1989 (5 page)

If I looked down, hundreds of feet below our whirling rotors, I could just make out something I would not otherwise have believed possible: a door in the Berlin Wall. And next to it, what else but a doorbell! It was permanently guarded, the pilot explained to me. If a West Berlin allotment-owner fancied spending Sunday
afternoon
doing a bit of weeding, he rang the bell and an East German soldier escorted him along a track lined with barbed wire fencing to another door in a concrete wall, behind which lay his vegetable plot. When he wanted to come back, he repeated the procedure. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised,’ the pilot said as we wheeled around and headed back towards sanity, ‘if every now and then they slip one of them a cabbage or two.’

As we headed back to the landing ground he showed me one more of the Berlin Wall’s anomalous ‘exclaves’, as bizarre as the
isolated
allotments: the hamlet of Steinstücken. By any sensible point of view Steinstücken was part of Babelsberg, a suburb of Potsdam, the old city of royal palaces south-west of West Berlin (and
therefore
in East Germany). But because for more than 200 years this particular little parcel of land had been owned by farmers from the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, it was legally part of that district, and therefore belonged to West Berlin. When the Wall was built the East Germans logically tried to occupy it, but the Americans stationed a three-man guard post there, helicoptered in and out. The East Germans responded by building Steinstücken its own Wall, all the way around the hamlet with its 200 inhabitants. For the next eleven years, the regular American helicopter flight was the only source of Steinstücken’s supplies. The problem was only ‘solved’ in 1972 when following an exchange of uninhabited territory elsewhere East Germany gave West Berlin a road link to Steinstücken, a corridor 1.2 kilometres long and twenty metres wide, lined with a high barbed wire fence, and a wall behind it.

For twenty-eight years, from August 13th, 1961 until November 9th, 1989, West Berlin was the largest, most populous walled city the world has ever seen, a wall built, like those of other walled cities of the past, to keep people out; the difference was that it was built by those who lived outside it. In 1981 it was a city of the very young and very old. Large numbers of the middle-aged middle class had grown tired with the restrictions of living in a city you had to fly or travel more than 120 miles to get out of. The enclave might have been rich enough in its leisure facilities but it was a long way from the
industrial
powerhouses of affluent West Germany. And that was not to mention the latent threat of the grizzly bear parked on its doorstep.

The famous old ‘
Rotes Rathaus
’ – the ‘red city hall’ (a reference to its crimson bricks – lay in Mitte. It was still the seat of city government for the East, but the West had simply moved into the local government offices of one of its
Bezirke
(districts), all of which had their own imposing buildings much as Greater London’s boroughs do. West Berlin was therefore run from the town hall for Schöneberg district. It was from the balcony there that JFK had delivered his famous ‘
Ich bin ein Berliner
’ speech in June 1963, two years after the Wall was built. (The popular joke that what he actually said was ‘I am a doughnut’, is only partly true. When a German says he or she comes from a city, they omit the article: the proper way to say ‘I am a Berliner’ is simply ‘
Ich bin Berliner
’. Inserting the article ‘ein’ gives the impression one is referring to an object and in most of Germany ‘ein Berliner’ is the term used to refer to one of the old city’s
specialities
: a large round jam-filled doughnut. In Berlin, however – where the doughnut is at home – the same thing is called ‘
ein Pfannekuchen
’. If there were wry smiles amidst the emotional tears in the eyes of most Germans who heard his words, the Berliners themselves would scarcely have noticed.)

But while Berlin and its Wall were regularly used by Western
politicians
to make public points about the evils of communism, the fact was that the city’s divided status was actually the result of a sulky but peaceful agreement to disagree between the old allies turned Cold War enemies. Following the confrontations over the blockade and the building of the Wall itself in 1963, this had eventually been
codified
in 1971 in the ‘Four Power Agreement’, a magnificent piece of
pragmatic diplomatic obfuscation. It miraculously never mentions West Berlin by name – it is referred to only as the ‘relevant area’. This laid down the rules that allowed secure links between the allied
districts
and West Germany, while at the same time making clear that ‘the relevant area’ was not legally part of West Germany. In theory, as far as the four governments were concerned, Berlin was still an occupied city, even though they all now recognised East Berlin as the de facto capital of East Germany.

