Twenty years ago the Berlin Wall came down and, red-eyed with fatigue, too
many beers and too much adrenalin, I was sitting in the bar of my hotel on
Unter den Linden. The red-faced man next to me was a veteran foreign
correspondent of The New York Times, who had covered every major story since
the Allied landings at Normandy. “How old are you son?” he asked.
“Twenty-five,” I muttered, dimly wondering if perhaps I was about to be
busted for underage drinking. This was still East Germany after all, and you
never knew what laws you were breaking. “You unlucky son of a bitch,” he
ploughed on. “This is the best story you will ever cover and you, son, have
only just started.” He was almost right, although he and I had no idea how
strange the story was about to become.
I crossed over into East Berlin the night the Wall came down. At the
Bornholmerstrasse crossing there was a party atmosphere. The pavement was
sticky with sickly Crimean champagne, the only kind available in the East at
the time. People were chanting and singing, although I never once heard the
German national anthem. That was to come later. Whole families had left
their apartments in the middle of the night to test the new reality and see
whether they could venture into the West without getting stopped, or worse.
There were children in pyjamas who must have thought they were dreaming.
These sleepwalkers were part of the first bloodless and successful
revolution that Germany had witnessed in its mostly unhappy history.
The East German border guards stood by, round-shouldered and pale-faced,
probably wondering if they too should join the throng. Erich Honecker, the
ousted East German leader, had wanted to crush the brewing demonstrations
with the same brutality that the Chinese leadership had displayed a few
months earlier at Tiananmen Square. The Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev told
him that this wasn’t an option and the days of the German Democratic
Republic were numbered. Decades of fear, indignity, oppression and
state-sponsored curtain-twitching courtesy of the Stasi suddenly melted away
in one night of freedom. When totalitarian regimes lose the ability to
frighten there is really very little they can do to stop their own implosion.
And so it was in East Berlin. For the next few days 3.5 million East Germans
flooded West Berlin, a city of just over one million. Although they were all
Germans it was a bizarre clash of fashions, attitudes and language. In
general, East Germans wore clothes that had gone out of fashion ten years
earlier in the West. Brown fake leather coats and washed jeans were common.
They were far more polite than the boorish West Berliners and their German
was grammatically more correct and cluttered with the clumsy euphemisms of
East German communism. Multicoloured Trabi cars littered the streets,
avenues and pavements of the western half of the city like dodgem cars
abandoned after a riotous funfair that had spilled out of its tent.
Oddly enough, a population that had been forced to queue for basics all its
life was now queueing again. The banana had become an icon of forbidden
freedom in the minds of the East and supermarket fruit stalls in the West
were now crowded with East Germans. The other forbidden fruit that the
visitors were patiently queueing for was porn. Thanks to advertising, which
the regime could never stop from spilling over into the East on TV and
radio, the burghers of East Berlin knew all about Dr Mueller, the West
German sex shop chain that peddled fantasies and accessories with the
reassurance of medical expertise. Most East Germans who came that weekend
returned home clutching dirty magazines, bananas and whatever was left over
from the 100 marks of welcoming money that the West had squeezed into their
hands on arrival. Very few were dreaming of or even thinking about
unification. Most wanted to taste freedom and continue with an improved
version of their existing lives.
It was two days after the wall came down that I was sitting in my room at the
absurdly lavish Grand Hotel, now home to hundreds of Western journalists.
The hotel had been opened earlier in the year, expecting to host government
ministers and sports stars. Not hacks and certainly not ordinary East
Germans, for whom the hotel was out of bounds. The gloved staff curled their
lips like courtiers in the presence of barbarians.
There was a knock on the door. I opened it to find a middle-aged couple and
two teenaged children standing in front of me with nervous smiles, all
wearing matching purple shell suits. “I am your Uncle Wolfgang,” the man
said. “We heard you were here.” My East German family, whom I had never seen
before, were of course curious to hear about my parents in the West and what
I had seen in recent days. They were even more curious to see the inside of
the hotel. They had not yet crossed over to the West. “We’re saving that for
another day,” Wolfgang said. Considering the throng I had witnessed since
arriving in Berlin this struck me as strange. But like other East Germans my
relatives were both excited and scared. “What will happen to us now?” they
asked. “Will those who went to the other side be punished? What will the
Stasi do? What will happen to our currency? Will East Germany survive?” In
November 1989 there were no obvious answers to any of these questions.
