1989 (8 page)

Hackepeter was like something transplanted straight from the set of Cabaret, without the singing girls: brown-painted walls, dark, smoky, lit by low-wattage bulbs in low-hanging yellow shades. On a small raised stage a two-piece ensemble of keyboard player and drummer who used mostly cymbals trotted out tunes from the fifties. There were two waiters, one rotund, balding and middle-aged, the other scrawny and ancient, both in stained white jackets,
carrying
trays of quarter-litres of state-brewed Berliner Pilsener beer. Sitting over a couple – regular service ensured by the astute tip of a single Western D-Mark – felt like being in a surreal time warp. Over the bar hung a faded photograph of a woodland scene, a young boy and girl holding hands in a forest glade in the Harz Mountains. It looked sentimental and bucolic. Until I squinted to read the caption:
Buchen Wald im Harz
. Had it always been there, I wondered, from the time before Buchenwald became a synonym for evil, or for the time when it became one? But then the occasional sinister frisson was part of the essential Berlin experience. In the West money and conscience had sanitised all traces of the past. There was less of each in the East.

Ironically it was in the West that the real remnant of Nazism remained, alive if not quite kicking. In 1981 Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s right-hand man arrested in Scotland on a controversial mission (the subject of countless conspiracy theories) to make peace with Britain prior to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, had for many years been the solitary inmate of the vast redbrick Spandau Prison. By then eighty-seven, Hess was on what newsmen consider a
perennial
death watch, and Reuters news desk asked me to ‘redo’ his obituary. The message from London added the rider – in the even then outdated telexese from the days when costs were calculated per
word – ‘though realise he ungotaboutalot recently’. Hess might have ‘ungotaboutalot’, but the fears of his imminent demise were serious enough to have his son Wolf-Rüdiger come to visit him. I met him outside. Having been just three years old when his father made his ill-fated mission, and having not seen him again until he was in his thirties (Hess was allowed only one thirty-minute visit per month), he could tell me little. As I shook his hand in farewell, it occurred to me that I was now just ‘two handshakes’ away from Adolf Hitler. A chilling thought.

Back in East Berlin I had happily found another local pub to call my own, one where the past also lingered, but without the same taint. It had been a balmy evening in early summer when I first
discovered
Metzer Eck, while returning from a day ‘on the other side’. I was also responsible for providing reports in English for Reuters from West Berlin, which made life occasionally schizophrenic. This had been one of those days covering the hijack of an airliner by Poles claiming political asylum in West Berlin, followed by a minor riot between squatters and police near a bar named after Bobby Sands, the IRA hunger-striker. So it was with all that Western confusion rattling around in my head that I ventured up a side street and
stumbled
into the secret heart of East Berlin.

As I got out of the U-Bahn at Senefelder Platz, I had decided to explore a little. Instead of my usual plod up Schönhauser Allee, past the great bulk of the Volkspolizei station and the wall of the old Jewish cemetery, where the arrangement of the brickwork still
displayed
Stars of David, I took the back streets, past where an
architecturally
interesting old nineteenth-century water tower stood. But before I reached the water tower a welcoming glow from a corner bar beckoned. The sign above the door read Metzer Eck. As I creaked open the door and glanced into the warm smoky atmosphere, the bar appeared as welcoming as any I had yet encountered in East Berlin: not very. There was the immediate sharp sense of mistrust, the unspoken question: ‘Who is it? What does he want here?’ In the Western half of the same city the answers would have been simple and obvious: ‘A passing stranger, in search of a quick beer.’ In the East there were always second thoughts. It is always disconcerting to walk into a bar for the first time in a part of the world you do not yet
know very well. All the more so when it is a part of the world
controlled
by a paranoid totalitarian state, where you still have a foreign accent and society is riddled with informers.

I was therefore not totally at ease as I took up a standing position by the bar and ordered a small Pils. It is one of the English-speaking world’s more common myths about Germany that the natives drink lager beer in huge litre jugs called
Steins
; they do occasionally in Bavaria, particularly at Oktoberfest time, and the great jug is
actually
called a
Krug
(
Stein
is a German-American term). In Berlin, they almost invariably drink Pils, much drier and hoppier, and mostly from a tiny twenty-five-centilitre glass with a delicate stem, and usually with a little doily arranged around the base to catch any drips. Anyhow that – minus the doily, which the East had run out of – was what I was holding in my hand, trying to sip
nonchalantly
, when the man with the beard and thick black-framed glasses approached me.

