HELLO TO BERLIN – Part Eight

The young filmmaker tries to cross back from East to West Berlin with forbidden goods

(Part of the novel Friends & Enemies included in a different form in published version)

I reached the Friedrichstrasse crossing point just before midnight.

I was well-oiled with cheap East Berlin beer and schnapps, but not drunk. My friend Lothar – DDR museum worker, passive dissident and surface conformist – had given me something, though he had not said what, to take across to West Berlin and I had to be on my guard.

There was no queue.

The guard checked my battered blue British passport with its imperious request to allow the bearer to proceed without let or hindrance and stamped an empty page. I returned it to my coat, donated my unspent East Marks to the orphaned children of North Vietnam and walked towards the remotely controlled doors that accessed the S-Bahn trains to West Berlin.

But they did not open and, as I stood waiting for them to do so, a voice behind me shouted: “You! Come back!” And then more than one voice, “Zurueck, bitte! Zurueck!”

I turned and saw two guards approaching. They asked me to remove my coat – an old trench coat loaned to me by Lothar to ward off the late November snow that had started falling as I left his flat, and, presumably, to hide the goods, which, Lothar had said, it was better I know nothing about.

Scheisse!

The older guard took the coat, while the other, a rotund youth with acne, led me back across the hallway to a room beside the passport desk.

“Please sit!” he said, indicating a chair in front of a scuffed, Formica-topped table.

I sat and surveyed the cream coloured walls stained with nicotine and, in my imagination, the faded blood of previous detainees.

After a minute or two, another guard entered. He was tall, blonde-haired and judging from the insignia on his uniform, an officer.

He stood for a moment and then perched on the edge of the table opposite my chair

“Good evening!’ he said in perfect English.

“Good evening,” I replied, disconcerted by the fact that my first line of defence – ‘I don’t speak German’ – had been undermined.

“As you were walking way,” the officer continued, “my guards noticed something moving in the back of your coat.”

“Moving?”

“Yes. I think you know what I mean.”

“I have no idea,” I said, shaking my head.

“Then,” snapped the officer, unrolling a sheet of card in his hand, “what is this?”

I stared in amazement at the image in front of him: Lothar’s favourite collage; the one that had hung on the wall above his bed in the Prenzlauerberg apartment – a gem of humorous subversion and light-hearted satire.

I rubbed my eyes and shook my head, feigning ignorance and innocence.

“Never seen it before.” I paused and tried a polite English smile. “Not bad. Where did you find it?”

“In the lining of the coat,” snapped the officer, unimpressed by the smile or my misplaced flattery of a subversive piece of art. “Are you telling me, you did not know it was there?”

“No idea,” I said, dropping the smile but upping the level of Michael Caine nonchalance in my voice.

“I find that hard to believe. Where did you get it? ”

I thought fast.

I must not involve Lothar, if I did he would lose his job at the museum and most probably be charged with subversion.

“At a shop,” I said, improvising a beginning without middle or end in sight.

“You bought this picture, this piece of counter-revolutionary propaganda in a shop? I don’t think so. No one would want to sell you something like that.”

“Not the collage, the jacket.”

“And the picture was inside it?”

“Yes.”

“Without your knowledge?”

“Yes.”

The officer stared at the image and then at me.

Sweat formed on my forehead, perhaps from the heat, perhaps – in the interrogator’s eyes – from the effort of lying.

“And where was this shop?”

“In the centre… near the television tower.”

“There are many shops near the television tower. Which one?”

The officer stood up and paced around the room. The youth with acne left and I felt panic pinch the pit of my stomach and tighten the edges of my brain. Could they arrest me? Hold me indefinitely? There were no official diplomatic relations between the GDR and Britain, artists on the DAAD programme had been reminded of this in a circular from the British Council: ‘All visits to East Berlin undertaken at own risk.’

My heart palpitated, the sweating intensified.

“I can’t remember.”

“Convenient,” laughed the officer, going to the door. “Well, I have time. So please, over the next five minutes, try and improve your memory!”

He left the room.

I stared at the picture on the table and despite the feeling of anxiety chuckled.

