The following is an account of events that occurred between December 1971 and June 1972. I’ve kept these facts to myself all these years for obvious reasons, but I’m too old now to worry about any of that.
“I have never been there. It’s just a metaphor. I like division.”
Lou Reed on his 1973 album “Berlin.” (IHT, 16-17 Dec. 2006)
Blame the weather or the “Berliner Luft,” that crisp yet dry air that fills the lungs with more energy than the brain can channel. Yet there it was after weeks of living under a lead gray blanket, a beautiful, sunny, azure sky on a cold winter’s day in West Berlin. The year was 1971 and history recorded the “Age of Aquarius.”
Actually, history recorded more than that given the demonstrations in the center of West Berlin on that sunny December day. Held in check by about two thousand police, over four thousand students protested against the recent killing of Georg von Rauch, an alleged member of the “Baader-Meinhof” urban guerilla group, or the “RAF,” the “Red Army Faction” that had declared armed conflict against the West German state.
German friends of mine were at the demonstration, whereas I, influenced by my best friend, sought another venue. A perfect day, I felt and my partner surely agreed, for a drive into the country, which in Berlin is in the midst of the city.
Instead of going to the university for my history seminar or participating the demo, I was driving on the upper part of the Kurfuerstendamm, about three kilometers away from the political medley , heading west toward Koenigsallee with Brutus sitting next to me, alert and on the lookout for a parking space.
One of the distinct pleasures of West Berlin, and not just for dog owners, was a promenade through its magnificent forested parks, where you could walk for hours and enjoy the solitude of nature in the heart of a bustling city.
Passing Hagenstrasse on Koenigsallee I took a left toward Koeningsweg, maneuvered into a parking lot, and let Brutus jump out of my VW camper. He headed straight for the pine forest, checking several trees on the way. The scent of pleasure was in the air, and he knew we were by the wooded area of the Hundekehle Sea, where dogs were free to roam. He dashed around a bent with gusto and excitement, for he expected that he would soon encounter many others of his kind. The Hundekehle was simply canine paradise.
Blame Brutus, for this is the site where my idealism encountered reality, and the events that followed as a consequence were not part of any plan I could have ever conceived. It simply was not noted on my statement to Fulbright, the organization that sponsored my stay in Berlin. Yet, things happened afterwards that changed the lives of some people forever, and certainly Brutus was a main contributor.
Before I reached the bent of the path, I heard their barking, and turning in saw Brutus with another dog that looked almost like him. That was surprising, for he was as far as I knew the only “Old English Sheepdog” in either part of divided Berlin.
West Berliners for the most loved dogs and courted many breeds, but for some reason Brutus’ kind was not yet known. Returning to West Berlin decades later as a professor with my students on a study trip and walking into the “ Café Bleibtreu,” where I had had drinks with Gabi, I was astonished to discover a former neighbor, a nasty one at that who had stolen my records, sitting at the bar with an “Old English Sheepdog” at his side. If not I, at least Brutus had made an indelible impression during our stay in West Berlin!
In East Berlin, as Brutus and I experienced on our visits, the attitude towards dogs was unabashedly hostile, at best utilitarian with a preference for guard dogs. In West Berlin my friend and I dined together in restaurants, whereas in the East we were restricted to sausage kiosks on the street, and even then subject to hostile glares when I made a purchase for my friend rather than myself. And this at a time when about three thousand German shepherds patriotically served the East German state, guarding its border with the West.
Arriving at the lake and approaching the happy canine couple I quickly noticed a difference as a dog’s tail brushed the air, distinct from Brutus’ bobtail. I followed their playful encounter, and only noticed the young woman when she stood next to me. She struck me as strikingly German with her flax-like blond hair, pronounced breasts offset by small hips and long legs. Unlike Brutus, I concealed my excitement offering her a deadpan look; one I reserved for classroom debates, and listened to an explanation of her dog’s mixed pedigree. Indifferent to genealogy, Brutus playfully romped with Polly, both splashing through the Hundekehle’s shore waters indifferent to the wintry weather.
That is how I met Gabriella Gillig or Gabi as she called herself. The four of us continued our walk around the Hundekehle: the dogs dashing in and out of the lake, the two of us walking slowly and chatting about dogs, politics, or music.
Blame the environment. It must have been the stillness of the forest or perhaps the playful antics of the dogs that contributed to the remarkably comfortable feeling of our encounter. I felt at ease with her; no strains or sly, sideway glances, no searching for right words, which usually turn out wrong anyway. We exchanged stories, offered opinions, smiled, and laughed were as natural as the vegetation around us. Even when Brutus in his excitement sought to mount Polly, there were no embarrassing—“oh, how gross”---comments, merely Gabi’s amused laughter and simple remark: “They like each other.”
I liked her immediately and that was not difficult, given her looks and charm. But there was more. I felt a surge of energy with her and a sense that life held exciting things yet to discover. I enjoyed too that she was not a student and given our conversation I knew that she was more sophisticated than most women I have met.
Therefore, if blame for what followed is sought, it is surely mine. I wanted more than a history seminar, an insider’s tour of Berlin, a political analysis of the class conflict or of the Cold War. Unable to articulate what I wanted yet sensing instinctively that Gabi would somehow form this ambiguous feeling and give it stolid content, I was drawn to her and felt that an adventure was in the making.
In the parking lot, we agreed to have a drink somewhere close-by, deciding on Zehlendorf, a city district with a quaint village atmosphere on the southern tip of the Gruenewald Forest. There we found a rustic Gasthaus with corner oak table next to a tiled stove, where we settled in with our canine companions in true German “Gemuetlichkeit.”
After our order of two glasses of Riesling and a large bowl of water for our friends had arrived, Gabi toasted our chance meeting and told me about herself. She spoke about her work as illustrator for a group of architects. I mentioned that I came from Los Angeles, where I had started graduate school, giving her a brief abstract of my research project, what had brought me to West Berlin.
She came from Diehlen, a small village near Heidelberg, where she had studied architecture and design and finally decided to become an illustrator, rather than an urban planner. Career opportunities brought her to West Berlin. She liked the city, and apparently knew the scene well as she freely spoke of bars and music places in Kreuzberg and Charlottenburg, two very different cultural scenes in West Berlin, as I already knew from my brief stay in the city.
But here I should say something about the Berlin of that time, one difficult to image today given the radical political transformations of German unity and the invention of a united Berlin, where urban mobility and individual freedom are taken for granted.
In those days Berlin was divided into four sectors, one for each of the victorious Allies, and as a result it was split between the Germans of the East, the communists, and those of the West, defenders of western democracy and capitalism. There were many Berlins, actually, the four sectors Berlin of the Allies, and the two “cities” of the Germans, known as East Berlin, capital of the German Democratic Republic and West Berlin, a democratic enclave 130 kilometers inside the “SZ,” or Soviet Zone of Occupation, where I an American student was ensconced.
For young West Berliners especially the students of those days the place to be, “die Szene,” was either Kreuzberg or Charlottenburg, depending on your preferred lifestyle.
One was in the American Sector, the other in the British, but that only mattered in Allied politics. For young West Berliners Kreuzberg, a former middle class district was where the alternative scene was in the making, whereas Charlottenburg was a haven for student life with its many pubs or “Kneipen,” bars, restaurants and clubs.
Coming from California student life, Charlottenburg was certainly distinctly German with its quaint “Kneipen” yet familiar, whereas Kreuzberg was a different world altogether. When I arrived, a new German rock movement emerged with groups like “Tangerine Dream,” a Berlin band with smooth electronic sound—“stoner’s music,” soothing with drugs; and “Can” with its new hit “Spoon,” or the wild group “Birthcontrol.” However, the most known rock group in Kreuzberg was the local “Ton, Steine and Scherben”—“Sound, Stones and Broken Glass.” An appropriate name, I thought, for a group that played a fast beat of loud rock and sang lyrics of “Mach kaputt was Euch kaputt macht.” The group’s songs, feverishly popular in Kreuzberg, were more than a savage no to consumerism, capitalism, or US global power; they were a shrill challenge to middle class complacency and a blunt rejection of the world as it was.
I was no stranger to criticism of the US adventure in Vietnam having joined protest demonstrations in Berkeley and Los Angeles, and having suffered assault, teargas and arrest at the hands of the police, or “the pigs” as we used to call LA’s “finest.” I too sang along with Country Joe and the Fish with “Give me a one, give me a two…and what are we fighting for…” the anti-war lyrics popular in the 70s.
Yet what took me aback in listening to the new German rock was the brutal rage in the music against capitalism, and this, mind you, in West Berlin, capitalism’s showcase on the frontier of communism. There was no “Give Peace a Chance” tolerance here; rather the music was a call to arms against capitalist society’s preferred life-style, that of consumption. The response was simple and raw: destroy what destroys you—mach kaputt!
Not an idle suggestion at that time as the bank robberies of the “Baader-Meinhof” guerillas proved in West Berlin that year with plunder of the Technical University (TU) and of several banks. The West Berlin police, trained as a military arm, and also known to students as “the pigs,” had swept through Kreuzberg like an occupation force since September.
In walking through Kreuzberg today with its gentrified and restored apartment blocks typical of Berlin’s Empire period, it is difficult to envision the desolation and ruin of that near-abandoned center of one of Berlin’s affluent neighborhoods before the war.
The Kreuzberg of the 1970s, with rubble and bombed buildings in dire neglect facing the Berlin Wall, was not surprisingly, the home of the “Alternativen,” a mix more colorful and desperate than Sergeant Pepper’s Ragtime Band.
Consisting of students, squatters, punks, dopers or anarchist—“Chaoten”—all thriving on the “Ton’s” music, the low rent and cheap dope, or even hooked on the new left politics complete with utopian visions of collective paradise.
All rubbed elbows in the many neighborhood pubs and bars—the “Kies” for locals--along Oranienstrasse, where “Little Istanbul,” or “Kebobtown” as hostile police called it, was situated with over 100,000 Turks, their shops, souks, and vegetable stalls adding a cultural mix to the Kreuzberg scene. Popular too the inexpensive Turkish restaurants and exotic oriental foods, supplemented, if you wished, with just as cheap “shit” or hashish that often unknown to Western smokers was laced with opium bringing other visions of a distinct individual paradise.
