Got distracted by dachas
There’s a scene in Luca Guadagnino’s remake of Suspiria in which the psychoanalyst Klemperer, played as an old man by Tilda Swinton in heavy makeup, takes a trip across Berlin, past bureaucratic checkpoints, to visit a small house outside the city. It’s a small structure, barely more than a room, and there’s a garden, or space for a garden — he first visits in winter, so there’s not much growing, but he eats a sandwich under a blanket, next to a tree.
I liked the austere aesthetic of the whole movie, but I have since become obsessed with this house. He called it his “dacha”, (in German: Datsche) and I have been dreaming about having a dacha of my own. Think how amazing it must be to leave your apartment in the city, get on a train and get off the train, and then, take a little walk, and arrive at a little paradise, your own garden with an overnight shelter. I spent a lot of time looking for images of this particular dacha online (no dice), but did eventually find out that it was filmed in a garden colony outside of Berlin. The script didn’t even call for a dacha, I read, but while scouting Soviet-era train stations, Guadagnino came across the garden colony and became enchanted, later rewriting the script to include it. Such is the power of the dacha.
There are thousands of garden colonies with these little gardens in Germany, outside most towns. I remember seeing them the first time I went there as a teenager, these quaint orderly gardens being one of the things that made the country so beautiful to me, that made it seem so superior to America. It seemed so civilized to have gardens outside of town, for people without gardens of their own to spend a day growing food and flowers, taking their bounty back to their kitchens. The ones I saw just had little sheds on them, but there are garden communities with larger gardens, and larger houses, like the one in Suspiria.
In German, these gardens have a few names: Kleingarten, Schrebergarten, Heimgarten, Familiengarten, Parzelle, and of course, Datsche. Definition of Datsche in German: “Grundstück mit Wochenendhaus” — land with weekend house, literally. How idyllic. They exist in other European countries, too, especially German-speaking, but also in the U.K., where they’re called allotments (though my understanding is that most allotments don’t have houses on them. My boyfriend Matt’s dad has an allotment in South London, and here’s how Matt describes it: “My dad’s allotment has a tiny shed on it but you could only fit a single chair in there with a radio and a bottle of scotch. It’s no dacha. Some people do like to hang at their allotments and drink scotch and listen to the radio, of course. So it’s not completely clear-cut. But it is not ze same”).
These gardens were generally created in the 18th and 19th centuries for urban families to have some fresh food and a place to relax, and they could build a little house as long as the land was mostly kept clear for gardening. Then during the wars they ended up feeding families and cities and saving lives. Today they’re back to being recreational or at least supplemental and many have turned bourgeois, coveted weekend escapes. You can rent them on Airbnb.
Datsche comes from dacha, the Russian word. Pronounced datch-uh, it means “something given” — they originated as gifts from the Tsar in the 17th century. In Keith Gessen’s A Terrible Country (a great book), the grandmother character in Moscow is bereft because after a downfall of sorts, she no longer has her own dacha outside of town, and her friend won’t invite her to her dacha, despite her hints. So the grandson character helps his friend build his own modest dacha in exchange for letting the grandmother come and stay. She does, and she’s so happy. I loved picturing that fictional grandmother in her fictional grandson’s friend’s fictional dacha. Dacha dacha dacha.
When reading about dachas in Keith’s book, and others, I always picture the German ones, the little houses in gardens outside of town, but if you Google Russian dachas, many of the pictures are of massive houses. They are retreats for the elite — no garden huts for them. Later, Soviet leadership took over the houses and gave them to party officials. They also distributed small plots of land to workers, many of whom built small homes, and these look like the German dachas I love. Today something like 60 million Russians have dachas they go to outside of the cities, leading to eight-lane gridlock in the summer on Friday nights, leaving Moscow.
New York has community gardens, but not in the same way. And people have second homes, but also not in the same way. There used to be bungalow communities upstate, where normal working-class or middle-class families could have summer bungalows to escape the New York heat. (The film A Walk on the Moon, with Diane Lane and Viggo Mortenson, takes place in one near Woodstock.) These are maybe a little bit similar. Some of them still exist, which I learned when my friend Ruth told me about this place where you could buy a “summer house” for $60k, plus membership in a cult (basically). That said, there are other summer homes upstate for cheap, compared to the city, though often without year-round water. They go for anywhere from $90k. I learned you can’t get a mortgage on a house you can’t live in year-round, and the costs to winterize make what seems like a great deal, seem less so. I’ve never been interested in being a homeowner, really, but the dream of owning a dacha has me reconsidering.
My friend Nastia at work is Ukrainian, she’s been in the U.S. five years. I asked her on Slack, “Do they have dachas in Ukraine?” “Yes,” she said, and then, “My family has two.” I told her I liked to Google pictures of them, and we sent a few pictures of dachas back and forth. It was a nice break from my very heavy workload to which I am completely dedicated, always.
Watercolor by Matt Davis