1989

by Peter Millar

  Of all the others who gathered round the Stammtisch several nights a week, the only one who had regularly visited the West, and not just West Germany, was Bernd. As a musician with the Berlin Symphonic Orchestra, he regularly travelled on trips that were designed to show that the communist state had every bit as great a command of the cultural arts as it had of sport. And that at least would not turn out to have been the result of performance-enhancing drugs. Bernd had been to Belgium and the Netherlands and he was very excited because now, for the first time, he was going to Britain. ‘You’ll’ love London,’ I told him. ‘Ahh, we’re not going there,’ he replied. ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘We’re going to Wales,’ he said. It appeared the level of cultural reciprocity East Germany aspired to hadn’t quite been achieved. The Berlin Philharmonic (West) played at the Albert Hall and the Queen Elizabeth Hall on London’s South Bank; the Berlin Symphonic (East) were playing in Cardiff and Llandudno.

  That didn’t stop Bernd being excited though. Not particularly because he was going to Britain, but because he was going to the West and that, as always, was a shopping opportunity. Particularly when he had a wife as demanding as Uschi. (Wives of course were not permitted to accompany their spouses on foreign trips, to diminish the chances of defection, although for obvious reasons even that occasionally didn’t work.) For the next two weeks, however, I had only one task every evening Bernd was present in the pub: to school him in the correct pronunciation of the one English phrase he desperately needed to know if his home life was to be worth living over the coming year: ‘Please can you sell me a pair of orange leather ladies’ trousers?’ I tried in vain to explain to him that no matter how well he pronounced it, he was going to get odd looks in Llandudno’s Marks and Spencer. But he wasn’t having it; according to Uschi they were all the rage in West Berlin. And the West was the West, wasn’t it? He came back several weeks later, sadly empty-handed and completely bemused by the ‘very rude’ reception his request had received.

  There was one other regular who had been in the West, but not for a long time. Hans Busch was the exception at Alex and Bärbel’s Stammtisch: he was a communist, an actual card-carrying member of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, the ‘leading force in the state’, created by an enforced merger of the Socialists into the Communist Party when both became legal again in 1945. Ironically, Busch was the grandson of a wayward Polish nobleman who had lost his fortune gambling in the heady days of the Weimar Republic, survived by selling off his title and settled with a German wife in a little town near the Dutch border. Hans’s mother Liselotte became a committed communist, a political affiliation she concealed during the Nazi era by marrying a staid conservative businessman and producing babies. Hans was born near the end of the war and in 1956 his mother finally followed her convictions and decided she and her children would up sticks to experience the new ‘socialist state on German soil’ for themselves. Hans was therefore a chosen son of the GDR who, when challenged that East Germany was only communist because it was the ideology of the occupying power, replied: ‘You could make the same conclusion about capitalism in West Germany.’

  Busch’s youthful enthusiasm for his mother’s ideology had taken a few knocks over the years however. Initially he had the convert’s zealousness mixed with the quirk that being a declared revolutionary was accepted by the establishment. He delighted in the vocational training in forestry he received through the state-sponsored apprenticeship scheme, and at eighteen even volunteered for the Bereitschaftspolizei (the public order police). Unlike most East Germans who regarded the compulsory school subject as a chore, Busch had been as eager to learn Russian as a Muslim might be to learn Arabic: because it was the language of his religion. Alex, a lapsed Catholic, teased him that the party’s prescribed ‘self-criticism’ sessions were akin to confession. ‘Maybe it’s because it’s a form of lapsed Christianity that I believe in it,’ Busch retorted.

  In truth his faith had lapsed too. As a good-looking young man he had had a string of girlfriends in a state where sex was positively encouraged as a distraction for the young, not least because of a falling birth rate due to cramped living conditions. But when he lost his job because of an affair with a visiting West German girl who was deemed a ‘security risk’, he began to wonder about the party’s insistence on dominating every aspect of his life.

