The Berlin Wall is gone, but liberated inhabitants are still searching for the elusive anchor of their souls.
Someone once asked John Le Carre what on Earth he would write about, now that the Berlin Wall had fallen, and the black-and-white, dark and light, East versus West, cloak and dagger (especially dagger)John
world of George Smiley was no more. How could there be life after Checkpoint Charlie?
Le Carre simply responded by continuing to turn out novels about the murderous, black-and-white, dark and light nature of the human condition, relocating the scene of the crime to Frankfurt, London, Tel Aviv, Panama or Nairobi, as the mood took him. The point is, you don’t need a Berlin Wall or an Iron Curtain to set the scene for murder and mayhem. But the Berlin Wall sure as hell was the perfect, living, in-your-face metaphor for that slender dividing line between good and evil.
Which side of the wall you found yourself on (unless you were a spy or a double agent) pretty much defined your perception of good and evil.
West Berliners used to proudly define themselves as islanders – defiant citizens of a small, garishly commercial island of civilisation, cut off from the rest of the Western world by the 165km wall that encircled them. Beyond the wall was the menacing, grey sea of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), within spitting distance, but in reality more inaccessible than Jupiter or Mars for all but the privileged few.
In two short visits in the 1970s I observed the Berlin Wall only from the eastern side – which is misleading, because, of course, the wall’s 360° encircling of the Western sector meant that you were constantly changing your relationship to the glaringly neon, diabolically tempting island that was West Berlin as you went about your business in the eastern sector. Nevertheless, on whatever point of the compass you stood, you were always able to point towards the wall and say, “There, that’s the West.”
Did we ever feel tempted to cross over into West Berlin, just to see? Of course we did. But, apart from the wall (actually a double wall with a military road running down the middle) and the banked sand barriers with mine fields and trip wires that would trigger flares when anyone was foolish enough to try to sneak across; apart from the 260 watchtowers, each manned by two fresh-faced, well-armed soldiers whose steely eyes never missed a thing; apart from the barbed wire, the panting dogs on tireless patrol, and the boards with vicious protruding nails that would rip through the boots of anyone trying to jump down from one side of the wall before attempting to scale the second wall, spikes that would literally nail them to the ground if they were lucky enough to get that far: apart from all this, there was ideology.
Who in their right mind would want to leave the security of the capital of the GDR, with its free health and education facilities, its cheap trams and subways, and its austere but affordable housing? Who would want to brave the ravages of the free-for-all West, with its sky-high prices, its heroin-haggard lifestyle, its selfishness and its pornography?
Well, quite a number of people, especially young people, were anxious to do just that. So, where ideological persuasion failed, the physical defences surrounding the wall, above and below the ground, had to be continually sharpened. Even the ancient sewers that still linked the two halves of the city were secured by electrically charged fences, which, as one commentator put it, “allowed free passage only to the shit of the two parts of the city”.
The wall was ugly as hell, but somehow you miss it. You miss the sense of orientation it gave as you moved around Berlin. I can’t get my bearings anymore.
I hop on a subway train with my friend and guide Oliver.
“Which side are we on now?” I ask him.
“This used to be the West,” he says. A few stations further he tells me that we are entering part of what used to be the East. And then, after a few more curves, we are back in the West.
I remember it well. Where the East Berlin subway system snaked under the western part of the city, the train would slow, but not stop at any of the stations. The stations would be darkened, soldiers in greatcoats cradling their Kalashnikovs to their chests, vigilant against any attempt by a passenger to leap from a carriage and make a rush for some imagined subterranean entrance to the West.
Today the train stops at every station. People leap carelessly on or off and make their way into the free night air.
We get out in what used to be part of the eastern section. The grim rows of old, soot-covered, bullet-riddled houses, with double courtyards reaching far back into the interior, are now transformed into a trendy area of chic boutiques and sidewalk cafes, thronged nightly with a well-heeled young crowd. Round the corner, prostitutes from Eastern Europe, uniformly dressed in lycra leggings and white platform sneakers, stand under the street lights to flag down passing cars. The predicted moral degeneration of the West has come home to roost where Walter Ulbricht once thought he had built an indestructible socialist paradise.
The new, reunited Berlin is sprawling and wealthy, bursting with cultural energy, a dazzling new Babylon soaring into the sky.
But it is also an old Babylon, afflicted to its foundations with a past it cannot quite put aside. The Prussian steel, the Nazi firing squads, the Stasi excesses all somehow throw a muted shadow over the born-again city.
The wall is gone, but I am not the only one who seems to be suffering a sense of disorientation. The liberated inhabitants of Berlin still wander vacantly through their brave new world, apparently searching for the elusive anchor of their own souls.
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