1989 (10 page)

He developed another trick. The East German state operated hard currency stores for its own citizens – a means to remove from them any D-Marks sent by relatives in the West – in which it sold, amongst other things, Western brand cigarettes at what amounted to duty-free prices, some twenty-five per cent cheaper than in the West. More importantly for Manne’s new trade, one of the most popular brands, Marlboro, could also be had for East German Marks. Albeit Marlboro made in Moldova (then the Soviet Republic of
Moldavia
). At over seven Marks a packet, these cost almost double the best East German brands. But Manne did his sums. He worked out that a carton of 200 would cost him about seventy-five East Marks, which at the black market exchange rate was the equivalent of only fifteen D-Marks, whereas he could easily sell them to his brothers in the West for twenty D-Marks. That gave them a fifteen D-Mark discount on the West Berlin shop price for 200 Marlboro, and him a profit of ten D-Marks, which was equal to fifty East Marks, or half a week’s wages for a waiter. The profit on two cartons gave him the equivalent of a week’s wages.

‘I can remember the first time I tried it,’ he told me one evening
at the
Stammtisch
. ‘In theory you’re only allowed to take out one carton of cigarettes, but in practice they don’t care about us taking out anything that isn’t in short supply over here. So I took three cartons of cigarettes in my dufflebag. By the time I got over, I was still sweating just a little, so I stopped at a bar on the way for a
West-beer
. And when it came to pay for it, I sold two of the cartons to customers in the bar.’

He did not, however, run the risk of converting D-Marks into East Marks at five to one in West Berlin and bringing them back with him (that was currency smuggling and a major crime). Instead he found something even more lucrative: he bought up cassettes of Western pop albums, brought them home, re-recorded them and sold each copy for twenty East Marks. He bought a tape-to-tape copying machine to make the business easier and had top quality speakers built to order in the East, paid for in D-Marks, a turntable and amplifier, and set up his own disco for hire at private parties. The fat roadworker had become a celebrity DJ. He even found a girlfriend. For Manne Schulz the Wall had become not so much a barrier as a door to a new life. Although he would never have said so publicly, the last thing he wanted was for it to be opened to
everyone
. But then nobody imagined it ever would be.

Of all the others who gathered round the
Stammtisch
several nights a week, the only one who had regularly visited the West, and not just West Germany, was Bernd. As a musician with the Berlin Symphonic Orchestra, he regularly travelled on trips that were designed to show that the communist state had every bit as great a command of the cultural arts as it had of sport. And that at least would not turn out to have been the result of
performance-enhancing
drugs. Bernd had been to Belgium and the Netherlands and he was very excited because now, for the first time, he was going to Britain. ‘You’ll’ love London,’ I told him. ‘Ahh, we’re not going there,’ he replied. ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘We’re going to Wales,’ he said. It appeared the level of cultural reciprocity East Germany aspired to hadn’t quite been achieved. The Berlin Philharmonic (West) played at the Albert Hall and the Queen Elizabeth Hall on London’s South Bank; the Berlin Symphonic (East) were playing in Cardiff and Llandudno.

That didn’t stop Bernd being excited though. Not particularly
because he was going to Britain, but because he was going to the West and that, as always, was a shopping opportunity. Particularly when he had a wife as demanding as Uschi. (Wives of course were not
permitted
to accompany their spouses on foreign trips, to diminish the chances of defection, although for obvious reasons even that
occasionally
didn’t work.) For the next two weeks, however, I had only one task every evening Bernd was present in the pub: to school him in the correct pronunciation of the one English phrase he
desperately
needed to know if his home life was to be worth living over the coming year: ‘Please can you sell me a pair of orange leather ladies’ trousers?’ I tried in vain to explain to him that no matter how well he pronounced it, he was going to get odd looks in Llandudno’s Marks and Spencer. But he wasn’t having it; according to Uschi they were all the rage in West Berlin. And the West was the West, wasn’t it? He came back several weeks later, sadly empty-handed and completely bemused by the ‘very rude’ reception his request had received.