The collage showed Karl Marx and Lothar – both bearded, both middle-aged – sitting at a table for two in an East Berlin bar drinking People’s beer with People’s schnapps chasers. On the wall above, portraits of Lenin, Stalin and the DDR’s first leader, Walter Ulbricht, stared down in stony silence and obvious disapproval. Beside them a blank fourth canvas indicated where Mr Marx should have been if he had not been having such a good time with the hoi polloi below: imprisoned in a frame, a grey-bearded, graven image painted to look as stern and impassive as the three successors who had co-opted and corrupted his name.

The door opened and the youth with acne entered, a cup of coffee in his hand.

“Thought you could use this,” he said.

Nice cop, hard cop routine, I thought, but the youth did not stay.

I took a sip of the hot but tasteless liquid and tried to think through the shop story.

But I didn’t know any clothes shops near the television tower.

Scheisse!

My brain misted over and before I knew it, before I could step on the brake of adult self-control, I started crying. Crying like a small child who has lost its mother and doesn’t know how to get home. No, not crying – wailing.

The door swung open and the officer stood on the threshold.

“What is the matter, Mr Cruft?” he demanded.

I shook my head and continued to wail.

“Have we treated you so badly?”

Again I shook my head.

“Then where is your famous stiff upper lip?”

I shook my head for a third time.

The officer turned on his heels, slammed the door shut and disappeared.

I continued to bawl.

The exhaustion of a hard night’s drinking with Lothar, the long walk in the cold night air from Prenzlauerberg to Friedrichstrasse, persistent worries about my new film in West Berlin, and my girlfriend’s sudden defection to a Maoist had all combined to reduce me to an infantile state of self pity and despair.

If I could have got up and danced, if I could have shaken a leg, waved my arms and screamed ‘Star Fucker!” with Mick Jagger then dropped dead-tired into bed, the hopelessness I now felt might have sweated itself out and been flattened by the overriding need to sleep. But here I could not sleep and I could not dance, so I howled. The officer had been right: where was it – that symbol of British sangfroid and cold civility? Gone with the wind, gone to a graveyard every last bit of it. When will they ever learn? Boys cry too. They do. They do.

“Mr Cruft?”

I looked up and through my tears saw a man in a suit with a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles perched on his nose.

“Mr Cruft,” said the man in a soft, heavily accented voice. “We are sorry you are so upset. On January 1^st, 1974 – tomorrow as we speak – a new Four Power Agreement comes into effect regulating all matters related to Berlin. We hope this agreement will improve understanding between East and West and in the light of its imminent enactment and your obvious distress we have decided to overlook this unfortunate incident.”

He pointed to the collage on the table and without further comment tore it into little pieces and threw the resulting remnants into a waste paper basket beneath the table.

“You are free to go. Auf wiedersehen!”

The destruction of Lothar’s work led to a new bout of tears from me, but this time the guards were ready. They lifted me from my chair and walked me out of the room and across the hallway to the automatic doors where the youth with acne held out Lothar’s trench coat.

“Expect you could use this,” he half-whispered, a pimply smile on his round face.

I took the coat, but before I could say thank you the door released and the guards deposited me on the far side: somebody else’s baby, a wimp for the West to whip into order.

And by the time I had rattled over the wall past the burnt out ruins of the Reichstag and the floodlit modernism of the Academie der Kuenste to Zoo station – staring into the neon-lit night sky from my empty S-Bahn like a dropout on Valium or a hippie on lysergic acid – I had recovered. Thin skin healed over, emotions in custody, British upper lip stiff as a military crease. And when, after leaving the train and braving the snow covered streets, two West Berlin policemen stopped me near the Tiergarten, asked me for my passport and searched me – out of boredom or on the off chance of finding a red terrorist from the Baader Meinhof gang – I accepted the intervention as meekly as a lamb and as quietly as a mouse.

Governments were always obsessed with something, always on guard against subversion, always under threat. In East or West, there were always enemies, enemies within, enemies without; the skill of a good citizen lay in reading between the lines and recognising friends.

