THEA
TØNNESVANG

At the train station, I borrow a lighter from a girl. We’re the only ones waiting for the train, isolated from the rest of the city by a single lamppost. I tell her that I’m looking for young people, and she laughs. ”They’re all gone. It’s only elderly and unemployed people who live here,” she says.

In the time of the GDR, Weißwasser was a flourishing city. The mining industry and the glass factory made the city grow; children played on the newly pawed boulevard. After the reunification, the city changed. Industry had to close due to political changes, and the unemployment rates exploded. People began to leave.

In the 1980’s, Weißwassers population peaked at 38.000. Since then, the tendency has been a shrinking and aging population, counting 15.000 inhabitants today. The new generation is quite big, there’s more young people in the city now. But it’s a fragile state. Many of the kids here say, ‘no future in Weißwasser’, Christian Klämbt, social worker in the city, tells me.

On the parking lot by the mine, I meet a woman. The color of her car changes in the sun, it feels somewhat psychedelic. She wears jewelry from the last remaining glass factory in Weißwasser. A rising phoenix with a red tail of glass. She comes out here to meet with ‘her people,’ car tuners. The police often bother them, they check their cars and think they do drugs. But it’s not here the real problems are, it’s in Weißwasser, she tells me. “It’s a lost cause, this town,” she says.

On a sleepy afternoon I go to an ice hockey game. Lausitzer Füchse vs. Kassel Huskies. The arena slowly fills up to the rim with people. I go outside to smoke. Two girls lean on the balcony, each sipping on their hot tea. “No-alcohol-week,” they say and laugh. Not a lot happens around here, they tell me, except from when there’s ice hockey. A seemingly drunk guy passes by and addresses the girls’ choice of beverage. I ask him what he’s drinking, and he offers me a sip. The sweet taste of raspberry and alcohol tingles in my mouth.

During halftime, I ask a cheerleader if I can photograph her. Her name is Josy. Most of the people in Weißwasser don’t really take the cheerleading team seriously, she tells me. “To them, we’re just girls in short skirts, who they can hit on whenever they want. But we’re actually quite good! Last year we won a second place in the regional championship, and this year we’re aiming for gold.”

It was some of the mothers of the other cheerleaders who suggested that Josy should go see a doctor. “A mother knows,” they told her. When she found out, she was already 26 weeks pregnant.

“When you’re young, Weißwasser is a town you leave,” Josy tells me. Maybe she had also wanted to go another place. To study and live in another town. But now that’s off the table. The father of her child has his whole family here, and they would never let her leave, she tells me.

It’s early Sunday when I go to a service in a small free church. A woman sits down beside me and greets me welcome. “Is it your first time here,” she asks enthusiastically. I tell her that I’m a photographer, and that I’m working on a project in the town. Her smile doesn’t disappear but seems stiffer. Everything is so clean in here. Peachy walls and cheeks. A preacher dressed in a suit talks about how we must make the words of the bible matter in our present lives. He touches his heart.

In the time of the GDR, everybody knew if you went to the church. And if you went to the church, it had consequences. Elisabeth’s parents, for instance, never had the chance to study at the university when they finished school. Still today the christian communities are smaller in the east than in the west of Germany, Elisabeth, a young woman, tells me.

When Elisabeth was 16, her friends began to leave the region. Some to study in bigger cities, others just to get out of here. It was a slow process; in the beginning they came back for the weekends and holidays. In the end, her younger siblings went away as well. Elisabeth began to pray, asking God where her place was. Here or somewhere else. She had this lurking feeling, that life was passing her by if she stayed in Weißwasser, where nothing happened. In the end he answered. She had a purpose here. “Someone also has to stay.”

Under the tin roof by the danceschool, the ’TS’, Celina greets me with a hug. Bottles of cherry liquor and banana juice are passed around, the girls need to hold on to their sweet drinks if they don’t want the boys to finish them in one sip.

