1989 Read online

  To take the train from Friedrichstrasse west therefore was to take a little bit of the East with you in your soul, at least until you got off at West Berlin’s Bahnhof Zoo. As its name suggests this had until 1945 been merely a large station convenient for the Zoologischer Garten, but with many central stations destroyed, it had by default and partly because of its situation near the ‘new’, Western-shifted ‘city centre’ around the Kurfürstendamm, become the long distance transport hub for West Berlin. It was hardly an advert for the city, however. That year, 1981, West Germany as a whole was still in a state of moral shock caused by the new film Wir Kinder vom Bahnof Zoo (We Kids of Zoo Station), with its David Bowie soundtrack and its disarmingly depressing tale of underage prostitution and drug abuse in the shadow of the station. Here more than anywhere else it was clear that West Berlin, for all its superficial glitz and glamour, was a city of the déracinés. Here people I got to know in the West, from West German journalists, local politicians and British military types still based in Hitler’s Olympic stadium, all thought they lived in the real Berlin, and marvelled when I disappeared East ‘like Harry Lime going down some manhole’, as one diplomatic wife put it in a slightly mismatched analogy. But for all its privations, I slowly began to feel more at home in the East, a city that was somehow quieter, less frenetic, and, I was gradually coming to understand, for all the resentment of its population against their government, more sure of what it was, and where it was: a city with – significantly there is no better word than the German one – a Hinterland.

  Bizarrely it was thanks to my limited means of transportation that I was discovering that ‘Hinterland’ at close quarters. The bike also had the advantage of allowing me to get definitively out of the eye of whoever might be watching me. The Stasi didn’t ride bikes. On several occasions in what was a glorious warm spring, I had cycled out of the city altogether, something no West Berliner could do. Cycling along dirt tracks through fields of waving golden corn and then stopping for a beer at a little village bar unchanged since the 1920s was a surreal experience that contrasted radically with my everyday life in the office with Erdmute and Helga or the hectic traffic-clogged bustle of West Berlin.

  But I was determined to pass the driving test before my wife arrived, so as not to be dependent on her to ferry me across the frontier. And as I was living in East Berlin it seemed only sensible to take their driving test. It would, after all, make a nice feature for the German service in Bonn, for whom the lives of their compatriots on the other side of the Iron Curtain was a matter of endless fascination, fuelled by not a little Schadenfreude.

  The only thing was that I could not exactly take the test precisely as an ordinary East German might, even if I had wanted to. The regulations declared that as a foreigner I had to go through that wonderful organisation, the Dienstleistungsamt für Ausländische Vertretungen, the DLA, partly because they wanted me to pay the money for lessons and the test itself in hard currency: D-Marks. I duly signed up and went along for my first lesson, an introduction to the theory test which was in itself rather intimidating, not least because it would obviously be conducted in German, but also because at that stage the concept of a theory test didn’t exist in Britain.

  I met up with my instructor in the offices of the state motoring school. He was a genial grey-haired man who clearly thought the whole business of teaching a Westerner somewhat amusing and could indeed see the problem of me learning some of the more obscure auto mechanic terms in German. This sent a further shudder of panic through me. I had no idea that the ‘theory test’ also included elementary mechanics (it has only in the past few years become part of the British test) even though it should have been fairly obvious, particularly in a country where repair garages were few and far between, and spare parts were notoriously hard to come by.

  He gave me a curious smile, however, and said he was sure we could find a way around it. After all, I would be driving a Western car, wouldn’t I, and they were famously reliable. We then had a brief discussion of European road signs which reassured the two of us that the standardisation across the continent did indeed apply to both sides of the Iron Curtain (not a phrase we actually used as such of course). There turned out to be just three significant differences: the universal East German upper speed limit of 100 kph (just over 60 mph), compared to the West which famously had none at all; the fact that if there was a painted sign with a right-facing arrow next to a traffic light, it meant it was legal to turn right on red, provided it was safe to do so; and that the ‘little green man’ on pedestrian lights wore a hat. (This last turned out to have been a specifically Berlin thing, which was discarded in West Berlin after 1945 but engagingly one of the few East Berlin features to cross over when the Wall finally came down.)