HELLO TO BERLIN, 1973 – Part Five

The young English filmmaker goes East with his East Berlin friend to meet a Goddess of the Steelworks, and very seductive socialist, in the DDR hinterland

(Part of an early draft of novel Friends & Enemies not included in published version)

Lothar waited beside the sealed up Metro station of Berlin Mitte on the northern side of Checkpoint Charlie – or Grenzuebergang Kochstrasse as his government called it. The sky hung low and cold, and he wore a woollen scarf and fur-lined Russian hat.

Jon the filmmaker, who Dieter had reintroduced to Lothar at the Berliner Ensemble, had, at last, got in touch and agreed to meet up today, Sunday the fifteenth of November. The Englishman, with a visa for travel outside East Berlin, would bring Dieter’s old Mercedes and drive with Lothar to the East German hinterland for an inspection of a steelworks under the guidance of Lothar’s secondary, proletarian lover, Brigade Leader Almuth Wietz.

A car hooted. Lothar glanced towards the checkpoint: a Trabant stalled at the crossroads, guards coming off duty, an American military Jeep asserting – like a child from the wrong side of town – its right to drive in the Russian zone. Not much traffic at three o’clock on a Sunday – too late for tourists wanting to view the Red Threat, too early for Turkish guest workers seeking prostitutes priced in East Marks. The horn sounded again, and this time Lothar saw a figure climb out of a mud-spattered vehicle across from the Metro entrance. The figure wore a scarf, blue jeans and an anorak longer at the back than front. A Westerner, thought Lothar. Lost or wants to sell me his jeans.

He turned back to the checkpoint, hoping to catch a glimpse of Dieter’s Mercedes. He was cold and impatient for the warmth of a comfortable car.

“Hello.”

A hand tapped him on the shoulder. Lothar swung round and found himself face to face with the Westerner.

“Yes?” he snapped, preparing to lecture the young man on the importance of clean cars and respectable clothing in a socialist country. “How can I help?”

“It’s me. Jon.”

Lothar put out a hand and pulled down the scarf covering the stranger’s mouth.

“My God,” he said. “So it is. Where’s the car?”

“There,” replied Jon, pointing to the wreck across the road. “The mini-van. The one you found me in on the Berliner Ring.”

“Mini-van?” exclaimed Lothar. “What about the Mercedes?”

“Reinhardt had to go to Karlsruhe. His father’s ill. So…”

“We’re going to Schwedt-an-der-Oder, number one new town of the GDR and the country’s most model of model socialist communities, in that?”

“Afraid so,” laughed Jon. “Not the same as a Merc. But it drives all right.”

Lothar shook his head, straightened his hat and followed Jon. He should not be making a fuss, he knew, but he had looked forward to drawing up at the steelworks in a Mercedes. Looked forward to Almuth’s expression of amazement as he stepped out, held the rear door open and invited her to step inside and feel the luxury of leather seats. She was more of a socialist than him, but would still have been impressed – still have felt her fading sensibility for glamour and the world of the rich and famous touched.

“You all right?” Jon asked, as Lothar attempted to close the passenger door with a piece of string doubling as a handle. “That side’s a bugger to shut.”

Jon leant across and slammed the door, breaking the string in the process.

“Damn! You’ll have to use my side, now.”

“And in an emergency?”

“Not sure,” replied Jon with a grin. “Hope for the best, I guess.”

The car started. They swung left into Kochstrasse, took a right down Unter den Linden and after circling the television tower twice found the road to Schwedt.

“Hopefully, the Vopos won’t stop us”, Lothar remarked in a piqued tone, as they swept through the outer suburbs of North Eastern East Berlin. “I’m not sure they could deal with you, the car and the presence of a leading GDR citizen inside it!”

Jon slowed to let an old lady cross the road and, as he did so, leant over to Lothar.

“Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No! It’s Super-Gran!”

