1989

by Peter Millar

  Helga was another matter. I think for a while she genuinely wondered if she and Jackie could become friends. But men in other places had other ideas: barely a few months after Jackie arrived, Helga was transferred. We never saw her again. Her place as cleaner was taken by Frau Neumann, an elderly harridan who fussed and bustled around the place, generally annoying all three of us (Erdmute included). Perhaps the most signal sign of her real obligations to her employers was the time we had a late party with a gathering of East German friends, a babble of voices that the microphones in the walls obviously couldn’t distinguish. Frau Neumann turned up in the early hours of the morning, claiming she had decided to come over and do our ironing because she ‘couldn’t sleep’. The secret state never does.

  In the meantime we were getting on with what we could under the circumstances to make our ‘own mark’ on our first marital home. I had persuaded Reuters in London that they really had to spend money on refurnishing the flat, something that under a succession of bachelor correspondents had not been done for years. They agreed, but only if I kept costs to a minimum. The other complication, of course, was that there was simply no furnishing worth having to be bought in East Berlin. The average standard of goods in shops – when there were any – was of a quality to make Ikea’s bargain basement products look like Chippendale. We did, therefore, the only thing any man with a young wife and an albeit limited expense account for furniture would do: we went shopping in the West. And before long had found ourselves a nice, relatively modestly priced brown leather sofa. There was a problem, however: nobody would deliver to East Berlin, at least not without prohibitive charges that included protracted dealings with customs officials – which I suspected involved substantial backhanders all round – and visa formalities for the delivery men.

  So we opted for the only logical alternative, as it turned out totally illogical in our circumstances, but we didn’t know that at the time: we hired a self-drive van. This was a bit of a challenge in itself for a relatively novice driver, but we loaded up the sofa and set off for Checkpoint Charlie. Everyone, from the West Berlin office staff to the man at the sofa shop, said we were mad: they would never let us through. It simply hadn’t occurred to us. I had, after all, a customs exemption certificate for East Germany; I hadn’t considered that it might not be valid for the import of larger household goods. And sometimes, as all journalists will tell you, it’s just best not to ask that extra question. When we turned up at Checkpoint Charlie they opened the barrier as usual but waved us to one side into a loading bay while a relatively junior border guard dashed into the prefab huts that made up the border post to fetch his superiors. The senior officer who emerged frowned at first when he saw my customs declaration form, then turned to ask something of another who turned out to be the burly, curly-haired one – Yogi Bear – who had congratulated me on passing my driving test. He smiled again. I liked it when he did that. Then he went to fetch one of his colleagues who was even more unusual: she both smiled and was female. She had a nickname too. We called her ‘Lovely Rita’, not because she was called Rita – we never knew her name – or was particularly stunning, though with long dark hair and an easy smile she was pleasant enough looking, but because of the Beatles song: ‘Lovely Rita, meter maid,’ which included the line, ‘and the bag across her shoulder made her look a little like a military man.’

  She wasn’t actually military but customs, but she was definitely a woman and when she looked inside the van she had only one comment on our unusual and possibly illicit cargo: ‘Hmm, nice sofa! Real leather!’ And that was it. She stamped the forms and off we drove. Several hours later I drove back to West Berlin to return the empty hire van – to the amazement of my Western colleagues and the man from the furniture store who had been expecting his goods returned. On the way out, the Checkpoint Charlie guards all turned out to watch, and ‘Rita’ came over to ask if we’d got the sofa into the flat all right. Not one of them looked in the back. For all the tortuous schemes that would-be escapers from East Germany devised, from hollowed-out petrol tanks to secret compartments under the floors of freight lorries, on that occasion I could have had a dozen escapers in the back and nobody would have noticed.

  Ever afterwards, if it happened to be ‘Rita’ on duty when we crossed through Checkpoint Charlie she would make a point of asking, ‘How’s the sofa doing?’ I never had the courage to admit that a week after we bought it I had fallen asleep on it with a felt-tip pen in my rear pocket and put a series of indelible scrawl marks all over it. Come to think of it, I didn’t tell Reuters either. It was hard enough telling the wife.

