by Peter Millar
Rattling through the night in a prison van, under armed guard with sirens screaming in the distance, we could have been forgiven for being gripped with despair. But Berliners are a tough lot. Instead there was Berliner Schnauze (literally ‘Berlin snout’ but a lot more easily understood if you think of it as ‘Cockney lip’; the two have a lot in common). Martha, a fifty-year-old bar landlady, nagged the two young policemen: ‘A fine way to behave, this is. I suppose you’d do the same to your own mothers. You need your rear ends spanked.’ ‘I’ll tell you one thing, I think I’ll take the day off work tomorrow.’ ‘Don’t you worry, they’ll claim their fortieth anniversary record production figures without you.’ ‘Oh, we’re slowing down – do you think that means the cops have to economise on petrol too.’ As the truck passed the district police station, we showed them what we were worth: a rousing chorus of the ‘Internationale’ again. They had taught them well in school ‘Völker, hört die Signale, auf zum letzten Gefecht, die Internationa-a-a-le erkämpft das Menschenrecht’ (the German version was particularly suited to our situation: ‘People, hear the call, march on to the final fight, the Internationale will win our human rights).
After twenty minutes we pulled into a brick courtyard and stopped in a line of other trucks. And waited. And waited. It was an hour of suspense laced with working-class black humour: ‘I wonder where that boy of mine is,’ wondered Martha. ‘I bet they’ve got him too.’ We asked the police. They had. He was in the next truck. His disembodied but still sarcastic voice came through the night air: ‘Hello Mum, got you too, did they?’ We fell apart in nervous laughter. ‘Hey mister, let me out,’ called a bubble-gum-chewing girl from the back, ‘I’m dying to go for a weewee.’ ‘I can’t help that love. You’ll have to hold on.’ ‘It’s alright for you, big boy – I’ve got nothing to squeeze.’ And then: ‘Oh bollocks, I’ve just ruined my last pair of tights.’
Then we shunted off again into the dark, still in convoy. The cells were full, one policeman carelessly revealed. This time the laughter stopped when the truck did. The doors opened to reveal a high-walled, floodlit courtyard, ringed by People’s Police in jackboots and jodhpurs, a scene from every nightmare about Germany that every German shares. They clasped lethally thin truncheons, the same as I had seen the Stasi man whip across the fallen girl’s legs down on Alexanderplatz. Through the chicken wire that caged us inside the lorry, we faced a brightly lit room, like a carwash, with white-tiled ceiling, walls and floor. Around the edge of the floor ran gutters to take away urine and vomit. Young men stood spreadeagled, legs apart, hands high against the wall, quiet, subdued and sick. Anyone foolish enough to complain had his inside leg measured with a truncheon. Not many said anything after that.
The man squeezed next to me in the prison lorry sighed deeply in despair. The infectious collective euphoria that had survived our arrest evaporated into the cold night air that seemed to have swept in across the north German plain, straight from Siberia. This, one of my fellow prisoners recognised, was Marzahn police post, a forbidding fortress amid the drab tower blocks on the eastern edge of East Berlin. ‘Out, one by one,’ ordered a blond crew-cut officer, and pushed us to a neat bureaucratic desk where identity cards were taken away, the men separated from the women and shoved into the white room to join the miserable line. It looked like the party was over. Big time.
And no time for heroics. When it was my turn to present my identity card to the cold-faced clerk sorting humanity at his folding card table, I handed over my passport and my press card. So where was ‘We are the people’ now? I could argue that suffering the same fate as my fellow captives would not help them, whereas by getting released and spreading the news of what was happening, I just might. And in any case they would have found the passport when they searched me. But to be honest a far more simple principle had kicked in: the principle of self-preservation. The blond beast behind him snarled and shot bayonet glances at the two policemen who had been our guards. Their dragnet had caught a crab: the last thing anyone wanted here was the presence of a foreign reporter. East Germany wanted to do its dirty washing very much in private.
