When I arrived in Berlin to take up a scholarship in early 1987, I found a city frozen in deep winter and Cold War division. The only ways through its notorious Wall were checkpoints where anything could happen.
The city seemed frozen solid. Skaters used the Spree river and canals as fume-free highways. Cars skidded as they took off from the lights. When I walked to the U-Bahn subway from my apartment each morning, I checked the temperature on the big thermometer in the apotheke’s window and began a daily guessing game. I knew that it was at least minus 10 when the hairs in my nostrils began to freeze. It was my first time in Berlin, and the big freeze of January 1987 cast a magical glitter over the divided city, adding to the sense of mystery and dark drama. A friend with a flat overlooking the Tiergarten station told me that it would take Soviet tanks only 15 minutes to reach them from the Brandenburg Gate.
In this atmosphere, with images of the movie The Spy Who Came in from the Cold surfacing in my head, I took the S-Bahn (rapid rail) to Friedrichstrasse station to make my first crossing of the Berlin Wall. My New Zealand friend, Gunter Bennung, had made contact with Jutta Bach, his old school friend from Potsdam days, and encouraged me to visit her. I was able to telephone to fix a time to meet her at the station. It was the only checkpoint available for foreigners crossing on foot. We spoke carefully above the clicks and hissing that signified the listeners. I told her I was a friend of an old friend who would like to take her to dinner. And she replied, in a measured voice, that she would be very happy to host me on my first visit to, loudly, “the capital of the DDR [Deutsche Demokratische Republik, in East Germany]”. At the station, she would be wearing a blue and yellow scarf, colours of the Freie Deutsche Jugend (Free German Youth) so that she would be easy to recognise.
There were different queues at the station, channelling different categories of humans. I became aware that I stood out in my self-conscious curiosity, my looks that were almost German, certainly Anglo-Saxon, among the majority with heads bowed in capped anxiety, scarved misery, overcoated desperation. It was as if they had been let out of a cage on condition they returned to it by midnight, or they would be turned into something worse than a pumpkin. I had to pay five Deutschmarks for a pass that let me stay in East Berlin for the eight hours that remained of the day. Five marks for entry to one of the worst shows on Earth. When I passed my passport across the counter, a man without expression moved it out of sight. What was he doing with it? There were mirrors above my head that he scanned before he moved me on with a short nod of his head. Now, I was required to change a minimum of 20 good solid Deutschmarks, real money, for socialist Monopoly notes, coins that would blow away in a strong breeze.
Then I put my bag on another counter to be searched by a Vopo (East German police) who rummaged through the contents until he came up with my notebook: “Why do you need this?” “I … er … so I don’t forget things.” He turned the pages with my scribbled addresses, expenses, names, then tossed it back in my bag: “Don’t forget too much, eh?” and smirked at my obvious anxiety. “Or use up all that paper too quickly. Next!”
I went through a metal door to encounter a small crowd that seemed expectant only of bad news. The smoke of two-stroke engine exhausts drifted pungently through the station’s dirty tiled halls that resonated to the sound of speeding lawnmowers – the Trabants that charged down Friedrichstrasse, determined to be cars. Jutta was not among the crowd, but kept her distance from curious eyes and cameras, standing beside a pillar with the signalled scarf. We embraced and I went to give her the gifts I had brought but she was quick to say, “Not here”, and drew me away from the station.
Jutta guided me down an icy gasse (lane) as the afternoon light shrank, shrouded by the cold. There were the scars of shell wounds in the masonry, bullet holes, the graffiti of guns everywhere, as if the war had finished only yesterday. No one else seemed to be walking this way and once we were out of sight of the station, Jutta stopped and I could show her the gifts I had brought, items rare or unobtainable in the east: a net of oranges, a kilo pack of coffee, two bars of Lindt chocolate. And a four-pack of supersoft toilet rolls. I saw instantly from Jutta’s face that the “advice” I had been given by my young flatmates about certain shortages in the DDR had been wrong, but she was gracious enough to quickly put me at my ease.
We walked around the centre for a while: jackbooted soldiers at the Neue Wache (New Guardhouse) memorial, shrine for the victims of militarism; the Museum Island, still half-ruined like the cathedral, its unlit dome reflecting ghostily in the mirror glass of the Palast der Republik. Then I shouted her a meal in the restaurant of the best hotel, cheap by Western standards, but which could be paid for only with Western currencies.
Jutta was now 46 and had worked hard for socialism all her life. She counted herself lucky that, as an official interpreter in Spanish, she had actually been to Cuba. But when she elaborated on the restrictions around her life and work, on where she could travel, what she could read or listen to, I was outraged. She calmed me down as heads turned in the restaurant: “There is nothing you can do. The Wall is the Wall.” “But there must be something.” I could barely hear her when she whispered, “Márquez. Bring me the latest [Gabriel Garcia] Márquez.” She needed magical realism. It would be riskier than carrying toilet paper but I vowed that I would next time I visited (and I did). But I was filled with anger as I went back through the Friedrichstrasse checkpoint and could barely contain it as the Vopo carefully examined every single page of my passport, enjoying my impotence.
