Volume I, Number 8	Carol J. Bova, Editor.    Web Publishing by Doppler FX.	07/01/97

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Russian Diamond Grit at the German Kitchen Table by Hans Durstling As a gentle summer breeze from the kitchen window blew through the stream of black powder I poured from one metal salad bowl at shoulder height into another one about down by my knees, wind-carried dust drifted to the white linoleum floor colouring it increasingly grey. It was fine and uniform, like road dust on the car. You didn't really notice it until you ran a finger through, but then, oh boy, oh boy. That was okay, though, kitchen floors are made to be cleaned and I'm not married either. Trouble was, the tiniest of sparkles still flashed amid the floor dust. Diamonds. Damn. It wasn't working. And thus ended my first and only experiment in the purification of diamond grit by the ancient method of winnowing. This particular piece of kitchen technology took place in Germany, in the industrial city of Dortmund, in the summer of '93 or maybe '94, and this is the story of how I came to be cleaning diamond grit in the breeze from my kitchen window. It doesn't have a whole lot of redeeming social and moral value, and you won't likely learn much of lapidary utility from it either. But it is a look from a lapidary perspective into a weird world that flourished briefly as the iron curtain came down. It is gone now, and won't be back. I'd been in Germany for three or four years by then, making as many trips to Idar-Oberstein as I could afford and learning a lot from my German goldsmith friends by simply looking over their shoulders as they worked. Now, a goldsmith is always looking for odd-shaped pieces of metal and for files and sharpening stones and tools you can't buy in the shopping mall hardware stores. And I like technological stuff anyway. As I got to know people in Germany and they me I began to get the suggestion, "well if you like that kind of stuff you should check out the "Polish Market." In German it's "Polenmarkt," and slightly derogatory. I filed it on the back burner, forgot about it. Of course the people who gave me the advice were neither insistent nor very descriptive. But finally one Saturday morning almost a year later I took the streetcar to the north end of Dortmund where the steel mills and the blast furnaces are, and wow! - discovered the Polish Market first hand. When did the Wall come down? 1989, wasn't it? And I imagine it must have taken another year or so for things in Russia itself to become thoroughly disorganized. Remember that the Russian command economy had been based on meeting production quotas - making things to fill warehouses. Old Herr Ernst Biehl, (who, by the way, started cutting agate at nine years of age) the proprietor of the "Asbacher Huette," a waterwheel driven agate mill out in the countryside some twenty kilometres from Idar had told me on one of my visits that as for his family, they had been mighty fortunate to be living in the country in the hard years just after the war, because here you could always raise pigs and grow vegetables. The great stone dealing families of downtown Idar in their turn-of-the-century art deco townhouses couldn't do that. "No, you know, in those times, those old families, they had basements full of diamonds and nothing to eat." He paused, reflectively surveying his own green property: "Yes, basements full of diamonds and nothing to eat." It was much the same in Russia. Warehouses full of goods and nothing to eat. Human priorities being what they are, ways were soon found to empty the warehouses in the interest of filling the stomachs. A huge and entirely spontaneous network of transcontinental flea markets sprang up in which, via who knows how many middlemen, the contents of the Russian warehouses got funneled into hard currency countries. I was told that the Russians could not enter Germany without a visa. But the Polish could. So the Russians brought their stuff to flea markets in Poland, where it was bought by the Polish traders who fanned out from there across western Europe. My "Polenmarkt" had its counterpart in all major Germany cities. A large dirt parking lot about half the size of a football field and closed in by a chainlink fence harboured the Dortmund Polish Market. Blast furnace stacks in the background lent additional grittiness. And what a throng! All races, all nationalities crowded shoulder to shoulder to pay their one DM admission and jostle through the gate. You felt like you were in the Middle East, not in clean disinfected Germany. The Middle Eastern feeling came from the Turks, the poor, urban underclass of so-called "guest workers" who had come to Germany in the boom years of the sixties