Lothar’s demeanour of disgruntlement remained in place for a moment and then cracked, as a chuckle broke free from its straitjacket. The Englishman was irresistible and he had remembered his host’s interest in Western comics. A kindred spirit, an anarchist at heart, an oddball artist with a sense of humour. He was also young – Lothar’s junior by twenty years – and his youth infectious, an invigorating tonic for an ageing alcoholic. Why be grumpy? Why carp? Who cared what car they were in? Who bloody cared? Status was stultifying, keeping up appearances a game for mugs and party hacks. Together, Jon and he would have fun and if they frightened a few Vopos in the process, so what? Conformity be damned! Long Live the Marx Brothers!

Lothar leant forward and thumped the dashboard with his fist.

“Or this!” he yelled. “Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No! It’s Super-van!’

The two men roared with laughter, waved at the old lady, now safely across the road and – on Lothar’s prompting – burst into a dual language version of the Internationale.

By the time they reached Schwedt, it was dark. But Lothar’s spirits were light as a feather, his soul full of a joie de vivre normally associated with drunkenness or that moment where orgasm is in sight and assured, but not yet paid for in prostate pain. As they approached Almuth’s workplace, sparks from the smelter lit up the night sky.

“The heartland of our socialist republic,” exclaimed Lothar, as they drew up at the gates of the People’s Own Steelworks.

Jon climbed out and gazed up at the smelting tower.

“Amazing!’ he cried. “In the West, steelworks are monsters – blots on the landscape. But this…this is beautiful…a Cathedral!”

“Perhaps, because here it is the workers we worship,” Lothar said, putting an arm round his friend’s shoulder.

Jon nodded and the two men stood in silence watching the miracle of molecular fusion forge steel from the stone of iron ore.

“Lothar!” cried a female voice behind them. “Is that you?”

Lothar and Jon turned. A tall, well-built woman in hard-hat, heavy-duty boots and green overalls with a small red star above the left breast was approaching from the gates.

“Almuth!” shouted Lothar, moving to meet the Wagnerian apparition. “Jon, meet the High Priestess of our Workers Cathedral, Brunhilde of the Bronze Smelting Process, Mother Superior of Steel Ingots and Iron bars, the Goddess of…” – Lothar reached Almuth, planted a passionate kiss on her burnished lips and turned back to Jon – “Meet Brigade Leader Comrade Almuth Wietz.” Jon moved forward and shook the outstretched hand.  “Almuth, meet Mr Jon Cruft, our artist from the far off land of Anglo-Saxons.”

“Hello, Jon,” said Almuth, pointing back at the works. “A fine moment to arrive.”

Jon nodded, overcome with admiration for a woman he had only just met and about whom he knew next to nothing – the overalls, the grime, her man’s job.

“Shall we go round the works, now?” she asked. “What do you think, Lothar?”

“Whatever Jon wishes,” replied Lothar. “I’m merely the facilitator of this field trip.”

“Fine, let’s go,” she said, heading back to the gates. “You coming with us, Paul?”

“I’d love to, but as a lowly intellectual, I must at all times and in all places remind myself of how real workers, live, think and drink! I’ll be in the works bar when you return.”

Almuth laughed, took Jon by the arm and led him off through the pearly gates.

Jon enjoyed the tour – not so much for what he saw, but for what he heard. Almuth was no propagandist paid to persuade dignitaries from the third world of the East’s superiority, but a woman who believed in the system. A system, she said, that may not have bought people the wealth of the West, but had ensured there were no fat cats, few criminals and a ruling party which – though not a paragon of virtue in its sometimes paranoid perception of duty – outlawed self-aggrandisement along with the speculators and Mafioso who, in the West, had turned the making of money into a religion of death and destruction. Yes, there were disappointments and frustrations and, as a brigade leader, she knew all about them. Socialism, in her book, should not claim to be able to cleanse the human condition of suffering. Existence, physically and psychologically – getting from birth to death in one piece, as she put it – was tough, regardless of where a government stood on the political spectrum. But helping people live together in moderation and with a common purpose – rather than playing them off against each other for bigger cars and better houses – was feasible and eminently practical. Not everyone had a car, but those who did shared. Not everyone had a television, but those who did allowed others to watch.

