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Sophieneck, Grosse-Hamburger-Strasse

parklife/CreativeCommons

I’m so, so angry and frustrated that I can’t show you the pictures I took of this place, because it’s my favourite pub in Berlin. You find it in the Scheunenviertel, the streets north of Alexanderplatz and Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse, just a few minutes east off Oranienburgerstrasse (which I know I keep going on about). Sophieneck (nothing to do with a neck - it should arguably be written Sophie'n Eck) means Sophie or Sophie's corner, and it’s on the corner where Sophienstrasse meets Grosse Hamburger Strasse, where you’ll struggle to buy a hamburger of any size.

What can I say about Sophieneck? In winter you enter through the main door, pull back the thick curtain and face the bar, slowly discovering the atmopheric interior; in summer people sit outside, or stand smoking now – although it’s a one-room bar and so I think could allow smoking again following the Constitutional Court’s ruling that applying the smoking ban in its current form to one-room bars is disproportionate, it’s chosen to stay non-smoking on the inside – and you enter from the side if you like. What never changes is the warm but clear light from the low green lamps hanging, almost as though it were a library, over the tables and from the candles all around. This pic, if a bit festively wintry compared to the way I saw Sophieneck last night, gives you an impression of how it feels.

andedam/CreativeCommons

You sit at any of the collection of apparently scraped-together, worn wooden tables and chairs with which the place is furnished, some with leather green or red upholstery. The cornered two-seater with the iron bits is my fave, by the way. On all the walls are vintage metal advertisements, for Schultheiss beer, Gold Dollar cigarettes, Ricard, Leibniz-Cakes, Tetley’s Ales even, and Kathreiner’s malted coffee. That used to make children gesund und kräftig, apparently. And look up at the gorgeous green beading – is that what you call it? The bit where the ceiling meets the walls, anyway, is painted with carved bosses or motifs (can you tell that I struggle with architectural vocabulary?) and is very much in place here.

The only thing that could possibly improve it would be to do away with the music which is just noticeable in the background, though not always, to be fair. If they did that, Sophieneck would be the best pub in the world. As it is, though, it’s damn good. The food is perhaps solid rather than brilliant – I had (and took a photo of – grrr!) a nice Kassler last night, mind, with sauerkraut and potatoes.

It’s a fine, fine place, and if you like pubs you’ll love it. It has a website, too, with a couple of pictures I’m glad to say and a sort of impressionistic panorama thing.

I've been dodging the whores on Oranienburgerstrasse these last couple of nights; if you come here you'll find out that they hang out - and that really is the phrase, they trail across the street, I suppose because they can't decide whether cars or pedestrians are the most likely customers. Last night a bottle blonde in a basque and ludicrous platform thigh-boots (pretty much the normal clobber for die Girls of Oranienburgerstrasse) said those very words,

Hallo. Grüss dich... Stopp!

getting desperate at the end, as you can tell, as she tried to interest me in business. I ploughed on towards my beer. Just a little tableau of Berlin life.

I thought you'd like to see from the horse's mouth, as it were, where these Berlin posts are being produced. That was part of my reasoning; the other part is that my bloody camera seems to have bloody packed up on me, the bloody thing, so this is the last photo of mine I can share with you. Infuriating - truly infuriating - because of the brilliant pictures I took at the Sopieneck pub last night, which I wanted you to see.

Damn. Unless the bloody thing recovers after a good night's sleep I guess I'm relying on CreativeCommons and the kindness and creativity of strangers for the rest of my Berlin blogging. Which was not the plan of course.

I feel a bit like that today, having been to the Holocaust Memorial just south of the Brandenburg Gate and then two exhibitions about the GDR: the Stasi exhibition on Französischerstrasse and the DDR-Museum on the banks of the Spree.  I wasn't hugely impressed by the Holocaust Memorial, I have to say. Of course it's impossible to say how on earth you can memorialise the murder of millions, and a load of stark blocks of stone are as good as anything I suppose, but it doesn't really make you think. I wish the lines of sight had been obscured - you never really get lost in this thing even when you get to its lowest point. To be fair, I didn't go to the exhibition which may be more impressive.

The Stasi exhibition is worthy, not long on fun or gadgets to play with, and not all that friendly to non-German speakers either, but it's free and gives a pretty detailed history of the Staatssicherheitsdienst and guide to its techniques - there are even some of the jars on show containing dusters impregnated with suspects' smells, gathered from chairs so that sniffer dogs or Geruchsdifferenzierungshunde as the Stasi magnificantly called them could sniff out dissidents. More seriously, you can read edited copies of real Stasi files and there's quite a lot of information about how the Stasi used informers and knew everything that went on in the GDR and beyond. At the moment there is an interesting special exhibition about postal interceptions by the Stasi, too.

