by Tim Moore
So when a backpacked German rambler lights up, he isn’t just shortening his lifespan and making astonished foreign cyclists swerve into trees – he’s making a stand for democracy and righting the terrible wrongs of his forefathers. After the German authorities banned smoking in bars, tobacco activists protested in T-shirts bearing the yellow Star of David with ‘SMOKER’ printed across them – seeking to remind people, in the most clumsily offensive manner imaginable, that the head of Hitler’s anti-fag institute was a fervently anti-Semitic SS officer who killed himself rather than face trial.
It rained, sometimes with merciless intensity, and accompanied on one occasion by a tornado, which laid waste to a village I passed very close to. (I didn’t actually see it but nonetheless watched the roof-stripped buildings on TV that night with a certain flinty pride. I accept this doesn’t sound great, but nobody died.) Now that it was warmer I stopped bothering to hide from the rain, taking blustery skipfuls of sky water full in the face and revelling in the awed stares of shell shocked Berghaus couples taking cover under picnic shelters. At least traffic-swash was never a hazard: the vast bulk of my ride through Germany was played out on bespoke bike paths. The natives really do a tremendous amount of cycling, and I encountered several unfamiliar new breeds: hausfraus pedalling home with the weekly shop bulging their panniers, boys towing the family dog in a weather-proof trailer. The unhelpful common denominator was pottering sloth; on a bike with almost no brakes I could hardly afford to be reckless, but my speedy weaving would routinely elicit ‘easy Tiger’ tuts and harrumphs.
So rarely do German motorists expect to share the carriageway with cyclists that I could sense their panic when required to. Even dark-glazed, low-riding street machines – the sort of vehicles that in other countries run cyclists off the road on principle – would drop back and wait for several hundred clear metres of tarmac to appear before they dared overtake. Sadly, though, I was never quite far enough from the road to be spared the terrible noise that leaked from every car, soul-wilting, ear-rotting reminders of a nation still unshakably rooted in the High Mullet age. If it wasn’t Toto it was Bonnie Tyler. ‘The Final Countdown’? What a cruel misnomer – I never heard the last of it. My historical ponderings were routinely interrupted by the mental image of Germans sitting about drumming their fingers and bursting into the odd yodel, just filling time before someone invented the power ballad.
To cut the nation some slack, perhaps they’re ju … no, I can’t do it. When I reflect on my portentous ride through Germany, the nation that more than any other defined what my journey was about, one moment stubbornly bullies itself to the front of my mind. I’m freewheeling into a sumptuous, sunlit valley, alone in the world, when a drunken yell bursts raggedly from a roadside clump of trees: ‘Woah-oh, ve’re HALF-VAY ZERE!’ I veer wildly across the tarmac in alarm, then glance down at the odometer and think: Well, look at that – so ve are.
I crossed Rostock harbour on a ferry, gazing without envy at cruise liners stacked with deck after deck of egg-box cabins, like Commie resort hotels laid on their side. Heiligendamm, Europe’s most venerable spa resort, had spent the socialistic era with its grand white mansions requisitioned for holidaying forestry workers and war invalids; with very mixed feelings I wheeled past these same buildings, now returned to the elite, lavishly reinvented as the sort of hotels G8 leaders shake hands outside. Again I was presented by the distasteful spectacle of very rich people refusing to look as if they’re enjoying themselves: the lounge-suited saunterers out on the manicured lawns were engaged in the usual sombre parade, competing to see who could appear the most wearily blasé about their wonderful surroundings.
How much more fun the forestry workers would have had out here, I thought, feeling a special affinity for this fine body of men and women now that I’d spent – let me see – just over 20 per cent of my fifties within their wooded realm. Apart from anything else, all those lumberjacks would have been striding around with their choppers out: by the 1970s, full nudity was standard on GDR beaches and at holiday camps. Many people took the habit home, and it was commonplace for whole families to strip off when they came back from school and work. Germans, of course, are always keen to stress that there’s nothing sexy about nudism. ‘I never heard of anybody seeing even one erect penis on a naturist beach,’ says Kurt Starke, formerly the GDR’s leading sexologist. But Kurt’s professional existence, along with the fact that the best-selling book of all time in his defunct nation was a shag manual entitled Man and Woman Intimately, speaks of a stiffy-centric society.
