Harry R. Wilkens on the Other Side of the
BABY RUTH & SUPERMAN
[Now don't think that I am crazy...the CANDY I mean is in reality called BABY
RUTH, existing since 1921 and NOT named after the famous baseball player
BABE RUTH, but after the DAUGHTER of US President Grover Cleveland.
HRW]
It is hard to believe, but most of the native kids in the '50s and '60s didn't know who or what Baby Ruth was, and they got knowledge of Superman only later, when they had access to it through a German version of his adventures.
But we other, more alert natives, we took advantage of the "Bookmark", the US Army bookstore. For a couple of cents they had all the candies and comics we wanted. You can only want what you know, that means we knew a lot more than those poor suckers back in town! We really lived in a parallel world, and just a step took us to the other side of the mirror, the brighter side, with better fed & better dressed kids, who, on their side, also had no access to OUR normal world of natives, even less than we had to THEIRS. However, there was no need for them to make this effort WE did. The kids of diplomats all over the world, especially in the poor countries, don't live otherwise: they just ignore what is going on around them!
All we needed to enter the Marvel-ous world of US comics was to have some US cash on us. This was easy after the introduction of the normal US dollar, whereas in the early '50s everything had to be paid with the forbidden so-called "Military Payment Certificate", small bank bills of low denominations (I don't remember to ever have owned a bill worth more than 5 or 10 cents or the ordinary 1 cent coins). Nowadays it is impossible for natives, kids or adults, to enter the US shopping center, let alone the Bookmark. In K-Town it became more and more secured and isolated off since the German terrorist threats in the late '70s, and more and more sealed off after since the Gulf War in 1991. Now it's entirely off-limits for German civilians...
For the candies, it was more difficult to get hold of them. Usually we knew no American kids, but it was sufficient to stand before a PX and to give a US mom money so they could buy some candy bars or other stuff for us. All we had to do is to wait. And they always came back, and many times they even didn't want to take our money! Today, native kids still don't know what marvels are hidden in the PX. Neither do adults, nowadays less than ever. Back in the '50s and '60s some native adults ate stuff they never would know in our days, for instance clams, let alone clam-chowder... Super Chunk Peanut Butter didn't mean anything for the common natives, because they even completely ignored what normal peanut butter was and what it may taste like.
With the French Army it was similar: amongst other marvels, they had a French cinema in the center of the town. After the withdrawal of the French army, the first thing German authorities did was to pull down this small building and to level the ground. Still in 1999 it was an emphatically empty spot, and no of the younger passers-by could have suspected the use of it. All natives were allowed to enter the French cinema, watch the latest French movies and buy those dead-cheap deadly French cigarettes. All we had to do is to speak French to the staff, and to pay in (normal) French francs. It was much more easy with the French than with the Americans, but they also had much less to offer, and, anyway, the French border was very close...
© Copyright Harry Wilkens 2002