Berlin 1999
I am not a Camera
Christopher Isherwood's "Berlin Stories" is one of my favorite books, although the Berlin of the early 1930s is long gone. The heady days of the wide-open Berlin which Isherwood described were soon followed by the horrors of the Nazis and World War II, and then 40 years of the Cold War. Isherwood began the book with the line: "I am a camera". He saw himself as a detached observer, like a camera: turn it on and what is there will be recorded. Fortunately Isherwood was not a detached observer at all, but very much part of the everyday life in the wild Weimar Republic, and the book was the inspiration for the play and movie "Cabaret".
I know I shouldn’t dare to compare myself to Isherwood, and I won’t. He was a great writer, rather rich, and completely immersed in the Berlin demi-monde. Berlin is still famous for its "Szene": its crazy clublife, cabarets, and non-stop partying. That isn't me at all (I could only go to a club for "anthropological research"),and I am not a camera: my photography skills are minimal, to say the least. But I do have my impressions, and I faithfully take notes on my trips. They're my own unique impressions of Berlin, definitely not the conventional wisdom that you'd get out the "Time Out" guidebook.
So, in February, 1999 I went to Berlin and Warsaw for 10 days. (My Warsaw trip is described in a separate travel diary.)The structure for my trip was: one day in Berlin after flying from New York, then 4 days in Warsaw, followed by 4 days back in Berlin. Quite a lot of this travel diary though, is comparison of the Berlin I saw this year with what I remember from my last visit there, in January 1990 when I was there for a week, plus several daytrips to East Berlin in 1987 and 1989. My most vivid impressions from all my visits are largely of East Berlin. I was fascinated by the place, and was probably one of the few creatures on the planet who thought West Berlin came in as a poor second. Now it’s one city again, sort of. It’s still one of the weirdest cities in the world, but definitely one of the most interesting. Now that it’s the capital of a united Germany , it will change it’s persona yet again. The next time I’ll visit, I’m sure it will be even more different than all the other times I’ve been there.
The Pope's Revenge
Getting to Berlin was more complicated than I wanted: a seven hours plus flight to Frankfurt, followed by another hour-long shuttle flight to Berlin's Tegel airport. The landing in Frankfurt was far too full of sharp turns and aerial acrobatics, and the final 10 minutes of the flight I made good use of the air-sickness bag. I'm a quiet person, but not in these circumstances. Then I turn into a shrieker and a deep heaver from the deepest recesses of my being. In other words, fellow passengers look back in horror to see who on earth is making such frightful noises! Just little ole me...
As I dragged my limp body out of the plane, I wrenched a muscle in my leg when I tried to move across a row of seats . I knew immediately this was going to be painful for days, and I cursed myself for being so careless and my bad luck in beginning this vacation.
To spare my readers, I'll only say that my air-sick operatics were repeated on the short flight to Berlin. The plane was a clunker from the early sixties. It was certainly air-worthy, but it had the look and feel of a converted military transport plane. The cockpit was separated from the passenger cabin by just a curtain. The only good thing about this ordeal was that it was very short. I was soon on solid ground again, queasy as all get out, but happy I was still conscious. My taxi-driver was Vietnamese. When I asked him how long he'd been living in Berlin, he wearily answered "I was born here" in a genuine German accent. I parroted Kennedy's famous line, telling him he could accurately say then: "Ich bin ein Berliner". He seemed to know I was joking. I'm sure he knew that Kennedy should've said: "Ich bin Berliner". To say "ein Berliner" is nonsense, because "ein Berliner" is a sort of jam-filled doughnut...To gloss over my gaffe, and Kennedy's, and all of America's gaffes past and present, I gave my Vietnamese taxi driver an extra big tip.
We drove right up to the Brandenburg Gate, which was certainly not possibly in January 1990, the last time I was in Berlin. Unter den Linden was pretty much the same, except now there were lots more cars, and only a few of them were the little Trabants, the dominant car of the former East Germany. We drove along Karl Liebknecht Strasse, named after one of the founders of the first German communist party (and still honored by not having the street named after him changed after the Wall fell). This street is now filled with stores with rather tacky neon signs, which was a real change from the much more Spartan storefronts that used to be there. Alexanderplatz is still more or less the same: huge and brutal. I'd booked a room at the Forum hotel. This had been one of the flagship hotels of East Germany: the Hotel Stadt Berlin. Now it was owned by the Intercontinental chain and had been completely renovated.
I asked for a room on a high floor, and made my way up to the thirtieth floor. It was a small and very plain room, but was comfortable enough. The view was really incredible. I looked out over Alexanderplatz, and just beyond it was the Berliner Fernsehturm: the enormous tv tower built by the Communists to give East Berlin an immediately recognized symbol. They were perhaps too successful: the tv-tower was soon known as the "Telespargel" because it resembles a huge asparagus stalk, but more irreverently it became known as the "Pope's Revenge". This was because every clear day in mid-afternoon, the angle in which the sun shines on the huge globe two-thirds up the tower would form a brilliant cross! When the tower was completed and the Communist bosses saw this they nearly collapsed from a collective stroke. They ordered changes, but not a thing could be done about it. It was an enormous embarassment to a government struggling for some respect: instead it was laughed at.
Artificial Country
I'm very interested in artificial countries, imaginary countries, fantasy lands etc. (I invented one myself...) Part of my reason for coming again to Berlin was to see what has happened in the former capital of an artificial country: the German Democratic Republic. It was founded in 1949 when the Soviet occupiers accepted the reality that they would not be controlling all of Germany soon and so set up a new country in their zone. In a further snub to the West, they made their portion of Berlin the capital of this new country, officially known as "Berlin: Hauptstadt der DDR".