  If we shopped when necessary in West Berlin, I was determined that it would only be when necessary, and we would not live our social lives over there. Jackie probably wondered about the wisdom of this as we wandered up Schönhauser Allee past shops that were a million miles from the glitzy establishments just the other side of the Wall: a flower shop that bore the name Blumen (Flowers), but didn’t actually have any most of the time. Then there was Uhren Schmuck (literally: Watches, Jewellery), the name for all of what passed for jewellers’ shops in the communist paradise, most of which contained no more than a few, usually second-hand watches, old brooches and – just occasionally – cheap pieces of amber from the coast of neighbouring Poland. By the time we reached Dimitroffstrasse, once Danziger Strasse but since Danzig had become Polish Gdansk, renamed in favour of a Bulgarian communist (it has since reverted), we were in need of a little light relief.

  Around the corner were two old-fashioned bars, though just how old-fashioned we were still to find out. They faced each other on opposing corners across the broad main street. One was called Schusterjunge (Cobbler’s Boy), the other Hackepeter (Chopped Peter). In reality these referred to two traditional, complementary Berlin culinary specialities: the former was a small brown rye bread roll usually served with the latter: a dish of spicily seasoned raw minced pork. It was a neat conceit therefore for them to be the names of two facing pubs. The opposition had been rather more pointed in the early 1930s, before Hitler’s rise to power, when one had been a drinking den for Nazis and the other for communists, and they had traded insults and hurled cobblestones at each other. We had no idea which was which. It didn’t take long to form an opinion.

  Hackepeter was like something transplanted straight from the set of Cabaret, without the singing girls: brown-painted walls, dark, smoky, lit by low-wattage bulbs in low-hanging yellow shades. On a small raised stage a two-piece ensemble of keyboard player and drummer who used mostly cymbals trotted out tunes from the fifties. There were two waiters, one rotund, balding and middle-aged, the other scrawny and ancient, both in stained white jackets, carrying trays of quarter-litres of state-brewed Berliner Pilsener beer. Sitting over a couple – regular service ensured by the astute tip of a single Western D-Mark – felt like being in a surreal time warp. Over the bar hung a faded photograph of a woodland scene, a young boy and girl holding hands in a forest glade in the Harz Mountains. It looked sentimental and bucolic. Until I squinted to read the caption: Buchen Wald im Harz. Had it always been there, I wondered, from the time before Buchenwald became a synonym for evil, or for the time when it became one? But then the occasional sinister frisson was part of the essential Berlin experience. In the West money and conscience had sanitised all traces of the past. There was less of each in the East.

  Ironically it was in the West that the real remnant of Nazism remained, alive if not quite kicking. In 1981 Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s right-hand man arrested in Scotland on a controversial mission (the subject of countless conspiracy theories) to make peace with Britain prior to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, had for many years been the solitary inmate of the vast redbrick Spandau Prison. By then eighty-seven, Hess was on what newsmen consider a perennial death watch, and Reuters news desk asked me to ‘redo’ his obituary. The message from London added the rider – in the even then outdated telexese from the days when costs were calculated per word – ‘though realis
e he ungotaboutalot recently’. Hess might have ‘ungotaboutalot’, but the fears of his imminent demise were serious enough to have his son Wolf-Rüdiger come to visit him. I met him outside. Having been just three years old when his father made his ill-fated mission, and having not seen him again until he was in his thirties (Hess was allowed only one thirty-minute visit per month), he could tell me little. As I shook his hand in farewell, it occurred to me that I was now just ‘two handshakes’ away from Adolf Hitler. A chilling thought.

  Back in East Berlin I had happily found another local pub to call my own, one where the past also lingered, but without the same taint. It had been a balmy evening in early summer when I first discovered Metzer Eck, while returning from a day ‘on the other side’. I was also responsible for providing reports in English for Reuters from West Berlin, which made life occasionally schizophrenic. This had been one of those days covering the hijack of an airliner by Poles claiming political asylum in West Berlin, followed by a minor riot between squatters and police near a bar named after Bobby Sands, the IRA hunger-striker. So it was with all that Western confusion rattling around in my head that I ventured up a side street and stumbled into the secret heart of East Berlin.