The natives of Kreuzberg, those who had survived the Soviet assault of spring 1945, were mostly old ladies, dressed in dark bulky coats, carrying grocery bags and hurrying to one of the cheap supermarkets like “Pennys,” or old men smoking stubby cigarillos on the way to the corner “Kneipe “ for a schnapps and beer or the newspaper stand to buy their lottery tickets. The “Old Berliners” studiously avoided the Turkish restaurants and made a beeline around such colorful “Chaoten Kneipen” as “Scheisse,” (“Shit”) or “Arschloch,” (“Asshole”) painted in psychedelic colors, provoking as they intended to do normal sensibilities. And they shrank away from the “foreigners,” having read in the “BZ,” their favorite newspaper, of Turks assaulting and robbing helpless Germans.
Despite this bizarre congregation of humans, or because of it, Kreuzberg was in constant bustle of activities with its covered German Market Hall and its sprawling Turkish souk, its cafes and bars, kebob stands and restaurants, and its frequent demonstrations, or squatters’ occupancy of vacant apartment blocks. Even students from the Technical University (TU) in Charlottenburg trekked to Kreuzberg to support the occupancy of the city’s vacated Bethanien Hospital.
Standing today on the Marienplatz in Kreuzberg and watching children playing or Turkish families sitting around their barbeques on the large green, it is difficult to image the battles fought here between police and demonstrators for the occupation of the Bethanien.
Although the former hospital’s main building has been renovated and now houses prestigious academic institutions, its side building stands in stark contrast, Now called the “Georg von Rauch Haus,” painted in psychedelic colors and occupied by artists and wannabe artists, who live there rent free, the Rauch Haus reflects best the Kreuzberg of the 1970s. There I later interviewed Thierry Noire, one of the first painters of the Berlin Wall, who lived in a chaotic, cluttered room before he moved to more luxurious digs.
How very different was Charlottenburg, a former royal village that had served the imperial court, housed the middle and upper middle class, and despite the bombings of the war still maintained grand apartment buildings of the Empire era along its broad, tree-lined boulevards and streets.
Its main boulevard the large Kurfuerstendamm with its upscale boutiques, restaurants and showrooms transected the district and was parallel to Kantstrasse near the TU and the School of the Beaux Arts, from where an odd mélange of career orientated science and visionary art students emerged, who along with the city’s new rich and chic—the “schicki-mickies,” frequented the stylish Italian pizzerias, toned music clubs, plush art galleries or smoky, politically orientated Kneipen.
Both Kreuzberg and Charlottenburg had an intense nightlife, for under Allied control West Berlin had no curfew, spawning the “vampires” who only ventured out to clubs at night, returning spent rather than replenished to their dwellings or tombs at daybreak.
Yet, a trip from Kreuzberg to Charlottenburg was more than going from one urban district to the other; it was more like entering another country experiencing difference of class and culture, certainly, modes of existence.
Apparently Gabi managed to bridge the cultural differences, for she lived in stylish Charlottenburg and worked in garish Kreuzberg, where her avant-garde architects had renovated a former 19th century brick factory flanking the Spree River and border of East Berlin. I knew the building for on its south side stood a plain plaque in remembrance of a young Turkish girl that had drowned in the Spree, an innocent victim of the East German Vopos’ insistence on territoriality threatening a West Berlin rescue crew with gunfire in its attempt to save the hapless youth. A “tragic border incident” as West Berlin’s popular newspaper, “BZ,” headlined the event. I wondered if Gabbi had witnessed the incident from her office, but did not ask.
Intrigued, I casually surveyed her appearance, and noticed her old jeans, the worn brown leather jacket yet the elegant saffron colored silk blouse held together at her wide cleavage with an exquisite antique gem studded broche. I found that her match of color and fabric, her combination of the shabby and the elegant, superbly accentuated her lush, pale blond hair and revealed more than her dress. If fashion is an indicator, I hazard, she may just manage to cross most cultural divides comfortably and with ease.
She casually placed her hand on mine, softly hummed Cat Stevens’ “Soul Train,” and with her other hand gently petted the dogs sleeping peacefully side-by-side. Nothing like a dog’s life in West Berlin, I thought blissfully.
Upon leaving the Gasthaus, she gave me her telephone number with a light kiss on my cheeks, whispering “Bis bald.” A gentle promise that we would meet soon,
As I walked toward my camping van Brutus circled Gabi’s car, searching for entrance as Polly pressed her dark nose against the back window, barking enthusiastically to join her.
“Are you in the US army?” Gabi asked in puzzlement, pointing first to my long hair and then to my vehicle. We both looked at the green plates of the van and I slowly shook my head: “No, that’s not where I want to be right now.” Holding Brutus by his collar I walked toward my vehicle as Gabi’s car disappeared around Zehlendorf’s village church.
Back on the Koenigsalle heading towards the Halensee traffic circle and the inner city, Brutus sighed several times and dozed off. I muzzled his hair and wished him pleasant dreams of Polly.
Outside heavy snowflakes drifted past my frosted window; inside Gabi’s telephone number burned a hole in my jacket’s pocket or rather in my mind. Unable to sleep I sensed its presence, a mere piece of paper folded in four, beckoning me, even though my jacket was on a hook in the hallway. I longed to call her, but hesitated fearing consequences; and my intuition was right as events later showed.
I telephoned her several days after our meeting at the Hundekehle.
To my surprise, she agreed to meet the same day in the Café Bleibtreu on Bleibtreustrasse, actually not too far from where I lived at the time on Sesenheimerstrasse in Charlottenburg adjacent to the Deutsche Oper, or the West Berlin Opera.
So this is Berlin I mused, where life moves fast.
I knew the place, but had reservations about its Yugoslav clientele, a motley crowd of pimps and dope dealers, and had avoided it in the past. Last summer the Café Bleibtreu entertained a gun battle in which one Yugoslav pimp was killed. Despite its notoriety, I knew that art students frequented the Bleibtreu; the Beaux Arts was not too far away. On my walk over with Brutus, I toyed with the sound of “Bleibtreu,” translated “faithful,” and speculated on its meaning, given its clientele.
When I opened the glass door Brutus rushed in and I ambled through thick smoke coming from the interior, arranged like a typical Kneipe with long bar rather than a café with small intimate tables.
Submerged in a smoke-filled aquarium and gasping for breadth I stood at the bar, where mostly males clustered like a school of fish. Roy Orbison lilting voice with “I’m Chicken Hearted” emerged through the din; a friendly voice of visits to country-style bars in Santa Monica in the 1960s.
The Miramar came to mind, which I visited only once, an experience for a lifetime. A shabby but inexpensive bar with two aquariums, one with calm gold fish, the other with frantic piranha constantly circling the tank. When someone bought a large pitcher of beer, the bartender would take a fish net, scoop up a gold fish, and drop it in the other tank to the cheers of the crowd. The ensuing slaughter outdid any television program in rival bars along Santa Monica’s Palisade.
In comparison the Bleibtreu seemed civilized I told myself, despite the earlier gun battle of Yugoslavian gangsters over prostitution zoning.
Brutus had already found a place, next to someone eating a sausage. I followed my friend and ordered a pilsner watching Brutus devour a piece of German “Wurst” or sausage.
Brutus was liked everywhere and spoiled by West Berliners.
“I hope you don’t mind, me giving your dog sausage, but I wanted to know where the front and the back were with all that hair.”
Having heard that many times before, I smiled and nodded, admiring the shaggy long hair of the two sausage eaters.
“And what kind of dog is that anyway?” came the expected question and I had a stock response ready.
“Brutus, that’s his name, is a novel breed, the first of its kind. He’s a Californian hippie dog, bred in Topanga Canyon by Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan, who yearned for a longhaired dog to represent the new generation of love and peace, the Age of Aquarius. That’s why were in Berlin, bringing love and peace. Peace to you, brother.”
“Hey, I like that story. You Americans give us peace, and we’ll give you love. I noticed that your fluff ball is no vegetarian, eating all that sausage. I thought you Californians were all vegetarians, dogs included.”
With Brutus nudging him for another piece of Wurst, I told him that the dog was an English breed that had nearly died-out at the beginning of the century. That revelation led to a round of pilsners, and I turned to canine history.
I narrated the story of a breed that nearly became extinct just before World War I, having lost its function as sheepdogs in the North Country, Yorkshire, then without sheep. But in the war the English used the dogs in no-mans-land to search for their wounded. The animals proved to be so courageous and hardy that they became national heroes, and the breed was revived, a sort of symbol of English perseverance and heroism.
“You see, the long haired “Old English Sheepdog” stands proud next to the short haired German Shepard. Hair length doesn’t make a difference when it comes to courage,” I concluded with a broad smile.
“Try telling that to the average citizen,” commented the sausage eater shaking his long mane and handing Brutus another morsel.
By the time Gabi arrived I had downed several pilsners and Brutus at least two sausages, both us feeling fine, neither wasted nor “wursted. “
Gabi’s entrance turned the heads of the bar fish at the Bleibtreu with her blond hair flowing in the crosswind of smoke and fresh air. As if on cue, Orbinson’s voice ushered her in with “I’ve been traveling night and day to get to you…” and I succumbed to the lure of this stunning Nordic in her black, bohemian uniform of half boots, silk blouse, jeans, and leather jacket; and Orbinson continued with “I’ve been traveling over mountains…I’ve been running all the way to get to you…” as we embraced and she kissed me on my cheeks again. Even Brutus was excited looking around for Polly.
I ordered another pilsner, a Riesling for Gabi, but no wurst for Brutus, a double disappointment for my friend.
Just as we started speaking someone from the back of the Bleibtreu shouted “Gabi—Maedchen!” and approached us at the bar.
He too was in black: cowboy boots, leather pants, turtle neck and leather jacket, but that left me with another impression as I mused, “No runic symbols on the sleeves?”, giving the intruder an expressionless look.
A smiling Gabi introduced the grinning tall blond as Lothar, an art student at the Beaux Arts, who suavely blocked me to the side, immediately engaging Gabi in a winded discourse on painting.
Someone named Wolf Vostell came up in their talk and the need to politicize art. For Christ sake, I thought, as if life in this divided city was not political enough.