The GDR was always a step-child of a country. The Soviets set it up as an afterthought and out of spite. They took quite a lot of the country's infrastructure and output as reparations for at least 10 years, and the GDR received no Marshall Plan assistance. The West refused to recognize the country, which was consistent with the GDR's own citizenry, which fled in droves until the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. After that they were prisoners in their own country for 28 years.
With the construction of the Wall, East Germany could actually build a "real" country. The strategy was to instill a GDR identity in the mostly reluctant and hostile population. It became easier with time as new generations grew up knowing no other reality than what they experienced inside the claustrophobic East Berlin and not very large GDR. To a degree building this identity was successful: East Germany had the highest standard of living in the Soviet bloc, won many Olympic medals, and was eventually recognized by West Germany and the United States. A grudging pride in the achievements of East Germany existed, but that hardly meant the majority of the population was happy with the reality of their "artificial country".
We all know the story, of how the East Germans liberated themselves in 1989. How they demonstrated by the hundreds of thousands in peaceful protests in Berlin, Leipzig, and everywhere else in the country. How thousands defected throughout the summer of 1989 disgusted how the reforms they knew were going on because of Gorbachev passed their own country by. And how in the end, the senile communist party leader Erich Honecker was forced out, and a few weeks later, the Berlin Wall was opened.
The opening of the wall was the death knell of the GDR. For all the development of an East German identity, East Germans were Germans, and at the time most of them were sick of being step-children. They wanted a standard of living just as high as their West German countrymen: nice cars, vcr's, fresh vegetables year round, the freedom to travel. And who can blame them?
They got what they wanted, and a lot more. Within nine months after the opening of the Wall, East Germany went out of existence. What had begun in the prior months now continued with lightening speed: the GDR was to be replaced with West German ideas, value, institutions, and procedures. In many ways these changes were imposed on their 17,000,000 countrymen, and not always in very democratic or diplomatic ways. The West Germans, after all, are not known for being meek and mild. And the meekness which had served the East Germans so well through 40 years of communism was used against them at every turn by their compatriots: accusations that the East Germans were lazy, stupid, and altogether inferior were common, but after a few years of this arrogance, the Easterners had had enough. By 1998, they were so fed up that their votes were the determining factor in replacing the government of Helmut Kohl, that fat-cat symbol of West German dominance. His fervent hope had been to lead Germany into the next century, but interestingly enough, many Germans east and west were ready to see him exit for good. Reportedly he was crushed by this outcome.
Between the opening of the Wall in November, 1989 and the unification of Germany in October 1990, East Germany existed as the kind of "fantasyland" I'm all in favor of: a reform communist country seeking the support of its citizenry and attempting to steer a new course in creating a socialist society on principles similar to that brief moment of the Prague Spring in 1968. It didn't stand a chance, of course. East Germans at the time were sick to death of being labrats in Marxist experiments, and the majority gleefully accepted the chimera of a painless future as part of a unified Germany. As a Frenchman had once remarked: "I love Germany so much, I'm glad there are two of them." and the Anschluss of Germany and Austria earlier this century by the Nazis showed the dangers of united German speakers in one nation. But the steamroller of unification was unstoppable, and the voices calling for the chance to create a democratic socialism were resoundingly drowned out.
One of my main reasons for coming back to Berlin was to see what had replaced the GDR in the last 9 years. My first impression was that it was for all intents and purposes obliterated. Well, the buildings that had been constructed by the communist regime were all still there, some in sad disrepair, others made over into something entirely new, and a few lonely monuments here and there to what had been a showcase for Soviet-style socialism. The markers of everyday life in Berlin-Hauptstadt der DDR were almost entirely gone, such as the state-owned shops, the antique neon signs advertising state-produced products and services, even the “Walk-Don’t Walk” signs of the discredited regime couldn’t survive. It’s as if the people who made the decisions to get rid of all that had been reality for 40 years never had the right to exist at all in the first place, and therefore had to be obliterated, so as not to remind people of what used to be there. And from what I had been reading, there have been loud complaints that the people making these decisions weren’t the people who had lived under “Real Existing Socialism”, it was the carpetbaggers from the West who had taken over the city’s administration and had imposed their values and their “vision” on the former East Berlin who were to blame.
Still, traces of the streetscape I remember so well can be found here and there, mostly tucked away on side streets, or the empty storefronts that haven’t been renovated or can’t be rented. After I had settled into my room and my stomach had begun to settle down, I headed out to explore this new East Berlin, just Berlin now really.
Fonts of the GDR
Alexanderplatz was still much too big and windy, but a tramline cut right through the middle of it now, which made it slightly more dangerous, and slightly nicer. The communists had banned trams from the city center when they revamped Alexanderplatz in the late sixties. They didn’t abandon them entirely like in West Berlin, and now a new network was being added on to what had survived on the east side of the Wall.
I walked over to Karl Liebknecht Strasse, which was lined on one side by long high-rise buildings with some of East Berlin’s main stores. Now it was all redone in a blue and white plastic motif. It certainly wasn’t an improvement design-wise, but the stores were now stuffed with merchandise and there were neon lights everywhere. For being the center of a big city, the quality of the products seemed remarkably down-market.