There was one other regular who had been in the West, but not for a long time. Hans Busch was the exception at Alex and Bärbel’s
Stammtisch
: he was a communist, an actual card-carrying member of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, the ‘leading force in the state’, created by an enforced merger of the Socialists into the
Communist
Party when both became legal again in 1945. Ironically, Busch was the grandson of a wayward Polish nobleman who had lost his fortune gambling in the heady days of the Weimar Republic, survived by selling off his title and settled with a German wife in a little town near the Dutch border. Hans’s mother Liselotte became a committed communist, a political affiliation she concealed during the Nazi era by marrying a staid conservative businessman and
producing
babies. Hans was born near the end of the war and in 1956 his mother finally followed her convictions and decided she and her children would up sticks to experience the new ‘socialist state on German soil’ for themselves. Hans was therefore a chosen son of the GDR who, when challenged that East Germany was only
communist
because it was the ideology of the occupying power, replied: ‘You could make the same conclusion about capitalism in West Germany.’

Busch’s youthful enthusiasm for his mother’s ideology had taken
a few knocks over the years however. Initially he had the convert’s zealousness mixed with the quirk that being a declared
revolutionary
was accepted by the establishment. He delighted in the
vocational
training in forestry he received through the state-sponsored apprenticeship scheme, and at eighteen even volunteered for the
Bereitschaftspolizei
(the public order police). Unlike most East Germans who regarded the compulsory school subject as a chore, Busch had been as eager to learn Russian as a Muslim might be to learn Arabic: because it was the language of his religion. Alex, a lapsed Catholic, teased him that the party’s prescribed ‘
self-criticism
’ sessions were akin to confession. ‘Maybe it’s because it’s a form of lapsed Christianity that I believe in it,’ Busch retorted.

In truth his faith had lapsed too. As a good-looking young man he had had a string of girlfriends in a state where sex was positively encouraged as a distraction for the young, not least because of a falling birth rate due to cramped living conditions. But when he lost his job because of an affair with a visiting West German girl who was deemed a ‘security risk’, he began to wonder about the party’s
insistence
on dominating every aspect of his life.

When the party refused him permission to attend his father’s funeral in West Germany, an even deeper disillusion set in. In the end Busch had devoted himself to the apprentice scheme he so firmly believed in, and was now warden of a residential home around the corner from the pub, which provided temporary lodging during the week for youngsters from the provinces come to learn about the print industry. He would still go through the motions of defending socialism – despite Alex’s jibes about ‘our friend Lenin here’ – but privately he would admit the truth of the old maxim about life under communism: ‘They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work’.

But it was Dieter and Hannelore, the husband and wife team who when I first discovered Metzer Eck worked there as waiters, who had the most heart-rending tale of the inhumanity of the Wall. It took me a while to understand it, not least because ‘Hanni’ had the most impenetrable Berlin accent I had yet encountered. But also because it followed an inhuman logic all of its own.

It concerned her uncle Eberhard, whom the family nicknamed ‘Pieps’. Pieps had lived in Teltow which all his life he, and the rest of
the family, had considered an outer suburb of Berlin (like someone in Orpington or Harrow might be considered to live in the outer suburbs of London). But Teltow had a Brandenburg rather than a Berlin postcode, so in August 1963 it suddenly found itself on the other side of the Wall. To the inhabitants of such fringe suburbs the sudden severing of their lifelines to the city they thought they belonged to was unbelievable. Teltow was little more than a straggle of streets where the Greater Berlin that had grown up in the
nineteenth
century sprawled out into the countryside. On its own it was nothing, yet now, literally overnight, this little overflow of urban sprawl had been designated a rural village. It was an anomaly on a par with the ‘walled garden’ allotments I had seen from my helicopter tour when I first arrived. It was true that Pieps and his
neighbours
could still drive into ‘Berlin’ – at least the eastern half of it – but now it was a journey of some forty kilometres just to reach the edge of the city and when they did it was a part they were completely unfamiliar with.