Still, I had already discovered that most conversations with Germans were given blunt political inflections. To my chagrin, a female student I had found attractive and complimented as such had dismissed me with distain as a “sexual imperialist” who only wanted to “colonize her body.” I was more taken aback by her language than by her rejection, and puzzled by this linguistic turn of boy meets girl in a bar.
This happened in Leydicker’s, of all places, a lively student-worker Kneipe, a distillery actually of 19th century working class roots, where nothing seemed sacred except alcohol and leftist politics. Sex was not even an issue, much less debated as in Los Angeles. In West Berlin it appeared to me people just had sex, like they had beer or coffee. No Freud or guilt complexes, yet a political sensibility influenced the choices.
A smile from the bar owner, Mother Leydicke, and extra schnapps had lightened that rebuff. But I had learned to become attentive to a more ideological language and another sensibility than what I was equipped with when I arrived in Berlin.
Since then I had a few “politically sexual” experiences in West Berlin. Adapting to the local sensibility, I started enjoying “capitalist sex” through individual effort, savoring the consumption of the other’s market value or sexual energy; and no less, I took pleasure in “communist sex” and collective engagement, delighting in the collective force of the group’s intensity to raise sexual pleasure or production quota.
And I even engaged in “apolitical sex”—yes, I admit it.
It happened in Leydicke’s one Friday evening, packed with students and workers, drinkers spilling out onto the sidewalk. I saw her at the far end of the long bar across the mad, smoky din of the heaving drunken crowd, and the looks we exchanged were magnetic, drawing us slowly but eventually together. After tense and tedious maneuvering through the crowd, we met, embraced, kissed passionately and pushed our way out the door. Coupling madly in my camping van parked around the corner, we neither exchanged names nor spoke. No lingering question of “will you still love me tomorrow,” all our energy was engulfed in the pleasure of the moment, oblivious to history or future. What could be more apolitical than that?
I had come to Berlin, speaking fluent German, having studied German history, certainly, but finding out on a daily basis that I was culturally unprepared for what I was encountering. In Los Angeles, besides European history, I had enjoyed reading the authors of the Enlightenment, and later Hegel, Sartre, Freund, and Jung, and I still kept a notebook near my bedside to record dreams in the morning, although less and less. In Berlin I became acquainted with new mentors like Marx and Marcuse, Adorno and Horkheimer, Benjamin and Reich, and Lenin and Mao, authors I was starting to read with students who had formed a discussion circle independent of their studies, something unheard of in Los Angeles, where we read to fulfill our course or degree requirements.
Apparently Lothar was light years ahead of me with sophisticated discourse on Benjamin’s thesis on art. The problem was that Gabi appeared enthralled.
Silently sipping my pilsner, stroking Brutus’ head, and half-listening to Lothar’s dramatization of the political artist, I was reminded of why I had avoided the Bleibtreu.
No doubt, the two looked fantastic together. Both were magazine-cover blondes fashionably tailored in black mufti, attractive and intelligent, and engaged in a serious discussion on art.
Rod Stuart’s song with “Do you think I’m sexy…” tied the noose, and I contemplated my escape from the Bleibtreu..
Yow all hear me? I’m from Los Angeles: the Big LA, Surf City, the Beach Boys, the Eagles and Hotel California. Right on!
With this warbled noise filling my mind, I was foolish enough, a non-smoker, to accept a Rothaendel cigarette from a commiserating drinker who had observed us. Feeling the black tobacco puncture my lungs, nausea was setting in. I was dizzy and felt like I was standing on the moon; it was time for me to get back to earth.
But before I decided on my escape, Gabi suggested we see an art exhibit.
With Lothar in tow we walked down the Kudamm, the Berliner’s abbreviation of the chic boulevard in the West End, the Kurfuerstendamm lined with elegant shops, slick BMW and Mercedes-Benz showrooms, expensive jewelers and high tone boutiques.
It was about nine in the evening, and despite the drizzling snow, the boulevard was crowded with well-dressed West Berliners out for the night. Cars cruised down the broad macadam; some stopping frequently as drivers discussed prices with classy prostitutes stationed on the sidewalks at ten meters intervals.
We were on Berlin’s terra firma of Western materialism heavily subsidized, of course, by the West German government and ultimately by the West German taxpayer. Here as intended by its financial backers, consumption set the tone and pace of human activity, for the Kudamm was capitalism’s showroom and ideological response to East Germany’s communism. Flashing neon lights, elegant merchandize, glossy cars, suave males and glittering females, all emitted a simple but powerful message: life is lucre, enjoy it!
Brutus indifferent to the dazzle around him apparently liked the Kudamm, eagerly sniffing and watering trees we passed on the way.
With Gabi and Lothar still engrossed in debate on political art, I observed the street scenes.
What caught my eye just to my right was the sight of an overstuffed German burgher squeezed into his Mercedes sports car, opening the car door for an elegantly dressed and knock-out, young prostitute. Nothing-new here: I have witnessed similar scenes on Hollywood Boulevard, yet it was different, at least I saw it so despite my feeble condition.
Discussions of Marx’s essay on money with Helmut came to mind. Watching the young woman slide into the coupe, I reflected that money is the universal transubstantiation—the unholy exchange of capitalism—in this case converting spent age into youth and dull flesh into exotic pleasure. Berlin’s political sensibility was coloring my vision.
On Fasanenstrasse we turned left, passed several antique stores cluttered with ancient plunder, and entered the Kunstgalerie 7. Its exterior gray stone with a neo-baroque portal was deceptive, for once inside a modern and voluminous space appeared where all--the floor, the ceiling and walls—was sanitized in white.
The gallery held a lively group of youth sporting velvet cloth or black apparel and a sprinkling of middle-aged men in business suits, their women in tailored tweeds. Spotlights facing walls illuminated large canvases without frames, some three meters tall, many heavily splashed with black, blue, yellow or red colors, giving the gallery space, despite its white infrastructure, a discomforting and surely intended visual tension.
In noticeable contrast to the hospital-white space with the canvas-contained chaos hanging from its walls, stood a monumental antique desk of Versailles vintage commanding the room’s center like a control panel. To one side a long and sumptuous buffet table overloaded with food and drinks of baroque splendor. Cat Stevens softly lamented on the airwaves that “…it’s not time, but I have to go away.”
Lothar and Gabi buried in discussion turned toward the paintings as I was forced to sprint after my friend.
Too late! Arriving just as Brutus had his front paws on the buffet table with snout deeply buried in a large silver bowel, from which I tried to disengage him.
“Macht nichts!-That’s alright! I like dogs and find that yours has certain aesthetic qualities,” exclaimed a small, taciturn man, dressed in black. Brutus as paintbrush, I ventured silently.
With Meerschaum cigarette holder in one hand, the compact young man, perhaps a few years older than I, gingerly removed the elegant antique bowl from the table, placing it on the floor in front of my glutinous buddy.
“It’s Beluga caviar. Your dog has excellent taste,” he remarked with a thin smile, introducing himself as Rene Zwissler, the gallery’s owner.
“Are you familiar with our neo-Expressionists?” he asked half-turning and gesturing to the walls with his hand..
Surely Zwissler was not referring to Kirchner or Nolde? Surveying a painting behind the buffet, I noted the mélange of red and orange, black and green blotches, broad, hurried brushstrokes, leaving images of squalid life with despair, solitude and violence dominating human affairs.
“No optimism here,” I dryly noted, “or idyllic scenes. No trees, lakes or flowers; rather asphalt streets, cement and steel buildings, and forlorn humans. Surely, a world very different from that of Expressionist painters.”
“Indeed, devoid of bucolic references or illusions of happiness, but what you confront is certainly a glimpse of our world, captured superbly by Berlin’s Neue Wilden,” remarked Zwissler with a condescending smile, sensing that I was lost in the world of contemporary art.
What “new wild ones?” I reflected as I slowly survey the crowd herded into Zwissler’s aristocratic corral, tamed for purchase.
“West Berlin is quite the center of contemporary art,” continued Zwissler, sipping champagne and casting a confident smile across his domain.
And immediately stated: “Baselitz, Fetting, Middendorf, or Salome are known world-wide. And certainly in the United States.”
“Maybe in New York or San Francisco,” I countered. “But in Los Angeles we are on freeways, in shopping malls, and for fun we go to beaches or the movies. Not much time left for visiting museums or galleries.”
“We can only hope that your visit to Berlin will expand your cultural horizon,” replied Zwissler dryly with dismissive grin and left to join a group in black gazing at a blacker canvas on the stark white wall.
The chatter of canvas-gazers was augmented by the voice of John Morrison with “she has wisdom and knows what to do—she lives on Love Street,”
With one hand on Brutus’s collar and the other holding a glass of champagne, I reflected on my rare visit to an art gallery, a re-vamped art deco department store in West Los Angeles, where junk car parts had been reassembled into expensive “objects des arts.” That exhibit had confirmed my notion that progress may apply to technology, but not to art.
Preferring renaissance paintings, the romantics or the impressionists, and certainly the original expressionists, I took distance to what was around me.
And, frankly, Zwissler’s gallery was yet another example of West Berlin’s paradoxes: paintings of humanity’s lurid, violent and impoverished condition yet ensconced in an opulent space touting luxury and appealing to the wealthy for purchase.
I thought to ask visitors what political meanings the paintings held, but dismissed the idea as certain faux pas. Of course, the paintings were politically relevant, after all this is West Berlin, and, naturally, they could not be compared to the naive style of socialist realism practiced on the other side of the Wall, where images of tractors, locomotives or factory workers dominated painting.
George Grosz’s Dada came mind with his “Pillars of Society,” a politically engaged painting exhibited in a similarly chic gallery of Berlin’s West End over forty years ago when communist and fascist fought for control of the streets.
Later expressing these thoughts to Gabi in Wuppke over a drink, I listened to her views on art with frequent references to Nietzsche, who apparently justified human existence from an aesthetic perspective.
We left the gallery, strolled past the synagogue, where two policemen on guard scrutinized us. Now this is today’s world, I thought in silent response to Zwissler’s glib remarks: German police guarding Jewish religious sites.
On entering Kantstrasse to our right was Bahnhof Zoo, West Berlin’s international train station, where groups of druggies were pan-handling. A skinny teenage girl pleading for “grosschen”-small change- drew Lothar’s distain: “Zombies. Nothing but trash and West Berlin attracts it.” With downcast eyes I dropped some change into her wool hat.