Typically enough, the GDR’s unexpectedly enthusiastic promotion of free love and hot comrade-on-comrade action was founded on ideology: notions of honour and virginity had no place in a secular state, and great sex was seen as the expression of a happy and equal society. Premarital relations were endorsed to the point of encouragement, with fourteen-year-olds advised merely to avoid ‘regular intercourse’. An instructive film shown in schools majored on the female orgasm, and optimal positions in which to achieve it. Starke insists that GDR women had more and better sex than their West German counterparts. ‘We studied the difference in orgasm rates among teenage female students in the East and West in the 1980s,’ he says, referencing a research project that might attract a very different sort of official interest today. ‘Our findings were that 98 to 99 per cent of GDR women aged sixteen to eighteen were able to have orgasms.’
My GDR jersey looked a little different these days. On its debut afternoon, back at the Fully Clothed Campsite Gathering of the MIFAs, that awkward emblem had earned me a few double-takes; pushing the bike over a narrow canal bridge I passed, at uncomfortably close quarters, a man of about sixty who fixed me square in the chest with a stare of incredulous hatred. A very short while later, a much younger man – too young to have been more than a toddler when the Wall came down – gave me an even filthier look. At a stroke I had morphed from hopeless ninny to bastard Stasi apologist; something had to be done. The next morning, and every morning after, I got busy with the gaffer tape, hiding the offending symbol under a big black cross. It looked pretty daft but it did the job – at least until late afternoon, when sweat and the elements began to undo the adhesive. By the time I presented myself at a guest-house reception desk I would be clasping one hand over my heart, like Pavarotti about to belt out an emotional aria.
Tim Moore
@mrtimmoore
MIFA’s coming home! Also unveiled my summer wardrobe. GDR jersey guaranteed to mislead and very possibly offend.
I understood what a terrible misjudgement the jersey had been at Kühlungsborn, pushing the MIFA around an outdoor museum at the foot of a GDR-era watchtower. I’d already passed one of these survivors poking balefully above the dunes, a cylindrical shaft topped with a splayed observation deck, like some giant concrete golf tee. Over five million East Germans attempted to flee their homeland in the course of its forty-year existence, nearly all of them before the ‘inner German border’ was fenced off and fortified in 1961. Thereafter, the tantalising proximity of Denmark and West Germany drew thousands of would-be escapers to these beaches, knowing that freedom lay just a moonlit lilo ride away. But the authorities knew it too: 2,500 border guards were packed into this short stretch of coast, twenty-seven watchtowers erected and long swathes sealed off behind a huge wall. For twenty-eight years the two seaside parties played a game. You could call it cat and mouse, but it was more fist and face.
It was a warm day, but while wandering past the stark exhibits I automatically pulled my anorak on over That Jersey. Soon it was buttoned right up to my neck. There were some truly dreadful GDR propaganda/deterrent photos of the 189 Baltic escape bids that ended in death: bloated, nibbled, washed-up bodies in the shredded remnants of home-made wetsuits, beneath some gloating headline about victims of imperialist ideology. All were young men. One display was filled with mugshots of some of the 4,500 people arrested on the sand or in the water, made to pose pathetically with their DIY submersible
s or canvas canoes.
Fewer than 900 escapees made it across the freezing open water, their tales a tribute to determination, ingenuity and sheer dumb luck. Most compelling was the story of Axel Mitbauer, a nineteen-year-old 400m freestyle champion from Leipzig who had already attracted the Stasi after being spotted chatting with West German swimmers at an international event in 1968, an offence that earned him seven weeks of lamp-in-the-face interrogation and a lifetime ban from competitive sport. For a year Mitbauer swam alone in flooded quarries, always under the Stasi’s watchful gaze. Then in August 1969, he leapt off a moving train to escape his surveillance team, made his way on foot to the Baltic resort of Boltenhagen, and pitched a tent in a dense copse behind the dunes. After a week-long recce, one warm, clear night he ate two roast chickens, sewed his medals into a pair of flippers and smothered himself in thirty tubes of ersatz Vaseline. You made your own fun in the GDR. But Mitbauer wasn’t finished: he crept down to the sand, and waited. Over previous evenings, he had established that the giant searchlights which swept the beach through the hours of darkness were switched off for one minute every hour, to allow them to cool. As soon as the beam died Mitbauer ran down to the black water and plunged in, clearing a horribly exposed sandbank just before the beam burst back into life and raked across it. Guided by the stars he swam for five hours before fatigue and hypothermia set in; he was saved by clinging to a naval buoy illuminated by an on-board diesel generator whose warmth sustained him until dawn. At 7 a.m., having covered 25km in ten awful hours, Axel Mitbauer was picked up by a West German ferry.
