1989 (9 page)

It was our landlord Alex’s own story, gleaned over the weeks and months that followed as I gradually became integrated into the
Stammtisch
crowd, that seized my imagination first among the many extraordinary tales of these ‘ordinary’ locals. Alex had become something of a professional Berliner; he made a point of cultivating the city’s old traditions in the bar, including a collection of
drawings
by Heinrich Zille, a famous nineteenth-century caricaturist of Berlin street scenes. He maintained a vintage street market cart which on special occasions he would bedeck with a panoply of
hard-to-come-by
treats, sausages, salami and cheese, usually acquired on the black market. Once a month, providing Alex could rustle up the wherewithal from his remarkable network of contacts, most of whom were grateful to be accorded the status of occasional
Stammtisch
guest in Metzer Eck, he would serve up
Berliner Eisbein
, boiled pork knuckle accompanied by potatoes and mushy peas.

For all that, Alex was not a Berliner by birth. He had been born in Danzig, a city whose vanished name was to me already as redolent
with historical connotation as Babylon or Nineveh and in the years to come would, as Gdansk, accrue as much again when it became the birthplace of the Polish free trade union Solidarity. Later I
travelled
there to meet Lech Walesa, the shipyard worker turned
political
firebrand who would kindle the first smoke amid the dry timber of the Soviet Empire. Alex had been on the threshold of his teens as the Second World War lurched towards its end, and towards his home. Like all young boys he had been compulsorily enrolled in the
Pimpfen
, a politically-directed organisation for children, whose members were supposed to graduate to the Hitler Youth. He remembered being inordinately proud of the small silver trumpet he learned to play and being desperately upset when his mother took it and hid it as the Soviet troops neared the outskirts of the city. The runic, lightning flash letters on the little banner that hung from it meant nothing to him; his mother suspected the Russians would not look on the SS with such indifference.

She was right too, his partner Bärbel chipped in over the
Stammtisch
, a cigarette as usual wobbling on her lower lip. She
contributed
the story of how her brother Horst, who had been a few years older and already enlisted by the Hitler Youth had been arrested by the Soviets several months after the conquest of Berlin. ‘It meant nothing to him, no more than being in the Boy Scouts. Besides he didn’t have a choice. Nobody did.’ That didn’t matter to the Russians. They came one morning at dawn – the secret policeman’s favourite calling time and took him away. They never saw him again.
Bärbel’s
father, a lifelong socialist who had rejoined the party and
supported
its forced merger with the communists, had been outraged. He wrote a succession of letters demanding his son’s release or at least visiting rights. In the end his campaign apparently succeeded when they got formal notification that Horst would be set free. It was followed, just a few days later, by notification that he had died of tuberculosis in Sachsenhausen, the former concentration camp north of Berlin which they had taken over and continued to run, only with different inmates. He was just seventeen. Bärbel did not have much time for the communists. Or the Russians.

Her son, from an earlier, failed marriage, was – inevitably – called Horst after his unfortunate uncle. And as his uncle had been forcibly
conscripted into the political youth movement of his day, so young Horst had been made painfully aware that to continue his studies beyond elementary level he would have to don the blue shirt of the young communists, the Free German Youth. ‘For one
generation
it was brown shirts, for the next it’s blue shirts,’ Bärbel would mutter cynically taking a long draw on her cigarette and a snifter of schnapps. It was a reminder to me that hers was a generation of Germans for whom freedom of expression was a luxury to be enjoyed only in private. That was why membership of the
Stammtisch
inner circle was such a privilege.

She and Alex had got together almost by accident. His family had come to Berlin as refugees when Danzig was given to Poland and the German population expelled. His parents found a billet amidst the ruins of the Prenzlauer Berg district for themselves, Alex and his sister Renate. Young Alex, in search of a way to contribute to the stretched family budget, signed up on a course to learn hairdressing. As an older teenager he went to see his older brother Norbert who on his return from the war had settled in one of the Western
provinces
. He did so without even thinking about the fact that Germany was already divided, and got stopped at the recently erected border with the West. He spent the night in a cell and was told to go back to Berlin. Instead he found a forest track that led through the still permeable frontier and spent several weeks hitchhiking, even into Austria – though crossing that frontier too was illegal – which had so recently been just another part of the now vanished Reich.