At the Savigny Platz, Lothar parted and walked toward the Paris Bar, where he intended to rendezvous with Rene later on. I politely declined his invitation having no desire to meet more of Berlin’s art crowd tonight. Instead I suggested to Gabi Wuppke, a popular student hangout on the other side of the square.
If anything was relevant in Wuppke, it was alcohol, sex and politics, the order of preference depending upon your needs. The Kneipe usually buzzed with political arguments and ribald comments mixed with cold distain of Honecker’s socialism from one group and support of the SEW, West Berlin’s version of East German’s monolithic communist party, the SED.
Here Berlin’s “Progressive Left” debated other Marxists, truly a learning experience for me as such political finesse was not common in California, where the prevailing view lumped all Marxists into one camp. The Progressives consisted of those who belonged to the “KSV,” a Maoist communist student association, the “Marxist-Leninist,” Helmut’s group, which advocated violent overthrow of capitalism, and the SEW, followers of East German communism.
All expressed distrust of West Germany’s domestic politics, denouncing police-state tactics, yet there were those who admired Willy Brandt and his current Ostpolitik, or closer political relations with the East.
All condemned West Berlin’s “Bonsonpolitik” or corrupt city government and were especially distrustful of the police. A large poster near the toilette proclaimed “BRD=Polizeistaat”—FRG=Police State.”
Because of West Berlin’s precarious location, its police was in fact trained for military combat, and thus, was a tough, no nonsense elite group, drawing the hostility of youth. No friendly neighborhood cop here. But there was not one in Los Angeles either as I had discovered with Governor Reagan’s SWAT, a crypto-military police force, deployed to squash demonstrations. The US’s Vietnam War had polarized society on both sides of the Atlantic.
Wuppke was part of the Berlin Helmut had introduced me to when he and Heidrun moved into my apartment on Sesenheimerstrasse, only a short walk away.
Here I received part of my political education, at least in theory. With pilsner beer and Rothaendel cigarettes, Helmut introduced me to another perspective of politics. I considered Nixon a crook and a deceitful president, simply—“Tricky Dick,” whereas German students often referred to him as a fascist or war criminal for he continued and escalated the war in Vietnam. We both praised Cuba, I more for sun and beaches, Helmut for the political experiment under Castro—“Venceremos: we will win, capitalism will fall.”
He was a committed radical with membership in the “Marxist-Leninist” movement; when he played his guitar, he often sang revolutionary songs of the 1930s in German or Spanish.
We had spent many hours in Wuppke with Helmut discoursing on Marx’s dialectics, the enigma of political consciousness or the possibility of revolution; and we agreed that the “real, existing socialism” as practiced on the other side of the Wall was an aberration of Marxism.
On one issue we faltered: For Helmut, following Lenin, violence was part of political action. I thought this a strange argument from someone who I experienced as sensitive and gentle. Despite his robust physical build and strength, I had witnessed Helmut refusing to brawl even when someone provoked him.
Yet he would quote Marx on the use of violence and believed that it was a necessary historical engine for social change, arguing that all classes resorted to or relied on force. In spite of our disagreement, we constantly returned to Marx’s notion of political consciousness, the weakness of it in German history, he believed, and in current society; thus the need to cultivate a political awareness in debates or demonstrations, and especially important to become politically involved, and to practice, what he called, “political engagement.”
I was quite impressed by Helmut’s commitment and had not encountered such strength of conviction in someone my age. There was my best friend in graduate school, Sande Cohen, who certainly was committed to his studies. But Sande was in a world of ideas and of abstractions—Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche---all bookish, it seemed to me, whereas Helmut appeared connected to the reality of current European politics.
In Wuppke the Vietnam conflict was usually a main discussion topic, receiving attention as well with posters of Ho Chi Minh and slogans of “USA=SS” plastered on its smoke-stained walls. But today the Kneipe buzzed with the news of the police raid in Eisnenacher Strasse and the killing of Georg von Rauch, who was an alleged member of the Baader-Meinhof urban guerilla movement, if one were to believe the West Berlin chief of police and the “BZ” headlines.
“The pigs brutally shot von Rauch in the head. Murdered him,” commented someone debating the news as we approached the packed bar.
“Yes, just like Ohnesorgs in 1967. A political assassination! And to link Rauch to Baader-Meinhof is a scare tactic to strengthen the police and attack the left,” was the retort.
“What bullshit to label Baader-Meinhof a gang of criminals! That’s the “BZ!”—Petty bourgeois rag. Baader-Meinhof is a political movement, and its resort to force is self-defense against the violence of capitalism. Use force against force,” vehemently stated another.
Brutus had found an empty table for us, settled under it and dozed off his heavy meal. We ordered beer, listened to Rod Stewart’s scratchy voice and watched the animated leather coats puffing heavy smoke and tanking yellow fuel at the bar, deep in debate about the killing of Georg von Rauch and the Baader-Meinhof group.
Not only was West Berlin humming with the Baader-Meinhof topic, especially since the group was allegedly sighted in the city that year, but West Germany was on a national alert, with debates of the student left and violence in the national parliament in Bonn, heavy police presence in Munich, where Johann von Rauch, the brother was on trial, and police sweeps through student areas in Bremen and Hamburg.
I had brought Gabi to Wuppke, eager to show her my scene of recent vintage after having seen hers. But Baader-Meinhof was not on her mind, and certainly not politics. She spoke about art and her interest in the aesthetic dimension, referring first to Nietzsche’s philosophy and then to the work of Herbert Marcuse, another philosopher I knew only vaguely. And of course Lothar’s brilliant grasp of contemporary art.
“He’s Rene’s lover,” Gabi shouted over the bar’s din during our third pilsner in response to my query of Lothar. I felt lighter and her warmth threw a haze over the slogans of Marxism-Leninism plastered on walls, beckoning me to political action. I was receptive to another call coming from the deep blue of Gabi’s eyes, where I conjured visions of us under a Mediterranean sky, warm sun, and languidly rolling waves beckoning.
Before I uttered something trite about the land of oranges and lemons, she asked: “Tell me about you. Speaking perfect German, coming from Los Angeles and studying in West Berlin. You drive a VW bus with US military license plates, but are not in the US military, as you told me.” And with a winning smile added a drawn out: “So?”
I had no immediate response. The alcohol, the smell of goose-larded sandwiches and brewer’s yeast, blended with clouds of sweet hash-scented smoke, and the loud political arguments, Wuppke’s entire atmosphere, was making me dizzy. I needed fresh air.
At the Savigny Platz again with Brutus leading the way, I formulated a lame response to Gabi’s question. I began slowly with Upper Silesia, a place that no longer existed, where I was born, an area that was once German once Polish as my parents and their parents of both German and Polish origin, the one more dominant than the other, depending on the politics of the times. I sensed my attempts at autobiography were awkward and feeble. What did I really know? When I was ten I had arrived at Ellis Island in America and my knowledge of Europe was bookish. I was an American from California. Still, I wanted to know more about the past. That is why I probably studied history and had accepted a scholarship to West Berlin, rather than take an opportunity to study in Montpelier, France.
Yes. I was married and my wife worked for the US Forces with the rights of military personnel, including license plates for the VW. No, I was somewhat estranged from my wife. We had different friends and interests. We were living in a WG, a communal apartment with a German and two Lebanese students. And, yes, I liked her very much. I was not sure if I had said all that or if I merely had thought something like that. Perhaps I said less, perhaps more than I realized. With our arrival at Gabi’s apartment on Mommsen Strasse, my awkward revelations ended. We parted with the promise of meeting again soon, or so I thought. As I ambled inebriated toward Sesenheimerstrasse with Brutus sprinting vigorously back and forth in search of new odors, I was clearly exhausted by the evening’s events and marveled at my friend’s reservoir of energy.
In the following weeks I attended seminars and lectures at the FU, or the Free University in Dahlem. Not much remains in memory of my classes, yet I recall my attempt to attend a conference on US foreign policy with eminent professors from the USA and West Germany. But students of the KSV, the “Communist Student Association,” a Maoist group, blocked entry to the main lecture hall, the “Audi-Max;” and a fanatic Maoist, who apparently took me for an “American Imperialist”, kicked me in the stomach when I attempted to cross their picket line At the same time, radical students had shut down the Friedrich Meinicke Institute, where the history faculty was located. After that, I switched my studies to the TU, which was within walking distance of my apartment, and had a good history faculty.
One day Gabi called out of the blue and invited me to East Berlin for the following day
Although reluctant to again visit the communist east, I agreed to meet her at noon in East Berlin in the opera café on Unter den Linden. Given Gabi’s short notice, I would have to cross the border on foot with my US passport. To go by car, I would require a US military travel permit, given the van’s registration, and that could take several days or a week to process.
As an American civilian, without protection, not even of my country, which did not recognize the GDR at that time, I felt vulnerable even paranoid, imagining eyes and cameras following me. Once on the obscure terrain of “real, existing socialism” with its secret police the Stasi and their hidden army of informers any word was questionable, any act suspect, and any perceived misdemeanor a ticket to prison.
Uneasiness, discomfort and sheer fear had dominated my previous visits to East Berlin, the “Hauptstadt der DDR,” as signs everywhere proclaimed “Capital of the GDR.” Once there, I found it impossible to behave in a normal manner and was in constant dread of misinterpretations of mundane conversations, or on the alert for entrapments via friendly invitations to the theater or for drinks. As a result I was constantly on my guard and reluctant to engage in even friendly or innocent banter with East Berliners. Little there appeared real to me, least of all socialism.
If anything, in East Berlin I felt closer to Germany’s dark history of Nazism than to socialism’s projections of a bright future. For me the German past was near, tangible, and often frighteningly close and certainly ugly, having left its scares everywhere my eyes cast their gaze.
Not merely on the shredded cityscape of bombed rubble or bullet scared buildings, urban voids or empty spaces of cleared debris everywhere in the city’s historic center, but in addition on the new landmarks of socialist construction with wide, isolated boulevards and empty, windy squares, devoid of life, all I saw brought a chilling suspicion paralyzing the mind that one was under covert surveillance., and once again under the scrutiny of an authoritarian Reich.