  When the party refused him permission to attend his father’s funeral in West Germany, an even deeper disillusion set in. In the end Busch had devoted himself to the apprentice scheme he so firmly believed in, and was now warden of a residential home around the corner from the pub, which provided temporary lodging during the week for youngsters from the provinces come to learn about the print industry. He would still go through the motions of defending socialism – despite Alex’s jibes about ‘our friend Lenin here’ – but privately he would admit the truth of the old maxim about life under communism: ‘They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work’.

  But it was Dieter and Hannelore, the husband and wife team who when I first discovered Metzer Eck worked there as waiters, who had the most heart-rending tale of the inhumanity of the Wall. It took me a while to understand it, not least because ‘Hanni’ had the most impenetrable Berlin accent I had yet encountered. But also because it followed an inhuman logic all of its own.

  It concerned her uncle Eberhard, whom the family nicknamed ‘Pieps’. Pieps had lived in Teltow which all his life he, and the rest of the family, had considered an outer suburb of Berlin (like someone in Orpington or Harrow might be considered to live in the outer suburbs of London). But Teltow had a Brandenburg rather than a Berlin postcode, so in August 1963 it suddenly found itself on the other side of the Wall. To the inhabitants of such fringe suburbs the sudden severing of their lifelines to the city they thought they belonged to was unbelievable. Teltow was little more than a straggle of streets where the Greater Berlin that had grown up in the nineteenth century sprawled out into the countryside. On its own it was nothing, yet now, literally overnight, this little overflow of urban sprawl had been designated a rural village. It was an anomaly on a par with the ‘walled garden’ allotments I had seen from my helicopter tour when I first arrived. It was true that Pieps and his neighbours could still drive into ‘Berlin’ – at least the eastern half of it – but now it was a journey of some forty kilometres just to reach the edge of the city and when they did it was a part they were completely unfamiliar with.

  But far more importantly, they were severed from much of their lives. Many of them had worked in nearby parts of the city. Now their jobs – earning valued D-Marks – were forever inaccessible. For Pieps and a couple of his mates, there was one thing that was even worse: they had been permanently cut off from their local pub. One night late in that fateful summer of 1961 – a quiet night, as all nights had now become since their road ended in a barbed wire fence illuminated by searchlights – Pieps and two of his friends were drinking in the bar they had perforce used since they could no longer get to Franz’s, only half a dozen streets away. At last one of them stood up and said, ‘I’ve had it with this. I’m going for a drink at Franz’s.’

  Bleary with beer, the three of them staggered into the night. The one who had made the suggestion strode forward with deliberation in his step, the other close behind, while Pieps who had had a bit more to drink, staggered confusedly after them. It was only when he saw the lights and the barbed wire that he half-sobered up and realised what they were facing. He ran after them. But his two drinking buddies had been prepared. They simply hadn’t told Pieps all of it. As they came close to the fence they dived for a hole in the ground, an area where they had previously scooped out earth and surreptitiously snipped through the barbed wire. Now they pushed their way through and ran for the second fence as if the hounds of hell were on their heels, as they soon would be. Only poor old Pieps, not quite in on the plan, ended up struggling with the wire, trying to follow them but caught hopelessly, and was unable to find the gap his two friends had squeezed throug
h. As it seemed he might have found a hole big enough, two crashing rifle shots rent the air, and splintered the bone in his leg. The people in the pub they had just left watched silently as the guards took him away.

  He was taken to Rummelsburg, the strict security detention centre in the south-east of Berlin, where a quarter century later I would – thankfully only briefly – also find myself. Pieps was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment; but when he emerged it was not only as a political misfit with a mark on his identity card that doomed him to menial work, but as a cripple, one leg an inch shorter than the other. He died not long after. Hannelore’s father was in the National People’s Army and considered his brother-in-law an unwelcome embarrassment. But she remembered him. Alex opened a bottle of his best Nordhauser Korn, and we all honoured poor old Pieps the way he would have wanted: with a round of schnapps.