I wouldn't recommend the DDR-Museum, though: it was a real disappointment. It's not a serious museum in which you could really learn much about life in the GDR or its history; fair enough. But it isn't really as much fun as it could be either. It's a hand-on museum where you pull out drawers and see bits and pieces of East German life - a school pupil's report cards, for instance - which is okay, except that most of the stuff isn't all that funny or amazing or evocative, and there isn't enough of it, either. There was a draw full of books to represent university life, for instance, but only one of the fabulously boring political books that the GDR used to produce - Lenin the Philosopher. The rest were truly dull things that might have been from anywhere, and I concluded that my collection of former GDR books is better than theirs. Yes, there's a Trabant you can sit in, and yes, there's quite a nice mock-up of a sitting room and kitchen, but you can only really spend about half an hour here. The best thing is the woman's wardrobe you can open: one or two of the frocks really are shockers. But with a certain utility style...

I once went to an exhibition in Prenzlauer Berg on consumerism in the GDR which was everything this isn't: really informative, with loads of stuff to gawp at - old washing-powder packets, radios, records - and truly hilarious, too. I'll never forget the huge file they had full of letters from the state telephone company giving elaborate made-up excuses for delays in installing the telephones people had waited years to acquire.

I love things that are spartan and utilitarian, as well as being incredibly mean and naturally short of funds, so one of my budget Berlin ideas is to use my local student canteen or Mensa. I've been using thes eplaces for ages actually, from the days when my ancient "ex" Naomi and I would gaze into each others' eyes over Eintopf in Bonn, where she was for a year, through to when the very nice Verena took me to the one in Heidelberg a couple of years ago, though there was less gazing with her I'm sorry to say. You wouldn't think these basic places were very romantic actually, although appearances deceive about this sort of thing. Mensen (it's an unusual plural) are open to anyone, so do go to one when you're in Berlin - you can find details about them at the Studentenwerk Berlin website. They're an unchanging feature of the German scene.

You wander in, find the tills and ask for a MensaCard (if they ask you who you are, or any other question in German that freaks you out, like whether you're a student, try saying ich bin Gast) then find a machine - they're blue and hanging on the walls - where you can load up your card with a few Euros, and you're ready to take a tray, knife and fork and get queueing. Mensen vary but there's usually a choice of fairly stolid but okay food (better than I ever got in the British education system), one or two or three main course one of which - the super-cheapie - is called Eintopf, which is going to be some sort of stew or hotpot or just slowly boiled-up vegetables and leftovers, really, which makes it sounds horrid but it's ace. My one today - hang on ...

... this thing was lentils with ginger and chilli, and it had quinoa and aubergine in too, and with the roll and some water it cost me about €3. You pay just a bit more as a guest than the students do. My fave is when you get a sausage with the Eintopf, I have to admit. So anyway, Mensen are brill for the impoverished visitor anywhere in Germany really, but they're all over Berlin. Breakfast and lunch only though - they do close at night.

Thoughts on arrival in Berlin

Berlin’s stations are something else. I love a good station: I recommend Limoges. Berlin’s principal stations, though, have a nostalgic, mid-20th century feel of dust and double-breasted suits that I’ve found nowhere else. Friedrichstrasse is the best: the first time I was here must have been on that first visit with the saucy Marie and the others, but the first time I remember Friedrichsstrasse was two years later when I arrived in East Berlin with the then femme de ma vie, Naomi. We’d decided to spend three weeks in the GDR, visiting Weimar (her cultured choice – it was about Goethe and Schiller) and Magdeburg (my dim choice – I just loved the city's name) but starting off in Berlin. I picked her up in Hamburg where she was studying that summer and we took the train – all the way. Most passengers held their breath the moment the train left the territory of the civilized Federal republic and crossed the East German border, only exhaling again when the train arrived in West Berlin and stopped at Zoo station where they disembarked. We, however, braver souls, stayed on.

