DDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republic), radio, beer, farm

Katja Schulz’ five word: DDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republic), radio, beer, farm

The tired and desilllusioned man had been waiting for a chance to get away from everything, from his house, his farm, his friends, his enviroment. From everything. He was tired and fed up with everything.

He didn’t know why he was so tired and fed up, but he didn’t actually care about why. He just registered that he was tired and fed up. He wasn’t warn out or ill. He was just damned fed up with everything, even his nice and well-kept farm went on his nerves. To hell with everything. The farm didn’t intereset him, the friends were silly nots, the surrondings were a damned mental desert to him.

He wasn’t overworked in either meaning of the word. He was not physically overworked. He did no hard physical work. Neither did he any hard mental work. He knew some people called him lazy, a lazy bone, just because he used to sit on his patio, sipping beer and listening to the radio instead of working the skit out of him in the fields. Why should he do so? He had no need of it, no need of working the shit out of him, even if he knew some of his farmer-mates used to do so in a misunderstood gesture of solidarity with the working classes. He despised that and observed that that the working classes also despised this from-the-top-downward poshing from the rich farmers. The new trend, so to say, was to do so, to sosialize with the people working for you. He despised the struggle of being mate with everyone and wouldn’t dream of doing so himself. He didn’t even try to be mate to those who naturally should have been his mates.

But he was tired, desillusioned and fed up with everything and everyone around him. If he had known where to leave for, he had left. If he had known what to do other than sit on the patio, he had done so. But he was stuck in his situation and saw no way out of his despisable well-off life. He liked to be well off and have the possibillity to be lazy, but not here, not now. Somewhere things had taken a wrong path of development, and he had got struck on that path. He had in the beginning tried to get a turn, but since he had many unsuccessful attemps, he had given up all tries and sat on the patio and was desillusioned and fed up everything. Now and then he wondered how others survived, how others could look so happy and content. On the other side he knew that he himself kept the upper lip stiff, so might be that the others also did so.

One day as he sat listening to the radio and sipping av beer in his emptiness, he casually heard a programme about a small island that were for sale, not too far away and not too expensive, that is, according to his ecconomy. Here he was alone among others. He could just the same be alone on an island, he thought. He hadn’t for a long time been thinking about changes in his life. No he did so. He seriously planned to check out the island for the purpose of buying it.

On month later he owned the island, an isolated one, even if it wasn’t that far away. He had put the farm on the leadership of his foreman, and he knew it would be run just as well as if he was sitting on the patio.

The island he decleared his autonome republic, and he gave it a name. He knew about that the former DDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republic), and the the letters DDR, but that didn’t stop him from using the same initials for his one-man republic. He called it DDR, The Depressed Devil’s Republic.