I felt that each step I took in socialist East Berlin carried me closer to the history of the Third Reich than my readings on its history in distant, sunny California. And thus each return to West Berlin conveyed a sense of relieve and a vow never again to cross the barrier at Checkpoint Charlie. After all, I reasoned, why go there?
Crossing that border was usually made into an unpleasant experience by the frequent crude behavior of GDR guards, some taking sadistic pleasure in humiliating the visitor. Once I was instructed to strip to my shorts, pull them down and forced to bend over as a rubbery finger probed my interior. That was frightening and demeaning, but even more, it was a brutal demonstration of the guard’s power: we can do this to you and much more, if we want. And in that there was a clear message: once you cross the border, you’re in our hands.
Disquieting for me as well was in sharing with East Germans their imprisonment, if only for the duration of my brief visit, and thus somehow giving validity to the absurd politics of a state that justified jailing its population. For in crossing the border I felt that I had joined inmates of a vast prison. Constructed not to keep invaders out but to confine its inhabitants within, the Berlin Wall was an inverted frontier.
Most of all, it was the realization that life for these people must surely be elsewhere, for it could not conceivably be here. With war rubble, shabby commodities and drab propaganda omnipresent in East Berlin, the compelling question of “where is hope” must surely lie on the other side of the Wall. At least so it seemed to me, especially when I passed the dreary pre-fabricated cement apartment blocks, the housing of socialism’s future.
Still, there were places to see, especially for a history student. Upon entering Berlin’s museum island in the old city center, I had spent many hours in the war-damaged and only partially restored Pergamom Museum to admire the stunning remains of neo-Hellenistic architecture, the once proud temple of Pergamon The museum offered an inviting and rich history lesson: the visitor standing inside a modern war ruin could view and reflect on another war ruin, one from antiquity. In East Berlin the fragments of history attest to humanity’s paradoxical progress. And Machiavelli’s and Gibbon’s notion of history easily come to mind with the rise and fall of empires and the cyclical turn of human events.
Then there was the former, elegant Gendarmen Markt, a square that marked Berlin’s French Quarter now wasted in eerie neglect and tragic decay. The square’s German Dom sprouted massive trees through a rusted iron hull forlornly facing its counterpart the French Dom, sadly deprived of its covering, a mere bare crippled crown gaping empty to the heavens. Between the domes, the once famous National Theater, sprouting chipped Doric columns blackened and bullet-scared, standing now as vivid reminders of the fierce ground battle of Berlin fought here in April 1945. For me East Berlin was a superb history text; every building, square or street like insightful pages of a past that lingers and will not go away, despite the bulldozers or ideology of the communists.
Other areas of Berlin’s center had received more severe destruction and not during the war. Communists had demolished the Imperial Palace, the centerpiece to the Museum Island and its park in the 1950s to make way for a non-descript building housing the secretariat of the state’s ruling party. Only the palace’s portal remained, strangely inserted into a brick and cement box, giving the building its only aesthetic qualification. On that portal Karl Liebknecht, a communist of distinction having opposed the first war, had called for a socialist republic in November 1918. The elegant portal, like a head without its body, was a revealing statement of the crude, selective history at work here.
To the east of the former Imperial Palace, the Alexander Platz or simply “Alex” to Berliners, once a bustling modern square with elegant art deco buildings, was transformed with heavy cement block structures encompassing a vast empty space devoid of humanity.
Later that evening I had the opportunity to ask its designer why such an immense space for the Alexander Platz, lacking in human proportion. The square’s monumental dimension, according to the architect, reflected socialism’s notion of humanity, and not capitalism’s. It was conceived for the socialist masses, a space for mass gatherings. I was even reprimanded for viewing urban space from the perspective of the individual and not the masses, which make up modern urban life.
With my checkered experience of previous visits in mind, I prepared myself with mixed feelings for the crossing into East Berlin. I was attentive to what I would carry and checked all my pockets to make sure no evidence of my association with the US military was on me. I discarded receipts from the PX store, a stub from the Templehof military movie and my address book, listing telephone numbers of American soldiers. Discovery of such scraps of paper, no matter how banal in West Berlin, would certainly bring intensive interrogation by East German guards. Worse, if searched by the East Berlin secret police or Stasi in a routine currency control such mundane pieces of paper would certainly question my identity and could well result in seizure and temporary internment, perhaps imprisonment. I was looking forward to a day with Gabi, but was certainly ambivalent about entering the East.
I left two hours in advance, allotting time for the crossing, should I experience unexpected delay at the border. Taking the U1 underground to Hallesches Ufer, I changed lines and existed at Koch Strasse, where the frontier began.
With Checkpoint Charlie on my left and the Checkpoint Charlie Museum on the right, I walked toward the large sign in front of me declaring: “YOU ARE LEAVING THE AMERICAN SECTOR” in bold letters additionally in French, German and Russian to emphasize the decisiveness of crossing an otherwise normal street in Berlin. I braced myself and stepped into the open mouth of the Wall, walking straight ahead on Friedrichstrasse, knowing I was doing more than taking a walk on one of Berlin’s most known streets.
I was already under observation. From the watchtowers on right and left, guards with binoculars pointing in my direction followed my steps, and ahead, past the red and white painted beam blocking the street, stood another guard waiting for me. Step right in said the spider to the fly.
The guard scrutinized my passport, studied the passport photo and looked intensely at me for what seemed like endless minutes. I was instructed to enter the long Customs barrack on my right. Luckily there was no line in front of the first window. As the guard examined my passport and face several times, I noticed a mirror above my head and a centimeter measure on the wall. The one gave the guard an image of my backside, the other an indication of my height, checked against the notations in my passport.
I was asked to go to the next window to change currency. Once I transformed the solid, thirty Deutsch Marks into flimsy East Marks I had to return to the first window to pay for the day’s visa. With twenty-five small bills and feather-light coins that resembled Monopoly money, I retrieved my processed passport with visa from a hatch in the wall. I took several deep breaths and entered the next room.
Another guard carefully studied my passport again, checked the visa entry, and to my relief, instructed me to continue down the corridor to the other door. It was at this very same spot, where, not too long ago, I was told to enter the room to my right, where I was asked to strip and thoroughly searched by a thin, pale blond Saxon. The memory of that humiliation and the sheer helplessness I felt as the guard’s firm, cold fingers spread the cheeks of my backside still unsettled me as I now walked down the long corridor. I realized what a fool I was returning to the East, giving others license to do with me as they pleased, and how thoughtlessly I had given up my freedom.
As I left the frontier barrack and walked past several road barriers, I showed my passport once more to two guards in front of a watchtower. After another lengthy examination of passport and person, I was permitted to enter East Berlin. All in all, an impressively bleak advertisement for tourism, and if you’re like me I thought ironically, you just want to come back.
I quickly crossed Leipzigerstrasse, continued past more ruins and walked toward the opera. A trajectory across the ruined Gendarmen Markt now named Platz der Akademie brought me to the back of St. Hedwig’s Cathedral. The sign on my left read “Bebelplatz,” named after August Bebel, a leading socialist of Wilhelminian Germany, I recalled from Professor Lundin’s history lectures at UCLA. Walking on, I studied the Cathedral, which was built and designed by Fredrick the Great to honor Silesian Catholics after his Protestant army had taken that province from Maria Theresa. I wondered if my Catholic Silesian ancestors experienced an identity crisis when they were forced to become part of Protestant Prussia. Would they have preferred to remain in the Habsburg Empire? Or perhaps in an independent Poland where Silesia is today?
With the “Kommode” –the library- on my left and the opera opposite, I brusquely marched across the square listening to my shoes hitting the pavement. Abruptly I stopped and slowly bent down to touch the gray cobblestones. This is the place where some of the finest words of the German language were deemed un-German, committed to flames, and turned into ashes. The thought struck me that the Bebelplatz is actually the former Opernplatz, or Opera Square where the Nazis had burned books. I searched for a memorial plaque and soon found one that read: “Lenin worked in this building in the year 1895, the former Royal Library.”
No mention of the book burning of May 1933 with the cremation, for example, of Heinrich Heine’s and Thomas Mann’s books. Yet their works were sold in the state-owned bookstores and I remembered that Thomas Mann was even considered for the GDR presidency by the East German communist elite. But that was another, a communist layer of history. A college friend’s phrase came to my mind: Onion History, one layer of events covered by another with no center or kernel and thus the deracination of history.
It was almost noon. Instead of entering the opera café, I quickly crossed Unter den Linden to join the crown in front of the Neue Wache or New Watch, the old Imperial guardhouse. A neo-Classic building, designed by Berlin’s greatest architect Schinkel, the former royal guardhouse was now the GDR’s “Memorial to the Victims of Fascism” and manned by the Friedrich Engels Honor Guard. At noon there was a change of the guards that always drew a crowd.
Of course, I had seen the ceremony before, but it was always worth another look, given the historical irony of the event. Upon my arrival, the officer with his platoon had just filed out of the former royal Prussian Arsenal, a splendid and rare example of Berlin baroque. Heading towards the crowd, the police cleared the space as the Friedrich Engels guards marched towards the guardhouse or Memorial. Almost abreast the building, the officer shouted a command and the honor guards shifted cadence with Prussian precision to execute the goosestep with a fierce martial slap of their boots on the pavement.
I tried to imagine how Friedrich Engels, the co-founder of communism, might have responded to “his honor guards” strutting the universally dreaded symbol of Prussian militarism, but failed especially when I noticed the admiration and joyous expressions of many in the crowd, clearly approving the martial ritual.
Once the guards had taken their position as statues in front of Doric columns, I entered the Memorial, where a gas flame in the center and a plaque on the wall beckoned remembrance of fascism’s millions of victims. My eyes streamed from words of peace to Schinkel’s relics and neo-classical decorations on walls and ceiling, all glorifications of a militarism that was first recorded in Homer’s Iliad and continued on the banks of Berlin’s Spree River. Unable to find some logic here, lyrics of a rock song came to my mind telling me that I was “standing on the moon…where talk is cheap and vision true.”
Resisting reflection on the paradoxes, I hurried across the boulevard to the café. Gabi had not yet arrived. I was politely directed to a table and ordered coffee. Frequented by Westerners, the opera café had better service than I usually experienced in East Berlin. Clearly, the waiters were hoping for tips in Western currency. With Deutsch Marks, for example, they could purchase Western goods in their more exclusive, government “HO-Shops,” where East Marks were not accepted. Not even the GDR government believed in its own money.
