312 – Beware the Snatchengrabber 7


Thinking about my old school teachers got me thinking about my old school and, man, I never really thought about it before, but that was a weird school. I’m thinking of John F. Kennedy German-American School in Berlin, Germany, which I attended for three years while my family was stationed in Germany. If you Google it, you can find some modern pictures of the campus but they really don’t do justice to what the school looked like when I was there. Not to mention the fact that I couldn’t find any photos of the inside of the school.

The school was divided into two sections: the old school and the new school. The old school was a giant concrete block built in the 60s in that classic Brutalist architecture style that makes everything look like the builders gave up in despair halfway through construction; my father used to describe the old school as looking like a “French prison.” It was all unfinished, unpainted concrete inside and out. The inside of the building is kind of difficult to describe. There weren’t hallways as you’d expect to find in most schools, just one big empty central arena with classrooms arranged around it and all opening into that arena. There was one large central staircase in the center of the arena that led up to the second floor, which existed only as a balcony along the inner walls of the arena. You know how, when you go to the mall and you go up to the second floor, they will have these big fenced-off gaps where you can kind of look down and see the first floor? It was kind of like that.

One of the strangest things about the old school was the grafitti. It appeared to be school sanctioned (or at least tolerated) because no one ever made any effort to cover it up during my tenure there. Some of it was clearly school sponored — like pictures of the school mascot or “Class of XX” commemorative graduation murals — but other pictures depicted drug use or nudity. There was a giant grotesque caricature of a naked woman with her big cartoon breasts bouncing out on the wall of the smokers’ corner. (The smokers’ corner, incidentally, was a perenial point of disagreement between American students, who all hated it and tried to get it banned every student council election, and the German students, who loved it because they hadn’t been exposed to enough anti-tobacco PSAs as kids.) I remember that you would occasionally run across entirely new and undiscovered graffiti. There was one unused stairwell in a far corner that you could enter from the second floor but the ground floor doors were locked so that you couldn’t use them as a back escape to sneak out of the new library they’d built down there without going through the front entrance book detectors. One time I needed to get some writing done between classes, so I used this stairwell to go up to the third floor (The third floor was entirely locked off, but I thought I could get some quiet time just sitting on the steps there) and BAM oh look a giant caterpillar with tits. Okay.

The new school was under construction while I was there. Apparently, they realized that making your school look like a prison wasn’t really very conducive to a good learning atmosphere, so the new school was nice and bright and open with white paneling on the walls and low-hanging phlorescent lights and, above all, windows (The old school had no windows except in classrooms, so the whole thing was pitch black whenever there was a power outage) that all combined to make it look like a mental hospital. The two buildings were connected, so you could be walking around in a medieval dungeon and then randomly walk through some doors and BAM you’d be in a nice modern insane asylum.

I wish I’d thought to take pictures of that place, but I was young and foolish. I need to ask my mom if she still has my old yearbook, since it probably has a few photos of the bizarre nooks and crannies of that place.

I wonder if it’s still the same? Modern pictures of the school make it look like they covered the old school with white paneling too to give it that modern sanitarium look, but the inside might still be pure Bastille. If there are any current JFK students reading this –hope springs eternal!– let me know what your school looks like now.

TLDR Old man talks about awful school