September 1987
There were five of us in the beat-up Mercedes saloon. Gunter driving, wife Rita beside him, their two kids in the back seat with me. We began to bake in the hot September sun as we inched our way along Zimmerstrasse towards the one lane that allowed foreigners with cars to enter East Berlin. When we finally reached the Checkpoint Charlie booth, Gunter handed our New Zealand passports to the Vopo at the window. We were all New Zealand citizens. Gunter and Rita had chosen to leave their German lives behind a few years before. Gunter had become Shiven the Clown, and a follower of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, dressed in flowing orange and white. The Vopo looked him over, flicked open the passport covers and then took them inside to a senior officer. The children began to complain at the mounting heat.
Gunter began to call out imprecations. My German was not good enough to understand them but they were good enough to turn heads 20 metres away and for Rita to roll her eyes. The Vopo came to the driver’s window and asked where we were going and what we were carrying. Gunter gestured at the cartons of fancy candles and cakes in the back and said, “What do you think these are, guns? Only you guys have guns.” The Vopo ordered him out of the car. Another appeared on the other side and demanded to see everything we had. As they took away the cakes and scented candles, gifts for our friends Jutta and Mech in Biesdorf, Gunter said they must handle them carefully because they were fancy explosives. That was a step too far and Gunter was escorted away and Rita told to move the car to a bay in No Man’s Land.
Half an hour later, Gunter returned minus the candles. Each one had been carefully examined in front of him and he had been strip-searched. From the looks on the Vopos’ faces as they escorted him back, this had not been fun. “What happened?” I said. “Why did they search you?” Gunter called out, “Auf wiedersehen, arschlochen,” as we drove away and Rita thumped him on the shoulder. “Well,” he said. “You know – they saw I was born in Potsdam and didn’t like I had a New Zealand passport, the idea they have to put up with their stinking lives here while one of their own lives in paradise.”
August 1988
Crossing checkpoints with Gunter, aka Shiven the Clown, was always a drama, a public performance with not just a frisson of danger but with the distinct chance of being arrested. In August 1988, I spent a few days with friends in southern Sweden and then travelled back to Berlin with Gunter from Copenhagen, where he had been taking part in a “Healers for Peace” conference. In his old Mercedes, we took the car ferry across the Baltic to Rügen in the DDR. Western travellers driving from Denmark or Sweden through East Germany to West Berlin were required to use just one highway from Rügen, the E251 south from and through Neubrandenburg. No stopping.
When we came off the ferry at Rügen, Gunter objected to the sub-machine gun slung around the shoulders of the young policewoman who checked our papers. He asked her why she greeted innocent, non-violent citizens of the Free World with a gun, and challenged her to use it. Fortunately, she ignored him and waved us on. But Gunter kept up a small head of steam on the subject as we made the long and slow journey over the cracked and potholed road to Berlin.
In my diary, I wrote, “Like driving through a world that was left behind in the 40s and 50s, perhaps even 30s. Dilapidated towns and villages, bad roads, no services, so no hoardings to advertise them. Strict police control on 80kph speed limit.” No doubt to save the road surface from breaking up even faster. “Crossing to [West] Berlin like moving into another time-frame, another life speed.”
Gunter contrived to make the crossing as exciting as possible. When we came to the Kontrollpunkt at Stolpe, after an intermin-able five-hour drive without refreshments and only a pause to pee and change drivers, we found a long queue of cars. Only one checkpoint lane was in operation. To the left were three empty lanes, two barred and one with an orange road cone halfway down. In the driver’s seat and desperate for coffee and a meal, I groaned. Gunter said, “Why don’t you just drive down there? If they stop you, just say you speak no German. I’ll pretend that I only speak German and couldn’t stop you.” “Why not? I said, “Bugger them,” swung over and drove down to the cone. In a moment, we were surrounded by police unslinging their rifles. I wound down the window and looked puzzled and daft. I was given a lecture by a stocky policeman with a broad Saxon accent to which I frowned, shook my head, shrugged and gestured at the empty lane. “But I thought this is way the way to go!” I said. In English. Gunter said something to the Saxon, gesturing at me in a way that suggested I was just a stupid foreigner who knew zilch, someone he had picked up on the side of the road in Copenhagen. After the border guards examined the engine compartment and boot for escaping dissidents, they waved us through, ahead of the queue. It had been an impressive double act.
LITTLE MORE THAN A YEAR LATER, the Wall came down. On December 22, 1989, I walked through the Brandenburg Gate, the first day it had been open since 1961. On New Year’s Eve I joined crowds pouring through an old checkpoint to watch the sky exploding with fireworks over all Berlin, celebrating the end of an old world and old tyrannies with fountains of sparkling hope. Jutta was happy, for new freedoms, magical realism come true; yet sad, in tears, for all those years working for socialism, the best years of her life, gone, wasted.
Philip Temple has written three novels based on his association with Berlin and last visited the city in September.
