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Gottfried Ursel · 5 min read · Season 3
Dead Fieldmice dance in the wind like leaves, flattened by the force of someone just trying to get to work. Above roses freight trains car chemicals west and war machines East.
Merseburg, Germany
dead Fieldmice
Murals of atomic optimism have outlived the statues because the high rise owners haven’t scraped together the money to repaint a neoliberal public yellow. The public satiated watching Lenin’s cold lips meet the earth.
Cold and depreciating, the industrial infrastructure and a working class drained of ambitions higher than buying their bread remain. The budget, having cut the steam which warmed their saunas.
The chemical plant flickers like candlelight , its havarie Fire shooting up in dark or day, occasionally letting out a frustrated groan. At least once a week sirens wail for every mistake. The land screeching out in pain and penance
It’s a place where miracles of science are conducted by hungover teenagers in lab-Coats.
A place where magic words free all prisoner but two ravens held captive for a crime they did not comit.
Where vocational school graduates employed to clean the bathrooms of public pools pass by the university campus. Having had their creativity beaten out of them, and drunk from cheap beer, they look up intimidated by the ugly DDR era buildings and the people inside of them, who can afford to pay others to scrub their toilets of the same tile.
A campus...
​... where the social work students don’t dare to live, ​
where novelty is indicative of having learned nothing,
where the professors who stand on pulpits spend their lecturers thinking about returning home to their families.
A university where the only institution which has survived the end of communism, the sovereign debt crisis, and a pandemic, is the only one that sells beer.
A town where the O of Aluminium flaps violently in the wind, waving goodbye to passing time It is a place which has not ossified, progress not corroding fast-held traditions, which refuse to melt into the air.
It is where modernity waits out its days, however many that may be.
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