Celina works as a bartender. She shows me pictures of the cocktails she knows how to make. “This one’s my favorite,” she says, and zoom in on the flaming Mai Tai Tiki on her phone. Celina has been living in Weißwasser since she was fifteen. She asks me to hold her cigarette and lollipop, while she takes off her leather jacket to show me her bare arms. Small wounds from cigarettes and knifes. It’s been five years since she cut the contact to her mother. “My stepdad raised me,” Celina tells me. “He taught me to listen to my inner beast, to trust it. To be a fighter.” Later she asks me if I’ve ever been to the Caribbean. I tell her no. “It must be so beautiful,” she says. “I really want to go. There, I would be free.” I ask her why she thinks that. “I don’t know. I can just feel it.”

New people keep joining the little group by the TS, and Nino bows down to hug them. His head almost touches the tin roof when he stands up, and he looks like an older brother who got lost among the other kids. But he’s just 18. I ask him what he thinks of living in Weißwasser, and he tells me it’s shit. Because of all the drugs, he says. He used to do drugs too, weed, cocaine, chrystal meth. But now that he’s got a job he sticks to alcohol and cigarettes. He works in the mine, but some day he wants to join the military. To protect his land, he tells me, like his father, grandfather and great grandfather. I think about whether it’s a coincidence or not that he touches his heart as he’s telling me this. Attached to his backpack hangs a scooter-helmet, even though he has no driver’s license. When the others drive to the Netto to get more alcohol, he yells at them to put on a helmet. They laugh and speed up.

Days later, I sit with Tim and Nino by the TS for a long time. They explain me about brotherhood and betrayal. About drugs tearing friendships apart. Tim is so worked up; he spits on me when he’s talking. ’20 years of friendship. No, not friendship, brotherhood!”, he says and pounds his chest. “And then he chooses drugs. Why would he do that?!” In his hand, Tim holds the charm that Jannes had around his neck yesterday. Tim himself has a matching one. ‘Our group, it’s family,’ they tell me. ‘If you fuck with one, you fuck with all. And if you break the code, you’re out.’

Samiha lives in an old slaughterhouse. When they first moved in, the place stank of meat, she tells me. Samiha wants to be a stewardess when she grows up. Or to work on a cruise ship. Anything that will take her away from Weißwasser. She asks me if I know Lana del Rey and plays one of her songs from her phone. Later, when we watch TV, she mistakenly reads that all people with ‘migrationshintergrund’ must leave Germany. I ask her if she’s scared. “That’s what would happen if the AfD wins,” she replies. “Then my brother would have to leave. And I would get the fuck out of here too,” she says.

Samiha is 15. It’s early spring while we walk by the small lake. In the summer you can go swimming here, she tells me. We talk about the ocean and the universe. She tells me how she never understood that the universe could be dark, when it’s light here. But now she understands that eternity swallows all light. On the way we pass a grey building. Sometime, before she was born, it used to be a cinema. Her mother has told her that it was a popular place to go out when she was young. In what used to be movie poster holders, advertisements for groceries and cutting boards glitter. 

I wait for Dennis and his friends for about an hour by the youth center. It’s closing time and some of the social workers open bottles of beer to finish off the day. When the boys arrive, their cheeks are red from riding the bike. Inside we sit on bean bag chairs while Dennis tries to connect with the large loudspeaker in the corner. He tells me he’s saving up for one just like it. Or maybe a larger one, if he gets the money. Then he can bring it to the nearby lakes, when him and his friends drive there in the summer. “The great thing is that if someone’s already by the lake you’re driving to, you can just continue ten minutes and you’ll find another one,” he tells me.

He puts techno on the speaker and nods along. But when I tell him that I don’t know any German music, there’s something he’d like to show me: 80’s pop from the GDR. Dennis is 15. When he grows up, he wants to live in a small village on the countryside. Then his kids can drive mopeds as fast as they want, without being bothered by the police. It sounds like an echo of his own dream.