Even though I had indeed gone into the bar, not just for a beer but in the hope of striking up a conversation, I was still more than a little unnerved by his approach. It was not just the fact that the beard and glasses, coupled with a black polo neck and battered leather jacket made him look a bit like a comic book caricature of a spy, nor even the – substantially disconcerting in itself – fact that he appeared to be wearing a human molar tooth on a chain around his neck, but that his first words, albeit heavily accented, were undeniably in English. Spooky. How did he know? Was I exuding some subliminal Anglophone aura? And then I realised: tucked under my arm was a copy of
The Times
. What the bloke with the beard was asking was if he could have a look at it.

This immediately placed me in a quandary. Could he? Well, of course. But should I? Was this a test? Was he a Stasi plant who had been tailing me, pre-empted my subconscious and realising I was bound to gravitate towards the pub, had gone on ahead to lie in wait for me, so he could catch me out disseminating hostile
propaganda
to solid socialist citizens of the workers’ and peasants’ state? On balance, I decided probably not. And on second thoughts, did I really care? The ‘Star Trek directive’ only went so far, and if he actually asked to see the paper, then who was I to deny him. It was
surprising enough to come across anyone in East Berlin who could actually read it. It is another one of those myths about Germans that they all speak perfect English. Very few do, other than
businessmen
, bankers and car salesmen. And certainly in those days, on the eastern side of the Wall, next to nobody did. They didn’t even learn it in school; the only compulsory language on the curriculum was Russian. And if they went abroad at all it was usually only to Poland or Czechoslovakia, where the inhabitants mostly had some German, if only because the Germans had a not wholly appreciated habit of popping in over the years, usually in large numbers.

While I was reflecting on all this, of course, the bloke with the beard was staring at me in a strange way, probably because I hadn’t answered him yet. He repeated the question in German. I answered in German and his wary attitude returned – after all what sort of East German had access to foreign newspapers? Only the sort you didn’t want to ask too many questions of, if you were an ordinary citizen, not that for a moment I suspected he was. I handed over the paper, and he perused it for a bit, glancing mainly at the headlines. I had no idea how much he was taking in. Then he turned back to me and made a few comments in English. And I slowly realised he was testing whether my command of the language matched his. I could see him grudgingly, wonderingly, admitting that I might be the genuine article, an adventurous tourist perhaps strayed way off-course. His name was Jochen, he volunteered. I told him my name and he bought me a beer. I bought him one back and for the next hour or so we stood there next to the bar, on either side of the shoulder-high tiled oven that was the most traditional form of Berlin central heating, and talked quite a lot about very little. It was a form of verbal fencing, that I was to discover was the prelude to any friendship, even the most casual in a society founded on mutual mistrust.

After a few beers we agreed to meet again a few days later, and yet again stood on either side of the
Kachelofen
, resting our beers on it. He insisted on talking English – he was desperate to practise his – which I found mildly irritating – I was keen to improve my Berlin German. There was also the fact that it made me feel conspicuous. Jochen, I was to find out, liked being conspicuous, particularly if it
meant demonstrating his learning. He was a stage designer, whichwent some way towards explaining his penchant for the dramatic in his clothing, not just the tooth – which I never quite managed to ask about and he never explained – and the leather jacket, but a wide-brimmed fedora hat which accompanied them. His sexual preferences were, I quickly decided, ambiguous, though he never demonstrated them.

He doted on his mother. She was a specialist in Latin America and travelled to Cuba; the two of them were working together, he told me, on a book about the history of the Sandinista movement in Nicaragua. It was Jochen’s one overt gripe against the party that they never allowed him to travel with her. He never told me if she was a member of the Communist Party, though I would have occasion to come to believe it. He was not, he insisted, probably because he didn’t relish the thought of too much inspection of his private life. But he was, he proclaimed, a convinced socialist, mostly it turned out for private reasons. His father had been a soldier in the war and had abandoned his wife shortly after Jochen’s birth in the early 1950s to move to the West. She was one of the few who deliberately chose the communist East. It soon became clear that Jochen’s personal and political life, had become fused, his hatred for capitalism developed out of scorn for the father who abandoned him for it. His devotion to his mother led to devotion to her ideology. He was a textbook case of Freudian Cold War psychology.