  It was for both Jackie and me an initiation into another world a Germany nobody had taught us about at school, and at the same time an invitation into the large extended family of friendship in a totalitarian society. We were becoming at home in a world that most correspondents at best only visited. At Christmas that year we held a party in our flat and served English roast turkey to a group of twenty that included Alex, Bärbel, Udo, Manne, Hannelore, Dieter, Günter. Even Jochen too. Alex brought bottles of best Berliner Pilsner. And we turned up the music for the benefit of the microphones in the walls. And drank and talked and told jokes.

  But it was Dieter’s recasting of the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin that got the loudest laugh: ‘There was this plague of rats down at the offices of the party,’ he started, already getting chuckles from his audience. ‘Along comes this little girl and she says she can get rid of the rats if they promise to give her whatever she wants afterwards. After a lot of umming and ahhing, they agree. So the little girl puts her hand in her pocket and brings out a clockwork mouse on a string. She leads it out of the building and as she does all the rats come running after her. When she reaches the River Spree, she kicks the clockwork mouse in. All the rats jump in after it and drown. The comrades are delighted, and say, “That was marvellous, little girl. Now we will keep our promise: what should we give you?” And the little girl smiles her sweetest smile and says, “A clockwork Russian soldier.”’

  I almost hoped the men with the microphones could have heard it. After all, it was only a fairy tale. Wasn’t it?

  5

  Swords to Ploughshares

  ‘I don’t know what he wants,’ said Jackie, her face reflecting something between panic, despair and disgust, as she pushed the rear door of the flat to, and summoned me to deal with the caller. I walked down the corridor and opened it again. And understood in a flash. It was Müllerchen. And all three of Jackie’s emotions were perfectly understandable.

  For a start Müllerchen looked like something no self-respecting cat would drag in. To say he was rat-faced was to do a grave disservice to most rats. He was a small man, about whom the word ‘mousey’ springs to mind, except that people keep mice as pets which give altogether the wrong impression. He had lank, greasy dark hair and a moustache that suggested he had himself tried to pick up some rodent with his teeth and half of it had remained stuck there. His name was Muller, the universally used diminutive Müllerchen being a reference to his size and general weediness rather than, as it might have been, an endearment. He lived with his wife and an unconscionable number of children in the ground floor flat where he fulfilled a modicum of the duties of a concierge.

  His official title was ‘KVW-leiter’ which stood for Kommunalwohnungsverwaltungsleiter, or communal accommodation supervisor. But everyone called him the Hausmeister (housemaster), a title he not only hated but which was hugely politically incorrect because it had been the word used under the Nazis when whoever filled the role was supposed to report to the Gestapo any suggestion of ‘treacherous’ talk about the party. There was, of course, little reason to suggest that that element of the job had changed, although Müllerchen was far too dim, and almost invariably far too drunk to take in, let alone report any whisperings of discontent against the SED.

  To make things worse, he spoke German as if it were a cross between Mongolian and Dutch – with apologies to both – a hissing, sibilant, nasal version of the language with a backstreet Berlin accent that confused consonants and had only the remotest idea of what grammar might be. Imagine a German with a sound but basic command of the Queen’s English being faced by a Glaswegian-born Cockney with a lisp.

  Even so, Jackie had managed to grasp the essence of what he wanted: ‘I think he wants our newspapers.’ This was said with some trepidation. And rightly so. Because what Müllerchen wanted was not our copies of Neues Deutschland or any of the other esteemed, two-a-penny publications of the official East German governmentbacked media, but the West German newspapers we also had delivered daily. These were, of course, taboo. Despite the fact that most East Germans could watch West Berlin television and listen to West Berlin radio, the idea of them actually getting their hands on words in print that had not been passed by Communist Party censors was anathema to their masters.

  Our newspapers were delivered specially, not by a newsagent, but by a hand-picked courier in the pay of the East German postal service, and undoubtedly vetted for party loyalty by the Stasi. They were not pushed through our letter box but had to be handed over in person to one of us, or to Erdmute in her role as office secretary. Reading the Western press was for Erdmute one of the big perks of her job, and no doubt explained why the Reuters subscription also included several of the more popular West German glossy magazines which she and Helga could be found perusing over coffee in our kitchen during their mid-morning fag break.