But at the end of it he came home, qualified as a hairdresser, met a pretty young woman, married her and settled down to life back in Berlin, a city with two currencies and two social systems but still one city for all that. Alex’s wife, however, was a devout communist – her father worked for the Stasi and when Stalin’s death was announced she burst into tears. Alex was not. She tried to convert him to the cause, get him to join one of the other small political parties that were allowed to exist under the umbrella of
communist
supremacy. It didn’t work. The building of the Wall in 1961, which left Alex separated from his sister Renate who had been working in the West when they closed the frontier, had stunned him. The political climate had soured Alex’s relationship with his wife and in
1967 they divorced. Her reward for political correctness was custody of their two children; Alex’s was redundancy from his hairdressing job. He took part-time work in bars, working as a waiter in the few that remained in private ownership, one of the few branches of the economy to escape total nationalisation, unlike all the breweries and distilleries. Bärbel was glad to hire him. The little girl who had seen her brother plucked from the family home never to return had grown into a handsome woman richly endowed with street-wise common sense and a love of old Berlin. Her two children, Horst, and a
striking
dark-haired girl called Kerstin, made up to some extent for the two sons Alex had lost. He moved in and it was not long before they had a child of their own: pretty little Alexandra.

But everyone in Metzer Eck had stories to tell, and before long – over enough late evenings downing cold Berliner Pilsener and the occasional
Korn
, a traditional Berliner vodka-like schnapps – I had heard most of them. More than once I was made to see things from a perspective I had hardly considered. As when somebody on one rare occasion did mention the war and I said my father had been in the Royal Air Force. At this, Kurtl, the little frog-like accordion player went misty eyed. ‘Ah yes,’ he said, ‘I remember we would hear on the radio: raiders approaching, direction Wolfsburg, Magdeburg. That meant it was our turn again. My mother would hurry me down to the shelter as we heard the bombs falling. It was when we came up from one of those, and climbed through the rubble to get back to our flat that we found the telegram to say my father had been killed at Stalingrad’. All of a sudden, I was seeing the old Reuters filing editor’s joke about only visiting Berlin at night from the other side.

There were also times when they failed to understand things too. As when I tried to defend Britain going to war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands and one of the regulars, a mother of two boys serving their time in the National People’s Army, said: ‘Think of all those innocent young lads called up and sent to their deaths.’ I tried to tell her nobody in Britain had been called up, that we didn’t have military service any more and that all the troops sent to the
Falklands
were reasonably well-paid, volunteer professionals. She wasn’t having any of it.

Amongst the most poignant, and in its way tragi-comic, stories
was that of the fat man I met on my first evening at the
Stammtisch
. Manne (short for Manfred) Schulz was the grandson of a
shoemaker
who had seen the company he worked for nationalised, and both quality and wages collapse. In the fluid, complex world that was Berlin in the 1950s he found a better job in a company in the Western sector and took his son, Manne’s father, with him. With the city still half in ruins, everyone found accommodation where they could. Manne’s mother remained with the children in
Prenzaluer
Berg, near her parents, until her husband found something other than working men’s hostels. By the time he did, Manne was so settled at school they decided he could continue to live with his granny and grandpa.