  Somewhat to my surprise, rather than spending any length of time on the technicalities of the driving test we drifted into a genial conversation about life in the ‘Capital of the GDR’. He hoped I enjoyed the rich variety of goods that the Socialist economy produced for its citizens, and mentioned – simply in passing – that he did remember tasting French brandy once and thinking it was very good.

  I got the message. For our next appointment, I arrived a few minutes early with – on Erdmute’s advice – a little present: a bottle of Courvoisier, purchased in West Berlin, purely he should understand as a thank you for fitting my lessons into his busy schedule. He smiled in supremely professional feigned astonishment, locked it away in his cupboard, and we sat down to study the road signs again. After about half an hour, he said he thought I was up to taking the theory test straightaway. But rather than produce a formal paper, he took me through about a dozen of the road signs we had just been discussing – all of them essentially the same as in Britain – and then with a flourish produced a form from his desk, signed it and handed it to me. ‘Congratulations,’ he said. ‘You’ve passed.’

  That only left the practical examination. I was actually hoping the lessons here might be a bit more rigorous. I genuinely had things to learn. For a start I was driving on the right rather than the left as in Britain. This is much less difficult than people who have never switched from one to the other imagine, particularly if one is in a car with the steering wheel on the proper side. And this one definitely did: it was a Lada, bright orange, both a car and a colour that most East Germans considered highly desirable. It belonged, of course, to the State School of Motoring. My instructor, however, was not the genial fifty-something of the theory department, but a bright-eyed short-haired young man about my own age who had that sort of ‘when I grow up I want to be a policeman’ look about him. And maybe he was. I decided in this case not to mix drinking and driving.

  There were other hazards that I hadn’t anticipated to driving in East Berlin, including at least one that we really should have covered in greater detail in the theory part: the tram. Trams ran down the middle of most main streets and had absolute priority as did the pedestrians who jumped off them whenever they stopped, which meant you had to be pretty damn careful to make sure you did too. And that meant knowing and understanding the very different traffic lights for trams, which were always white but vertical for go and horizontal for stop. The tram also posed another danger: because it ran on rails deeply embedded in the rutted cobbled streets, cars with thin tyres, such as a Lada, could get stuck in them. Cars shared the same lanes as the trams but were supposed to get out of the way fast by pulling in to the right if they noticed one approaching behind them, which was hard to avoid as the conductor unfailingly announced his presence by ringing a piercingly loud bell. Unfortunately if you were literally ‘in a rut’, sometimes getting out of the way wasn’t as easy as it seemed, which meant you could continue for several yards driving as if stuck in the groove on a Scalextric track with an impatient deafening bell from behind clattering in your ears.

  My test, for which I was judged ready gratifyingly quickly, was something of an experience in itself. It was to be taken, as I had expected, in one of the State Schoo
l of Motoring’s Ladas. What I hadn’t expected was that there would be four of us in it. The system routinely tested two candidates at once, swapping over as driver halfway through – accompanied by the instructor as well as the examiner. It felt a little crowded therefore as I piled into the back seat alongside my instructor, while the front seat next to the examiner was taken by a jolly but clearly nervous woman from the Ghanaian Embassy, who, she revealed, was taking the East German driving test for the sixth time.

  It soon became obvious why. She almost immediately fell into the tram track trap – happily without a tram just behind her – meaning she was nearly unable to follow the examiner’s instructions to turn right into a side street. When she eventually did manage to do so, she accelerated with relief, unfortunately just at the point where two children aged about nine or ten decided to skip out onto the cobbles after a bouncing ball. The examiner averted disaster only by jerking the wheel to the left. We careened to a sudden stop. By this stage the optimistic smile on the face of the young woman behind the wheel had been replaced by a rictus of resignation. He told her to drive to the end of the street and pull in.