Remembering former disappointments, I rejected the idea of ordering a cake that tasted like cardboard or a “Hawaiian Toast” more of the same but topped with a thin slice of canned pineapple. I thought of the delicious avocado hamburgers with red Bermuda onions I used to eat at the Topanga Canyon Café. But who here had ever eaten an avocado ,or even seen Bermuda onions.
The café was full with most tables occupied; yet only soft murmuring voices accompanied to Strauss waltzes could be heard. The atmosphere reminded me of a 1930s movie scene. I sensed that I was discretely observed, but when I looked around me, eyes turned and looked elsewhere. I was certainly a miscast in this scenario with my long hair held by a red bandana, the Rolling Stones T-Shirt, bell-bottom jeans and brown leather jacket everyone recognized that I was indeed from the moon. Had I brought Brutus I would have invited more stares or not even admitted to the café. The GDR was not canine friendly, and I had often been refused entrance to restaurants when I had appeared with my dog. The only dogs I remember were border dogs, leashed to a wire along the Wall.
The more I thought about my visits, the less I liked East Berlin, and began to wonder why I had agreed to come again to the Soviet Zone.
When Gabi finally arrived and ordered coffee, I was not in a good mood.
“I don’t understand why you wanted to meet here? I can’t think of a worse place, right now.”
“You’re a student of history, aren’t you? Enjoy the difference,” she responded.
“Gabi, are you kidding? History here is a travesty! I was across the street and just witnessed goose-steeping communists honoring victims of fascism! Hey, I lived in Hollywood and have seen lots of movies, but the scene here goes beyond fantasy.”
“Isn’t that history too--the distortions, the manipulations, the brutal justifications of the present? And how is the present made if not through appropriation of the past?” she asked.
“Okay. But history also reveals the truth, tells stories of those who were unable to do so,” I replied.
“Then you have a big job ahead of you,” Gabi said with a languid smile.
“You’re right, but first I like to eat and there is nothing on the menu that comes close to food, at least not what I consider food.”
“Are you really a spoiled American? Do you want a cheeseburger?”
“Sure, or an avocado burger, but right now I’ll settle for something that tastes like food. The coffee does not taste like coffee and I don’t even know what I’m drinking,” I protested.
Leaning forward Gabi took my hand and softly added “Let me spoil you and introduce you to the culinary delights of East Berlin.” Her husky voice, the scent of her perfume and the glow in her eyes held more promise than her words. I looked at her incredulously: eat good food in East Berlin?
“This may surprise you, but there are restaurants in East Berlin where you can eat well.”
I shrugged my shoulder in doubt and paid the bill, leaving Western currency on the table for the bowing waiter.
On the street, we encountered only few pedestrians, mostly women carrying shopping bags, some men with briefcases, all walking briskly to their destinations. Sporadic cars, coughing puffs of smoke, passed by on the all too broad and near deserted streets. No traffic jams here. The brown-gray sky added a dire touch to the already sinister atmosphere. And the air, heavy with the smell of acidic sulfur fumes coming from the dark chimneys of grim bullet-riddled buildings irritated my throat. Where is that famous “Berliner Luft?”—Certainly not here in this bleak, uninviting and forlorn worker’s paradise
Gabi locked my arm and led me along the banks of the Spree River. Looking into its desolate dark waters now empty of ship traffic with only debris floating, I wondered about the destination of flotsam.
Through the steady drizzle of snow, we finally arrived at a shabby house that held an old sign barely readable with the faded words “Zur Letzten Instance” or “The Last Appeal.”
Upon entering, we were warmly greeted by an old man whose sparkling light blue eyes gave his wrinkled skin a youthful appearance. The dark oak interior with comfortable chairs, benches and tables was complemented by a stunningly large and warm tiled stove, crowned by a handsome wood carved luster hanging from the ceiling. The room’s decor emitted a mysterious elegance belied by the building’s motley façade. Pleasantly warm after the cold trek across East Berlin’s forlorn center, I felt as if I had entered another century certainly a different Germany of rustic “Gemuetlichkeit,” distinct from the bleak socialist world outside.
Comfortably settled next to the green tile stove, the only guests, we sipped a sweet “Eiswein” and slowly devoured “Slovenian fois grasse” on toast, specialty of the house our host explained. A waltz serenade of Strauss barely audible accompanied our meal.
“I never would’ve believed that sweet wine could taste so good with liver pate,” I exclaimed having another glass. “But what is “Eiswein?”
“It’s made with the last grapes of the year, which are harvested after the first frost. The cold congeals the sugar in the grape, and the result is a very, tasty sweet wine,” responded Gabi with a smile..
Well, here you have it, I thought, another aspect of the aesthetic dimension. At least this one is not abstract.
Gabi instructed me that the main course was a surprise and I should taste first and ask questions later. To the accompaniment of excellent Moravian red wine, I ate a fine meat dish served with dumplings and sweetened red cabbage.
“Delicious—just fantastic! —I can’t remember having eaten so well! In fact, never! This beats avocado hamburgers any day. And in East Berlin, of all places! You did spoil me, and I love it!” I bubbled with contentment and pleasure in having shared this feast with Gabi.
“That was boar you ate,” Gabi said as we drank real coffee and sipped Slovenian plum spirits to digest the robust dishes.
“You are in an old Berlin establishment that was near the former Imperial Court of Appeals. Last chance to enjoy what might be your last meal,” she added laughingly, softly pulling my hair.
“I hope this was not my last meal, but it was certainly one of the best I have eaten. How’s this possible, I mean, in East Berlin? This place is a true oasis!”
“You just have to know the right people and they’ll take you to the right places,” Gabi responded enigmatically.
“And obviously, you do, Gabi, and I thank you!”
With a languid smile she gently added:”I would like you to meet my friends who live a short distance from the city center. We’ll have to take the tram.” After such a splendid meal in the most unlikely place, I sensed that Gabi had other treasures to share with me and followed willingly.
We rode in a packed tram that thinned out as we left the large apartment complexes behind us, arriving in a wooded area of the city. When the tram stopped at its terminus, we were the last passengers, and I was starting to feel uncomfortable in this obscure corner of East Berlin.
From there we walked about twenty minutes in the evening’s chill along isolated tree lined streets under the soft drizzle of snow, only the squeak of our shoes in the ground’s white blanket leaving sounds of our progress. We passed wide mansions and elegant villas partially hidden by large gardens. Majestic oaks guarded the streets and broke the fall of the snowflakes. Finally we stopped in front of a 19th century villa in art noveau style, a large, broad two-storey structure, surrounded by a small forest of oak, birch and pine trees.
At the entrance, a thin older man opened an ornamented oak door and greeted Gabi with a warm embrace. He sported large horn-rimmed glasses and was dressed in a black turtleneck sweater and a gray suit with matching suede shoes. It was difficult to see his eyes as the lenses of his glasses were tinted. Upon entering, Gabi introduced me as a friend and we were ushered into an oak paneled salon that held over a dozen people of various ages, all in conversation and drinking cocktails.
Sipping drinks, Gabi explained that the older man was an important architect who had designed various projects in East Berlin for the government. He specialized in pre-fabricated building material and was responsible for the construction of a large factory near the city from where pre-fabricated elements could easily be brought to urban building sites. His idea, she explained smiling, all rationally planned and at tremendous savings in construction costs.
I looked around the stylish room and noted the tastefully selected antiques. Nothing pre-fabricated here, rather all the furnishing appeared handcrafted objects des arts and most likely of considerable value.
“You have to understand our system and its demands,” the architect instructed me, adjusting his large glasses, wishing to share his wisdom with an outsider.
“We build for the socialist masses, the working class. We supply inexpensive housing, making modern apartments available to all and at very low costs.”
A two young men joined our group and one added: “Do you realize rents in East Germany are about 5% of an average worker’s salary, whereas in the West a worker pays at least 30% of his salary, if not more, for a small apartment?”
“Arno Heim and Klaus Dorn, my former students, from before my retirement” volunteered the architect.
Arno Heim took up the thread: “We are clearing the city of its bourgeois rubble and replacing it with socialist housing,”
The architect nodded and carefully placed his Bohemian crystal glass on a delicate Biedermeier commode, opened an antique decanter and filled his glass.
I was glad when Gabi took my arm and led me to a woman who was anxious to meet me. It suddenly occurred to me that my visit was known in advance.
“Gabi has told me all about you,” said a small attractive dark haired woman, introduced as Kristin.
Smiling at Kristin I quickly glanced at Gabi wondering what this was about.
“I would like to leave East Germany,” Kristin blurted out in near whisper, as she looked directly into my eyes, gauging my reaction. She had my full attention.
Although this was not the first time this evening that I was at a loss for a response, Kristin’s request took me by surprise.
I looked at Gabi who merely smiled and left us to join the architect and his former students.
Kristin took my arm and led me to a small sofa, secluded in a bay window of the salon and removed from the milling guests.
“I have had a relationship with a Japanese architect who worked for a Swedish construction company that built a large hotel on Unter den Linden and Friedrichstrasse. We were together for five years and have a child. He had to leave once the hotel was finished and I was not allowed to go with him. I want to join him with our child in Japan. Do you understand,” Kristin pleaded holding my arm tighter.
“I understand, and I’m sorry, but what can I do?”
“You can make my departure possible,” she calmly replied.
“I can?” I stuttered in astonishment. Was this happening to me, I thought Most likely, the rich food, the alcohol and the strange events had finally caught up with me. Or was there something in the drinks or the food? I surveyed Kristin and asked myself was she an agent of the Stasi? —And Gabi as well? My mind flashed alarm: was this an entrapment?
I slowly looked across the room and studied the faces of the guests. No one appeared to look in our direction and all seemed normal, or was it? Nausea surged through my body and I felt disconnected as if I was in someone’s drama with my part already written, only I did not know my lines. Winded and weak, I felt the room shrinking and wanted to leave, my only thought was escape. But I was in the depths of East Berlin without even a clue on how to get back to the border crossing.