Despite – or perhaps because of its bizarre status – West Berlin was a city that buzzed and bustled almost for the sake of it. On its own, with a population of 2.2 million (against East Berlin’s 1.4 million), it was much smaller than old Berlin had been but still larger than any other German city, East or West (Hamburg had 1.7 million
inhabitants
, Munich 1.3 million). There was a hedonistic ‘live for today for there may be no tomorrow’ atmosphere of existence in an
anomalous
enclave in the communist sea. West Berlin had created a new heart around what had in any case been the more affluent,
consumerist
area of the old metropolis, the Kurfürstendamm.

Not that it was all glitz: far from it. There were areas such as Kreuzberg, which had the largest Turkish population of any city in Europe, and in mid-summer felt and smelled like the back streets of Ankara, with doner kebabs roasting, coffee brewing and old men jangling worry beads in doorways. These were the areas closest to the old city centre, by definition now closest to the new city’s Western edge, areas that West Berlin had effectively turned its back on as if coming too close to the Wall and the ravaged heart of the old pre-war city was simply too painful.

Apart from the Turkish immigrants most of the population in these districts were students, or dropped-out students, who looked at the run-down old nineteenth-century tenement blocks near the Wall being left to rot away for lack of investment in a bleak
landscape
with little obvious future. And occupied them.
Occasionally
someone would get court orders and send in the police to evict them, but by and large the squatters presented themselves as
Instandbesetzer
(repair-squatters), and boasted that they were restoring buildings their owners were neglecting in order to write them down against tax.

Although West Berlin was effectively part of West Germany, it was not legally so. Because of that, anyone registered as a student at a West Berlin university was not eligible to be drafted into the West German army, the
Bundeswehr
, for the otherwise compulsory military service. As a result the city had a huge population of young West Germans in their twenties, diverted from their studies by its glitzy nightlife and hard-line anarchist fringe. If to the rest of the world the West Germany of the
Wirtschaftswunder
had come to be embodied by the image of a rotund, affluent businessman behind the wheel of a BMW, West Berlin was a long-haired youth in
skintight
leather trousers living in a squat and smoking dope. It also had a hard-edged techno rock culture, which allied with its scarred,
fractured
landscape, and traumatised Nazi past meant that West Berlin in the early eighties was the closest equivalent to urban heroin chic. No surprise that David Bowie had fallen in love with the place, moved into an apartment in Schöneberg and recorded ‘Heroes’ as
Helden
in German, with the Wall as a leitmotif in the background.

The August after I arrived saw the twentieth anniversary of the Wall’s erection, and it seemed to me that all that summer echoed the then two-year-old Pink Floyd hit: ‘Another brick in the wall.’ It boomed out over hot, dusty back street courtyards all through the summer months. I made it the headline to my first big feature story, a series of reflective first impressions of my new home. It made the back page of the
International Herald Tribune
and my first ‘
herogram
’, a telexed pat on the back from London. But that was based on my experience on either side of the wall, as stark a difference as it was humanly possible to imagine existing in what had until
relatively
recently been a single city.

It was hard to say then – and even harder now – whether it was a frisson of pure excitement, or a chill running down the spine that I experienced the first time I crossed the border at Checkpoint Charlie. Charlie was the sole non-rail crossing point for
foreigners
into East Berlin. The name, given it by the Americans in whose sector it lay, was purely alphabetical. The first road crossing point on the way from West Germany to Berlin was Checkpoint Alpha, that where it reached the Western edge of the city was Checkpoint Bravo. ‘Charlie’ was simply the most famous. For a good reason.
Here the apparatus of the communist state was in your face, and in the unsmiling faces of the border guards. Westerners called them
Grepos
, a slang term derived from
Grenzpolizei
(border police). They were in fact by then officially known as Grenztruppen, border troops, a separate regiment of the
NVA
, the National People’s Army.