It’s twenty years ago, nearly (a lapse of time to make one really think; but more of that later) so my narrative is somewhat questionable – fraglich as the Germans might say – but I remember the train standing for some time at Bahnhof Zoo with Naomi and I seemingly alone in it while all manner of workmanlike shunting, decoupling sounds went on, interrupted by occasional clear tannoy warnings: the next stop would be in Ost-Berlin. This was one of the tactical linguistic standoffs of the cold war: to the West, the Federal republic, Berlin was Berlin, isolated but worth a trip as they used to say; the other half, shrouded in darkness, was Ost-Berlin. I remember the transport maps did shows the eastern rail network, but in black rather than the bright colours of the western U-Bahn. For the German Democratic Republic on the other hand, Berlin was Berlin – Hauptstadt der DDR and the other benighted bit, full of capitalist vices like drugs and homelessness, was West-Berlin. In time, the train lurched across the strip separating the parallel republics, as slowly and cagily as though we were being exchanged for other agents, and we got out into the grimy air beneath Friedrichstrasse’s seemingly ancient cavernous roof. Even now it’s been cleaned up a bit and given at least a partial Deutsche Bundesbahn makeover, clear modern blue signs and all (strangely enough DB’s competitor in the old GDR persisted in calling itself the Deutsche Reichsbahn; it needed its monopoly) the station still has the feeling of the 1930s about it, of Isherwood, of Brecht and Weill and inevitably of the Brownshirts; of hats and nylons. It’s one of those places where the past is in the present, hauntingly and inescapabaly.

I seem to recall somehow being herded into the Tränenpalast, the brutal building in which movements across the border more substantial than a day were noted and no doubt filed, permitted or ruled out. We were going in the easy direction of course and since we knew it had been requested and required in the name of her Britannic Majesty that we be subjected to no let or hindrance we were confident of getting back out eventually, but it was still a distressing moment. In the end though the stamp thudded on to the Ausweis and we were released onto Friedrichstrasse itself to go and find our hostel, which we were to share with Mozambican and Cuban engineering students in Friedrichshain. For me ever since, Friedrichstrasse station has been a legendary place of arrival and sad departure – departures from Berlin above all. Like most of Berlin it’s a funny, ugly place to think of as special; but that doesn’t stop it being special in its ugliness.

Today I walked from my hotel, twice across the Spree past the Reichstag, the impressively modernistic Bundestag committee and administrative block and the less uncompromising but annoyingly securitized Chancellery – Angela’s den – finally to reach the new Hauptbahnhof built on the wastelands of that old scorched border and I saw again how, in Berlin, past and present are one. This new station’s design, its openness making its comings and goings somehow urgent as well as exotic – the Berlin-Warszawa express pulled in as I looked around – giving them a sense of destination in a full sense. The massive, classic central European vault recalls the past but triumphantly surpasses it: this is a Friedrichstrasse for the 21st century. Decades of lovers will meet here, and part; Berlin’s lovers will say their goodbyes here too. They won’t forget.

That twenty years lapse, by the way - nineteen in fact of course. While we were in the GDR, Erich Honecker was ill in the Charité hospital and his citizens were escaping through Hungary - we must have known at the time though I can't remember what the East German media said about it. Yet when we got back to Hamburg we agreed with the German students Naomi knew that there was no chance of the iron curtain being pulled back and that Germany would certainly not be reunited in our lifetimes. Only three months later they took their hammers to the wall and a year after that Germany was one. Astonishing. Astonishing too, looking back only nineteen years, that this city had a wall running through it and that the GDR seemed permanent. Things change.

Blogging the German capital

It's too long since I was in Berlin. That was my thought as I landed at Schönefeld airport this morning on the Ryanair extreme budget redeye. I first came here in the old days: before the Wende, I mean, when the city was still divided. Back in 1987 it was inconceivable that you might one day be able to walk down Unter den Linden all the way to the Brandenburg Gate - and through it. If by some miracle you'd managed to evade the Volksarmee guards to that point (highly unlikely) and got anywhere near the Gate itself, you'd have been shot.

But that story involves an imagined walk to the wall from the East; I always think of Berlin that way, from an eastern point of view. On that first visit - a crazy student trip organised by my college friend Pete who had a car with him in Ludwigshafen and persuaded Isobel, a Scottish siren called Marie and me to join him in the drive from Stuttgart, where we picked up the girls, across East Germany to the great city - I'd first seen the wall from the West, of course. The big white rampart with the bulging curved lip on top obscured the Brandenburg Gate but little viewing platforms were helpfully set up so you could mount ten or twelve steps and get a view over into the Eastern Bloc. I was fascinated as a child and teenager by this other Europe, this dark, greyly exotic world on the other side. In the early eighties I'd listened at home on my (I thought) amazing short-wave radio, the one my parents had bought me thinking I'd like the cassette recorder built into it but the real pleasure of which was listening to the world: All India Radio, Voice of America, Radio Moscow, Radio Berlin International for that matter... but I'm getting off the point. In the early eighties I'd listened to Radio Tirana, perhaps the most bizarre, certainly the most relentlessly ideological station ever to transmit. The Albanian regime, the Party of Labour whose propaganda it sent out, was not allied to the USSR, admittedly, and its tone was harsher and grimmer than anything thought or said in Moscow. But all these socialist countries shared that closedness, that strange undiscovered, uncharted dullness that I wanted to experience. I realise of course that it was a morally questionable feeling: to some extent I was finding chic in the oppressed lives of others. I knew that even at the time. But as soon as I realised it was possible to visit those countries, I wanted to go, first to Hungary, then the most open of the communist states, then on that first visit to Berlin, staying with Pete and the girls somewhere near Charlottenburg as I recall, at a Salvation Army hostel (they had room, and Isobel was a daughter of the Sally Army).