and seventies in a period of acute labour shortage. Now, twenty and more years later, with unemployment rising into double digit figures, they were still there. With half a generation's acclimatization behind them, and their children in German schools, neither children nor parents were any longer fully Turkish, but unable to become Germans either because that country's citizenship laws are based on ancestry not residence. They constituted a marginalized subclass which the good upstanding Germans preferred not to think about too much and if possible to avoid. The Polish market had originally been a kind of "Turkish Market" in the sense that because it was a flea market where you could get things cheap in high cost Germany, it naturally drew a lot of Turkish buyers. And sellers, too. Poor people, foreign people, marginals, adventurers and an artist or two constituted the throng. You didn't see too many good Mercedes-driving Germans at the Polish Market. They did their Saturday morning shopping in the comfort of familiar downtown department stores, unassaulted by foreign sights and smells and sounds, and paying for that privilege. As a rule the Turks sold from tables, the Poles down on the ground. They'd come in tour buses from Poland, on the bus for fourteen hours by the time they arrived in Dortmund at around six in the morning and began to spread their blankets upon the gravel and their goods upon the blankets. You could tell how "good" a market it was going to be by counting the number of tour buses in the parking lot. I think the most I ever saw was nine: that's a lot of vendors. And what a treasure trove! Ten power Hastings triplet magnifiers made in Belarus, eight dollars. Nickel plated diamond files, a dollar each. Diamond core drills, two to 6 or so millimetres, from one to three dollars. Binoculars, 8x40, twenty dollars. Twin lens reflex cameras in 2 1/4" x 2 1/4" format, twenty dollars. There were military night vision scopes of every description and telescopes, and surveyor's transits, and miniature benchtop metal lathes ($700 for the latter, and I still regret not having bought it), and red plastic "pocket" Geiger counters with digital readout and Cyrillic alphabet lettering, eight dollars. The Russian eight power stereo microscope was about my favourite. Many dealers had these. They looked exactly like upside down binoculars on a stick. I knew it was optical but I couldn't figure out exactly what it was, because they'd been clamped upside down on their stands to economize space in transport. One of the dealers though had sense enough to set one up right side up and put a penny beneath it. When I saw that, I said, oh wow! Twenty dollars. Then I bought four more of them and took them back to this side of the Atlantic and sold them for considerably more. The one I kept went to my girlfriend's daughter for her birthday. But by then they were getting scarce, and there was nothing I'd ever owned that came anywhere near it for looking at minerals and gemstones. Finally I did manage to locate one. Just one. The price in the six months interval had just about doubled, which doesn't make it any less ludicrously low. I bought it. And that's the last binocular microscope I ever saw at the Polish market. It's downstairs on my workbench now. But the diamond tools came a close second in my scale of preferences: saw blades, laps, every imaginable shape of grinding wheel, diamond paste, but never any grit as such, and that's what I was really looking for more than anything else. Mind you, the grinding wheels had grit in them. All you had to do was get it out. And that's how I came to be winnowing the diamond powder in the breeze from the kitchen window: trying to purify the grit I'd retrieved from a Polish market diamond wheel. That's the more technological part of the story. Tell you more about that, next month. Copyright, 1997 by Hans Durstling Hans Durstling is a freelance writer, jewellery maker and stone cutter living in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada, near the zeolite, agate and amethyst collecting areas on the Bay of Fundy. His stories, reviews and commentaries have appeared in Canadian Geographic Magazine, The European, Toronto Globe & Mail, Canadian Mineralogist, Mineralienwelt, Rock & Gem and many others. He now works primarily in corporate & industrial writing explaining complex scientific and technical products and processes to layman readers, and writing & narrating corporate & technical videos. A considerable portion of his time is taken up with the constant battle to keep minerals and gems ("the hobby that got out of control") from taking over entirely. Hans can be reached at sinico@nbnet.nb.ca.

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