The Ship’s Log | 12 January 2024
Stop! This was not a dream, so after I slept early I woke up at 3am, to pass the time I turned on the TV on a channel to rest my mind which has only commercial-free works usually classics, I came across a German language color play called LOLA. It had English subtitles, so it was easy for me to delve into the story. The plot in the play unfolded in the 1950s when there was only one television channel which started airing at 8am.
The story of a moralist, a bourgeois German scientist, who played the violin and fell in love with a cabaret singer. The cabaret scenery, the women, the orchestra, those who danced and swirled on the dance floor, the intrigues between the city elite and the bourgeois moralist, about women, around women, brought back memories of myself in Bremen. We did repairs for a whole month in winter 1957 at the Golden City cabaret, where sailors, locals, musicians and women, many women, mingled.
So, it made me tear up, I wet the pillow, I remembered my life back then, a life that was still unaffected by feelings, a free mind that thought the world belonged to him.
But this hidden bag of memories, which had no conscious background, clashes with the modern society in which I belong, I am part of it, even if I sleepwalk on the cloudy road of memories and dreams.
_
Gabriel Panagiosoulis
PS.
Lola (1981)
: Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film, which concludes his great trilogy on Germany. (The other two parts are The Marriage of Maria Braun and Veronica Voss).
Starring the great German actress Barbara Sukowa.
