A Writer's World (50 page)

I sat over my victuals in the Kurfürstendamm, in a Berlin now all but undivided by its wretched Wall, and to the strains of ‘Down By The Riverside’ from a street musician with a monotonous guitar. I looked into my mind – and my heart, too, since I am of a certain age – to see what images already loitered there of this infamously ambivalent city.

I found emblems of iconoclastic fun, and comfortable
hausfrau
emblems of flower boxes and sticky cakes, and Le Carré suggestions of the sinister mingled with the seedy, and above all symbols of terrifying power wrestling with tragedy. Berlin has many reputations, but few of them are straightforward. I have been visiting this city intermittently since soon after the Second World War and, realizing that my own perceptions of the place were blurred by time and myth and old emotion, I reluctantly tipped that lugubrious troubadour and set out to wander the city districts, east and west of the crumbling ideological border, to discover which of my mental images were still recognizable on the ground.

I did not have to look far for the fun. The top end of the Kurfürstendamm, the showiest boulevard of West Berlin, offers the liveliest and least inhibited streets scenes in Europe. Beneath the glare of the neon signs, past the crowded pavement cafés, flooding through the tumultuous traffic, an endlessly vivacious young populace laughs, struts, sits around, eats, plays music, kisses, and shows off from the break of afternoon until the end of dawn. It is like a perpetual fair, or perhaps a bazaar, the genteel with the rapscallion, the indigent with the well-heeled: gypsy beggars with babies, bourgeois ladies with dogs on leads, lovers embracing at restaurant tables, unshaven money-changers in dark doorways, an elegant wind
trio playing Scarlatti outside a brightly lit shoe shop, a not very skilful acrobat treading a rope between two trees, tireless drummers, tedious mimes, unpredictable skateboarders, portrait sketchers, hang-dog youths with ghetto blasters squatting among their own rubbish, smells of coffee and fresh rolls, double-decker buses sliding by, fountains splashing, sidewalk showcases of leathers and jewels – and presiding over it all, incongruously preserved there as a reminder of old horrors, the ugly tombed hulk of the Kaiser Wilhelm I Memorial Church, defiantly floodlit.

Berliners have always been famous for their irrepressible disrespect and hedonism, maintained through all oppressions and apparent even when I first came here to find a city half in ruins. Even on the east side, where the equivalent of Kurfürstendamm is the loveless Stalinist Alexanderplatz, even there, now that the dictatorship has gone, flashes of high spirit often show through the authoritarian grumps (fostered not only by forty years of communism, but by a decade of National Socialism before that). A waiter winks and bypasses the management ruling that we are too late for a cup of coffee. A young man dashingly V-turns his car, with a glorious screeching of brakes and skidding of tyres, across Karl-Marx Allee to pick up his laughing girl. A stretch of the hitherto sacrosanct Wall – the wrong side of the Wall – has been covered with murals and called the East Side Gallery.

Liberty is in the very air of Berlin now. It is good to be alive here, and to be young must be heaven. Everything is in flux, everything is changing, new horizons open, and nothing demands unqualified respect or allegiance. Although half of Berlin is the theoretical headquarters of the about-to-be-disbanded and thoroughly discredited People’s Republic of East Germany, the city is not really the headquarters of anything much, and this gives it a stimulating sense of irresponsibility. Tokens of fun abound, indeed, and none are more endearing than the preposterous little Trabant cars, like goblin cars, that swarm out of East Berlin for a night out or some shopping in the West, with hilarious clankings and wheezings of their primitive engines, and faces smiling from every window.

Walking in the woods beside the Muggelsee, in a corner of East Berlin that would have seemed inexpressibly alarming a year or two ago, I heard through the trees a strain of jovial German music, ho-ho, thump-thump music, with a hearty baritone solo punctuated by jolly choruses. I followed it through the quiet paths, along the reedy edges of the lake (overlooked on its distant eastern shore by the grim black factory chimneys of the former
Workers’ Paradise), and although by the time I reached its source the tune had changed to the old Tom Jones favourite ‘Green, Green Grass of Home’, still the scene I found there was an epitome of
gemütlichkeit
– the snug spirit of domesticity, laced with the sentimental, that was my second Berlin image.