Gently, Kristin took my hand and held it in her cool hands. Her pleading eyes locked with mine and she slowly said: “Gabi told me that you have special license plates on your car, and that you could drive across the border without the usual controls. Please help me and my child join my husband!”
I recovered my composure and carefully stated: “Let me talk to Gabi.” Adding with a smile I managed: “Don’t worry. Everything will be alright.” Slowly I extracted my hand from her firm grip and searched for Gabi with my only coherent thought: back to the West! —And as quickly as possible!
Gabi approached us and blurted with enthusiasm, “Heinrich would like you to see his special collection.”
I barely nodded and meekly followed the smiling architect up the stairs when all I wanted to do was to leave.
Opening the doors to a large room, the architect made a sweeping gesture with his right hand, allowing Gabi and I entry to what was a gallery with paintings of various sizes on one side and ceiling to floor tapestries on the other.
I starred in amazement at one painting with detailed scene of Venice’s Grand Canal, filled with gondolas and lined with palaces, but of another age. Looking at this elaborate view of the city, populated with hundreds of figures, was almost like entering another century. It was a stunning historical revelation, more rich than any history text.
I turned to my guest, who seemed to have understood my astonishment, and was about to ask him about the historical period, when Gabi stated flatly: “This is a Canaletto!”
In awe I stepped back to the middle of the gallery and now saw that the entire room’s wall was indeed a painting.
The architect took my arm and led me to a portrait on the other wall. “This was executed by Holbein,” he said as we stood in front of a man’s portrait. “And that is a sketch by Duerer.” With a nod I noted the large initials of the painter on the lower right side of the canvas.
When we sat on a small sofa in front of a Goblin tapestry, the architect took photographs and letters from a folder and showed me correspondence from New York, Madrid, and Munich. The letters were from museum curators who had expressed interest in purchasing the paintings.
“My son is in the West and he has had contact with leading museums concerning my collection. I am retired now and can without difficulty resettle in West Germany. The problem, however, is that I cannot take my art with me. The state claims the works as the people’s property; and I am reluctant to part without my collection.
“Gabi has told me about your special situation and I am asking you to help me relocate my collection to the West,” the architect implored, taking my hand in his soft fingers.
“New York alone has offered several million dollars once the works are safely on the other side of the Wall. Your assistance in making that possible is not without material reward for you,” he added emphatically.
“Naturally, there is a risk,” he continued, “for you and for me, possibly a greater one, the loss of my art collection and perhaps ending my life in prison. That is why we have to be careful and discreet. I’m sure you understand.”
“But the risk is well worth taking considering the objects and what is at stake,” he emphasized by squeezing my hand. “The alternative is too difficult for me to accept,” he concluded.
Somewhat numb by the evening’s events, I could only nod my head in silent response.
Our walk back to the tram terminus was in silence. I was bursting to confront Gabi, ask her about Kristin, the architect, Heinrich, and what this was all about. Did she engineer this peculiar evening? Of course, she did I thought in anger. I was set up!
Was all this for real? Kristin’s anxiety and plea seemed real to me. The paintings were very real, overwhelmingly so. The correspondence appeared authentic. Yet doubts and fears held me back. What was I getting myself into in East Berlin? Here, I knew from experience nothing was real; and certainly not socialism, judging the standards of a prominent communist architect.
I looked to Gabi for some sign of assurance, some word of encouragement; she smiled silently and pressed against my shoulder as the night’s frost nipped at my cheeks.
Was this romance in Berlin with potential prison as added ordeal? My immediate objective was to cross Checkpoint Charlie and reach the safely of West Berlin.
Still not a word spoken, due perhaps to the wind chill factor, we parted at the Alexander Platz. Gabi heading toward the Heinrich Heine Strasse crossing for West Germans, and I rapidly walking toward Friedrichstrasse and Checkpoint Charlie.
With my head spinning by the events of the evening, and filled with trepidation I approached Checkpoint Charlie’s eastern side. For a panicky moment I thought of Gabi, Kristin and Heinrich as Stasi agents and arrest awaiting me at the crossing, but I quickly dismissed that fear. I had done nothing illegal, not committed myself by word or deed to what was asked. Not yet, anyway. Not ever, I vowed and crossed to the West without incident, delighted to see the US military police greeting me at Checkpoint Charlie. Never again East Berlin was my last thought as I entered the underground at Koch Strasse and briskly descended the stairs to the platform.
Having cleared the table and settling in for our after dinner discussion, I hesitantly spoke of my day in East Berlin to my German friends, Heidrun and Helmut, eliciting their counsel. Heidrun shared our apartment and her friend Helmut regularly came to visit but lived in another WG, or communally shared apartment.
The day I met Heidrun, we moved into the spacious, three room apartment that occupied the entire first floor in Sesenheimer Strasse. Knocking on the door of the ground floor flat to borrow a cup of sugar, Heidrun appeared. And when I saw her I almost forgot why I was at the door; a rush of blood throbbed to my temples, speech faltered, and I would have stood there and stared for ever if she had not smiled and asked me in.
What had stopped me in my tracks was a lofty blond, nearly as tall as I, with gold colored hair and soft, light blue eyes exuding from a delicately shaped face that expressed warmth and sensuality. I felt that she sensed my awkwardness, yet her smile seemed to me an invitation, one that perchance expressed shared emotion. Ever since then there was this undefined, unspoken nevertheless acknowledged affinity we conveyed silently with spontaneous eye contact or light brushing of hands when we did things together, like set the table or prepare the meals.
Our contained emotions, born at first sight at least for me, was most likely why I asked Heidrun to move into my large apartment, renting her the front room, when Helmut decided he needed to live alone.
The rent I asked was lower than what they both had paid to Volker their landlord on the ground floor, who had squeezed them into a tiny room, no larger than a closet. Volker, also a student of architecture, had as I would discover later a nasty character.
Heidrun and Helmut had been a couple ever since high school; in fact, she had followed him to Berlin, when he began his studies in architecture at the TU. He at the university and she at a secretarial school, each heading in another direction it seemed, sensed—at any rate Helmut did—that a time for exploration had arrived.
I admired Helmut very much, and he became, at least for a while, my educator in Marxist theory. Our friendship complicated my feelings toward Heidrun even more; still, I could not deny that I was attracted to her and that she was not unaware of my emotions; her subtle responses—a look here, a touch of the hand there—only confirmed what I felt.
With his wispy long blond hair, broad shoulders and tall athletic body, Helmut looked very much like a figure in one of Schiller’s plays, The Robbers, came to mind; except he thought himself a revolutionary, a modern William Tell closer to Che Guevara. His preferred line of argumentation was Marxism-Leninism; and later he confessed he was a member of the “ Marxist-Leninist” revolutionary group that was vilified in “BZ” pages daily. Still, he firmly believed he would transform German society, creating the great collective in which “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all,” citing his favorite phrase from Marx.
My wife Carmen and I occupied the largest room at the end of the apartment, after a march through a long hallway, in a space that matched the California bungalow we had shared in the previous year. Typical of the Gruenderzeit or Empire period apartments of the late 19th century, the immense rooms had near floor to ceiling windows and tile stoves with height of almost three meters. Yet its once grand balcony was destroyed during the war and never replaced, leaving a precarious gap when the French windows were opened in the summer. Still, we all enjoyed the apartment and its location, facing the park on Goethe Strasse, and on its other side the large shopping area of Wilmerstrasse, where supermarkets, restaurants and Kneipen offered all one could wish for within a short five minutes walk.
In the other room, which I frequently used as a study, the occupants varied. For some time there were two Lebanese students Carmen had met at the Goethe Institute, where they all had studied German together. They introduced me to the music of Um Kulthum with “Inte Omri”—“You are my Life,” gave me my first experience of dancing with men and eating sandwiches of boiled eggs and potatoes sprinkled with raw onions while sitting on the floor. We laughed when we danced and they cried when they thought of Lebanon, wildly praising Baalbek, where antiquity awaited me along with mountains of hashish, should I come to visit. I never did.
Then there was an Australian architect who became my regular chess partner. A less fortunate choice of lodger, as I later discovered, was a West German student named Ralph, an alleged friend of Helmut’s, who, unknown to me at the time, was sought by the police in connection with the Baader-Meinhof guerrilla group. Much later, when I thought about those mad years in Sesenheimer and all the people who crossed our threshold—even Andrea who became a “porno-star” in Frankfurt—I glimpsed Ralph’s photo in newspapers as one of the most wanted by the VS or West Germany’s equivalent of the CIA.
Certainly: “there was revolution in the air,” if not on the streets than on the air waves or in the lyrics of the music, and in the minds of those who felt that society was not what it could be; the occupants of Sesenheimer formed a colorful group in the Frontstadt West Berlin, at the frontier of the Cold War.
Once a week those who wished would meet to discuss politics; it was Helmut who usually organized the gatherings bringing people he knew from all walks of life: intellectual students, curious workers, haughty aristocrats, all contributed to our discussions of Marx’s political economy, or of current events ranging from Brandt’s Ostpolitik to the war in Vietnam, or of the Latin American and European urban guerrilla movements, from the RAF to the Italian Red Brigade, or of the conflicts of the Israelis and Palestinians.
When I spoke of Angela Davis, the young black woman and communist who briefly held a position as lecturer in philosophy at UCLA, and of her mentor, Herbert Marcuse whose work “Eros and Civilization” became the guiding light of California’s counter-culture students, I was politely heard, but not taken seriously. Certainly, all had heard of Marcuse and his address to the French students in May 1968, and he was respected as part of the “Frankfurt School,” yet his turn to Freud and his attempt to synthesis Marxism and psychology found little resonance among West Berlin students. Helmut’s direction was revolutionary politics and with his knowledge of Marxian terminology and Lenin’s political strategy he held our attention.
Strangely, given the diverse points of view and the divergent topics, there was never a violent outburst by anyone. In reflection, I realize that the gentle guidance of Helmut played a strong part in keeping our discussions civilized.
Music was a topic as well. With the US war in Vietnam universally condemned, American music was universally accepted and enjoyed. All knew the music of Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Janis Joplin, Steppenwolf, the Doors, Jimmy Hendrix, or the Grateful Dead just to name a few; and songs of British groups from Rolling Stone to Who, from Cat Stevens to Rod Stewart where on everyone’s lips.
