Men I Hate: The Stasi Men

All the dogs in Berlin had the same face. A wiry, bearded face with intelligent eyes and perked ears. None of the dogs paid me the slightest bit of attention even though I was so dog hungry, missing our Labradoodle and yellow Lab back home in Boston. The German dogs trotted with purpose and never veered from the path to chase a duck or leap into the water or bark to say hi or keep away. This is what it means to be a good dog in Berlin.

It was 2018 and my husband and I were living in Berlin, where he was on an academic fellowship and I was there as “spouse of.” My position relegated me to the outer circle of the big-headed fellows, which was fine with me. It was part of the story of our relationship—he was a front guy, I preferred to watch the scene around me. We were also there to try and put our marriage back together following my husband’s gender transition from a queer woman to a man, which began two years earlier, in 2016. How would it be to live someplace where nobody knew our specific relationship history or had known us in a previous incarnation as a queer couple? Were we still a queer couple? The hope was that in a setting where somebody was cooking and cleaning for us, we would stop fighting about whose turn it was to vacuum and what’s for dinner and get to the big fights, such as, were we going to stay married?

We were living in Wannsee, a southwestern suburb of Berlin, on the River Havel. While there, I visited the late summer garden at the Liebermann-Villa, the summer residence of the painter Max Liebermann, on a tour with a cohort of fellows. A small birch allée leads to Lake Wannsee and features prominently in many of Liebermann’s paintings. There is a bronze otter fountain,