by Peter Millar
The other problem was in its own way every bit as pressing: I couldn’t drive. This would be a serious impediment in Berlin, as although I would be based in the East, I would be expected also to cover the West. I could do that by getting across on public transport, although it would mean queuing with tourists and other pedestrians at the two recognised border crossing points, but the real problem was that the office in the East relied on most of its basic supplies – printer paper, ink, telex ribbons – being brought over from the West. And lugging several dozen heavy boxes on foot wasn’t going to be easy, not least because there would be customs checks every time. I had taken lessons, of course, at some stage, but I hadn’t needed a car at university; there was no place for student parking, and not much for anyone else either, in the medieval, bicycle-friendly streets of Oxford. And moving to congested, crowded London with the Tube and buses hadn’t made me see the need for one either.
All of a sudden things were different. My girlfriend, although apprehensive about me going abroad again – this time for an indeterminate period – and with our future not exactly decided, bravely volunteered to give me a crash course. Pun intended. This mostly involved doing lengthy three-point turns in the narrow streets of Peckham, south London, in the car she had inherited from her grandfather: a venerable Hillman Imp. With only weeks to go before I was due to leave, I fought my way through the tortuous meandering suburban route that on the whim of some bureaucrat with more inspiration than common sense is called the South Circular to a test centre in Wandsworth. I had decided it would be good for me to drive the whole way and as a result was exhausted by just the strain of getting there on time, which we nearly didn’t. I took the test. And failed.
Driving was something that would have to be put on the back burner, to be sorted out in Berlin. Reuters were hesitant about this, but someone in the Bonn office suggested I could write a fun feature about taking the driving test in East Germany. And that was that. From then on it was my problem. The other one was my domestic situation: we decided to get married, but not until the summer when my wife-to-be would have completed her own professional exams even though she would not be able to practise as a patent attorney in a communist country. It was a brave step on her part which I appreciated. But the magic of ‘Berlin’ was potent for both of us. She would not come out to join me, however, until after the wedding which meant I would spend my first few months there alone. I suspect the Stasi were glad to hear that because waiting for me in the flat in East Berlin were two women: the fusspot and the honeypot.
I arrived in Berlin for the first time in the late spring of 1981. Summer was in the air and the laid-back youth of Europe’s most student-oriented metropolis were drinking beer in leafy pavement cafes and smoking dope in the green parks and along the beaches of windsail-dotted lakes. It wasn’t at all what I had been expecting. But then this was West Berlin. ‘Our’ side of the Wall. Like a version of London centred on Chelsea and Hammersmith and surreally severed from The City and the East End, West Berlin had turned its back on the East, forgotten where its roots lay for the sake of enjoying a glitzy affluence that its inhabitants all knew deep down was fragile.
While paying lip service to the aim of a reunification that none of them imagined they would see in their lifetimes West Berlin’s politicians and business people had created a whole alternative city structure. They might not quite have forgotten that the fractured metropolis’s roots lay in the East, that the original ancient city of Berlin lay wholly within the district of Mitte (Centre), now on the other side of the Wall, but they simply didn’t bother much about it. Out of sight and out of mind. They were more concerned with the tax incentives and financial aid from Bonn that kept the semi-isolated city’s commerce alive.
Shortly after I arrived – by then already installed in my more sober surroundings in the East – I was given an aerial tour of the extraordinary entity that was West Berlin, courtesy of the British Army which maintained a small fleet of helicopters on a base at Gatow in the far west of the city. They graciously picked me up from a more central, and more imposing venue: the main athletics field of Hitler’s vast 1936 Olympic Stadium, which then housed the British Army’s Berlin HQ. (It has since been hollowed out, refurbished and partly roofed over to serve as the scene for the 2006 World Cup Final.)
Lifting high into the sky in what was little more than a tiny glass bubble we soared towards the Kurfürstendamm and other central landmarks so I could get my bearings, then turned towards the outermost perimeter. What astonished me at first was the vast amount of greenery and lakeland – the Grunewald forest and the Tegelsee, Havel and Wannsee lakes (a house near the last was the scene of the notorious 1942 conference that decided on the Final Solution to the ‘Jewish Problem’). If West Berliners were cut off from the surrounding countryside, they still retained easy access to vast swathes of leisure land that most urban dwellers would have envied.
And then came the cut-off point: the long, winding, erratically twisting double wall of concrete with white sand in between, dotted with watchtowers like malignant mushrooms on concrete stalks, patrolled by armed guards, men with jeeps, and dogs. The total circumference of the Wall which looped out into the countryside all around West Berlin was 156 kilometres. From the air it looked not so much like a ribbon running round the Western half of the city as masking tape sealing it off, a wrapping around an awkward-shaped object, that in the middle got tangled up in it, as the ‘death strip’ narrowed to begin its urban incursion. From the air it was more cruelly apparent than from the ground how the Wall cut streets in two and turned thoroughfares into cul-de-sacs. We did not venture across into the East, which would have been seen as a ‘provocation’ in Cold War language, a violation of Warsaw Pact airspace, but we could hover just to the west of the Brandenburg Gate and stare down the long majestic and all but empty avenue of Unter den Linden that lay in a straight line in front of us, leading to Alexanderplatz, and beyond it – for me at least – home.
On the way back to the base the pilot diverted out beyond the Tegelsee towards what appeared to be a strange little walled garden just beyond the so clearly marked boundary of West Berlin itself. When I asked, he explained – shouting over the roar of the rotors – that that was exactly what it was: a walled garden. I was already aware that the Berlin Wall had been the greatest – and most cruel – postcode lottery of all. When the Allies had come to divide up the city, they simply did it along the lines already drawn up by the city post office. This had led to the front doors of the houses in Bernauer Strasse being sealed up while their inhabitants were still inside them. But here it had resulted in something altogether more odd: the ‘walled garden’ was a set of allotments, which because they were owned and used by people with a postcode in what was now West Berlin, had been bizarrely, with a scrupulousness that verged on the stereotypical German, left alone. East Germany had not appropriated the land. In fact, the West Berliners still used them.
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 surrou
nded 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.