  None of these publications were supposed to leave the office. Even when read, they were supposed to be disposed of in a special waste bin earmarked for incineration, though every now and then I did notice one of the glossies stage a successful escape bid via Erdmute’s handbag. Müllerchen, however, was another thing altogether. Jackie’s caution was admirable. For a start, if he really was conscientiously performing the duties of a Hausmeister, which I seriously doubted on grounds of his general incapacity, might this not well be a trick? A trap to compromise my standing as a correspondent on the grounds that I was ‘disseminating’ anti-GDR propaganda, such as the price of a discount three-piece suite, the ready availability of imported Greek asparagus, or adverts for holidays in Majorca?

  Certainly the idea of Müllerchen poring over the lengthy intellectual political leaders in the columns of Die Zeit, or perusing the foreign pages for ‘anti-socialist’ dispatches about the latest Soviet reverses in Afghanistan, seemed improbable to say the least. I decided initially to play the straight bat: I told him that unfortunately I needed the newspapers for my work and that even when finished with them, his government forbade me to let them leave the flat. I have rarely seen anyone look quite so crestfallen. If this was some sort of Stasi entrapment game, Müllerchen was playing a blinder. ‘Für die Kinder,’ he bleated. For the kids. ‘Just one page.’ I was puzzled. None of the broadsheet heavyweight newspapers we took regularly were famed for their funny pages. And I didn’t have the Muller family down as great sports fans. Which page could he mean? And then he told me, and I realised I should have known all along. ‘Die Fernsehprogramme.’ The television schedules. Of course!

  The East German government had long since given up the nigh impossible task of jamming the strong signals which not so much leaked over the Wall as were poured across it. After all an endless diet of soap opera from the dubbed import Dallas to West Germany’s home-grown Black Forest Clinic was just as effective an opiate for the masses in the East, as in the West. Better that they should escape into a television fantasy world rather than escape across the barbed wire fences that confined them in the real world. But in those days, long before on-screen electronic programme guides, nobody had any idea what was on and when. No publication available anywhere in East Germany published a schedule for
almost anything anybody ever watched. Yet here was Müllerchen with the answer just upstairs. He gave me his most ingratiating smile. How could I say no? It was easy. I wrapped myself in his government’s flag and told him I couldn’t possibly go against my host country’s regulations. Call it hard-hearted if you like but the idea of having a mendicant Müllerchen rapping on the back door on a regular basis just didn’t bear thinking about.

  But the inhabitants of our flat block weren’t all quite as antipathetic as Müllerchen or the unseen secret policeman in the flat next door. At quite the other extreme to both of them was Volker. If Müllerchen looked like a half-drowned rat, Volker looked like Bjorn from Abba. He had long blond hair which fell to his shoulders and a little wispy blond beard clearly cultivated from adolescent bum fluff to make him look older than he was. He was a would-be hippy who worked – given that not having a job in the workers’ paradise was illegal – as a gravedigger.

  Volker lived in the Hinterhof. The word translates literally as ‘back yard’, which is far from inaccurate but doesn’t quite do the concept justice. The big Berliner ‘rental barracks’ of the nineteenth century were built to a remarkable uniformity: all six stories high, but each roughly square in shape with the centre hollowed out to form a quadrangle open to the sky, the idea being that it allowed light and air to circulate to the living accommodation around it which was invariably cheaper than the ‘prestige’ apartments which faced onto the main road. It worked well in theory but even from its inception only to a limited extent in practice. For obvious reasons the sun only shone down into it when it was directly overhead, so for most of the day, and all of the winter, the Hinterhöfe and those who lived in them inhabited a world of deep shadow. Ours, however, was better than many, largely thanks to the Royal Air Force who had done the poor people of Berlin the favour of removing the apartment block immediately behind it. Instead of being enclosed on all four sides, therefore, our Hinterhof had three six storey sides and one bounded by a ten-foot wall and a patch of wasteland.