I was hungry, so I went to a branch of the Nordzee restaurant chain that had replaced the GDR’s chain of seafood restaurant’s Gastmahl des Meeres (Feast of the Sea).It was actually right in the same spot as the old GDR eatery. I went to the Gastmahl des Meeres one day for lunch in 1989, and the meal was not one of the GDR’s culinary delights, I have to say. At least I didn’t get sick like I did when I had my first GDR meal at an enormous cafeteria underneath the Telespargel back in 1987. That time, I disappeared into the men’s room for such a long time, that the Dutch friend I was traveling with was beginning to worry I’d been picked up by the Stasi. The Nordzee chain is dependable and cheap, and they have fresh seafood, which was definitely not the hallmark of the Gastmahl des Meeres chain.
Fresh food was one of the reasons the Wall fell, or the LACK of fresh food was. People in East Germany were quite aware that their countrymen in the West had fresh fruit and vegetables all year round, could buy fresh fish instead of canned fish from Russia, and had a choice of food and other products that were just not available in their own country.They were sick and tired of the lack of choice and quality. So when the Wall opened, 17,000,000 East Germans went on a shopping spree. Each one of them was given a gift by the West German government of 100 marks, and many people went right to the supermarkets in West Berlin and bought things like oranges and bananas. Bananas became a symbol for Die Wende: “The Change” as Germans called the opening of the Berlin Wall, so much so that signs began appearing in East Berlin saying: “The Revolution is not a Banana”.
Right behind Gastmahl des Meeres there was Das Internationales Buch, the largest bookstore in East Berlin. This had now been replaced by a very ordinary branch bookstore of a West German chain, but the fixtures and layout of the store were still the same as I’d remembered. Das Internationales Buch wasn’t exactly multicultural, unless you consider the former Soviet Union the whole world...but it had been stuffed to the gills with books in the “old days”. On the ground floor there were stacks of books by Honecker and other high-ranking officials. If you lingered around them, you’d fall asleep just looking at the covers. No one bothered to linger though: every customer marched right by this section and headed upstairs. There were large fiction sections up there, which was the most crowded part of the store. I was more interested in the non-fiction section and spent quite a long time browsing the shelves there. I was particularly intrigued by the Travel section of the store. There wasn’t anything available outside the “socialist family of countries” any time I was there, although once I spotted a lovely tome about taking the family to North Korea. The first time I was there in 1987, my Dutch friend bought a wall map of the Berlin region, which had the very large West Berlin section whited out. Unfortunately, he was slightly nervous about being in East Berlin in the first place and couldn’t wait to leave, and we accidentally left the rolled up map in the store and didn’t realize it until hours later. He emphatically told me: “We’re not going back”, and that was that.
Underneath “Das Internationale Buch” was the “Tutti Frutti” cafe, where I’d had my first East German cup of tea and glanced at “Neues Deutschland” back in 1987, while listening to U-2 and other Western bands playing on the radio.I thought Tutti Frutti a rather frivolous name for a cafe in a communist country, I doubt Honecker had thought it up. It was gone now of course, as was every other cafe and cafeteria in and around Alexanderplatz, all except for one: Cafe Mosaik. It still had a mosaic on the exterior of the citizens building socialism (a coffee factory?) How had it survived?
The only place I had a tasty meal in the GDR days was at the cafeteria in the Palast Hotel. This was one of the swankiest hotels in the old days, which means ordinary citizens weren’t allowed to stay there (so much for the classless society...). The cafeteria was open to the general public though, and it had rather good meat and potatoes food. So now in 1999 I naively hoped that perhaps that good restaurant from the old days had survived in the new dispensation. No such luck.It was replaced by a branch of the American TGIFridays chain. Well at least it wasn’t Hooters!
The weather was really nice this late afternoon. A lot of people were out enjoying the day, and I walked along Unter den Linden all the way to the Brandenburg Gate. Unter den Linden is still mostly filled with cultural institutions and government buildings. I noticed that the former Linden Corso Cafe on the corner of Friedrichstrasse had been demolished. The Linden Corso had been an extremely popular but not very nice cafe under the communist regime. It was now being replaced by a cafe of a much flashier kind altogether. As I moseyed along the beautiful avenue, I noticed a sign for a gallery called “Kunst Salon”. It caught my eye, because I think this was the first “evidence” I’d noticed that I was indeed in the former “Berlin-Hauptstadt der DDR”. The store was now mostly some kind of postcard shop, but the original sign out front and the arrangement inside was of pure GDR vintage.
I think it was then I realized that it was the style of signage that caught my eye, and that was because it was done in a font I think was peculiar to the former East Germany, and which was nearly universal in store signage, product packaging, book design etc. Nowadays we’d call it “branding”, but all the graphic representations of the GDR were more or less cut from the same cloth, cookie cutter or what have you. Probably there had been just one or two design studios for the entire country, which had just one (big) client: the state!
This realization was a small epiphany of sorts, because quite a lot of the nostalgia I had for the GDR was based on visual memories. I had liked the look and feel of the place. It certainly wasn’t for the pretty ruthless political and social system, which I don’t think I would’ve found very pleasant to live in. But for me, (a Swedish model socialist at heart and not an East German style communist), the everyday “packaging” of ordinary life and the everyday streetscape in the richest and most sophisticated of the east-bloc countries was extremely interesting. The former citizens of the GDR only realized the special qualities of their everyday lives once it was all gone. About five years after the Wall opened, a wave of “Ostalgie” went through eastern Germany, and nobody doubts now that these people are going to just completely assimilate to West Germany’s norms.
The Wessi’s of course didn’t get it. They were too busy bossing everyone around to care to ask if people really wanted what they offered. To the average Westerner, the East was a sea of dull uniformity exactly because it lacked the color and liveliness of commercial advertising ubiquitous in non-communist countries. In East Germany, store design, graphic design, and a style of ersatz advertising were highly developed, but in ways that Westerners found primitive and commercially unviable. Well, I suppose that was the point...the idea wasn’t to sell anything, but to inform, sometimes instruct, and subtly (or a with sledge-hammer more likely)--manipulate.
