Topic: Cultural rebellion in East Germany under communism (Chosen by stimcrab).
Deadline for submission: February 21, 2010 @ 8:00 P.M.
Voting begins: February 21, 2010 @ 8:01 P.M.
Voting ends: February 23, 2010 @ 8:01 P.M.
The above times are Eastern Standard Time.
Good luck to both stimcrab and HeroDan!
This is HeroDan's submission. Since he is unable to post his himself, I will be doing so for him.
---
My war.
It was just a normal day. Well, at least I thought it was going to be. The day was January 11, 1953. That was the day my life changed completely. Maybe if I had stayed there that day, none of this would've happened. Because of that day, I am the saddest man on earth. My name is Albreich Osthelm. I am 34 years old, and am the murderer of one of the most tyrannical man alive. But I can't tell you that now. First, I must explain everything, down to the very last detail.
It was a cold evening at Auschwitz, Germany. It had been 8 years after the Holocaust, yet people were still afraid. They still hid themselves. I came back from my work at the shoe factory, which fed my wife and son, and gave us everything we needed. On my way back, I spotted Otto Barguel.
"Albreich, long time no see!" he said
"Yes, maybe too long."
"So what have you been up to lately?"
"Not much, jus takin care of my good ole fam-" I gasped in terror as I saw the entrance of my house. Beside my beautiful house, hanging by the tree next to it, were my wife and son.
Their funeral was 3 days later.
Otto approached me. He said something about revenge. He talked to me, saying the communists in east Germany had done it. I wanted revenge, so I helped him.
I trained myself for two months, and March 5 a job came in.
We were hired to kill a man. Silently, but efficiently. We entered his base, and I slipped a mouthful of cyanide into his drink. He died of stroke, apparently. That's what people thought. I later named his name was Joseph Stalin. Im not sure if I actually got my revenge, but at least I did something to East Germany, the one that killed my family.
This is my submission to this battle thread, entitled The Nest of Birds. You'll quickly notice that the dialogue is in German. For this reason, I'm linking to a translator. It can be found here. I'm not sure how the umlauts will transfer, but if they don't show up, anything with an umlaut probably won't be translated correctly.
The Nest of Birds
There was illegal music blaring. Five of us, total, were in the room. There was Micha, Brillen, Hans, Uwe, and me, Sven-Detlev. All of us, especially Brillen, were particularly high on whatever drugs we could find on the streets of East Berlin. Our little collective had just received the Ramones eponymous debut, which is what we were listening to. When one of the tracks came on, it blared with some sort of circular saw, Brillen threw off his sunglasses and jumped absurdly high. No matter what the reaction was, listening to music always turned out to a worthwhile pursuit, even more so if it was forbidden.
We all had our own apartments issued to us by Country Joe and other high-ranking Muscovites, but we all hung around Uwe's flat on Sonnenallee. All of us were socialists, but this wasn't socialism; I'll tell you what it was: purgatory. The optimistic of us predicted that collectives like ours would be the subject of books some day. Pessimists said that we were going to rot behind the Iron Curtain. And the overriding majority of collective members, the existentialists, said we were going to die anyways, so it didn't matter. I was an existentialist. The collective was going to be fed into the compost pile of the USSR, Uwe's flat and all.
Suddenly, everyone looked up at Micha, who had stood up quickly. He started to speak: "Hör zu! Wir können nicht hier sterben! Dass ist was wir machen: Sterben."
"Halt dein Mund, Micha," Hans commanded.
"Nein. Nein. Ich rühe mich nicht. Alles sind zu rühe," he fired back. Micha was getting passionate about something.
,,Die Shrooms sprechen für dich."
"Nein. Ich bin richtig. Ich habe ein Idee," said Micha.
"Na ja. Es ist ein blödes Idee," Uwe chimed in.
"Lass Micha sprechen," I said, with a bit of violence in my voice. Everyone sort of waited for Brillen to chime in, but he was out cold on the floor. We decided to leave him there.
,,Wir mussen Macbeth leisten," said Micha. "Einmal würden wir Kultur machen."
"Scheisse," answered Uwe.
"Nein. Wir können nicht irgendetwas machen. Diese Idee ist unsere nur Chance für Kultur." said I.
There was bickering throughout the night. Once Brillen woke up, he readily took Micha's and my side. Hans quickly gave in. It really would be our only chance to inject some culture into Sonnenallee. Uwe kept refusing and refusing, but eventually, he just didn't care enough to keep arguing. It was settled then, we'd perform Macbeth for the masses.