  As I got out of the U-Bahn at Senefelder Platz, I had decided to explore a little. Instead of my usual plod up Schönhauser Allee, past the great bulk of the Volkspolizei station and the wall of the old Jewish cemetery, where the arrangement of the brickwork still displayed Stars of David, I took the back streets, past where an architecturally interesting old nineteenth-century water tower stood. But before I reached the water tower a welcoming glow from a corner bar beckoned. The sign above the door read Metzer Eck. As I creaked open the door and glanced into the warm smoky atmosphere, the bar appeared as welcoming as any I had yet encountered in East Berlin: not very. There was the immediate sharp sense of mistrust, the unspoken question: ‘Who is it? What does he want here?’ In the Western half of the same city the answers would have been simple and obvious: ‘A passing stranger, in search of a quick beer.’ In the East there were always second thoughts. It is always disconcerting to walk into a bar for the first time in a part of the world you do not yet know very well. All the more so when it is a part of the world controlled by a paranoid totalitarian state, where you still have a foreign accent and society is riddled with informers.

  I was therefore not totally at ease as I took up a standing position by the bar and ordered a small Pils. It is one of the English-speaking world’s more common myths about Germany that the natives drink lager beer in huge litre jugs called Steins; they do occasionally in Bavaria, particularly at Oktoberfest time, and the great jug is actually called a Krug (Stein is a German-American term). In Berlin, they almost invariably drink Pils, much drier and hoppier, and mostly from a tiny twenty-five-centilitre glass with a delicate stem, and usually with a little doily arranged around the base to catch any drips. Anyhow that – minus the doily, which the East had run out of – was what I was holding in my hand, trying to sip nonchalantly, when the man with the beard and thick black-framed glasses approached me.

  Even though I had indeed gone into the bar, not just for a beer but in the hope of striking up a conversation, I was still more than a little unnerved by his approach. It was not just the fact that the beard and glasses, coupled with a black polo neck and battered leather jacket made him look a bit like a comic book caricature of a spy, nor even the – substantially disconcerting in itself – fact that he appeared to be wearing a human molar tooth on a chain around his neck, but that his first words, albeit heavily accented, were undeniably in English. Spooky. How did he know? Was I exuding some subliminal Anglophone aura? And then I realised: tucked under my arm was a copy of The Times. What the bloke with the beard was asking was if he could have a look at it.

  This immediately placed me in a quandary. Could he? Well, of course. But should I? Was this a test? Was he a Stasi plant who had been tailing me, pre-empted my subconscious and realising I was bound to gravitate towards the pub, had gone on ahead to lie in wait for me, so he could catch me out disseminating hostile propaganda to solid socialist citizens of the workers’ and peasants’ state? On balance, I decided probably not. And on second thoughts, did I really care? The ‘Star Trek directive’ only went so far, and if he actually asked to see the paper, then who was I to deny him. It was surprising enough to come across anyone in East Berlin who could actually read it. It is another one of those myths about Germans that they all speak perfect English. Very few do, other than businessmen, bankers and car salesmen. And certainly in those days, on the eastern side of the Wall, next to nobody did. They didn’t even learn it in school; the only compulsory language on the curriculum was Russian. And if they went abroad at all it was usually only to Poland or Czechoslovakia, where the inhabitants mostly had some German, if only because the Germans had a not wholly appreciated habit of popping in over the years, usually in large numbers.