Of course, advertising (commercial or not) is always manipulation, East or West. The advertising I find so manipulative in the West simply didn’t exist in East Berlin before “Die Wende”. I liked seeing that, and observing the everyday lives that people were living without being bombarded by the constant huckterism and superficiality of the American (and nowadays practically global) set-up. On the other hand, the system that forced that non-commercialized and de-commodified reality on 17,000,000 people wasn’t appealing to me either.The price for a non-commercialized existence was being imprisoned inside an area about the size of Kentucky, and being bombarded by the endless “ad campaigns” of a government that was widely hated, almost always mistrusted, and which most people tried to shut out of their lives as much as was possible and politically safe to do. I was very happy to see the Wall collapse, and the Honecker regime with it. When I visited Berlin in January 1990, it was touching to see the political neophytes of East Germany debating on television how to cobble together a decent, democratic,but still socialist-leaning society: The Third Way between capitalism and the Soviet system. They wanted the German Democratic Republic to be democratic, but not West German economically and socially.
Their naivete was rewarded with the loss of their separate identity in October, 1990. That’s when West Germany formally closed down East Germany for good. It probably couldn’t have been otherwise. There have been countless regrets since then about what could’ve been done differently, but once the 17,000,000 former citizens of the GDR became a part of the country with 65,000,000 West Germans: well, majority rules. They lost their identity, their familiar institutions and ways of doing things (good and bad), and by and large, they had very little say in the matter. It wasn’t just the store-signs and antiquated neon signs that were thrown on the junk heap. Everything else was too. I really was thinking about all this as I walked around the center of Berlin as it grew dark. It wasn’t so coherent as I’ve just written, but I’d come back specifically to see Berlin and what had happened since the two sides of the city merged again after 1990. Walking up Friedrichstrasse and a little further up to where it changed names to Chauseestrasse, I could see a lot I remembered from my other visits, but the feeling of the surroundings was very different, not to mention the look of the place. It was bittersweet, because now this part of Berlin looked just like the other parts, and that included a lot of good things: a lot of restaurants, bookstores selling books that weren’t censored, etc.
I passed the Oranienburg synagogue, which had been torched in 1938 during the Kristallnacht. It lay derelict for decades, but finally the GDR government began to restore it. The events of 1989 occurred before the renovations were done, but now it’s a synagogue and community center again for the very small number of Jews still living in Berlin. A jarring addition to the quite beautiful facade of the building is that a protective barrier has been built between the sidewalk and the street to prevent bombs etc. from being flung out of passing cars. Also a semi-permanent hut for 24 hour police protection has been built there. It’s good that the Germans finally have gotten it right: don’t persecute the Jews, protect them. It’s a shame that in spite of everything that’s happened because of the Nazis, there are still Germans who can sympathize with such evil ideas.
It had been a long walk and I was cold and tired. After all, I lost a night’s sleep on the flight over. I got back to my enormous hotel fairly quickly and and ordered sandwiches from room service. The view of the Alexanderplatz train station thirty floor below me, with its constant coming and going of S-Bahn and commuter trains, plus a big part of Berlin all lit up in front of me, was a lot of fun to look at. All in all, more interesting than German TV, which has only two kinds of programs: the dullest public affairs programs on the planet, and dubbed bimbo Baywatch style imports from America. I’d be leaving for Warsaw early the next day anyway, so I gave the tv a miss and hit the sack much earlier than I would normally.
Wir Gehen Einkaufen (Let’s Go Shopping!)
My four days in Warsaw passed by quickly, and on Sunday I took the train back to Berlin. I arrived in the early afternoon, and the weather was even nicer than when I spent my one day there earlier in the week. I asked for a room on a high-floor again, and they gave me another one on the 30th floor, not the same one, but decorated in exactly the same way. I headed out for another lunch at Nordzee, and then bought a couple of tickets for the subway. I was going to go to Frankfurter Tor, in the Friedrichshain district, and would walk back to Alexanderplatz along Karl Marx Allee.
It’s a long walk, but I didn’t mind. I liked Karl Marx Allee a lot when I’d first seen it in 1988. Most of it is in the high Stalinist style, and in spite of being a prestige project, the construction materials weren’t that great, and in recent years the whole complex has been made a cultural landmark and everything is being renovated. It wouldn’t be right to stay “restored”, because the renovated buildings probably look better now than when they were brand new. The problem with Karl Marx Allee these days, is that there’s very little pedestrian life. In the GDR years, this was a showcase street, and it was lined with shops all along the way. When the trees had grown again along the boulevard, it wasn’t at all unpleasant to stroll along and “window-shop”. Unfortunately, nowadays most of the stores are empty, and some of the replacements in the new dispensation were selling quite tatty merchandise. In 1988, I walked along this “boulevard of socialist dreams” to look at the stores. That’s when the idee fixe in my head about the design of everyday life in communist Germany got started, I think. All the stores were owned by the state and managed by two companies: HO (Handelsorganisation) and Konsum. So all the signage was of a particular style, and all the merchandise in the stores was packaged and displayed very differently than what I’d seen anywhere in the West. It was fascinating, at least to me, and I would linger in front of store windows taking it all in. This caused people to rush over to see what I was looking at. Obviously there was something interesting on display! Maybe something interesting to buy! When they saw what I was looking at, it was just boxes of baby food or jars of jam. They immediately left, probably wondering what was wrong with me.