Like in the war, suggested Jon, as they watched molten steel flow across the floor into massive moulds and acknowledged the waves of workers overseeing the procedure. Yes, agreed Almuth, in a way. The solidarity that scarcity brings; coming together in a struggle where defeat of the enemy is more important than individual comfort; the sharing of resources and personal good luck for the good of all. Yes, that was socialism.

“But surely,” Jon persisted as they headed to the canteen. “Surely the disaster is past, the war over, the struggle won. You have your republic and now you can reap the rewards.”

“Yes,” said Almuth. “And life is better. But we still have a common enemy – the enemy you in the West, despite the sacrifices of your soldiers, have given into.”

“And that is?” inquired Jon.

“Greed. The wish to have more than your neighbour, the right to have more than your neighbour, the duty to have more than your neighbour. The motor of capitalism.”

Jon stopped and stared back at the glow of the smelter.

Was it that simple?

HELLO TO BERLIN, 1973 – Part Four

The young English filmmaker is (re)introduced to an East Berliner…

(Part of an early draft of novel Friends & Enemies not included in published version)

Lothar stared at the clock and held his breath. One minute to go and he would be free. Free to smoke, free to drink and free from the hordes of children and Young Pioneers that he had to show around the Pergamon museum everyday. He would also be free from the watchful eye of his partner of five years, and boss of ten, Ruth – she had a party meeting.

“Have a good evening, Comrade Schiewe!” a colleague called as she passed the door of his ground floor office – or cell, as he preferred to call it.

“The same to you, Comrade Orbanz!” Lothar replied, trying not to release too much breath. You’re thirty seconds early and I could report you to Comrade Ruth, he continued to himself. But I won’t.

He coughed into the undergrowth of his Karl Marx beard and was forced to exhale. He should cut back on smoking, and drinking, but as they were two of the three vices that gave him pleasure in life, he persisted – out of hours, of course. He was not allowed to smoke in his cell, nor drink at lunchtime (Ruth breathalysed him under the pretence of a kiss) and the third vice, sex, was not a viable option within the hallowed walls of the German Democratic Republic’s premier people’s museum. Anyway, Ruth – along with a Brigade Leader in Schwedt, where he gave lectures on socialist realism to steelworkers – provided enough entertainment in that area. There was, however, a fourth activity he enjoyed that was not a vice, approved of by Ruth and on the agenda for tonight. Going to a performance. It didn’t have to be a play, it could be an opera, classical concert, cabaret or even – with enough alcohol to numb aesthetic sensibilities and cotton wool to reduce decibels – one of the rock bands, now officially approved to keep youth ‘Back in the DDR’ and bopping to a dialectical beat.

He put on his coat and peaked Lenin cap, locked the door to his cell and exited the building by a side door that opened on to the banks of the Spree. He lit a cigarette, crossed a footbridge and walked along the river until he reached Friedrichstrasse station, already crowded with homebound commuters. He ordered a beer and Bratwurst from a kiosk by the ticket office, lit a fresh cigarette and stared at the departures board:  S-Bahn services to Mueggensee, Pankow, and Babelsberg; expresses to Warsaw, Prague and Moscow; but no mention of the trains leaving from an inaccessible platform above his head, trains that trundled across the Spree and the wall, past the burnt out Reichstag and into West Berlin – that grey area denoted by a blank on all street maps in the East.

Not a blank to Lothar, though. Before the wall, he had been there many times, but never thought of switching his blue East German passport for a green West German one. For him, East Germany offered security, a steady job and protection from the harsh competitiveness of capitalism – a system that cut no special deals for ageing curators. When the wall went up, he briefly cursed his luck, but soon settled down to the reality of life in a large, reasonably provisioned prison. Having your options reduced, he told friends, did not necessarily make you unhappier. We are, he reasoned, all imprisoned by life, the human condition and the limitations of mortality. Being able to go to Paris and Moscow had its plus side, but also risked diverting a person from more important tasks..