  While I was reflecting on all this, of course, the bloke with the beard was staring at me in a strange way, probably because I hadn’t answered him yet. He repeated the question in German. I answered in German and his wary attitude returned – after all what sort of East German had access to foreign newspapers? Only the sort you didn’t want to ask too many questions of, if you were an ordinary citizen, not that for a moment I suspected he was. I handed over the paper, and he perused it for a bit, glancing mainly at the headlines. I had no idea how much he was taking in. Then he turned back to me and made a few comments in English. And I slowly realised he was testing whether my command of the language matched his. I could see him grudgingly, wonderingly, admitting that I might be the genuine article, an adventurous tourist perhaps strayed way off-course. His name was Jochen, he volunteered. I told him my name and he bought me a beer. I bought him one back and for the next hour or so we stood there next to the bar, on either side of the shoulder-high tiled oven that was the most traditional form of Berlin central heating, and talked quite a lot about very little. It was a form of verbal fencing, that I was to discover was the prelude to any friendship, even the most casual in a society founded on mutual mistrust.

  After a few beers we agreed to meet again a few days later, and yet again stood on either side of the Kachelofen, resting our beers on it. He insisted on talking English – he was desperate to practise his – which I found mildly irritating – I was keen to improve my Berlin German. There was also the fact that it made me feel conspicuous. Jochen, I was to find out, liked being conspicuous, particularly if it meant demonstrating his learning. He was a stage designer, whichwent some way towards explaining his penchant for the dramatic in his clothing, not just the tooth – which I never quite managed to ask about and he never explained – and the leather jacket, but a wide-brimmed fedora hat which accompanied them. His sexual preferences were, I quickly decided, ambiguous, though he never demonstrated them.

  He doted on his mother. She was a specialist in Latin America and travelled to Cuba; the two of them were working together, he told me, on a book about the history of the Sandinista movement in Nicaragua. It was Jochen’s one overt gripe against the party that they never allowed him to travel with her. He never told me if she was a member of the Communist Party, though I would have occasion to come to believe it. He was not, he insisted, probably because he didn’t relish the thought of too much inspection of his private life. But he was, he proclaimed, a convinced socialist, mostly it turned out for private reasons. His father had been a soldier in the war and had abandoned his wife shortly after Jochen’s birth in the early 1950s to move to the West. She was one of the few who deliberately chose the communist East. It soon became clear that Jochen’s personal and political life, had become fused, his hatred for capitalism developed out of scorn for the father who abandoned him for it. His devotion to his mother led to devotion to her ideology. He was a textbook case of Freudian Cold War psychology.

  Jochen became my first East German friend, although it was a slightly odd relationship with,
for me, too many aspects that were to say the least ambivalent, although my wife’s arrival cleared up at least one of them. Jochen had a Bohemian lifestyle at a ‘garret artist’ level as a semi-freelance in a profession subsidised by the state, which approved of the arts as long as they kept in their political place. He had little money and did little work, living on beer and basics. His living conditions made our spartan apartment seem luxurious: a tiny studio flat with shared toilet facilities on the landing. I went round for dinner one night and he introduced me to homemade Prussian potato soup, a Berlin speciality ever since Frederick the Great introduced the humble spud in the eighteenth century. It was surprisingly good and I told him so. And he puffed with pride and said that was proof all the West’s money didn’t make for a better lifestyle. He wasn’t wholly right, but he wasn’t wholly wrong either. No East German ever made soup by opening a tin or a packet. For one very good reason: they didn’t have either.

  My conversations with Jochen at the bar had the advantage of making me an accepted fixture in Metzer Eck, if still for the moment considered an outsider. Standing at the bar meant, inevitably in the course of ordering and paying for beer, that I also got into conversation with the man behind it. He would turn out to be more influential on my attitudes to East Germany that anyone else I would ever meet. Alex Margan was a wry, witty, thoughtful man by then in his mid-forties, and he had one of those things that in East Germany was not best publicised: a naturally inquiring mind. For that reason alone he was fascinated by having a genuine ‘foreigner’ in his pub. He had listened to me speaking English but had not been entirely convinced at first, he told me. He had come across people who pretended to be foreign, to seem more interesting. Then when that suspicion faded, he wondered if we could have a conversation as he had no English. It was only when I was in there a few evenings on my own and we got talking in German that he really began to open up.