  It was my turn. And I have to admit I am forever grateful to that young Ghanaian woman. I didn’t get stuck in the tram tracks and I didn’t nearly kill any young comrades. After half an hour of blissfully uneventful pootering along the cobbles of Prenzlauer Berg, I pulled up back in front of the School of Motoring building and was told I had passed. The Ghanaian girl shrugged and went off to prepare for a brave seventh attempt. I sometimes wonder if she ever made it. My prize was a little grey plastic-coated booklet embossed with the ‘hammer and compasses’ coat of arms of the German Democratic Republic and the word Führerschein on the front. This, to my amazement, caused some hilarity amongst my West Berlin colleagues, whose driving licences said Fahrerlaubnis (driving permit). One of them joked that it had to be a communist country that would still issue anyone with a licence to be ‘Führer’.

  At a stroke, however, my life was transformed. At last I could take possession of the two-year-old VW Golf in British racing green which had been sitting immobile on the pavement outside the flat since I arrived. It had a distinctive blue licence plate, as did those of all non-diplomatic foreigners, and the registration QA (signifying foreign press) 41 (the United Kingdom was the forty-first country to recognise the GDR as a sovereign state) – 04 (it was the fourth ever registered). In short I was going around in a car that shouted my identity aloud to anyone who cared to know. But what did I care? I had wheels. Even the famously frosty border guards at Checkpoint Charlie were impressed. Their icy demeanour had with time begun slowly to thaw, thanks to their amusement at seeing me padlock my bicycle to the railings next to the border post entrance. One of them was a big burly bloke with curly hair who smiled occasionally, which was a lot more frequently than most. I had already mentally nicknamed him the Bear, although I would only know his first name on the day he became unemployed. He looked at the car, looked at me, smiled and said: ‘Gratuliere’ (congratulations). I smiled back.

  I was due to go back to England in a few weeks’ time for a holiday, the focal point of which would be our wedding. But when my wife finally arrived in Berlin, at least I would be able to pick her up in style.

  4

  Going Underground

  ‘Newsman and Bride to Make Home in East Berlin,’ read the headline above our photograph in the weddings section of the Scunthorpe Evening Telegraph. I suppose it was more exotic than Grimsby. East Berlin made even Scunthorpe seem smart.

  Our honeymoon was spent modestly, driving up to Edinburgh for a few days and back via the island of Lindisfarne. It was the first time that I had driven legally on the left-hand side of the road. Concentrating on it wasn’t made any easier by the fact that my new brother-in-law had thought he would make our first few married nights that little bit ‘hotter’ by applying an invisible layer of Deep Heat to the steering wheel.

  There was one other aggravation. We had only five days together before, at Reuters’ unsentimental insistence, I was due back in Berlin. The event dragging me back was not exactly earth-shattering: the annual Leipzig Trade Fair. But this was one of those occasions when a rare glimpse of the East German leader Erich Honecker in person could be guaranteed and, as always with reclusive Soviet bloc leaders, there were rumours about his health.

  Honecker, as it turned out, was in fine fettle, as I discovered by accidentally getting into the close entourage strictly reserved for the obedient East German press. It was only when I tried to do the unthinkable – ask the man a question – that my presence was immediately noticed and I was politely, if extremely firmly, escorted back to the holding pen where the foreigners were kept.

  It was a week later when I finally picked up Jackie at West Berlin’s Tegel Airport, and took her on an introductory sightseeing tour. As would be our custom with all future house guests, last stop was the viewing platform on the Western side of the Brandenburg Gate, where US presidents and other dignitaries visiting West Berlin were taken to view the concrete evidence of communism’s ‘inhumanity’. Next to us, dark and looming, sat the great grey stone bulk of the Reichstag, just in the West but still bearing black scorch marks from the 1933 fire and patched bullet holes from the 1945 Soviet conquest. In front of us, as we climbed the wooden steps of the platform, was a piece of pure theatre: the great neo-classical triumphal arch starkly floodlit with the communist ‘hammer and compasses’ version of the German flag flying over it in the dark night sky. Save for two goose-stepping guards shouldering Kalashnikov rifles, beyond there was no sign of human life, just the distant glistening orb of the East German television tower, a mile away. Immediately below us the Wall stretched out in an obscene bulge, designed to keep viewers on the Western platform all but invisible from the East. Set back from it, close to the Reichstag wall, was a line of white crosses, each bearing the name of a Berliner shot dead trying to flee to the West. And in front of the Wall itself the ubiquitous placard which by now to me had already become so familiar, the warning spelled out in black letters on white: ‘Achtung! Sie verlassen jetzt West Berlin.’ Warning! You are now leaving West Berlin. Not that you could do so very easily with a ten-foot high wall in the way.