I was hustled away, out of the glare of the blinding white lights into a welcome darkness, then down a courtyard and into a drab administrative building. It could have been a 1960s school or local government office. The stern-faced sergeant accompanying me pressed a buzzer and the doors unlocked. He showed his pass and led me upstairs. I was apprehensive, but not as much as I would have been had I been standing spreadeagled against a wall in that white-tiled garage. The sergeant left and my interrogators arrived. They didn’t look at all as I imagined they would. But then no one who has grown up on a diet of old World War II movies can entirely shake the image of stiff-faced Prussians with clipped accents saying, ‘Ve are asking ze questions.’
Predictably there were two of them: the good cop and the bad cop, just like in the movies. They even said they were cops – ‘Kripo’, Kriminalpolizei, the German equivalent of CID – but then secret policemen aren’t supposed to give their profession as secret policemen. And these two were Stasi. Nobody else was going to be allowed to grill a Western reporter caught up in a demonstration that challenged a totalitarian state. The ‘bad cop’ was short, with a dark-haired crew cut, and sneered a lot, particularly at my press card. The ‘good cop’ had shoulder-length blond hair, a leather bomber jacket and tight blue jeans. He could have been one of the crowd. He almost certainly had been. Neither would give me a name.
They wanted a statement. So I gave them one: a detailed description of my night’s adventures from my missing car to the back of the police van, though I saw no need to let them know where I might have stopped off for a swift beer or to use the telephone. The lad in jeans, who was obviously in charge, took it all down, fairly, neatly and allowing me to see it in case I wanted to alter anything. My only suggestions were a few corrections to his grammar. I was feeling cheeky again. They took my documents away. Somewhere in a backroom in Normannenstrasse, somebody was checking through that thick file I would only uncover more than three years later. But I had no need to see it with my own eyes to believe in its existence, no doubt with additions courtesy of Moscow’s much larger ‘fraternal service’, the Stasi’s Big Brother. He went over the night’s proceedings at least half a dozen times, checking for inconsistencies. At first I didn’t know what he expected. Then he made it clear: had I joined in any of these ‘anti-socialist protests’. ‘Of course not,’ I told him and handed out the old line remembered from my Reuters days: my mission was like Captain Kirk’s: to boldly go but not to interfere in the native civilisation. It raised a chuckle for half a second. Thanks to the porous airwaves, even in East Germany there were Trekkies. It was a lie, of course. It is not every day that you get the chance to join in a revolution you believe in.
In the end they gave up on the interrogation and took me to a spartan little anteroom of some sort where the sergeant who had brought me in and the ‘bad cop’ took turns to guard me. Their main task, it seemed, was to stop me looking out of the curtained window into the courtyard below where they were still bringing in and unloading prison vans full of their fellow citizens. The sergeant looked tired. He lived nearby, he said, when I squeezed a few words out of him at last; in one of the tower blocks of Marzahn. He wanted to get home to his wife. He had little taste for the night’s work, but blamed the ‘rowdies’. Then he went silent, suspecting I was trying to provoke him.
After an hour or two, as the clock hand crept round and the sky edged towards a still distant autumn dawn, the ‘hard man’ grew more chatty. He was only twenty-nine, he said, a few years younger than me. He had been on duty almost continuously for three weeks. It was the first indication I had had as to how much the exodus, the anniversary and the Gorbachev visit had strained both the manpower of even East Germany’s overstaffed police force, and its nerves. Close to, he looked exhausted. ‘I have had only a few hours sleep this week,’ he admitted. ‘My wife has hardly seen me. I had only
just got to bed two hours before I was hauled out again for this emergency. What sort of characters are they out there anyway? Hooligans, I’ll bet.’
I said they seemed to me to be just ordinary people, decent Berliners who were fed up with their lot and had thought things might be changing enough for them to shout about it on the streets without being locked up and beaten. He looked offended, shocked, suspicious, then just tired again. ‘Na ja, gut, perhaps they are right.’ It was a thought he instantly regretted having uttered. He turned on me, the hard man and the soft all at once: ‘This is just chitchat, right, between us? I mean, you being a reporter and all? You wouldn’t publish this in some West rag just to get me into trouble? If you did, I’d run into you again some time you know.’ It was meant as a threat but it sounded desperate; a year later some of the Stasi men who had been sent out that night to mingle with and spy on the demonstrators claimed it had changed their lives. It was easy to be wise after the event. Enough people had had the same experience in 1945.
