the background.
The August after I arrived saw the twentieth anniversary of the Wall’s erection, and it seemed to me that all that summer echoed the then two-year-old Pink Floyd hit: ‘Another brick in the wall.’ It boomed out over hot, dusty back street courtyards all through the summer months. I made it the headline to my first big feature story, a series of reflective first impressions of my new home. It made the back page of the International Herald Tribune and my first ‘ herogram ’, a telexed pat on the back from London. But that was based on my experience on either side of the wall, as stark a difference as it was humanly possible to imagine existing in what had until relatively recently been a single city.
It was hard to say then – and even harder now – whether it was a frisson of pure excitement, or a chill running down the spine that I experienced the first time I crossed the border at Checkpoint Charlie. Charlie was the sole non-rail crossing point for foreigners into East Berlin. The name, given it by the Americans in whose sector it lay, was purely alphabetical. The first road crossing point on the way from West Germany to Berlin was Checkpoint Alpha, that where it reached the Western edge of the city was Checkpoint Bravo. ‘Charlie’ was simply the most famous. For a good reason.Here the apparatus of the communist state was in your face, and in the unsmiling faces of the border guards. Westerners called them Grepos , a slang term derived from Grenzpolizei (border police). They were in fact by then officially known as Grenztruppen, border troops, a separate regiment of the NVA , the National People’s Army.
They examined in detail my passport, my new multiple-entry visa, stamped both and admitted me with the words ‘Welcome to the capital of the German Democratic Republic.’ The words ‘East Berlin’ were never uttered at official level. The half-city which was not surrounded by a wall – a fact many Westerners often forgot – was referred to only as Berlin, or if necessary for clarity’s sake, ‘the capital’. The unmentionable other bit was, if it absolutely had to be mentioned, Westberlin , as if Westminster were to be excised from London.
The difference was as dramatic as in any spy film. Whereas the apartment blocks of the more chic Western districts had been lavishly restored – and even those inhabited by squatters were garish with graffiti – those in the East still had the countless bullet pockmarks that bore witness to the ‘euphoric welcome’ afforded by the Berlin proletariat to the Soviet champions of People’s Power.
These were the ranks of six-storey nineteenth-century Mietkasernen (rental barracks) built by Prussian industrialists to house the new German capital’s burgeoning working class. My flat was on the first floor of a typical block on Schönhauser Allee, a broad thoroughfare that ran north-south, just a few hundred metres east of the Wall, and would have been described as ‘leafy’ were the trees not permanently caked in the dirt of diesel exhaust and the residue from the cheap, environmentally unfriendly but plentiful lignite brown-coal used in the power plants that provided heating. This was the heart of Prenzlauer Berg, a gritty working-class inner-city suburb. Today it is the bustling, Bohemian heart of trendy Berlin, alive with restaurants and nightlife. Not even in my most exotic fantasies could I have imagined that just two decades ago.
On the ground floor, just below the flat there was a bar called Wörther Eck (Wörther Corner), because it was on the corner of Wörther Strasse. It was a grimy place with vinyl-topped tables, and a secret staircase at the back that I would only become aware of onceit was no longer used. There was a shop on the corner opposite that bore the catchy label ‘ Obst-Gemuse ’ (fruit and veg). The communist government had replaced all traditional or family names of shops with functional ones. That Germanic insistence
The August after I arrived saw the twentieth anniversary of the Wall’s erection, and it seemed to me that all that summer echoed the then two-year-old Pink Floyd hit: ‘Another brick in the wall.’ It boomed out over hot, dusty back street courtyards all through the summer months. I made it the headline to my first big feature story, a series of reflective first impressions of my new home. It made the back page of the International Herald Tribune and my first ‘ herogram ’, a telexed pat on the back from London. But that was based on my experience on either side of the wall, as stark a difference as it was humanly possible to imagine existing in what had until relatively recently been a single city.
It was hard to say then – and even harder now – whether it was a frisson of pure excitement, or a chill running down the spine that I experienced the first time I crossed the border at Checkpoint Charlie. Charlie was the sole non-rail crossing point for foreigners into East Berlin. The name, given it by the Americans in whose sector it lay, was purely alphabetical. The first road crossing point on the way from West Germany to Berlin was Checkpoint Alpha, that where it reached the Western edge of the city was Checkpoint Bravo. ‘Charlie’ was simply the most famous. For a good reason.Here the apparatus of the communist state was in your face, and in the unsmiling faces of the border guards. Westerners called them Grepos , a slang term derived from Grenzpolizei (border police). They were in fact by then officially known as Grenztruppen, border troops, a separate regiment of the NVA , the National People’s Army.
They examined in detail my passport, my new multiple-entry visa, stamped both and admitted me with the words ‘Welcome to the capital of the German Democratic Republic.’ The words ‘East Berlin’ were never uttered at official level. The half-city which was not surrounded by a wall – a fact many Westerners often forgot – was referred to only as Berlin, or if necessary for clarity’s sake, ‘the capital’. The unmentionable other bit was, if it absolutely had to be mentioned, Westberlin , as if Westminster were to be excised from London.
The difference was as dramatic as in any spy film. Whereas the apartment blocks of the more chic Western districts had been lavishly restored – and even those inhabited by squatters were garish with graffiti – those in the East still had the countless bullet pockmarks that bore witness to the ‘euphoric welcome’ afforded by the Berlin proletariat to the Soviet champions of People’s Power.
These were the ranks of six-storey nineteenth-century Mietkasernen (rental barracks) built by Prussian industrialists to house the new German capital’s burgeoning working class. My flat was on the first floor of a typical block on Schönhauser Allee, a broad thoroughfare that ran north-south, just a few hundred metres east of the Wall, and would have been described as ‘leafy’ were the trees not permanently caked in the dirt of diesel exhaust and the residue from the cheap, environmentally unfriendly but plentiful lignite brown-coal used in the power plants that provided heating. This was the heart of Prenzlauer Berg, a gritty working-class inner-city suburb. Today it is the bustling, Bohemian heart of trendy Berlin, alive with restaurants and nightlife. Not even in my most exotic fantasies could I have imagined that just two decades ago.
On the ground floor, just below the flat there was a bar called Wörther Eck (Wörther Corner), because it was on the corner of Wörther Strasse. It was a grimy place with vinyl-topped tables, and a secret staircase at the back that I would only become aware of onceit was no longer used. There was a shop on the corner opposite that bore the catchy label ‘ Obst-Gemuse ’ (fruit and veg). The communist government had replaced all traditional or family names of shops with functional ones. That Germanic insistence
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