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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.