By six thirty a.m. we were both restless. His denim-clad colleague came back. They were, he said, trying to locate my car. They might have been, for all I know; they never found it. That was left to the hire firm who, although I reported the inconvenience to them, did not get too worried for a couple of weeks, then sent their own man to find it and sent The Sunday Times a thumping bill. I was more worried at the time in case the delay had been to allow the Stasi to search my hotel room. What concerned me most was that they might find a carrier bag in which I had left social security papers Alex had asked me to take to Kerstin and Andreas in West Berlin. These papers proved they had made full contributions towards the East German state pension scheme (not that they had any choice). West Germany would honour refugees’ contributions made in the East, but, being German, they insisted on seeing the paperwork.
My worry at that precise moment, however, was less about helping them deal with bureaucracy, but that if the Stasi found them they could accuse me – quite rightly – of smuggling documents belonging to the East German state. It was still on my mind as shortly after seven a.m. I was driven by police through streets that were now conspicuously empty, the pale autumn sun reflecting in puddles left from the use of water cannon. I had been given until midday to leave the GDR. We pulled up at the Grand Hotel and my suspicions deepened when the reception said they could not find my key. I asked for the floor manager to open my room, expecting the worst, particularly when I heard hurried grunts and movements inside. I edged open the door not knowing what to expect, but a sudden, unmistakeably female squeal made me suspect it wasn’t the Stasi after all.
It wasn’t. Poking their heads out from under the bedclothes were an American correspondent, who for obvious reasons shall remain nameless – he is today a senior consultant for an international communications company – and a young British reporter. They had, he explained as he hurried into his trousers under the gaze of my bemused police minder, spotted me being herded into the back of the police truck, and reckoned I wouldn’t be needing my bed for the night. Oh, and by the way, she – also necessarily nameless – added by way of excuse: she had rung The Sunday Times to tell them I had been arrested. She thought they’d put it on the front page.
They had. Late, of course, so late in fact that it had only made a very final edition which got little further than central London. (I only saw it days later.) But I had got my front page. The ‘splash’ no less. My story as updated over the phone from Metzer Eck beneath the headline: ‘Gorby, Help Us!’ Alongside was a full-length picture of a snarling, baton-wielding People’s Policeman. To the left: my picture byline, and the brief statement saying ‘The Sunday Times Central Europe correspondent Peter Millar was arrested last night during the demonstrations in East Berlin’. Right now the East Germans were no longer arresting me, they were expelling me: I was given until noon to leave the country (i.e. cross into West Berlin), and was unsure when or if I would be allowed back.
‘I called your wife,’ Bob, the foreign editor said in his usual laid-back laconic manner when I checked in to say I was on my way back. ‘She didn’t seem too worried. I expect it’s the sort of thing that happens to you all the time.’
‘Not exactly.’
‘Well, hurry back,’ he added. ‘I’ve got another story for you. A change of scenery.’
Neither of us, even then, realised the big one was waiting just around the corner.
10
9/11/1989: All Fall Down
‘It’s a big story, it really is, you should hang on until at least the end of next week.’ Italian Photographer Dario Mitidieri was at his most persuasive. We were sitting over sundowners in the bar of the Kalahari Sands Hotel in Windhoek, Namibia.
In a week’s time – between November 7th and 11th, 1989 – the former Southwest Africa was to have its first democratic elections, the first area administered by the apartheid regime in Pretoria to concede the vote to the black population. I was there to do a ‘curtainraiser’: an advance feature to whet the public’s appetite. It was Bob’s idea of a ‘break’. Admittedly it was a bit of a change from Warsaw and Berlin. ‘I dunno, Dario,’ I said as we nursed our drinks in the tropical heat, ‘I have a feeling I should get back to Berlin’. Luckily, Bob agreed. No matter how exotic the Namibian jungles and desert might be, I would have felt seven kinds of idiot if I had still been sitting there on November 9th. It was Dario who ended up kicking himself.