I did notice that the stores were full of merchandise, and I didn’t really see any long lines, nothing worse than what we experience in New York at the local supermarket. A lot of what was on sale though people refused to buy, because it was junk or they didn’t need it. Clothing stores had racks and racks of clothes made of petroleum by-products that hung around for years, because nobody would buy the stuff. When something good showed up, it would be gone immediately. People were well-dressed because they snapped up the nice clothes or had them made by seamstresses. The German penchant for neatness and cleanliness meant people were very nicely turned out, and the stores weren’t messy and ugly, which was a surprise to me, because most descriptions of life in communist countries I’d read emphasized any and all shortages and shortcomings. Parts of New York were far drearier, if you ask me. But this was the GDR, the richest of the east bloc countries, and this was Berlin-Hauptstadt der DDR, which was a showcase of communism. You waited 10 years for a plastic car, a color tv cost $2,500 (!) and you’d probably never get a telephone, but life was much harder in Poland and Russia in those days.
Well instead of observing the other-worldly appearance of Karl Marx Allee I remembered, I just looked at the architecture on my “comeback tour”. The last third of the street was built in the early sixties, and was a precursor of the prefab blocks that were built everywhere in the east bloc up through the eighties. The ones in East Germany were definitely better built than elsewhere, but they were now being redone because they hadn’t held up well at all. They looked nicer now, if gaudier. The fact is though, that the newer part of Karl Marx Allee is ugly, and no wonder so many western visitors added that to their impression of “real existing socialism”.
The communists widened many of the streets in the center of Berlin, creating 8 lane nightmares for the plastic cars to sputter along. As can be imagined, such broad roads aren’t pedestrian friendly, and so walkers are channeled into the underground passageways communist urban planners were very fond of. So after stopping a moment to admire Der Haus des Lehrers (The House of Teachers), I headed into the depths below Alexanderplatz. It’s a bit like the Times Square subway station, although cleaner and more bare, since even nowadays, there aren’t a lot of advertising billboards down there. I passed a little underground shop which sold nothing but eastern German products. Finally! A blast from the past! Here was a store that looked like the former HO and Konsum shops of the GDR, although it was tiny, and had no customers, at least when I dropped in. I’d read that such stores have opened, because many Ossi’s missed the brand names of the “good ole days”...they liked their east ketchup better, and even some of their old tobacco brands, and it was a badge of pride to buy some of these underdog products.
Up in Alexanderplatz, the huge Kaufhof department store is located right next to my hotel. It occupies the building of the former flagship branch of CENTRUM, the former state-owned department store chain of East Germany. Now it’s no different than a department store in any part of Europe or the US, for that matter, at least on the inside. That means it’s very different from what CENTRUM was like. I went there many times to look around in my previous visits. It was the busiest department store I’d ever been, with crowds of people milling about looking for something interesting to buy. I think more often than not, they were disappointed. Although CENTRUM was loaded with things on the shelves, closer inspection often resulted in customers visibly recoiling from the merchandise. This was especially true in the clothing departments, which had racks and racks of stuff that people just whizzed by without even bothering to look at. The electronics department had color tv’s with prices that would daunt almost any prospective buyer, about $2,500 at the official exchange rate. Fortunately, a rack of maps with a big selection was something I came across on one of my visits, and I stocked up on a pile of them I’d never find anywhere else. My Dutch traveling companion remarked that the maps were more colorful than the cities they represented, which really was only a slight exagerration.
On the ground floor is a very large supermarket, which became the place where I ended up getting a lot of my meals this time in Berlin. It has a really big and nice salad bar, and I could get all sorts of good food cheaply from that. Before 1989 this was also a self-service supermarket, and it had a big selection of sausages and fish, and loads of canned goods from what I remember. It was better than I’d expected, but compared to what replaced it after re-unification, I could understand why Ostalgie goes only so far...
I planned to do a lot more nostalgic shopping the rest of my stay in Berlin, mostly haunting second-hand bookshops and flea-markets looking for old GDR architecture and city-planning books. Fortunately, it wasn’t too hard to do that, because a lot of books from the old days were unloaded rather quickly after the Wall opened, and certain bookstores sell almost nothing else. They’re mostly in the eastern neighborhoods, although one was way, way over in Steglitz in West Berlin. That was on my itinerary, and would take me to parts of Berlin I’d never ever been to in this enormous city.
Coming to Germany to shop almost seems like a masochistic way to spend a vacation, because the Germans (east and west) have never been known for providing pleasant shopping environments. Stores aren’t open for the convenience of most shopper’s schedules, although things are loosening up a little, and some of the rudest shopclerks I’ve ever come across have been German (and most of them, in my experience, were in West Berlin). But where else was I going to find GDR kitsch but in the places where it was made?
Generally I find shopping tedious, especially back home in New York. I’m not a shopaholic and would prefer to have everything I need or want delivered at the push of a button like on the Jetsons. There’s hope for that with the internet. True to my eccentricity though, I found shopping in the GDR extremely interesting, and the prospect of ferreting out totems of the communist past under the new dispensation was an adventure for me.