Shakespeare was never illegal in the USSR, hence all the Russian movie-versions of Hamlet, so scripts were not a problem to get. We rehearsed and practiced. No props were available to us, but we did it anyways. Brillen was Macbeth. I was Lady Macbeth. And we practiced. There was fun to be had, and more than one substance to be ingested (even one called Captain Steve's Banana Salve from America).
The final day came. It must have been spring, but I couldn't tell. I was either numbed from the marijuana or the thrill of performance. The bloc stared at me violently. We brought out a sofa, which was our stage. Brillen was carrying a boom box, which blared "Geh zu ihr" from die Puhdys first or second LP, which was forbidden, but no one really cared today; there was almost a furor over what we were doing on the short of Sonnenallee that day. Brillen took off his sunglasses for the first time, probably, ever, and then he donned a white t-shirt and a shoddily made wooden sword.
And so it went: ,,Gestern, gestern, gestern. Leben ist nur einen welk Schatten."
The Obermeister, who had left perturbedly earlier, came back with soldiers. We were all up on stage taking out bow. No one was clapping, but they all looked at us, rapt. The soldiers were yelling something, but, by this time, none of us cared. We were neither excessively happy, nor sad; we were enlightened. That's what Shakespeare does to you.
Now I'm not totally clear on what happened then, but I'm pretty sure we were fired on by our own government.
,,Der Thane des Fife hatte eine Frau. Wo ist sie jetzt?"
Hey, flash artists, want an idea? Check this out: The Scarecrew
And everyone, please check out the latest humorous spy serial, The Frank Keretta Stories
This battle can now be voted upon. Please remember that you are allowed only one post within the thread. Please include who you voted for and some feedback for one or both writers.
A bizarrely specific topic to start off our shenanigans, and it seems like stimcrab might have already had this ready (or at least planned) before he made the challenge. Regardless of whatever extra prep he might have had, his was the best story.
Herodan had an interesting idea, but the story was so short as to almost sound like an abstract to a larger work. There really wasn't much there to grab hold of, I'm afraid.
Stimcrab had his own issues, and one of those has to do with the dual languages used. I applaud his use of German, and knowing the language myself I could read it without constantly having to copypasta stuff into the translator, but I imagine this will be a huge stumbling block for most readers. I understand, also, that it brings a certain amount of authenticity to the work. But most folk won't know these two languages, so it can break the flow pretty hard when all of the dialogue is in one language and all of the rest is not. Having to go back and forth will frustrate most readers to the point that they won't bother reading the piece. Stylistically, dialogue in other languages is usually done in italics or within brackets to indicate that there is another language being spoken. Either that or very few lines will be written in other languages and either translated in the text like this:
"Halt dein Mund, (shut your mouth) Micha," Hans commanded.
When you want to portray a foreigner in other countries who doesn't understand the language is another reason to do a large portion of dialogue in those languages. And when that happens, you as the author are generally expected to explain any pertinent plot points discussed in the foreign language dialogue later on in the story in the main language of the piece. Otherwise, you should stick to one language, and simply indicate in some way that the other language is being spoken.
It ended up being a fun intellectual challenge for me to brush off my rusty-ass German in order to get through the story, but I think it's going to be hard for others to really appreciate the story what with having to translate everything. There's just too much plot development in the foreign language for people to be able to gloss over it.
stimcrab: 1
Herodan: 0
Tis better to sit in silence and be presumed a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt.
I'm going to have to give my vote to stimcrab on this one.
Stimcrab: Your story was really short. I also found the meeting with Otto and Albreich very unbelievable. Albreichs dead family is hanging within sight of Otto, yet he's completely oblivious to this and greets Albreich like nothing at all is wrong.
Herodan: I don't understand German, and I'm not going to Copy/paste into a translator for the lolcat english version of what you wrote. While it is interesting what you are attempting to do here, the thing is, your narrators primary language is english. It's already implied that the teens are speaking German, since they live in Berlin, actually making the dialog German doesn't add anything to the story, you'd be much better throwing german specific slang into english dialog to create the effect I think you're trying for.
stimcrab: 2
Herodan: 0
Since there are only about twenty minutes left and only two people have voted throughout the entire voting period, I will end this battle early. The clear winner is stimcrab with his two votes to HeroDan's zero voted.
Please refrain from posting in this topic now that the battle has ended.