With hindsight it seems improbable in the extreme that barely a week before the Berlin Wall came down, a journalist who had spent years living there, and even covering the remarkable events happening in Eastern Europe over the previous months, had no idea it would happen. But then you have to take into account that nor did the CIA, MI6, nor West Germany’s intelligence service the BND* nor even the KGB. Nor was it in the pipedreams of any civil rights campaigner or even in the wildest drunken fantasies of anyone in the pubs and bars of Berlin (East or West). The best anyone hoped for was change: gradual, creeping reform that would make the dictatorship in East Berlin just that tiny bit less dictatorial, more responsive to public opinion, more open to economic reforms that could benefit the population. And then maybe – just maybe – one day, when things had improved, a more liberal visa regime would be introduced that would make movement between the two German states easier, in both directions. To have said that the borders would be open within a week and German unity a done deed within a year would have sounded like rampant insanity.
It was not that there were no signs of progress. There were. Bigger ones than had been expected. The demonstrations that ruined the planned fortieth birthday party had taken their toll on morale within the East German politburo. Barely ten days later, on October 18th, the geriatrics who for years had fawned on their little autocratic leader, Erich Honecker, turned and stabbed him in the back. His successor was an apparatchik some twenty years younger who had been waiting in the wings for years, a man Honecker had handpicked because he was no threat. His name was Egon Krenz, but to most East Germans he was known simply as Horseface. For obvious reasons. He was the last man who expected to inherit a crisis and the least capable of coping with it.
This surprise development had meant that barely two weeks after my expulsion from the GDR, I touched down once again at Tegel in West Berlin. Exhausted I found myself a hotel in the West, flopped on the bed and turned on the television, then decided – true to the old rule – I had better check in with the desk back in London. The duty staffer on the foreign desk came on and asked, rather shrilly, what I was doing in West Berlin: ‘Shouldn’t you be in the East?’ I humoured her as best as I could without shouting. It was ten thirty at night and the only really sensible thing for me to be doing if I was to hit the ground running the next day was to take in the West German news coverage on television and in the press. That way I would know what was going on in the big picture before I started focusing again on the details. There was also the serious possibility that I would not be allowed back into East Berlin.
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In the meantime I planned to have a quick meeting with Kerstin so I would be able to pass first-hand information to Bärbel and Alex if and when I crossed into the East. We met at Cafe Kranzler, a pavement cafe on the corner of the Ku’damm which for three decades had been the place to see and be seen in West Berlin. Kerstin and her husband Andreas had been out of East Germany barely two weeks and spent part of that time as refugees in Poland, but looked as if they had emerged from a glossy fashion catalogue rather than the drab world beyond the Wall. Both were sporting what for Germans, East and West, was the symbol of the good life: leather blouson designer jackets. Kerstin combined satin-pink lipstick with a spiky-slick hairdo and tight tapering trousers. Andreas’s fashionably faded new blue jeans offset exactly his pastel-green leathers.
The waitress smiled politely as she took our order; nobody was treated like a refugee in those heady weeks, provided, of course, that they looked as if they could pay the bill. After all, Cafe Kranzler was itself a Flüchtling. In its pre-war days when it was frequented by the young Marlene Dietrich it had stood in the city centre, on the corner of Friedrichstrasse and Unter den Linden, now just across the Wall. Kerstin giggled. ‘It’s all so colourful,’ she said. ‘Such consumerism,’ Andreas sighed happily. These were not young idealists, delighting in the freedom of expression offered by life in the West; they were young materialists delighted by the shopping. What had most impressed the pair was the food hall at KaDeWe (an acronym for Kaufhaus des Westens: Shop of the West), West Berlin’s most exclusive store. It was the first stop for West Berliners showing off the riches of capitalism to relatives from the East. Kerstin and Andreas went there with Aunt Renate.