Since nearly every store in Germany closes on Sundays, I couldn’t begin until the next day. So on Monday morning, I headed over to the biggest bookstore in Berlin, Kiepert near the Kurfurstendamm in West Berlin. I had a list of titles I’d found on the new German version of Amazon.com, all sorts of architecture, city planning books, and aerial pictorials of German cities, east and west. Although Kiepert is full of books, I struck out trying to find copies of title after title on my list. I screwed up my courage to go ask the officious looking middle-aged woman stationed at the counter if they might have some of the books in storage areas. She didn’t look very approachable, and just as I expected, I was greeted with a glare. I realize that asking to find a book in English in a German bookstore might not be an everyday occurrence, but I’m sure that her attitude was a 24/7 phenomenon. She waved to the opposite side of the room and just said: “Over there!” Of course that’s where I’d been looking, and I said “Where, over there?” After escorting me to the spot where the books weren’t, she said I could have the books ordered, although her body language indicated she’d rather not be bothered and would prefer I leave. I tend to get a little irritated and sassy when people are so supercilious like that, so I just abruptly said: “No thanks, I’ll just order these books from Amazon.” The look of horror, anger, and disgust she shot at me when I uttered that word “Amazon” was worth leaving the store empty-handed. With lousy service like that, web-shopping in Germany should really have a rosy future.
Next I headed over to Die Kleine Buchladen, which is on the ground floor of the Karl Liebknecht Haus, named after the co-founder of the Spartacists (along with Rosa Luxemburg) The Spartacists soon after became the German Communist Party, which after the war unified with the very reluctant Social Democrats in the Russian zone of Berlin to form the Socialist Unity Party (SED), which had a monopoly on political power for 40 years, until 1989 ended all that. Then the SED re-formed itself (and swears it has reformed too), and now calls itself the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS). So I was headed to the PDS bookshop to see what they had to offer in the way of GDR kitsch.
Talk about reduced circumstances! This once all-powerful party now owned just a single building with a “kleinburgerlich” (petit bourgeois) atmosphere and a cozy little bookstore selling to a small customer-base book-titles which once had been imposed on the entire population of East Germany for 40 years.
Like many Ossi’s, the woman at the cash register was self-effacing and modest, like some kind of Mennonite communist. She didn’t know any English, but her demeanor was welcoming and maternal, and she didn’t mind at all that I snooped around the shop and hung around the used-book nook for such a long time. I’d hit paydirt, because they did indeed have some fun little items, like a pre-Solidarity picture-album of Warsaw that eluded me in Warsaw itself, as well as a sixties gem: Haushalt Encyclopedie published by Verlag fur die Frau, full of helpful hints for the housewife building communism. That 800 page tome cost only 5 marks.
The PDS still has some clout in eastern Germany, particularly in eastern Berlin, where quite a lot of the former GDR apparatchiks still live. It’s certainly more conciliatory and reformist in the Gorbachev sense than the rightfully discredited SED, but it can’t really shake off its heritage, and is held in complete contempt by many in both east and west. It seems to revel in its pariah status though, and acts as a gadfly to the often insufferable attitudes of the Wessi’s. It’s helped by having the extremely articulate and engaging Gregor Gysi as its leader. He’s Jewish, the son of the former culture minister of the GDR, and during the bad old days, he was often a defense lawyer for dissidents, although he was a party-member. A very interesting background and he seems a genuine proponent for propagating an analysis of East Germany’s past and present status that often bursts the balloons of conventional wisdom about what “real existing socialism” was really like.
I can understand why people would vote for the PDS. I always think the underdogs have a right to be heard, and in the unified Germany, the eastern Germans have not always been treated fairly or kindly. Of course, the Wessi’s usually think otherwise, because they calculate how much money they’ve spent on bringing the former GDR up to parity in infrastructure and investment, and how they’ve invited 17,000,000 fellow Germans to join their genuinely democratic political system. And that’s all true, but they complain often that the Ossi’s are ingrates, and when it then veers off into stereotyping and denigrating the East German experience, as it so often does, the unappealing Germany of yore rears its ugly head: the tendency to declare oneself superior and others inferior, and the default to oppressive ways of dealing with those considered inferior. That’s a tradition the West Germans still have not entirely shaken, and they have a reputation for boorishness whenever they go abroad on vacation, as well as at home in the eastern Lander. They could learn something from the oppressed about humility, but only a few seem to take the hint.
Old Genossen
During my visit to Berlin in 1990, when the city was still divided even though the wall was open, it was fairly easy to spot East Berliners. They wore clothes by and large manufactured in the GDR or the east bloc, and although everyone was neatly dressed and often with style, it was obvious the quality wasn't as high as in West Berlin. Of course now everyone had access to the same brand names we're all familiar with, so there wasn't any difference in how people looked. Except...often I would come across a distinct kind of middle-aged or older man. They dressed in baggy, non-descript clothes and always wore a hat similar to a Greek fisherman's cap cocked to one side. They were usually walking along in a determined and unsmiling manner, with an otherworldly detachment from everything they passed. Their otherworldliness wasn’t really surprising: they were the bewildered anachronisms of pre-1989 days, and their world had disappeared. Most of them were diehard communists, old Genossen (comrades) often at odds with the revisionist PDS, not accepting it as pure with their communist ideals. They were true believers, and they're still to be found in the enormous pre-fab housing estates of eastern Berlin. They collect their pensions now in Deutschmarks (and soon in Euros), but they're not very happy about it. They read Neues Deutschland, and are probably revolted by its "liberalism", but it's one of the few things left that isn't westernized. How they must miss the Handelsorganisation stores, the good old days of the Stasi and the closed border. Gorby ruined everything! No wonder they look neither right nor left as they wander through the familiar streets of the GDR-built landscape, now covered with neon signs for Japanese cars and American colas. The workers abandoned them as soon as they could squeeze through the open Wall. The GDR is continuously discredited by the West German controlled mass media, and their compatriots are nostalgic for the solidarity and less complicated routines of GDR daily life, not for what what's often called the "criminal Stasi state".