We went east for a day trip, as westerners used to back then. And how satisfyingly different it was! On the streets, no commercial life, or hardly any. Unter den Linden was an avenue almost entirely lined by embassies, with the Russian one and those of other Warsaw Pact countries - Bulgaria perhaps, Poland - having the best addresses. Perhaps there were a few trade delegations. But no actual life or discernible activity. It was summer, and we found lunch at an outdoor stand under a tent just north of Unter den Linden, where we stood in line behind an East German soldier in his blue-grey uniform with the green stripe, eventually ordering Broiler – big pieces of roast or grilled chicken – and Puffer, which were big round potato cakes served with a sweetish low-grade apple sauce. Later we drank beer in Alexanderplatz. Not the best beer, and not the best setting, sitting outside in one of the most garishly ugly squares in all Europe with English-style pint mugs in our hand that were scratched, cracked and chipped, so many comrades had used them. But the East was still sexier, more intriguing, and ever since then I’ve always come back, and always stayed east of where the wall once stood. Or perhaps not, this time, or if so then just, My hotel, the Arte Luise “Kunsthotel” (I got a deal, and couldn’t resist this ultra-cool, ultra central artsy place whose rooms – even the amazingly minimalist bargain-loft single I’m in, without shower or sink – are designed by a different artist. Mine is yellow, and by Brigitte Schroeck. The building was part of the no-man’s-land that stood between the two sides, In the East, technically, but in another sense, neither East nor West. Nowhere.

Barack Obama/CreativeCommons

Okay, okay, so Joe Biden is a senior senator with serious foreign policy credentials, having served twice as chair of the foreign relations committee. I think the appointment is a mistake. I thought Obama would appoint a woman, and I still think he'd have been better to do so. Surely Obama needs to play to his strengths in this election, not trim or compromise as a defensive move against McCain. Naming Biden seems an obvious move to neutralise accusations that Obama is too left-wing, too idealistic and too inexperienced. But I reckon anyone who wants a reassuring, stolid presence in the White House is likely to vote McCain anyway. The reason to vote Obama is precisely because he is fresh and idealistic - a unique selling proposition that is dulled by this blundering compromise.

Biden is too white, too male and too Washington, and putting him on the ticket opens the way for McCain to blur Obama's appeal further by choosing a black, Asian or female running mate. The Obama campaign has obviosuly been afraid of naming a woman - because it seemed tokenistic, and because it might scare away voters who are just about getting used to the fact that the Democratic nominee isn't white. But they should have taken the plunge. The coming convention should have been the time to sharpen the Obama image and make McCain seem like somehting from the 21st century. An impressive female nominee would have stiffened the resolve of many Democratic voters, especially those women who supported Hillary Clinton, seeing something historic in her campaign, just as historic as Obama's candidature.

Is he losing his nerve?

China is chasing the wrong kind of dream

kenyee/CreativeCommons

I'm not a great fan of the Olympics generally (I wish they weren't coming to London, and can't understand why anyone wants them), and of the Beijing Olympics I am very much an unfan. What's there to like? The people of China may be enthusiastic about the games, but the truth is, we can't really know what they think. I sat next to a Chinese student in Cambridge at a dinner last year - she was young, about 25 I think, and studying business with the aim of working in the City of London. She was pleasant and talkative, but everything she said might have been scripted in Beijing. Unflagging on the excitement of the Olympics (and this was last year, remember) and on the Chinese economic miracle, her good English suddenly became useless - she in fact became silent - if I mentioned anything about democracy in China, or even the situation in Hong Kong. On subjects like that she really did say absolutely nothing.