Hooray! Right? Wrong. The Stasi didn’t like happy endings, particularly for one of the 600 vilified ‘sport-traitors’ who fled to the West. One morning, Mitbauer started up the car he’d bought after selling his story to a tabloid, and thought it felt strange: he got out and found all the wheel-nuts had been loosened. After that, and mindful that the Stasi had a history of kidnapping high-profile escapees and defectors and repatriating them, drugged and trussed up in a car boot, he took to sleeping with a chest of drawers pulled across the door. Back in Leipzig, his mother was repeatedly interrogated by Stasi officers, and ultimately ordered to sign a statement that denied her son’s existence. After refusing, she immediately lost her job and never worked again.
I pedalled woodenly off down the boardwalk, gazing out at the misty outline of Denmark and the routinely suicidal desperation that had driven so many towards it. If nearly all of them had been young men, then that was only because older ones had wives and children and other escape-deterrent responsibilities, and because women weren’t always physically equipped for the challenge. The GDR was as good as Communism got, yet everyone who lived there hated it.
Or not quite everyone. As I’d learned from my nightly reading – my wife had brought out a three-volume library of East European history in exchange for my Winter War book – the Stasi recruited one in six East Germans as informers. Most volunteered without being asked, drawn by what a former Stasi psychologist described as ‘the German impulse for order and thoroughness, to make sure your neighbour was doing the right thing’. One in six! Every time I went past a group of old cyclists or a bus full of pensioners I’d look at the faces and wonder which of them once passed the evening with their ears pressed to a wall, notepad in hand. Perhaps that postman had been one of the schoolchildren the Stasi roped in to roam these beaches, reporting on suspicious lingerers. Maybe twinkly-eyed granny over there was a chambermaid who let the Stasi know which guests had brought along an inflatable dinghy. A country full of fear and hate and secrets. What a terrible place to live, the embodiment of that polarising Cold War maxim: you’re either with us or against us. No wonder East Germans drank more than twice as much as their hardly abstemious Western brethren.
The Baltic seaside levered itself up into a farewell parade of small hills, then I turned inland and left it behind for ever. Spooling back through our four-week friendship made me feel rather intrepid and resilient: the coastline that had been scattered with slabs of pack ice on our first date was now generously sprinkled with parasols. And then I spooled forward, and felt a little sick. My next scheduled appointment with the sea lay twelve countries and 5,000km away.
11. THE INNER GERMAN BORDER
‘From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.’ Delivered on 6 May 1946, Winston Churchill’s address in Fulton, Missouri, introduced what would become a standard coinage for the divide between western Europe and the Soviet-run east. His speech was widely considered the Cold War’s opening rhetorical salvo: at the time, most west Europeans were too preoccupied with their own domestic reconstruction to be overly bothered with what the Soviets – still regarded as heroic war-winning allies – were up to over there.
Stettin, for many hundred years a Prussian city, had just been rechristened Szczecin by its newly installed Soviet-sponsored Polish authorities. Trieste, now in Italy, was then a free territory, hard up by the newly declared Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Had Churchill’s nominal barrier come to fortified fruition, it would have saved me an awful lot of cycling, especially if, as he did, I chose not to trouble myself with Finland. As it was, over the next three years his metaphorical curtain was yanked hither and thither, ending up hung over a substantially more dilatory border. In 1948, the Yugoslavs split from the Soviets, pushing the curtain east; a year later, it was pushed west through a newly divided Germany.