Die Toten Mahnen Uns (And Then More Shopping)
The next day I took a trip into deepest east Berlin, to the Lichtenberg district, to go to a bookstore, and to “drop in” at the gravesite of the luminaries of East German socialism at Die Gedenkstatte der Sozialisten (Socialists’ Memorial). Except for Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg (especially Rosa Luxemburg), all the rest were rascals of varying degrees of nastiness, especially Walter Ulbricht....I was going primarily to pay my respects to the dead ideals of Rosa Luxemburg. She spent most of World War I imprisoned, because she was a lonely voice in Germany for pacifism. She did not think it was a good idea for English and French workers to be at war with German workers. She was strong in her opinions and quarrelled with just about all the big-shots in socialist circles, including Lenin with his dictatorial methods. She was sincere about lifting the workers out of misery and ignorance, and felt that only workers who were educated and self-aware could create a worker’s state. She did not feel that the time was ripe for a revolution when the War ended. Unfortunately, she was murdered in the chaotic days of 1919. The Social Democrats were in power, but just barely. Various armed gangs controlled much of Berlin, and there were daily gun-fights around the city. Luxemburg and Liebknecht were picked up by rightest mercenaries one day and promptly beaten to death. Luxemburg’s body was tossed in the Landswehr canal.
The Socialist Unity Party (SED) claimed it was a direct descendant of the Sparticist League co-founded by Luxemburg, although I doubt she would’ve agreed. It also said it was a Leninist party, but Luxemburg opposed Leninism. She’s surrounded by Leninists at her gravesite. It’s a rather gloomy spot, with a dark craggy slab in the middle of a circle of graves. It looks like a tombstone, sort of. Of course there are no crosses on it or on any of the graves. The monolith simply bears the inscription: Die Toten Mahnen Uns (The Dead Admonish Us). After 40 years of the GDR, no doubt that was true. So that was it...the Socialists’ Memorial truly is that now, as much a memorial to people as to ideas. Still,on the anniversary of Liebknecht and Luxemburg’s death, the PDS has a march to the memorial, perhaps mourning what went wrong while publicly declaring to uphold the ideals of “Karl und Rosa”. Just a few weeks prior to my visit, 70,000 people marched to the gravesite. That’s a fairly large number of people voluntarily going out on a winter’s day to pay their respects to the first two German communists. In 1989, I was in East Berlin on the very day of the last march to the Memorial in GDR times. I noticed a very large number of uniformed men. These were the Kampfgruppen, sort of comparible to the National Guard, but far more numerous, and just as uneasy to be around. Were they there to protect the country from hostile outsiders, or to keep control of the population at home? (I know the answer to that for both the Kampfgruppen and the National Guard).
I made my way down to Frankfurter Allee and took the U-Bahn a few stops to go to Samariterstrasse. A modest bookshop there was stuffed floor to ceiling with books from all the east bloc countries.I must’ve looked at every title in the store, and piled up a little stack of finds. I resisted a coffee table book of Socialist Mongolia and a guide to Ceausescu’s Bucharest (regrettably now that I’m back home), but found a nice mid-sixties home decorating guide for one’s brand-new prefabricated GDR apartment. The furniture depicted was identical to all the Scandinavian modern mass-produced models of the day, which I would love to be able to squeeze into my tiny Village apartment if I could find it, or afford it. Instead I would just cram a few more books on the shelves about this kind of furniture. The proprietor was an identical copy of the lady at Die Kleine Buchladen, who somehow had made the transition from the communist days to owning her own business with her GDR-style personality intact: warm, polite, and not pushy. I browsed for almost two hours and she didn’t mind in the least.
Next another stroll along Karl Marx Allee, with a stop at Die Karl Marx Buchhandlung (now privatised but still in its old-fashioned Zuckerbacke digs) On the way back to the hotel, I stopped at a Kartoffel stand in the middle of the Alex. Interestingly, it was a Vietnamese man who cooked and sold me a large plate of fried potatoes (a snack in Germany as well as a side dish at supper.)He was probably one of the left-overs from the pre-1989 days. East Germany had a shortage of workers and contracted with Vietnam for thousands of people to come over to work a few years. They had no shortage of applicants, because East Germany was a veritable consumer’s paradise compared to Vietnam. The Wall fell, and most of them lost their jobs, because their factories went bankrupt. Some went back to Vietnam, but most just tried to wing it in the unified Germany. An interesting historical footnote: German-speaking Vietnamese...
Erich’s Lampshop and Bertolt Brecht’s House
My evenings were spent browsing through my growing pile of books and trying to enjoy what the deadly German TV networks offered up: Sominex on the Air. Actually, one show I liked was exactly that: a little cartoon aired every night at bedtime for tykes (about 7:30). It was a GDR relic, and is one of the few leftovers of that society that seemed to be appreciated in the West and is shown throughout the country. It’s called Sandmannchen (Little Sandman), and is a little similar to the religious program called Davey and Goliath(athiest version), the claymation cartoons from when I was a kid. The one channel I wanted to watch was the Middeldeutscher Rundfunk(MDR). It replaced the old DDR channels, which were in some respects livelier than West German ones, because they were trying to entice their trapped audience, who it was said “internally emigrated” every night by watching Western stations. It showed a lot of old DEFA movies, the East Germans’ one and only filmmaker. But it wasn’t included on the cable system at the hotel! One of the movies I missed was described as a comedy, and I would’ve liked to have experienced that...