  ‘Where are we going now?’ asked Jackie.

  I pointed into the glare of the floodlights and said, ‘Over there.’

  Unsurprisingly it took her a little while to settle in. But we were young, adaptable, and both taken with the exotic romance of living in East Berlin. It was undoubtedly a bit monochrome, but then so wasThe Malte se Falcon.

  The language, of course, would prove an initial problem for Jackie, although at least she was not required to work in it. She had done German at school but only to O-level and now gamely signed up to take lessons provided by the ubiquitous DLA, which meant her class included the wife of the Yemeni ambassador, several North Koreans and a smattering of Hungarians, Poles and Yugoslavs.

  It was only after a couple of weeks that we realised she was learning German with a difference. Some of the variances between her textbook, ‘German for Foreigners 1a’, and those we had known back at school in England were immediate: ‘Here is a 100 Mark note. The 100 Mark note has a picture of Karl Marx.’

  A few took a moment to sink in. Like most in the genre, the book followed a typical family as a means of learning everyday vocabulary. Here is an example from the chapter entitled: ‘A Typical Day at Work’: ‘Herr Sander is a fitter in the People’s Own Enterprise “Red Star”. His shift begins at six a.m. At five thirty a.m., Herr Sander arrives at the factory, and by six a.m. on the dot he is standing by his machine in Hall 2. Before breakfast the party secretary comes into the department. He asks about the export contract for Cuba and discusses the five-year plan with the workers.’

  Little things like that reinforced the fact that we were living in a wholly alternative version of Germany. A further complication was that they didn’t actually use the full expression ‘People’s Own Enterprise�
� but an acronym of the German Volkseigener Betrieb: VEB (pronounced Fow-Eh-Beh). As virtually everything in East Germany was owned and operated by the state, this was an important word in its own right. East Germans used these acronyms all the time, often because, as in the case of the infamous DLA, they were a lot easier to pronounce than the full-out version. Another in everyday use was LPG, which was the East German version of the Soviet collective farm, or Landwerkschaftsproduktionsgenossenschaft, an ‘agricultural comradeship’. To call a spade a spade.

  One of the results was that when Jackie would practise some of her newly-learned German on West Berliners, she would tend to use VEB or LPG instead of ‘firm’ or ‘farm’. It was what she was being taught every week by native speakers for heaven’s sake, but it still caused the future ‘Wessies’ to collapse into laughter. Not at her accent, but at this unknown vocabulary. Even so, hardly encouraging if you’re struggling with a new language.

  Happily, back on what was now definitively ‘our’ side of the wall, she faced no such patronising sarcasm. All these terms, including FDJ – for the Freie Deutsche Jugend (Free German Youth), the communist youth organisation Herr Sander’s daughter, like every other DDR child, belonged to – have vanished, an alternative language faded into history. It should be remembered (particularly by former West Germans) that there is a whole generation of African, Middle Eastern and South American industrialists and agriculturalists out there who used those same textbooks. And even if some of them may also have forgotten the socialism, their command of German still owes its allegiance to VEB Roter Stern.

  But language wasn’t the only difficulty. There was the fact that we were not so much living above the shop as in it. With two other women. Getting up in the morning to have breakfast wasn’t quite what it should have been for a young couple when the breakfast table in our kitchen was already occupied by Erdmute and Helga, both chain smoking, and gossiping in a language that strained my still growing command of colloquial Berlin dialect and was certainly beyond Jackie. Nor was it helped by Erdmute with her sweetest smile volunteering to put the coffee on again for us. It felt like being houseguests in what was supposed to be our own home.