But far more importantly, they were severed from much of their lives. Many of them had worked in nearby parts of the city. Now their jobs – earning valued D-Marks – were forever inaccessible. For Pieps and a couple of his mates, there was one thing that was even worse: they had been permanently cut off from their local pub. One night late in that fateful summer of 1961 – a quiet night, as all nights had now become since their road ended in a barbed wire fence
illuminated
by searchlights – Pieps and two of his friends were drinking in the bar they had perforce used since they could no longer get to Franz’s, only half a dozen streets away. At last one of them stood up and said, ‘I’ve had it with this. I’m going for a drink at Franz’s.’

Bleary with beer, the three of them staggered into the night. The one who had made the suggestion strode forward with deliberation in his step, the other close behind, while Pieps who had had a bit more to drink, staggered confusedly after them. It was only when he saw the lights and the barbed wire that he half-sobered up and realised what they were facing. He ran after them. But his two
drinking
buddies had been prepared. They simply hadn’t told Pieps all of it. As they came close to the fence they dived for a hole in the ground, an area where they had previously scooped out earth and
surreptitiously snipped through the barbed wire. Now they pushed their way through and ran for the second fence as if the hounds of hell were on their heels, as they soon would be. Only poor old Pieps, not quite in on the plan, ended up struggling with the wire, trying to follow them but caught hopelessly, and was unable to find the gap his two friends had squeezed through. As it seemed he might have found a hole big enough, two crashing rifle shots rent the air, and splintered the bone in his leg. The people in the pub they had just left watched silently as the guards took him away.

He was taken to Rummelsburg, the strict security detention centre in the south-east of Berlin, where a quarter century later I would – thankfully only briefly – also find myself. Pieps was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment; but when he emerged it was not only as a political misfit with a mark on his identity card that doomed him to menial work, but as a cripple, one leg an inch shorter than the other. He died not long after. Hannelore’s father was in the National
People’s
Army and considered his brother-in-law an unwelcome
embarrassment
. But she remembered him. Alex opened a bottle of his best Nordhauser Korn, and we all honoured poor old Pieps the way he would have wanted: with a round of schnapps.

It was for both Jackie and me an initiation into another world a Germany nobody had taught us about at school, and at the same time an invitation into the large extended family of friendship in a totalitarian society. We were becoming at home in a world that most correspondents at best only visited. At Christmas that year we held a party in our flat and served English roast turkey to a group of twenty that included Alex, Bärbel, Udo, Manne, Hannelore, Dieter, Günter. Even Jochen too. Alex brought bottles of best Berliner Pilsner. And we turned up the music for the benefit of the microphones in the walls. And drank and talked and told jokes.

But it was Dieter’s recasting of the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin that got the loudest laugh: ‘There was this plague of rats down at the offices of the party,’ he started, already getting chuckles from his audience. ‘Along comes this little girl and she says she can get rid of the rats if they promise to give her whatever she wants afterwards. After a lot of umming and ahhing, they agree. So the little girl puts her hand in her pocket and brings out a clockwork
mouse on a string. She leads it out of the building and as she does all the rats come running after her. When she reaches the River Spree, she kicks the clockwork mouse in. All the rats jump in after it and drown. The comrades are delighted, and say, “That was marvellous, little girl. Now we will keep our promise: what should we give you?” And the little girl smiles her sweetest smile and says, “A clockwork Russian soldier.”’

I almost hoped the men with the microphones could have heard it. After all, it was only a fairy tale. Wasn’t it?

‘I don’t know what he wants,’ said Jackie, her face reflecting
something
between panic, despair and disgust, as she pushed the rear door of the flat to, and summoned me to deal with the caller. I walked down the corridor and opened it again. And understood in a flash. It was Müllerchen. And all three of Jackie’s emotions were perfectly understandable.