After the war Germany had been split into four zones, administered by the four principal Allies; not even the feverishly Russophobic Churchill imagined that Stalin would swiftly force through a constitution which established the Soviet zone, covering the entire eastern half of the country, as a separate nation under his effective control. One suspects Winston warmed up for his famous Iron Curtain speech by kicking himself hard and often. At the 1945 Yalta Conference, he and Roosevelt had blithely accepted Stalin’s pledge that free post-war elections would be held in all the many East European nations the Red Army had just pushed the Nazis out of. Yalta was intended to fashion a durable peace; instead it provided the Cold War blueprints.
For the first few years of coexistence, East and West Germany shared a fairly open border. But ‘Ossis’, as Easterners were nicknamed, proved stubbornly resistant to the appeal of a Soviet-ordained way of life, and crossed to the West in ever-thickening droves. For the GDR, fortifying its 1,381km inland frontier represented an admission of ideological and economic defeat, but the scale of the exodus left them no alternative: by the time the Berlin Wall went up on 13 August 1961, 3.5 million East Germans – a sixth of the entire population – had fled to the West.
My first passage across the Iron Curtain proper, the inner-German border as was, came near Schönberg: a beautiful town in name alone. Here the conserved frontier post had been rather clumsily accessorised with a Trabant on its front lawn and a polystyrene sentry mannequin; the museum inside was closed for lunch, but hooding my eyes against the glass doors I read enough captions to understand this crossing’s unedifying main business. Throughout the later years of national division, a daily convoy of trucks passed through here from west to east, returning a few hours later. In between, they had been relieved of a cargo of toxic Western waste – from as far away as Italy and Holland – dumped in a ten-million-ton, 100m mountain a couple of miles away, which remains the largest hazardous landfill site in Europe. The whole enterprise was an exercise in cynical irresponsibility: the safe disposal of such material in the West cost around 100 dollars a ton, but Schönberg offered a no-questions-asked service that earned the increasingly impoverished GDR authorities twenty dollars a ton in hard currency. After unification, appalled inspectors discovered fizzing open pits full of leaky, unmarked barrels that had their Geiger counters clicking themselves silly. A recent study found that the incidence of cancer amongst Schönberg workers stands at 80 per cent above the norm.
How the people of the GDR suffered, taken unpleasant advantage of
on all sides from their bastard nation’s birth. After the war, the victorious Russians found their prize new territory irresistibly strewn with plump metalworks, ripe blast furnaces and other pick-your-own solutions to their domestic industrialisation problem. In two years, over 4,500 East German plants were carefully dismantled, packed into trains and shipped to the motherland, stripping the new country of half its industrial capacity. Many plants had their entire workforce forcibly transported at the same time, sent out to the middle of Russia to bolt their factories back together and then run them. One afternoon I rode for miles along the bed of a railway that had ferried pre-war tourists to the Baltic resorts: the Russians pinched all the tracks and that was that.
The EV13 signs made a brief reappearance, and as was their wont promptly despatched me across many hours of deserted hilly pasture. But by now the MIFA and I were used to having a bit of rough with our smooth, and we took the verdant juddering in our stride. The abrupt transit from bustling suburb to houseless, rolling greenery was, I soon learned, a sure sign that the former inner border had been crossed: the GDR systematically depopulated its frontier regions, ostensibly to create a secure buffer zone against Western aggression, but in truth to hamper escape bids. Almost every day I’d pass a plaque or memorial that marked the spot of some age-old hamlet the authorities had completely erased. They were still at it deep into the 1980s.
EV13 forever criss-crossed the old border, but I rarely lost my bearings. The West had better tarmac, fewer cobbles, more bike paths and a surviving scatter of that Cold War classic, the little yellow sign telling NATO tanks how fast they could go. The east remained visibly poorer – a young ‘Ossi’ told me later that his ‘Wessi’ friends earned twice as much doing similar jobs – and was home to tattier cars, more Aldis and a veritable forest of ‘cash paid for your old gold’ signs. I also became adept at spotting the very Russian GDR border-guard barracks, windowless four-floor hulks half hidden in overgrowth. The most obvious tell, though, was the squat little hat-wearer who still lets East Germans know when it’s safe to cross the road. The red/green ‘Ampelmann’ has been deliberately retained as a non-emotive nostalgic token of the GDR: ‘A positive aspect’, in the words of its original designer, ‘of a failed social order’. I suppose it’s a bit like the Nazi people’s car that somehow wound up as Herbie the love bug.