My last full day in Berlin I planned to visit the home of Bertolt Brecht. It’s a good long walk through the heart of the Mitte district. I love European early morning air, usually with some fog and always cool bracing wind, even in the summer. Berliner Luft I guess, in this version. I passed the somewhat sad-looking hulking lump of a building called the Palast der Republik. There used to be the Kaiser’s Palace located on the spot, or very nearby actually. It was bombed to smithereens in the War, but could’ve been restored like so much else in Berlin was. But to the communists it was a symbol of the bad Imperial past, so in 1950 it was dynamited and carted off. For decades it was just a parking lot, although with very few cars to park in it for most of that time. So it remained until in 1976, Erich Honecker’s “gift” to the East German people was completed: a palace befitting a people’s republic. It looks on the outside like a big packing crate, but with that tacky reflective glass that was so popular in the seventies. The inside was hardly palatial. It was big, but definitely not beautiful; sort of a Trump-style casino decor as interpreted by communist bureaucrats. The enormous main lobby was filled with hundreds of hanging globe-shaped lighting fixtures. The East Germans immediately named it “Erich’s Lamp Shop”.
Although it was ugly, the building was genuinely popular. Many an East Berliner had their rites of passage there, from the Jugendweihe ceremony, which was mostly an excuse for teenagers to have a party (sort of a communist prom), to wedding receptions and various factory anniversary celebrations and the like.It was full of restaurants, bars, and buffets, as well as the assembly hall of the Volkskammer, the rubber-stamp East German parliament (except for its last 10 months when it was full of lively debate about how best to dismantle the GDR). The communists were fond of saying that THEIR parliament house was always open to the public and was truly a people’s palace. It helped though that the Volkskammer met only two weeks a year, so parliamentarians were rarely in the way.
It was just another slap in the face for eastern Berliners after the city was reunited when the Wessi’s started shopping around the idea of tearing down Erich’s palace and REBUILDING the Kaiser’s palace. So far nothing has come of those plans, although there are proposals to build a Disneyesque facade of the Kaiser’s palace and tack it onto the old Palast der Republik, which would make that structure look even MORE like a warehouse. Until it’s decided what to do, the existing Palast is completely off-limits, with the excuse that it’s full of asbestos (probably true). Wags point out though that the International Conference Center in western Berlin had asbestos problems too, but instead of shutting it down, it was remodeled.
I walked up Friedrichstrasse, which nowadays is trying its hardest to be swank. Not quite, in my estimation. The dreadful Palast der Tranen(palace of tears) has been torn down. This was the annex which had been built on the side of the Friedrichstrasse station and was where east Berliners would say good-bye to their relatives and friends returning to the “Other Side”. In 1990, as I headed for the exit-hall, I realized I’d made the mistake of exchanging way too West German marks for DDR marks, and I couldn’t get them changed back into West German money...they were more or less worthless at that point. I kept a few as souvenirs and placed the rest on top of a garbage can. I guess an East Berliner got a little extra east-bloc cash in his pocket that night.
A further 10 minute walk and I was at Brecht’s house. It’s not a fancy building, but was one of the few undamaged ones in early post-war East Berlin, and most of it was given over to Brecht and his wife, Helene Weigel. She had a roomy flat downstairs, and he had the whole second floor. I headed into the office to join a tour, and was greeted by a woman dressed in a severe intellectual style. She told me that I was the one and only member of the 10 am tour, so she gave me a very detailed explanation of every room in Brecht and Weigel’s living quarters. It was a real thrill, and she was a font of detailed information about every aspect of their home lives. She was a bit non-plussed when I raved about a huge old-fashioned television set of GDR vintage. I realized about halfway through the tour that she was too. She probably gave the same tour under the old regime as now, and she referred somewhat cryptically to all the changes of the last 10 years. Although she was very friendly and polite, the only time she smiled was when she informed me that “Monica Lewinsky is now in Berlin!”
“Good God!” I thought to myself , “is there no escape from that sordid situation from back home?” American celebrity culture, right in the heart of Bertolt Brecht’s house! I thanked her for the info about Monica and for her excellent tour, and headed down to the Brecht bookshop on the ground floor. Nothing really of interest there, except for buying postcards depicting the “Ampelmannchen”.These were the clever and colorful Walk/Don’t Walk signals on nearly every street corner in East Berlin, and they had been specifically designed to be instantly recognizable to children: a touch of whimsy in a rather unwhimsical land. Of course, the West Germans ordered them removed when the city was reunited, because they were East German and therefore of no value. Quite a lot of them were taken down, until a grass-roots effort to preserve them finally won a court-order to stop it. But most of them are gone, replaced by perfectly inferior West German signals.
As I passed by the pleasant cemetery right next to the Brecht house, I saw a groundsman apprentice unloading some garden tools from the back of a van. He was so breathtakingly handsome I think I startled him with my stare. He looked puzzled and maybe a little flattered. I was slightly embarrassed to feel drawn to this shining example of what 60 years ago would have been held up as the ultimate Aryan youth, I’m so glad that we now live in a world where people are judged solely by their character instead of through a genetic lottery ;-)
On my way back to the hotel, I stopped in front of a table of old books in front of the Berlin city hall and got my last piece of GDR kitsch, a tourist map of the communist-designed new-town of Eisenhuttenstadt(formerly Stalinstadt). I’d hoped to take a day-trip to it, but was slightly deterred by reading several reports of attacks by skinheads there. It was a model town in the GDR days, but has very high unemployment now, and I didn’t want to risk getting in the way of any unfriendly locals.
Next day I had a grueling flight back home to New York via Frankfurt, vowing never again to book a flight that wasn’t non-stop. I arrived home to my cramped apartment in emotional tatters, I now could begin converting my home into a small museum and archive of GDR kitsch.So long to East Germany, and its few surving remnants in Berlin. Next visit, I’m sure even less evidence will remain extant.