For a start Müllerchen looked like something no self-respecting cat would drag in. To say he was rat-faced was to do a grave
disservice
to most rats. He was a small man, about whom the word ‘mousey’ springs to mind, except that people keep mice as pets which give altogether the wrong impression. He had lank, greasy dark hair and a moustache that suggested he had himself tried to pick up some rodent with his teeth and half of it had remained stuck there. His name was Muller, the universally used diminutive Müllerchen being a reference to his size and general weediness rather than, as it might have been, an endearment. He lived with his wife and an
unconscionable
number of children in the ground floor flat where he
fulfilled
a modicum of the duties of a concierge.

His official title was ‘
KVW-leiter
’ which stood for
Kommunalwohnungsverwaltungsleiter
, or communal accommodation
supervisor
. But everyone called him the
Hausmeister
(housemaster), a title he not only hated but which was hugely politically incorrect because it had been the word used under the Nazis when whoever filled the role was supposed to report to the Gestapo any
suggestion
of ‘treacherous’ talk about the party. There was, of course, little reason to suggest that that element of the job had changed, although Müllerchen was far too dim, and almost invariably far too drunk to take in, let alone report any whisperings of discontent against the SED.

To make things worse, he spoke German as if it were a cross
between Mongolian and Dutch – with apologies to both – a hissing, sibilant, nasal version of the language with a backstreet Berlin accent that confused consonants and had only the remotest idea of what grammar might be. Imagine a German with a sound but basic command of the Queen’s English being faced by a Glaswegian-born Cockney with a lisp.

Even so, Jackie had managed to grasp the essence of what he wanted: ‘I think he wants our newspapers.’ This was said with some trepidation. And rightly so. Because what Müllerchen wanted was not our copies of
Neues Deutschland
or any of the other esteemed, two-a-penny publications of the official East German
governmentbacked
media, but the West German newspapers we also had
delivered
daily. These were, of course, taboo. Despite the fact that most East Germans could watch West Berlin television and listen to West Berlin radio, the idea of them actually getting their hands on words in print that had not been passed by Communist Party censors was anathema to their masters.

Our newspapers were delivered specially, not by a newsagent, but by a hand-picked courier in the pay of the East German postal service, and undoubtedly vetted for party loyalty by the Stasi. They were not pushed through our letter box but had to be handed over in person to one of us, or to Erdmute in her role as office secretary. Reading the Western press was for Erdmute one of the big perks of her job, and no doubt explained why the Reuters subscription also included several of the more popular West German glossy
magazines
which she and Helga could be found perusing over coffee in our kitchen during their mid-morning fag break.

None of these publications were supposed to leave the office. Even when read, they were supposed to be disposed of in a special waste bin earmarked for incineration, though every now and then I did notice one of the glossies stage a successful escape bid via
Erdmute’s
handbag. Müllerchen, however, was another thing altogether. Jackie’s caution was admirable. For a start, if he really was
conscientiously
performing the duties of a
Hausmeister
, which I seriously doubted on grounds of his general incapacity, might this not well be a trick? A trap to compromise my standing as a correspondent on the grounds that I was ‘disseminating’ anti-GDR propaganda, such
as the price of a discount three-piece suite, the ready availability of imported Greek asparagus, or adverts for holidays in Majorca?

Certainly the idea of Müllerchen poring over the lengthy
intellectual
political leaders in the columns of
Die Zeit
, or perusing the foreign pages for ‘anti-socialist’ dispatches about the latest Soviet reverses in Afghanistan, seemed improbable to say the least. I decided initially to play the straight bat: I told him that
unfortunately
I needed the newspapers for my work and that even when finished with them, his government forbade me to let them leave the flat. I have rarely seen anyone look quite so crestfallen. If this was some sort of Stasi entrapment game, Müllerchen was playing a blinder. ‘
Für die Kinder
,’ he bleated. For the kids. ‘Just one page.’ I was puzzled. None of the broadsheet heavyweight newspapers we took regularly were famed for their funny pages. And I didn’t have the Muller family down as great sports fans. Which page could he mean? And then he told me, and I realised I should have known all along. ‘
Die Fernsehprogramme
.’ The television schedules. Of course!