‘I’m The Boss’ was the first T-shirt slogan I saw, on the ample bosom of a housewife dancing a vigorous disco-jig with her decidedly un-henpecked husband. East Berlin was having a public holiday, and at the hotel beside the lake several thousand citizens, great-grandmothers to babes in arms, were enjoying a family feast in the sunshine. How perfectly they fulfilled my conceptions! How genially they laughed, sang, danced, drank their beer, and ate their pickled pork knuckles! With what indefatigable smiles the two bands alternated, one with the old oom-pah-pah, the other exploring the less raucous fringes of rock! As I watched them there, so hearty, so comradely, I recognized how limitless was the strength of Berlin’s
gemütlichkeit
, sustained over tankards and ice-cream cones through war and peace, dictatorship and revolution, hope and disaster, down the generations.

It knows no borders, recognizes no ideologies (Hitler encouraged it in the name of Strength Through Joy, and even the communists were obliged to allow family reunions across the Wall), and for myself I find a faintly disturbing quality to it, so absolutely is it able to disregard history. I distrust its latent tendency to prejudice – against immigrant Turks, for instance, who are ubiquitous in West Berlin. I dislike its silly aspects, evident all over the city in jokey statuary, gimmicky fountains. and fairly ponderous humour.

The Berlin cosiness is an ethos in itself, for better or for worse, and it is inescapable. Here we see it at a modest wedding in Spandau, where the bride in her long white dress, the groom in his high white stock, the priest and amiable altar boys, the intermittently squabbling choir girls, the solitary bespectacled bridesmaid (pink glasses to match her pink dress), the wildly over-accoutred family guests, the casual passers-by and even we ourselves are all embraced within its bonhomie. Here we observe it at an alfresco restaurant in the Grünewald woods in the persons of two middle-aged ladies giggling over their asparagus, smiling and nodding encouragingly at us and balancing their purses carefully on the rims of their glasses to stop the chestnut blossoms falling into their wine.

And it is realized most explicitly at Lübars, at the northern extremity of West Berlin. Lübars is a genuine farming community, surrounded by
meadows and marshland within the limits of the great city, It is crystallized
gemütlichkeit
. There is a pretty village church in a sweet village green; there are farmyards and stables and a restaurant with lace tablecloths. Sometimes a plump farmer trundles by in a trap drawn by two horses, and if you walk out of the village centre you may find a kind of pixie settlement, all enveloped in green, where people live in little toylike houses, attended by gooseberry bushes and small lawns exquisitely trimmed, like Germans in a fairy tale.

I looked through a big hole hammered in the Berlin Wall, quite near the site of the old Checkpoint Charlie, and saw into the patch of no-man’s-land beyond. It was littered with rolls of discarded barbed wire, surrounded by ruined buildings, and floored with the dismal mixture of sand, gravel and rubble that has resulted from three decades of herbicide – no greenery was allowed to soften the allegory of the Wall, let alone provide cover for escapers. Three East German soldiers were in there, one tilted back on a kitchen chair with his cap over his eyes, the others kicking an old steel helmet about in the dust. It was an epitome of squalor and wasted time.

For yes, the squalor of the Cold War certainly survives in Berlin. Farther along the Wall, Potsdamer Platz, once the busiest intersection in Europe, is now a dingy wilderness of gravel and miscellaneous huts through which the traffic passes as across a patch of desert. Verminous wild rabbits hop around down there, anachronistic hippies with headbands and small children protest against this and that outside grubby tents. Not far away hundreds of Poles run their shambled market of trucks and awnings, selling American cigarettes, crude transistors, some bilious-looking cheese and dismal bric-à-brac; they were guarded, when I was there, by a huge, mastiffy kind of animal, slavering at the jaws, which was not just the most gruesome dog I have ever set eyes on, but the most horrible creature of any species.

Even now, in the centre of Berlin, you know when you are approaching the line of the Wall, whether from the western or eastern side, by an unmistakable air of dubious dereliction: bombed, rubbish-strewn spaces, peeling posters, huddles of men in dark clothes, vestigial street marts with stalls and trailers, apparently abandoned vehicles, faded graffiti like KILL REAGAN or PUNKS UNITE, and, in the more touristically accessible parts, souvenir huts selling Soviet army caps or bits of the Wall encased in plastic. Nobody knows what to do with this dismal swathe, sweeping through the heart of the city in such an unlovely way;
for the moment it is like the pale strip that is left on the human skin when a bandage is ripped off.

