At the end of April 1989, I decamped from my traineeship at The Times to East Berlin, because I wanted to look at a country frozen in the Cold War, behind its concrete curtain. I became caught up in the middle of a revolution that ended 40 years of division in Europe – and whose effects are felt across the world to this day.

A huge stroke of historical luck was on my side. The German Democratic Republic was a country that had fascinated me since my first visit in the early Eighties: the mixture of Soviet communism imposed on a German culture was so contradictory that it drew me back again and again.

It had been a European backwater. When I arrived at The Times, I told Mike Evans, the paper’s long-serving defence correspondent, that it was my academic speciality. “You might want to get another one,” he replied.

Suddenly, though, East Germany’s internal dissent dominated the bulletins. After May, the great exodus through the newly opened border began in earnest and swelled throughout that summer. By the autumn, the marchers were carrying their defiant banners and the cry, “We are the people!”, rang out in the streets.

Like the few other Westerners I knew in the old East, I still follow its post-unity archaeology closely.

The scanty revelations of my Stasi file portrayed me as “personable, intelligent and of pleasing appearance” (I confess to a rare moment of gratitude to the Stasi for that description), but, alas, full of “negative and hostile attitudes to official organisations like the Free German Youth”. I appeared “not to have made much of an impression at the German department of Humboldt University”.

In truth, I distrusted most of the official organisations and institutes that dominated daily life, and spent most of the time simply mingling with as many East Germans from different backgrounds, and with different viewpoints, as possible.

This year, I felt a sudden hankering to go, as the Germans say, on a Spurensuche – a retracing of steps – to find some of the people who helped me understand the East, and hear how they had fared in the past two decades since that miraculous night when the Wall crumbled to dust and souvenirs.

In her song Anchorage, about reconnecting with a girlhood friend, Michelle Shocked says, “I took time out to write to my old friend/ I walked across that burning bridge.” And that’s what I have done. Here they are then, my friends from a place that doesn’t exist any more – except in all our memories.

Burckhardt Kolbmueller
Bechstedt, Thuringia

Twenty-three years after we first met, I find Burckhardt, a bit greyer but otherwise unaltered, grilling sausages in a well-tended courtyard in one of Thuringia’s many beauty spots.

He looks exactly as I remember him from my first long visit to the East in 1985, when he was running a university summer course. These days, he’s armed with a better computer and fewer restrictions – and in charge of a bunch of educational and cultural projects based in nearby Weimar.

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