1989 (23 page)

‘I called your wife,’ Bob, the foreign editor said in his usual
laid-back
laconic manner when I checked in to say I was on my way back. ‘She didn’t seem too worried. I expect it’s the sort of thing that happens to you all the time.’

‘Not exactly.’

‘Well, hurry back,’ he added. ‘I’ve got another story for you. A change of scenery.’

Neither of us, even then, realised the big one was waiting just around the corner.

‘It’s a big story, it really is, you should hang on until at least the end of next week.’ Italian Photographer Dario Mitidieri was at his most persuasive. We were sitting over sundowners in the bar of the
Kalahari
Sands Hotel in Windhoek, Namibia.

In a week’s time – between November 7th and 11th, 1989 – the former Southwest Africa was to have its first democratic elections, the first area administered by the apartheid regime in Pretoria to concede the vote to the black population. I was there to do a ‘
curtainraiser
’: an advance feature to whet the public’s appetite. It was Bob’s idea of a ‘break’. Admittedly it was a bit of a change from Warsaw and Berlin. ‘I dunno, Dario,’ I said as we nursed our drinks in the tropical heat, ‘I have a feeling I should get back to Berlin’. Luckily, Bob agreed. No matter how exotic the Namibian jungles and desert might be, I would have felt seven kinds of idiot if I had still been sitting there on November 9th. It was Dario who ended up kicking himself.

With hindsight it seems improbable in the extreme that barely a week before the Berlin Wall came down, a journalist who had spent years living there, and even covering the remarkable events
happening
in Eastern Europe over the previous months, had no idea it would happen. But then you have to take into account that nor did the CIA, MI6, nor West Germany’s intelligence service the BND
*
nor even the KGB. Nor was it in the pipedreams of any civil rights campaigner or even in the wildest drunken fantasies of anyone in the pubs and bars of Berlin (East or West). The best anyone hoped for was change: gradual, creeping reform that would make the dictatorship in East Berlin just that tiny bit less dictatorial, more
responsive to public opinion, more open to economic reforms that could benefit the population. And then maybe – just maybe – one day, when things had improved, a more liberal visa regime would be introduced that would make movement between the two German states easier, in both directions. To have said that the borders would be open within a week and German unity a done deed within a year would have sounded like rampant insanity.

It was not that there were no signs of progress. There were. Bigger ones than had been expected. The demonstrations that ruined the planned fortieth birthday party had taken their toll on morale within the East German politburo. Barely ten days later, on October 18th, the geriatrics who for years had fawned on their little
autocratic
leader, Erich Honecker, turned and stabbed him in the back. His successor was an apparatchik some twenty years younger who had been waiting in the wings for years, a man Honecker had
handpicked
because he was no threat. His name was Egon Krenz, but to most East Germans he was known simply as Horseface. For obvious reasons. He was the last man who expected to inherit a crisis and the least capable of coping with it.

This surprise development had meant that barely two weeks after my expulsion from the GDR, I touched down once again at Tegel in West Berlin. Exhausted I found myself a hotel in the West, flopped on the bed and turned on the television, then decided – true to the old rule – I had better check in with the desk back in London. The duty staffer on the foreign desk came on and asked, rather shrilly, what I was doing in West Berlin: ‘Shouldn’t you be in the East?’ I humoured her as best as I could without shouting. It was ten thirty at night and the only really sensible thing for me to be doing if I was to hit the ground running the next day was to take in the West German news coverage on television and in the press. That way I would know what was going on in the big picture before I started focusing again on the details. There was also the serious possibility that I would not be allowed back into East Berlin.

In the meantime I planned to have a quick meeting with Kerstin so I would be able to pass first-hand information to Bärbel and Alex if and when I crossed into the East. We met at Cafe Kranzler, a pavement cafe on the corner of the Ku’damm which for three decades
had been the place to see and be seen in West Berlin. Kerstin and her husband Andreas had been out of East Germany barely two weeks and spent part of that time as refugees in Poland, but looked as if they had emerged from a glossy fashion catalogue rather than the drab world beyond the Wall. Both were sporting what for Germans, East and West, was the symbol of the good life: leather blouson designer jackets. Kerstin combined satin-pink lipstick with a
spiky-slick
hairdo and tight tapering trousers. Andreas’s fashionably faded new blue jeans offset exactly his pastel-green leathers.

