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.
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