The East German government had long since given up the nigh impossible task of jamming the strong signals which not so much leaked over the Wall as were poured across it. After all an endless diet of soap opera from the dubbed import
Dallas
to West
Germany’s
home-grown
Black Forest Clinic
was just as effective an opiate for the masses in the East, as in the West. Better that they should escape into a television fantasy world rather than escape across the barbed wire fences that confined them in the real world. But in those days, long before on-screen electronic programme guides, nobody had any idea what was on and when. No publication
available
anywhere in East Germany published a schedule for almost anything anybody ever watched. Yet here was Müllerchen with the answer just upstairs. He gave me his most ingratiating smile. How could I say no? It was easy. I wrapped myself in his government’s flag and told him I couldn’t possibly go against my host country’s regulations. Call it hard-hearted if you like but the idea of having a mendicant Müllerchen rapping on the back door on a regular basis just didn’t bear thinking about.

But the inhabitants of our flat block weren’t all quite as
antipathetic
as Müllerchen or the unseen secret policeman in the flat next
door. At quite the other extreme to both of them was Volker. If Müllerchen looked like a half-drowned rat, Volker looked like Bjorn from Abba. He had long blond hair which fell to his shoulders and a little wispy blond beard clearly cultivated from adolescent bum fluff to make him look older than he was. He was a would-be hippy who worked – given that not having a job in the workers’ paradise was illegal – as a gravedigger.

Volker lived in the
Hinterhof
. The word translates literally as ‘back yard’, which is far from inaccurate but doesn’t quite do the concept justice. The big Berliner ‘rental barracks’ of the nineteenth century were built to a remarkable uniformity: all six stories high, but each roughly square in shape with the centre hollowed out to form a quadrangle open to the sky, the idea being that it allowed light and air to circulate to the living accommodation around it which was invariably cheaper than the ‘prestige’ apartments which faced onto the main road. It worked well in theory but even from its inception only to a limited extent in practice. For obvious reasons the sun only shone down into it when it was directly overhead, so for most of the day, and all of the winter, the
Hinterhöfe
and those who lived in them inhabited a world of deep shadow. Ours, however, was better than many, largely thanks to the Royal Air Force who had done the poor people of Berlin the favour of removing the apartment block immediately behind it. Instead of being enclosed on all four sides, therefore, our
Hinterhof
had three six storey sides and one bounded by a ten-foot wall and a patch of wasteland.

Historically, because the
Hinterhöfe
accommodation was cheaper it had been lived in by the poor which meant the rich folk living in the apartments that faced the main road treated it like dirt, which invariably was what it was full of. Everybody kept their bins there for a start, even if it was the only playing space for most of the apartment block’s children. Under communism of course, there was supposed to be no such thing as rich and poor, but it was still remarkable how it tended to be people like Volker who ended up living in the basement. He had a one-room flat that opened onto the bin storage area, but because of the missing apartment block on one side he occasionally got a few rays of sunlight. Not that Volker noticed them.

Like most would-be hippies – or maybe just a lot of kids his age with too much time on their hands – he spent a lot of time in bed. This might, of course, also have been because he had a very
attractive
girlfriend called Kathrin, a leggy blonde who spent a lot of time wandering around in one of Volker’s shirts and not much else. She was younger than him and possibly too young to be spending as much time in his flat as she did, but that was none of my business and in any case we were pretty certain her father knew about it. He was, Volker confided behind a hand – as if the man himself might be watching – a ‘sort of policeman’. We could all imagine what sort. On the other hand our confidence in her father’s omniscience might have been misplaced – how many fathers dote on their teenage daughters to the extent of wilful blindness? The alternative – which I very much doubted – was that her dad was using her to keep tabs on Volker and his mates, who liked to think of themselves in a small way as ‘dissidents’.