The waitress smiled politely as she took our order; nobody was treated like a refugee in those heady weeks, provided, of course, that they looked as if they could pay the bill. After all, Cafe Kranzler was itself a
Flüchtling
. In its pre-war days when it was frequented by the young Marlene Dietrich it had stood in the city centre, on the corner of Friedrichstrasse and Unter den Linden, now just across the Wall. Kerstin giggled. ‘It’s all so colourful,’ she said. ‘Such consumerism,’ Andreas sighed happily. These were not young idealists,
delighting
in the freedom of expression offered by life in the West; they were young materialists delighted by the shopping. What had most impressed the pair was the food hall at KaDeWe (an acronym for
Kaufhaus des Westens
: Shop of the West), West Berlin’s most
exclusive
store. It was the first stop for West Berliners showing off the riches of capitalism to relatives from the East. Kerstin and Andreas went there with Aunt Renate.

Their smart clothes were bought with money scraped together by Andreas’s father before they left East Berlin. Kerstin had already found herself a job as a waitress at the Argentinian Steak House on the Ku’damm at twice the salary she earned at the bowling alley in the East. In D-Marks too! Andreas was toying between taking up an offer of a waiter’s job in the Wienerwald fast-food chain or a trial as a
maitre d
’ at the Old Nuremberg Bavarian sausage restaurant in the basement of the Europa Centre, directly beneath the skyscraper with the symbol of capitalism: the Mercedes star itself. ‘They have only offered me a three-month contract to see how I do, but that sounds fair enough,’ he said. Their biggest problem was finding a flat. Andreas was hopeful. ‘It all works through strings, you know,’ he confided with a grin, ‘just like
drüben
, over there,’ he laughed,
jerking his thumb in the manner East Berliners always used to
indicate
the West, but now meaning the East. They had settled into a new world with disconcerting speed, almost as if they had only moved a few miles across town. Which was, of course, precisely what they had done. But could the East German system’s imprint on its
citizens
really be so fragile? It seemed it could.

In fact West Berlin had seen fewer of the new refugees settle there than most of the rest of West Germany. Many of those who had fled came from the East German provinces with no real roots in Berlin, while even some of the East Berliners who had got out felt that to move to the enclave of West Berlin was moving back into the bear’s den. On the other hand there were some who, like Kerstin and Andreas, couldn’t properly feel at home in West Germany, which they regarded as too provincial and where people spoke with funny, unfamiliar accents. At one of the welcome centres set up over the previous weeks I had met Petra, a twenty-two-year-old dentist who had fled via Prague, Budapest and finally Bavaria. She was friendless and jobless but still could live nowhere but Berlin: ‘I had to come back to Berlin, at least to understand the mentality, the accent, the sense of humour. Bavaria was beautiful but more foreign than I’d imagined. It would be very hard to fit in there. The only problem here is that I love the landscape but access to it is still restricted by the bloody Wall. It’s hard to see the rest of one’s past so near, yet so far.’ She had been warned by the West Berlin authorities not to use transit routes through East Germany, nor the few U-Bahn
underground
railway lines which, run by the West, passed under East Berlin streets and therefore were for a few miles nominally under communist jurisdiction.

I introduced her to Günter, my old opera-singing beer-drinking actor chum from the East Berlin Volksbühne. He had been in the West for over three years, and was working at several theatres. Life as an actor in the West was a lot less certain than in the
state-sponsored
East German arts world, but he had little good to say about the regime on the other side. He had asked on several occasions for permission to visit West Berlin for the birthday of his ageing mother and been refused without reason. When she died, they let him out for the funeral. He did not go back: ‘Their stupidity is matched only
by their thoughtlessness. But it’s the friends I still miss most. Last month I became a granddad (he was only forty-four) but I cannot visit my grandchildren. They would let me move back permanently, which I don’t want to do, but not for a visit. It’s funny, you know; there I felt locked in, unable even to go to Poland without a visa. Now I can travel wherever I want in the world, but the one thing I’d really like to do is get on a train and nip up to Alex’s place for a drink.’ He had no idea how soon his wish would be fulfilled.