They examined in detail my passport, my new multiple-entry visa, stamped both and admitted me with the words ‘Welcome to the capital of the German Democratic Republic.’ The words ‘East Berlin’ were never uttered at official level. The half-city which was not surrounded by a wall – a fact many Westerners often forgot – was referred to only as Berlin, or if necessary for clarity’s sake, ‘the capital’. The unmentionable other bit was, if it absolutely had to be mentioned,
Westberlin
, as if Westminster were to be excised from London.

The difference was as dramatic as in any spy film. Whereas the apartment blocks of the more chic Western districts had been
lavishly
restored – and even those inhabited by squatters were garish with graffiti – those in the East still had the countless bullet
pockmarks
that bore witness to the ‘euphoric welcome’ afforded by the Berlin proletariat to the Soviet champions of People’s Power.

These were the ranks of six-storey nineteenth-century
Mietkasernen
(rental barracks) built by Prussian industrialists to house the new German capital’s burgeoning working class. My flat was on the first floor of a typical block on Schönhauser Allee, a broad
thoroughfare
that ran north-south, just a few hundred metres east of the Wall, and would have been described as ‘leafy’ were the trees not permanently caked in the dirt of diesel exhaust and the residue from the cheap, environmentally unfriendly but plentiful lignite
brown-coal
used in the power plants that provided heating. This was the heart of Prenzlauer Berg, a gritty working-class inner-city suburb. Today it is the bustling, Bohemian heart of trendy Berlin, alive with restaurants and nightlife. Not even in my most exotic fantasies could I have imagined that just two decades ago.

On the ground floor, just below the flat there was a bar called
Wörther Eck
(Wörther Corner), because it was on the corner of Wörther Strasse. It was a grimy place with vinyl-topped tables, and a secret staircase at the back that I would only become aware of once
it was no longer used. There was a shop on the corner opposite that bore the catchy label ‘
Obst-Gemuse
’ (fruit and veg). The communist government had replaced all traditional or family names of shops with functional ones. That Germanic insistence on exactitude was however let down by reality. The fruit and veg shop never had much of either. It certainly never had anything green, although the white cabbage occasionally had a greenish tinge. The stock-in-trade was hoary carrots and bruised onions.

Across the road was the equivalent of a neighbourhood
supermarket
. It announced this with the word
Lebensmittel
(foodstuff), which included milk that wasn’t always sour, tomato juice imported from Romania as well as barely drinkable red wine, and,
thankfully
, an almost unlimited supply of still surprisingly excellent beer. The beer and the tomato juice – and some remarkably foul Russian mineral water – all came in identical half-litre bottles which were either brown or green irrespective of content, so it meant it was well worth paying attention to the label, even if it was usually faded.

The flat itself had a long, high-ceilinged corridor with a door to the stairwell at either end, three doors off to the left and three to the right. Those on the right were the bathroom, kitchen and a separate toilet; those on the left, in succession, the office, the living room, and the bedroom. The rooms were big and though it was far from luxurious it was as good a first marital home as many young couples in London could afford. The downside, of course, was that it also housed the office: I would be not so much working from home as living in the office.

And the office was the realm, let there be no mistaking it, of Erdmute. This improbable first name was derived from ‘Earth Mother’, and sounded just as preposterous to most 1980s Germans as it did to me. The exceptions were those old enough to sympathise with children of the thirties and forties who had been given names thought appropriate to the latent paganism of National Socialist ideology. (There are still middle-aged Russians today who labour under the name Melor, derived from Marx, Engels, Lenin, October Revolution – most of whom were called Melsor until Stalin fell out of favour). Erdmute had been employed as secretary since the opening of the office in 1959. Back then she had been a ‘slip of a
thing’, she claimed; by now she was a jovial, self-possessed woman in her forties with heavy glasses and a shock of bright red
hennadyed
hair.