Lothar bit into his sausage and smiled at his erudition and capacity for self-delusion. He did sometimes fancy a coffee on the Ku’dam, of course. And, perhaps, if he lived in the West, he wouldn’t drink so much, or, then again, fearful of losing his job, and seduced into penury by the myriad temptations of capitalism, maybe he would drink more. Either way, thanks to his friend Dieter from West Berlin, he now had the best of both worlds. The state paid him and Dieter brought him catalogues, news of the Western art world and all the material he required for his project ‘Representations of Capitalism in American Comics’. Ruth had obtained official approval for the research, but waiting for Superman to arrive through official channels would have condemned Lothar’s magnum opus to the fate of many things in the DDR – death by inertia. Dieter delivered on time, the party didn’t. In fact, it was Dieter who had bought tickets for tonight – a performance of Goethe’s Faust presented in the Brechtian manner by the Berliner Ensemble. He was coming with a young English filmmaker and Lothar was looking forward to the evening.

He popped a last morsel of sausage into his mouth and stuffed cardboard carton and paper beer mug into a bin beneath the counter. Litter was not a problem in the East – less packaging, better internal policing. That self-regulating mechanism, which ensures people stay in line with the law, functioned more effectively in the land of Marx and Lenin than in the West. Lothar (anarchist by choice, conservative by nature) approved of the sense of social responsibility instilled by the state in its citizens (especially the young) and was glad he did not have to put up with the dirt, noise, disrespect and physical abuse that, according to Dieter and the official party newspaper, plagued some Western cities.

He left the station, followed the direction of the railway as it wound its way westwards on a brick-built viaduct and then, with the wall and a guard tower in sight – floodlit to counter the dying day – turned right into a street that contained the Berliner Ensemble and little else apart from rubble. He entered the building of concrete and stone – a mixture of pre-war decadence and post-war utility – walked across the red-carpeted foyer and entered a dining room, whose high-ceiling, oak tables and upholstered chairs still reflected the artistic freedom and over indulgence of the Weimar Republic. He ordered a beer with a Korn chaser, and sat down at a table near the door. Dieter had not arrived and the only person in the room he knew was a psychiatrist from Pankow – a friend of Ruth’s and a party member. Not suitable company when Western visitors were due. Lothar lit a third cigarette, turned his back on the doctor and surveyed the room.

The Government, he recalled, had presented Brecht with the theatre as part of a package to entice him back to the motherland. Unlike fellow exiles Weil, Eisler, Wilder and Stroheim, Comrade Bert had not enjoyed America.  He had produced some good work there – Mahagonny, for example – even tried his hand in Hollywood, but despite the money on offer he had stuck to his ideals and refused, unlike Comrade Faust, to sell his soul. The founding of Germany’s first socialist state in 1949, and an invitation to work there, gave him the chance of combining art and politics in a practical way and he headed back east with enthusiasm to reap the rewards of Nazism’s defeat by the Soviets.

“And why not?” Lothar mused, as he downed his Korn. “I’d have done the same.”

Of course, there had been difficult moments – especially after the uprising of 1953, when the party ordered Brecht to issue a statement condoning its brutal crackdown. And, were he still alive today, he would have hated the wall and castigated the current conservatism of the party on social, moral and artistic issues. Above all, he would not have approved of the dogma and reverence now attached to his theatrical methods and preferred styles of performance. He had spent his life forging new forms and criticising old ways – the last person to accept fossilisation and the polite applause of party hacks.

“A free spirit, like myself!” Lothar concluded, raising his glass to a portrait of the bard recently repositioned beneath Marx and Lenin. “To your eternal memory, comrade!”

Just then Dieter walked in accompanied by a long haired man in jeans and denim jacket.

“Welcome,” Lothar declared, rising to greet Dieter with a bear hug

As the two friends embraced, the long haired man stared at the bearded East Berliner, a puzzled look on his face. Then, as Lothar turned from Dieter to shake his hand, he smiled.

“Of course, the man in search of vodka. You said we would meet if we were meant to. Extraordinary.”

Lothar took a step forward, peered at Dieter’s friend and then laughed.

“The Englishman from the Ring, who eats no beans – the honourable emissary from Greater Britain! Welcome to our people’s paradise, comrade!”

.