Only the day before, Kerstin had been on her way to work at the steakhouse when she noticed the dramatic news on the electronic billboard at the Ku’damm Eck crossroads. It displayed a giant
electronic
picture of an elderly man in glasses. The picture was
familiar
, the disrespectful text that ran underneath it was not: ‘Bye bye, Honey.’ Erich the red had gone, pushed out by his own crown prince. Giggling with malice, she told me that by some delicious mischance the announcement of his appointment as the new leader of East Germany had interrupted a television programme on state-run
television
called
Everyone Dreams of a Horse
.

With swept-back iron-grey hair and curling lips that revealed a mouthful of sharp teeth, Krenz at fifty-two had the sort of ‘kindly uncle’ leering smile that makes adults cringe and grab their
children
tightly by the hand. Back in my hotel, I watched a rerun of his first televised address as ruler of East Germany: he sat hunched over his script, reading slowly, his head moving from left to right as he followed the words, looking into the camera with sunken but
penetrating
eyes at the end of each paragraph. His assumption of power reassured nobody. Wolf Biermann, the satirical singer-songwriter expelled from East Germany in 1976, described Krenz as the ‘
nastiest
possible candidate’. Several thousand East Berliners had already shocked the new regime by briefly forming a human chain across Alexanderplatz to express their scepticism about the promise of a more human face.

That news in itself was enough to set me hurrying in my hire car along the old familiar rat run that went along side streets, across main thoroughfares blocked by the Wall and ended up, as always, at the one checkpoint where ‘non-German foreigners’ (a nice expression which in itself expressed East Germany’s hard-to-shake
schizophrenia) could cross into the East. Although I had not been formally told when I was expelled that I was henceforward
persona non grata
, I was aware that I was still by no means sure that I would be allowed across. But I had a card to play I thought just might come up trumps: I had two passports. Amongst journalists it was a not uncommon phenomenon, for many reasons. To cite but one: the Israelis insisted on stamping those of all visitors, and anyone with an Israeli stamp in their passport was then automatically barred from most Arab countries.

But I had an additional advantage: being born in Northern Ireland, I was entitled to both a British and an Irish passport. Most people back home chose one or another, depending on their religion and/ or attitude towards the sectarian divide. As a journalist, I thought I was obliged to see both sides of every question so I opted for one of each. There was also the fact that we were not long past the days of airline hijacks – usually by pro-Palestinian groups – who would take hostages and threaten to shoot them. They routinely started with the Israelis, but then soon went on to the Americans, and because of the sort of poodle politics Britain had played over recent decades,
eventually
moved onto the Brits. I hoped we Irish ‘sons of the revolution, begorrah’ were a sight further down the firing line.

I had been travelling on my British passport two weeks earlier when I had been arrested – even if bizarrely it had been my Irish passport I pulled out of my pocket to separate me from the crowd of other detainees at the interrogation centre. But on balance I decided that if they had banned me it was more likely to be the British passport that had gone on the blacklist, and therefore the Irish card was the one to play now. As it happened the border guard on duty was my burly old acquaintance I had nicknamed the Bear. He said simply, ‘Not surprised to see you back,’ which was as close to a political comment I ever heard him make, and stamped my visa. I was in. First stop, obviously: Metzer Eck. Where better to take the pulse? Alex and Bärbel were delighted by my news from Kerstin and Andreas and my first-hand impressions of how well they were doing in their new lives. But most of the discussion in the pub centred on what was happening on their side of the Wall. Michy, a new Metzer Eck regular who was a cabaret artiste from the
Reiz’zwecken
(Tin
Tacks) cabaret troupe lamented that popular wit was outstripping their scriptwriters. They had just rehearsed a new sketch with Krenz as the wolf in a version of
Little Red Riding Hood
when he saw a banner on the street showing the new leader’s face with pointed ears and the caption: ‘My, grandma, what big teeth you have.’ ‘They don’t laugh any more,’ Michy despaired. ‘We used to have to fight the censor for every bloody comma. Now we can’t even keep up with the jokes on the streets.’ Alex laughed and poured him another beer.