To understand their doubts you have to remember that East Germany had become a
swot among communist nations. This was the ultimate cradle-to-grave nanny
state. It told you where to educate your children and how, what to feed
them, how to dress them and what work to prepare them for. Nanny knew best
and nanny was draconian if you disobeyed. But with its steel quotas, its
mountains of Olympic medals and its absurd cars, which inspired ridicule in
the West but envy in the communist world, the East Germans could fool
themselves into thinking that life wasn’t all bad. Despite the thousands of
dissi- dents, writers, artists and clergymen who denounced the regime and
suffered for it, communism in East Germany created a thoroughly petit
bourgeois nation of curtain-twitching conformists.
Only this can explain why almost a quarter of the whole population were
informally co-operating with the Stasi. Only this can explain the banal
level of detail that can still be found in the Stasi archives. “Subject seen
entering café on Friedrichstrasse at 15.43. Sat down alone. Ordered cherry
cake (no cream).” And only this can explain the state of the nation address
given by East Germany’s last Communist Prime Minister, Hans Modrow. It
began: “Comrades, these are turbulent times but let me reassure you, your
allotments are safe!”
In the coming months cries for freedom turned into calls for German
unification. “Wir sind das Volk!” (we are the people) suddenly became “Wir
sind ein Volk!” (We are one people). My own relatives were less excited
about German unity than they were worried about being peons in yet another
giant socio-political experiment.
That is certainly one way to look at Berlin and the upheavals that have played
out there. The city that started as a garrison town in the swamps along the
river Spree has been a laboratory chamber of German history since its birth.
Frederick the Great wanted to turn his small Prussian backwater into an
elegant European capital. So he commissioned Karl Friedrich Schinkel to
build him a city on spectacular NeoClassical lines. In order to fill this
city with people he offered the beleaguered minorities of Europe greater
freedoms in return for residency. By the mid-19th century Berlin had
sizeable Jewish and Huguenot minorities. The taste for freedom always rubbed
up against the need for discipline. Frederick the Great himself embodied
this contradiction. He was a philosopher king, who loved the arts, played
the flute and was probably homosexual. His Sans Souci Rococo summer palace
in Potsdam is the architectural equivalent of La Cage aux Folles. He was a
close friend of Voltaire. At the time he used his armies to bludgeon
Prussia’s path to a greater German future.
His split personality set the stage for what was to come. Until the day the
Wall came down without violence Berlin was yanked from the exuberance of
nationalism under Bismarck to the trauma of defeat after the First World
War, to bloody revolution and counter-revolution in 1919, to the extended
happy hour of the Weimar Republic that ended in the financial ruin of the
Crash, the rise of fascism, the hysteria of Nazi nationalism, the war, the
trauma of near annihilation, the embers of recovery, postwar anger
management and the brutal division of the Cold War.
This is the backdrop against which I see my own relatives, uneasily dipping
their toes into the choppy waters of liberty in 1989. They have all been on
a rollercoaster ride of history. The past two decades have produced their
own agonies. Unification has not always been the seamless melding of two
Germanies, sometimes it has seemed like a big nation swallowing a smaller
one and getting a serious bout of indigestion. The joke that did the rounds
in the early Nineties was that Germany unifying was like the Beatles getting
together again. “Let’s hope they don’t go on another world tour.” As it
turns out, the richest and most populous nation in Europe still plays mainly
to local audiences and shirks the global stage.
The past two decades may have been the least eventful since Germany first
became a united nation in 1871. It has turned out to be an extended period
of rehab. My relatives, for one, appear to be thriving on it. Their
electrical business is doing well. They go on holiday in Spain or Thailand.
Their children are free to study what they want at university and they’re
not driving Trabis. By the standards of German history such normality is
really quite radical.
Berlin, written and presented by Matt Frei, starts on BBC Two on November 14.
The series is co-produced by the Open University. A free bilingual Berlin
city guide is available at www.open2.net
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