Jochen became my first East German friend, although it was a slightly odd relationship with, for me, too many aspects that were to say the least ambivalent, although my wife’s arrival cleared up at least one of them. Jochen had a Bohemian lifestyle at a ‘garret artist’ level as a semi-freelance in a profession subsidised by the state, which approved of the arts as long as they kept in their
political
place. He had little money and did little work, living on beer and basics. His living conditions made our spartan apartment seem
luxurious
: a tiny studio flat with shared toilet facilities on the landing. I went round for dinner one night and he introduced me to
homemade
Prussian potato soup, a Berlin speciality ever since Frederick the Great introduced the humble spud in the eighteenth century. It was surprisingly good and I told him so. And he puffed with pride
and said that was proof all the West’s money didn’t make for a better lifestyle. He wasn’t wholly right, but he wasn’t wholly wrong either. No East German ever made soup by opening a tin or a packet. For one very good reason: they didn’t have either.

My conversations with Jochen at the bar had the advantage of making me an accepted fixture in Metzer Eck, if still for the moment considered an outsider. Standing at the bar meant, inevitably in the course of ordering and paying for beer, that I also got into
conversation
with the man behind it. He would turn out to be more
influential
on my attitudes to East Germany that anyone else I would ever meet. Alex Margan was a wry, witty, thoughtful man by then in his mid-forties, and he had one of those things that in East Germany was not best publicised: a naturally inquiring mind. For that reason alone he was fascinated by having a genuine ‘foreigner’ in his pub. He had listened to me speaking English but had not been entirely convinced at first, he told me. He had come across people who
pretended
to be foreign, to seem more interesting. Then when that
suspicion
faded, he wondered if we could have a conversation as he had no English. It was only when I was in there a few evenings on my own and we got talking in German that he really began to open up.

He would later reveal that I had accidentally aroused a certain level of suspicion simply from my association with Jochen, who was known to openly express support for the government, which most of his regulars – I was to learn – considered downright weird. Jochen was a tolerated regular in the pub but behind his back they called him ‘
Tarn
’, a nickname that suggested he was there ‘in
disguise
’. I had, of course, had my own doubts too. Our suspicions, in the end, were mostly – if not totally – unfair, but that was something I would find out only years later when their world had been swept away and I finally opened my Stasi files.

Either way, Jochen was not invited to the
Stammtisch
, that table closest to the bar where our hosts themselves would sit down when they had a moment free and mix with their most valued
customers
, those they considered friends. The
Stammtisch
is an
institution
in every German bar but at the time I was only vaguely aware of the honour when one evening, Jochen not being present in his usual position near the
Kachelofen
, Alex motioned to a place on the
bench next to him and told me to sit down. He introduced me to the others: an immensely fat man in his thirties called Manne who had damp palms, spoke with a lisp, and sat in the corner nursing his hundred grams of schnapps; a big bearded bloke with an iron
handshake
and a loud laugh whom Alex introduced only by his surname, Busch; a musician from the East Berlin philharmonic called Bernd, and Uschi, his loud bottle-blonde wife who spoke in a thick accent with long vowels that I later learned was the hallmark of Saxony, and Dresden in particular. There was also Axel, who produced
documentaries
for state television; Udo the overweight clarinettist; Ulla, the gap-toothed waitress from the bar down the road; Günter, an actor with the Volksbühne company who was allowed to pour the beer for the after-hours crowd and would deliver bursts of opera as he did so; Erwin the bus driver; Lothar the stocky landlord of the pub across the road who came in on his nights off, and the lads from the bakery down the road who came in to fetch draught beer in buckets for the night shift. Like the best of well-run pubs (an
institution
that the Germans treasure and modern Britain neglects to its peril), it was a vibrant microcosm of the district’s society. Indeed, particularly under the circumstances, it kept that society sane.