the first American anyone in the area had ever seen.   

During the day people usually worked in Repnitz chopping wood, messing  with cars, fixing something, or just driving over the open fields.  By afternoon,  if people weren’t drunk already, we would get together and drink until  evening,  and  then  again  after  dinner.    We  often  met  at  Walter’s  trailer  wagon for the corn alcohol that we drank shots of with our bottles of beer.   Occasionally in those first years in Repnitz a visitor or someone joining or  departing our drinking would salute with a “Sieg Heil” which would echo  through my mind without  comprehension.  I was left to wonder about how  this could have been said to impress me , whether  it surfaced in response to  the dissolution of peoples’ identity as East  Germans  and the extreme state of  unemployment  that  replaced  it,  whether  it  was  a  hangover  from  Eastern times said to buck Soviet occupation and out of ignorance of the  history it summoned up, or if the source came from an embarrassed dismissal of  the East German state that had proclaimed to have been founded by resistance  fighters.  No one ever spoke of it.  I lived in Repnitz on and off between  1990-1992, and for part of 1994 and some of 1996-97.  Most recently I was  in Repnitz this past winter of 2003.  Much is changed, but the images that  follow  are  from  the  small  window  of  time  (1991-92)  when  Repnitz  was  still  engaged  in  its  East  German  customs  while  struggling  with  being  absorbed into a new state.