That doesn't of course tell you all you need to know about a vast and varied country like China. But it does tell you the most important thing, the most salient fact from which so much else flows. China ain't a free country. Yes, the opening ceremony of these games was magnifique in its bizarreness, impressive like those interminable military parades in Red Square used to be, but I found its aggressive coordination of collective effort both ominous and oppressive. Only a dictatorship can achieve something like this, I thought. And of course it turned out to be fake, the pretty little girl not only having mimed, but having mimed to another girl's singing. Why wasn't the world shown the girl who really could sing? The fireworks, too, were faked. It's not true that all the tickets have been sold, either. That lie has been exposed because it's obvious the organisers have bussed people in to support the games. And they're not the only achievements the Chinese regime is going to fake. The other night there was an excellent programme on BBC Radio 4 explaining how new versions (made among other places in China, as it happens) of the popular performance-enhancing drug EPO, which is especially helpful to endurance athletes, is nearly impossible to detect and probably won't be detected given the pathetically lax standards applied by the International Olympic Committee. That's not China's fault, but you have to be naive in the extreme to think that the Chinese athletic system will not do everything it can to top the medal table at these games. The Chinese political system is not unlike that of Russia and East Germany in the 1970s. Remember how those countries wowed us with their athletic achievements? I certainly remember Marita Koch, Marlies Göhr, Bärbel Wöchel and those others who blew the Americans away, as well as Donna Hartley and Verona Elder, sadly. I expect to see many a smiling Chinese gold medallist at these games, and I wonder whether we'll ever know the truth about the Chinese training systems, as we now know what happened in the old Soviet bloc. Have we learned nothing? I've learned enough to say that Tirumesh Dibaba is the fastest woman ever over 10,000 metres, having broken Paula Radcliffe's world record in winning the gold today. I doubt you'll hear that on the BBC, although I suspect people like Brendan Foster agree with me and Wikipedia rather than the version put out by the BBC's website.

Incidentally, I think our media is being craven about the clear abuses by the Chinese regime right now. Only a few days a former American athlete was refused a visa because of his views about Tibet. Why is this scandal not the story of the games? Since then, an ITN journalist was arrested simply for reporting a protest. Again, why isn't that a big story? It should be.

One more thing. Everyone says and thinks just now that China is the coming world superpower, economically at least, if not politically too. It's undeniable China is becoming richer and more integrated into the world economy. But I'm not convinced about the great Chinese future. For one thing, I don't think statistics coming out of China are likely to be reliable, any more than Olympic ticket sales figures were honest. More fundamentally, though, if you wanted to dominate the world economically, you wouldn't start by having a one-party state. China's progress is bound to be limited, its opening painfully slow and excessively cautious , its treatment of workers and innovators high-handed and counterproductive, as long as it is run by the Chinese Communist Party. One day the Chinese people will say goodbye to the CCP - and then we'll all really be able to celebrate one dream for the world.

Irakli Gedenidze/GFDL

I wrote yesterday that it wasn't clear to what extent Russia was pulling back from Georgia. But it's quite clear now that they are not doing so, but are making sure they destroy as much as possible of Georgia's miliatry capability, for example its navy's equipment at the port of Poti. The Americans are right to demand that Russia pulls out of Georgia immediately - and to condemn Russian bullying.

Russia's foreign and security policy at the moment, as well as unattractive, reckless and lethal, is simply incoherent. The Kremlin may not like the deal between the US and Poland about missile defence, but its own actions have made it imperative for Poland to tie the Americans into its own security. Russia is pushing its neighbours into Washington's embrace, because without US guarantess they have no security. Georgia proves that if any proof was needed, and the logic of Georgia's situation, and Ukraine's , is to want NATO membership even more desperately than they did before. If the Russians had any sense they'd be cooperating with Washington over missile defence (the Americans have offered to cooperate and both have an interest in protecting Europe from mad regimes) and would be guaranteeing the security of their neighbours rther than threatening them. Clearly, Medvedev doesn't have that sense. Or Putin doesn't. Or both don't.

What more can be done? Not a great deal, but some things. I think the French and the Americans having been doing the right things; the deal Sarkozy cam up with is sensible, and unpalatable as it might be for Georgia I think there have to be talks about the status of South Ossetia as part of any solution. So insisting on that plan being implemented is the first thing. If that doesn't happen, then the US should call off the joint military training it's apparently planning with Russia, Russia should be excluded from the G8 for the next meeting at least (perhaps they could be replaced by India - that might annoy them nicely) and the US and EU should review their backing for Russian membership of the WTO. But this Polish deal is the best retaliation for what Russia has done so far. I wonder if they'll get the message.