They were not of course ‘dissidents’ in the sense of those cultural and intellectual figures who particularly in the Soviet Union made a point of taking a public stand against totalitarianism. They were primarily disaffected, with a similar attitude that many Western kids have towards their parents’ society: not so much active
rebellion
as passive resistance. If in the West this often manifested itself as left-wing engagement, in a supposedly communist society it took the form of anti-establishment libertarianism. Rather than
organise
themselves, they resisted organisation, preferring to hang about in small groups grumbling about things. Maybe not that different after all. Their biggest statement, if their parents let them get away with it, knowing what it would mean for their career prospects, was refusing to join the FDJ. But then the concept of ‘career’ meant
relatively
little in East Germany: unless you were eminent in science, sport or classical music, or were a dedicated party apparatchik, there wasn’t much you could do to raise your living standards far above the average.

Most young people did join the FDJ, not out of ideological
conviction
but because it was the line of least resistance, plus they organised regular camping trips and had a fairly liberal attitude towards sex. In some ways this was a direct continuation of a similarly relaxed
attitude in their immediate predecessor Nazi organisations which glorified the body (and approved of large numbers of pregnancies to boost the workforce). But there was also the general official view that as an activity it was ‘mostly harmless’. Refusing to join was,
therefore
, not just a statement but almost an act of self-denial. However, it obviously hadn’t hindered Volker’s success with the opposite sex.

Dissident youth didn’t actually do much most of the time, except get together late at night, drink beer and occasionally smoke dope if someone had got his hands on some – there were more than a few interesting window boxes in the
Hinterhöfe
despite the relative lack of sunlight. One of his mates, however, did a bit more: Martin wrote and sang songs. He was about ten years older, in his early thirties, but also had shoulder-length hair and a beard, though he looked more like an overweight Jimmy Page than either Bjorn or Benny. His songs, however, sung to the accompaniment of raucously strummed acoustic guitar were in an altogether different tradition, that of caustic irony. His idols were the American Tom Lehrer, the great Russian dissident singer-songwriter Vladimir Vissotsky and of course, East Germany’s own Wolf Biermann.

Biermann was the son of a communist murdered by the Nazis who in 1953 at the tender age of seventeen had moved from West Germany to the East to work for the communist dream. He had his eyes rudely opened by the building of the Wall and the discovery of just how repressive his supposedly ideal regime could be. The
communists
who had at first adored this talented young actor, singer and songwriter turned on him with a vengeance when he began singing songs with a sting in the tail. He was refused membership of the party, then declared a ‘class traitor’ and banned from publishing his music or performing in public. But his fame as a countercultural icon was assured. In 1976 he was surprisingly allowed to go on a concert tour in West Germany which turned out to be a pretext for getting rid of him altogether, by revoking his citizenship and
refusing
to let him back into the country.

He was Martin’s hero and he would perform Biermann songs to admiring audiences of kids like Volker at late night spontaneous ‘gigs’ in people’s flats or in summer at impromptu lakeside picnics. He also wrote his own. One of my favourites was a catchy, gently
satirical take on the government’s tendency to treat Westerners – or anyone in possession of hard currency – better than their own people, stuck with no more than the money the government itself issued. The prefix ‘Inter’ – supposedly as in ‘International’ – was a clear indication to most East Germans that whatever it was attached to was not for most of them. ‘Intershops’ sold imported Western goods – from hi-fi equipment to good quality coffee – as long you paid for them with Western currency. These were usually situated in the lobbies of Interhotels, which were for Western guests only and again accepted only hard currency. ‘Intertank’ filling stations on the autobahn between Berlin and the West German border had better quality petrol, never ran out and accepted only West German D-Marks. They were officially only to be used by Westerners
travelling
between West Germany and West Berlin, and were
occasionally
used for clandestine meetings by family members separated by the border, and for smuggling (the strict border checks at either end were primarily looking for people). The East German airline was called ‘Interflug’ and although it was theoretically possible to buy tickets for East German Marks, this was academic as most East Germans did not possess passports.