Seediness enough, then, from the days when spies were swapped across this false frontier and young people were murdered just for trying to cross it. But the sinister part of my third image? Gone, it seems to me, all gone. Utterly dispersed is the awful fear that used to hang over the Wall like a black cloud, making every crossing from East to West a chill apprehension. The soldiers of the People’s Army kick a redundant helmet about a rubble yard, instead of peering over their gun sights from a watch post, and the Democratic Republic’s immigration officials, once so terrifyingly robotlike in their zeal, have turned out, to everyone’s surprise, to be human after all. The Television Tower above Alexanderplatz, whose bulbous platform used to look like some sleepless, ominous, all-seeing eye, now merely reminds us that if we care to go that way there is a revolving restaurant at the 680-foot level, and an obliging tourist office at the bottom.

All the resonances of the antagonism have gone, too – a whole genre of legend, politics, art, and humour made irrelevant overnight. I had a meeting one day with two German officials, one from each side of the former border, itself an appointment that I would have thought a wild improbability ten years ago. Extracting spontaneous responses from them was rather like unpacking particularly fragile pieces of china, so anxious were they both to appear neither overweening nor apologetic. But I sensed no animosity between them and no resentment, though one was dressed in the sportiest Western fashion and gave me a handsomely printed visiting card with translations in English and Japanese, while the other wore an ill-cut dark suit without a tie, and offered me only a piece of pasteboard with his name typed upon it and a crookedly stamped logo on the back.

And where now is the power of Berlin, which once made the world cringe before Prussian salute and Nazi goose-step, swastika, and rampant eagle? The divided Berlin of our time has possessed no real power, one half having been a mere puppet of Moscow, the other an all-too-obvious advertisement for capitalism. I had to try hard to recognize any symptoms of arrogance in this city.

I did feel a few tremors of it, but only a few, among the relics of the frightful Prussian monarchy, especially in the old royal quarter of the city. There huge triumphal columns still stand on overwhelming façades, supervised by scowling lions, prancing griffins, winged horses, heroes and assorted divinities. The enormous dome of the Cathedral swells over
Marx-Engels Platz (né Lustgarten); helmeted soldiers stamp outside the Memorial to the Victims of Fascism and Militarism (né the New Guardhouse). The Reichstag, rebuilt but still domeless, stands forlorn beyond Potsdamer Platz, and beside the Spree there loom the portentous classical piles of the institutions that proclaimed, in the last half of the nineteenth century, Berlin’s resurgent and assertive culture. A battered Brandenburg Gate still dominates the great avenue of Unter den Linden. Between its trees one can almost see, if one really concentrates, the plumed shakos of cavalry colonels, the fierce moustaches of Junkers, or even the open carriage of the All-Highest himself, the Kaiser, the Emperor of all the Germanies, escorted by uhlans from his war ministry to his
schloss
…

But only just, and still less remains of Hitler’s hubris. There is the brilliantly conceived city-centre airport of Tempelhof, the best thing the Nazis ever built, and there is the unfortunately splendid stadium in which, during the 1936 Olympics, Hitler found himself made a fool of by Jesse Owens (who has a street named after him, just around the corner – more than can be said for the Führer). The rest has mostly gone, and to me it all feels drained of menace. That airport is just a visionary airport, that stadium is just a stadium. I can pass the site of the Gestapo headquarters without a tremor. I can survey without fear the bump where Hitler’s bunker used to be. Goering’s fat spectre does not show itself upon the steps of his air ministry. The evil has been exorcized.

As for the postwar structures of consequence, they have no sense of command at all. The official buildings of the communist East may be vast and overbearing, but they are essentially sterile, without the sap of true virility. The monumental buildings of the capitalist West feel flimsy, impoverished or contrived: The roof of the Congress Hall collapsed not long ago, the Philharmonic Hall looks as though it has been banged together out of odds and ends, and Mies van der Rohe’s design for the New National Gallery was originally used for the Bacardi Building in Cuba.