Flake: Nobody really lived in Baumschulenweg (1). There's nothing there except the nursery [which is the name sake] and a crematorium. I don't know anything else except the S-Bahn that goes through it.

Paul: School was rather boring. When I was in Year 1, I had to go to the Harz (2) for a treatment regimen because I was too frail. I remember that I cried often because I was homesick. I'd say that everyone cried because they couldn't be with their parents. It started off in the evening, everyone was crying. I was nursed back to full health up there. I first had muesli there in the East, it was great. I was a "regular" [patient] and called the little health guy and had this health book to fill out all details. Example - how to scrub ourselves, how to do full body massages, and how to make muesli.

My lessons lasted about two hours. At noon it was outside on a mountain to be out in the fresh air which I thought was amazing. That was my treatment regimen run by the government itself. Back in school, teachers often were asking my parents if I was taking any drugs because I was so often absent minded. I had these permanent rings under my eyes and a green complexion in the face. They wanted to know if I was smoking Nuth cigarettes? Nuth was a stain remover [solvent] in the East, which was poured over cigarettes and then dried. Then you would smoke them. I of course never did that, but they suspected it.

I was a little messed up, [lit - grubby, messy] perhaps it was because of my mother who was born in Poland. My father came from the German part of Czechoslovakia (3). At any rate, my mother gave me her Polish social coziness and it's this lust for life that matters anyway. I already had longer hair, but I didn't understand I must wash it every day. Anyway, I was constantly counted out by my teachers [for it]. This culminated in receiving a letter from the principal which said: "We would like to bring to your attention that you have to appear for the test washed, teeth brushed, and without wearing sandals!"

Flake: Paul had it good. He moved with his parents to Russia as a kid and went to school there. I only ever went to Prague for four days.

Paul: I spent a year in Moscow. It was in Year 3 and because of my parent's job we lived there. My father is a professor of Slavic languages and worked at home. My mother taught Russian at the technical school for foreign trade economics. I had learned to speak some Russian very quickly accent-free as kids learn pretty quick. This time spent in the Soviet Union was impactful on myself.

1 - This is a footnote for the suburb strip mall Americans right now. I know you gotta be 'I thought he was from Berlin', yeah he is. All of this is big city life nuances you don't get unless you lived in one. This is a small locality in Berlin. Big cities often have localities like this to make the big city make sense regionally. Chicago is filled with them too despite everyone's postal address saying 'Chicago' on it. I would say I am from Chicago to an outsider, but inside Chicago itself to other Chicagoans, I would instead tell them Roger's Park which is my version of Baumschulenweg. His version of my North Side is Treptow. Big cities are confusing, am I right?? It really is like this because when inner communicating to people in a big city, it's literally impossible to explain why one half of a city has no correlation to anything on the other half. You gotta divide things with words somehow to create spatial understanding why That Chicago and Other Chicago are 40 minutes apart, needs two train lines, and these two buildings are very far away from one another.

2 - This is a more rural mountain area.

3 - Paul's understanding of his father's origin is something that I know not a single American textbook will prepare anybody to comprehend. I know he's blatantly describing Sudeten Germans and what he means by Gebeiten is Sudetenland. It seems more likely his father was born as someone who "should be" from the Republic of German-Austria to fit the time period and after WW1 became "incorporated" Czechoslovakian until the 1945 expulsions. Something like 3 million Germans became merged to Czech and would have been grandparents in that statistic. Then his father gets born there on technicality rules afterward. These displaced people later became known as Sudeten Germans or Bohemian. His father's family side would have then very highly likely to have been a part of the 12 million who got relocated after WW2 at the first sign of the expulsion removal after 1945.