On the night of August 12th, 1961 they had all been over to his mum and dad’s new place near Tempelhof Airport. The grown-ups had a few too many and came home by U-Bahn bleary-eyed in the small hours of the morning, not noticing anything untoward at the ‘sector boundary’. They still had hangovers when a neighbour woke them at seven a.m. to tell them the world they knew had come to an end. Manne still remembered bouncing out of bed and running to nearby Oderberger Strasse, where armed guards were
supervising
the construction of a concrete block structure behind barbed wire. He did what only an excitable ten-year-old could: he found a hole in the barbed wire and squeezed through, running off to his parents’ house to tell them what was happening. They, of course, already knew. They were just relieved to see him on the right side and were wondering how they could let his grandparents back in the East know he was all right, when he slipped away again: to go back and tell them himself. It was another two years before his mother next saw him: at Christmas 1963, the first occasion after the
building
of the Wall on which West Berliners were permitted to travel east. By then he was twelve and although he was delighted to see his mother again, he was not upset that he could not go back with her.

He took me to see his grandmother, now in her eighties, and she just smiled when they recalled the story and said: ‘Yes, I just had a feeling I’d be stuck with him.’ Ironically, by the time I got to know him, his grandmother could come and go across the Wall whenever she felt like it and life was about to change radically for Manne too.
The East German regime had no qualms about letting its old-age pensioners travel west; they were no longer productive workers and if they chose to stay on the other side then it was simply one less drain on the ‘workers’ and peasants’ state’.

Manne, though only in his mid-thirties, was about to fall into the same category. The sprightly lad who had clambered around the rubble in the Berlin of the 1950s had grown into an immensely
overweight
adult. He had worked as a shelf-stacker, then an asphalt-mixer preparing tar to pour over the cobbles on the streets of Prenzlauer Berg. He had become one of the regulars at Metzer Eck, famous for knocking back
Korn
. He would drink it in hundred-gram measures, jovially referred to as ‘
sto gram
’, the only bit of Russian most East Germans could remember from their compulsory lessons at school. But the year before we arrived in Berlin, he had suffered a perforated appendix. Because of his obesity what should have been an urgent but simple operation became a major surgical task. No sooner was the appendix removed and the wound sewn up than the stitching failed. Then he suffered a rupture. In the end he needed a total of seven operations and was ill for seventy-eight weeks, long enough for his sickness pay to expire. He was scarcely fit to return to mixing asphalt, but he had only two choices: to return to work of some sort or run the gauntlet of red tape to be declared an invalidity pensioner. To take a pension was to take a colossal cut in wages, but it meant freedom from the one right guaranteed citizens of the German Democratic Republic, the right to work, and its corollary: that not to work was a crime against society punishable by imprisonment.

But the pension also carried one inestimable perk: the right to go west. After visits to three doctors, thorough examinations, endless trips to police stations and government offices, he finally received the certificates that entitled him to a passport, with a valid visa for exit up to thirty days in a calendar year. If the state expected him not to come back, it was sorely disappointed. Invalidity was what Manne had been waiting for all his life: from just a fat bloke in the pub he became the centre of society. The first time I met him was just a few weeks before he received his passport: the transformation was incredible. On his return from his first visit west, he kept the
Stammtisch
spellbound with his stories of the luxuries on sale along
the Kurfürstendamm, about the opulence of KaDeWe (the Harrods of West Berlin) and – more down to earth – the endless supplies of fresh fruit and vegetables on sale from stalls in the street. The
regulars
sat there in awe. They knew of course that I could – and did – go to West Berlin whenever I wanted. But this was one of their own. He told them about the stereo systems, the flash cars, the endless variety of pop music. Bärbel’s impressionable fifteen-year-old daughter, Kerstin, sat hanging on to his every word, stars in her eyes.

Manne’s disability certificate had overnight made him a centre of attention, but it was also a career move: he became a full-time smuggler. The first few times he crossed the Wall to visit his parents or siblings, he would return home with the little gifts they had given him and some Western currency. There were a few other things too that his brothers slipped him: well-thumbed hardcore pornographic magazines wrapped in plastic bags which he smuggled through with ease by slipping them down his trousers, secured with the
bandages
that supported his swollen stomach. It was a still a wound that would put off investigation by all but the bravest of customs officials.