Berlin as was
“Who is Paul Carpenter?”
That heavily-accented, staccato German voice from the front of the bus sent a total chill down my spine. I could feel everyone else wanting to see who “Paul Carpenter” was, but not daring to look in case that made them complicit in something. Outside, Red Kites were lazily circling a tractor on the hot fields. I braved a glance at the speaker – a tall, thin man with a light brown police uniform and a large pistol, hostered on his hip. I raised my hand, my arm shaking, hearing myself say “it’s me…”
I was 14, and this was my introduction to East Berlin.
Whatever the trouble was, it was resolved by the guides. I was part of an exchange program between my home town of Morley and a similar town in Germany called Siegen. I’m pretty sure that my exchange partner was a serial killer, but that’s a story for another day. As part of our two week visit to Germany we were to spend a few days in East Berlin – that icon of Communism.
For most of my formative years, the GDR was a visible reminder of the “Threat of Communism”, as it was always referred to. Over the wall were millions of square miles of secrecy, punctuated only by vast military displays and the occasional spying row where one side or the other would be “expelling diplomats” left right and centre for a couple of weeks.
I know a lot of people now who are too young to remember what it was all about. I imagine it’s too close to today to get taught in schools so it’s fallen into a bit of a cultural limbo, but if you’re my sort of age, it was the kind of thing you’d talk about incessantly over dinner times. Who had the “best tanks” and the “biggest army” was exactly the thing to fire up the imagination of a 10 year old in Leeds. The Russians were only beaten to Favourite Enemy status by the Nazis – but were every-present in action films. Ivan Drago, of course, being the coolest.
As you hit your early teens, your relationship with the Communist East changed a bit. The enormity of the threat grew in pace with your own awareness of it. You could spend whole nights laying on the banks of the res with a spliff, talking about the madness of the bomb, looking at the stars and feeling your insignificance with a cold kind of clarity. So it was that my brief encounter with the GDR in what I – no-one – knew were it’s dying days was packed with fear and excitement. I was going behind the iron curtain!
I do remember things about East Berlin. Even then, it struck me as odd that it took 4 people to serve me when I was buying a pencil or some such inconsequential piece of Commie memorabilia. One to take the pencil… one to wrap it… someone to take my money… someone to give me the change. The money itself felt light. Compared to the excitement of West Berlin, where you could take an escalator down from the main floor of a shopping centre and find yourself bathed in the exotic neon glow of sex shops, East Berlin left no colour in your memory. I was there for a day and all I remember is the unsmiling guards and oddity of empty shops.
All that is left for me is a single photograph of the members of the exchange group crouching in front of the wall. Obviously it was taken from the West, because the wall was covered in graffiti. No such frivolity was allowed if you were just 6ft to the East. A younger thinner me, with Joe Bloggs ‘icewash’ flares about 34 inches wide is just about discernable in the middle. There’s a picture of a military green Trabant I took in the East and – ironies abound – a picture of a Ferrari Testarossa I took in the West. And that’s about it.
A few months after my visit the wall fell. It was sudden and unexpected in the manner of that spell in the mid 80s where Chernenko was appointed President and died before we had the chance to get used to pronouncing his name. For all the totalitarian grimness and monumentulism of the East and its symbology it was washed from the pavement of history overnight. It seems that history has no more a memory of the place than I do.
Today is the 20th anniversary of that day. But it wasn’t just a wall that fell – it was a whole country that vanished overnight. They had a currency. A football team. An iconic car. Frighteningly proportioned female athletes! Presidents and TV shows. And in the course of a few tumultuous weeks it was all erased. I wonder sometimes what the people who grew up there feel about the way their entire society was dismantled before their eyes.
On a shelf, next a small kaleidoscope and a cartridge for the Atari 2600 is another reminder of my childhood. A couple of square inches of painted concrete. I think I’ll hang onto it.