Helmut played guitar, as did some of his friends, and all sang, beginning with Cat Steven’s “Peace Train” and often ending with Spanish revolutionary songs Helmut knew. No one attempted to imitate the songs of Ton with “Destroy what destroys you.” But the gathering in Sesenheimer was not one of anarchists, rather people who wanted to create, not destroy.
I had bought a powerful stereo system for a low price at the PX and records of groups less know to the Germans like Hot Tuna, Carol King or Cool and the Gang, Curtis Mayfield and War, the black sounds Carmen preferred; all could be heard even in the wee hours of the morning. Fortunately, our apartment building was occupied by mostly students; thus when Janice Joplin’s “Bobbie Maggie” at full throttle rattled the French windows after midnight, the “Polizei” was not alerted; rather, friends of friends would drift in and a party would begin with music passage to “Sweet Smoke, Just a Poke,” a Dutch rock group with soothing sounds of “stony music.” Brutus loved the company, running from one to another, sniffing, pawing and licking all who let him; and everyone was his friend.
The discussions and readings were augmented by weekly dinners. Not everyone attended the reading sessions, but the dinners were popular, sometimes drawing a dozen guests. One reason the communal dinner became a standard for us was that each had to take a turn in preparing the meal. Since we were more diverse than the usual Berlin “WG,” we enjoyed an international cuisine from our Lebanese students, certainly German dishes like Sauerbraten, and of course American ones from avocado hamburgers to tacos.
Carmen and I would shop at the PX and purchase American products including peanut butter, favored by Heidrun; the Lebanese would search in “Little Istanbul” and come back with falafels and pieta bread; Heidrun would buy goods around the corner on Wilmerstrasse for her German dishes; and Carmen’s Italian cooking was universally acclaimed.
After one such meal, I narrated my unusual day in East Berlin.
I spoke of Gabi and the events at the architect’s villa, mentioning Kristin’s plea to escape and the architect’s wish to relocate his art collection in the West. The more I described Kristin’s situation, the architect’s paintings, the more I revealed my misgivings of such a project, and my fears of possible entrapment. I was seeking their advice, but I was not sure if I wanted their encouragements or their dissuasions.
I knew the safest option was to drop this matter entirely and focus on my studies. Still, I was intrigued that such strange circumstances had come my way.
“Not only dangerous but a waste of time,” responded Helmut dryly
“The art collection should stay in East Berlin, where it belongs. Clearly, that greedy bastard is more interested in money than in art,” he added with distain.
“And if you attempt to bring out the woman and her child,” he rationalized, “you will not only endanger yourself and her. You may also ruin the child’s future.”
“Have you considered that if you’re caught, you and the woman will end in prison? That’s for certain, but the child will be placed in an orphanage and its life changed forever,” he starred at me and added: “Do you want that?”
He lit a cigarette and looked at me for a long time, and then at Heidrun. No one said anything.
Then Helmut took my arm and spoke slowly, “The woman may receive a sentence of two years, but you could go to prison for over ten.”
He paused to let that sink in.
“The East German court will consider you a ‘slave trader’ and give you a harsh penalty to set an example. And I have heard that prison life over there is gruesome. You may not survive.”
Again a silence settled across the room.
“OK, forget about the paintings. It sounded foolish anyway. I mean how do you transport a Canaletto—its gigantic?” I remarked although I thought you could always fold the canvas.
“But what about Kristin? Haven’t you repeatedly argued for political engagement and a better world,” I argued.
“What better opportunity than this to improve someone’s life,” I reasoned with conviction I now mustered despite Helmut’s bleak prognosis.
“Listen, you won’t change a thing. The Wall will remain; the Cold War will persist; and the GDR will continue to imprison its population,” Helmut stated emphatically.
“But you, my naïve American friend, you’ll risk ruining the lives of three people. It’s not only dangerous, it’s stupid,” he nearly shouted the last word.
“How do you know that Kristin really wants to leave?” Heidrun suddenly asked.
”What do you know about her or about Gabi?”
“Not much. But Kristin’s appeal seemed real to me; I believed her; and her story sounds realistic,” I replied.
“Why should Gabi involve herself if not to assist her friends in the East? She has a successful career in the West and is not political at all. In fact, she has never talked politics to me once,” I blurted.
“The worst kind!” Helmut shot back. “I wouldn’t trust anyone who ignores politics, especially not in Berlin. It’s suspicious.”
“Helmut! Look: a chance to help someone. No theory here. No waiting for political consciousness to sink in.”
“A simple choice to help someone or not. That’s the real issue,” I responded.
“You’re presumptuous in assuming that the woman’s life will change for the better. I’m not so certain.”
“Who knows?” he argued. “You may bring her and the child more grief once they are in the West.”
“That’s speculation, I’ll admit, but it’s certain that you are putting her life and yours on the line if you go through with this,” he concluded.
That’s how our discussion ended. Heidrun gave me an understanding look. Carmen had remained silent throughout the debate, and may have taken this for just another intellectual exercise, one of the many exchanges of ideas that would be forgotten tomorrow. The others found other topics to discuss.
And I turned to my best friend, who I knew would support me no matter what choice I made. On that resolve Brutus and I went for a long walk despite the cold sweeping through Berlin, a fierce wind coming from the Ural mountains via the flat plains of Eastern Europe, not even held in bay by the Berlin Wall.
Brutus was full of energy and headed straight for Goethe Park in search of new adventures.
After our conversation at Sesenheimer, I decided to speak again with Kristin. I wanted no doubts, should I decide to go through with this.
That meant I would have to return to East Berlin, but this time I decided to drive across the border.
I wanted to explore Berlin’s Stadtmitte, the center, and consider possible escape routes, should I take Kristin to West Berlin. As for the paintings, well, Helmut was right, it was just a question of money. After all, East Germany had wonderful museums.
Driving past the US Air Force guards at the Tempelhof Air Base, I knew that I was committing myself to the project. Still, I reassured myself that I could always say no as I filled out the military documents for travel to East Berlin. This was an ordinary visit to the other side of Berlin by US military personnel, and no different from those taken by members of the occupation forces on a daily basis.
No doubt even to dull East German border guards that my long hair with headband placed me in another culture, yet attached to the US Armed Forces, complete with travel permit, soon stamped and signed, and strictly observed under the official category of US military personnel with official Allied permission to visit East Berlin.
I applied for a Wednesday. For on that day, the entire company of the Friedrich Engels Honor Guard had full-dress parade at the Neue Wache, usually attracting a large crowd of Allied military onlookers from the West.
Gabi was informed and I asked her to contact Kristin setting a meeting for next Wednesday. Telephone lines from West to East Berlin had been reconnected lately, ten years after the Wall, yet in dialing “010” the wait was anywhere from one to ten hours, depending on East German service—and how secure was the line?
I insisted that Gabi arrange the rendezvous herself. I did not want Kristin to know that she was meeting me; I wished to surprise and evaluate her reactions. Of course, I counted on Gabi’s sincerity. I realized that could be a major flaw on my part.
Early Wednesday morning with Brutus ridding shotgun, I drove to Checkpoint Charlie. We stopped at the Allied kiosk in the middle of Friedrichstrasse; I showed my military travel documents and signed in the daily logbook. For security purposes, all Allied personnel traveling to East Berlin were required to sign in and out upon return. Should by midnight someone not sign out, the US Army would send a patrol to East Berlin and make inquiries at the Soviet Military Command in Karlshorst.
Allied rights were respected in Berlin, especially now with the new Four Power Agreements concerning East Germany and the status of West Berlin currently under discussion.
“Brought your buddy for protection,” asked the MP with an ironic smile.
“Not going over to the East for a haircut, are yaw?” he added, returning my travel permit.
“No. Just some dog food for my buddy,” I responded with light banter.
“Well. Don’t turn into a pumpkin. Midnight it is. Hav’a nice day.”
The MP waived me on as I accelerated toward the East barrier. With the van slowly approaching the East German guardhouse, I noted four border guards awaiting me. Most likely they had observed my vehicle with binoculars at Allied Checkpoint.
One gestured towards the guardhouse, and an officer joined the group. I stopped the van and pressed my US military travel permit to the closed window, knowing that they did not have the right to open my vehicle and force me to exit.
The guards walked around and examined my vehicle as the officer scrutinized my travel permit, then my face slowly, back to the travel permit carefully, and then again to my face slowly and back to the permit. Printed in German and the three languages of the city’s Occupation Force, the document was stamped, dated and signed by the US Armed Forces, granting me immediate entry to East Berlin.
Yet, the officer hesitated, studied my dog, and me and sternly pointed to his right, indicating a spot where to park. Within minutes, two guards, one on each side, shoved long-handled mirrors under the van examining its underside. Brutus and I remained in the bus with doors locked, listening to Dylan’s “Come, Lady Lay,” which I slowly increased in volume the longer we waited.
With revulsion marked on his face, the officer returned to the guardhouse to telephone. After a few more minutes, the van rocking with “Just like a Woman,” he reappeared and waived me through, antipathy apparent.
My van passed the barracks on the right and only came to halt at the end of the border crossing, where another guard checked my travel permit briefly and gestured me to drive on. The barrier opened, I was in East Berlin and Dylan began “Mr Tambourine Man.”
In the intersection, I turned right onto Leipziger Strasse and headed toward the Alex passing new housing blocks with missing tiles. At Berlin’s once famous Spittelmarkt, now nothing more than an empty intersection, I turned left toward the Alex with its shopping area. Always crowded with East Germans and foreigners, the Alex was a good place to start my scouting expedition, I reckoned.
Parking on a side street behind the Rathaus I strolled with Brutus toward the large square joining the morning flow of pedestrian traffic. Quite obvious that Brutus and I diverged from the East German norm, yet apparently only children seemed to notice giving us curious or often friendly looks. The adults of East Berlin, the socialist masses--in the words of Heinrich, the designer of the Alex--were evidently engaged in serious pursuit of their affairs, oblivious to the world around them.
At a sausage kiosk I joined a queue that patiently and silently waited to order. Unlike standing in line in the West, here no one spoke. Only Brutus expressed excitement, having caught whiff of something eatable.
When it was my turn, I ordered two sausages with bread and a beer, peeling off a twenty East Mark note from my large bundle of bills.
Like all military personnel traveling to East Berlin, I brought my money with me, illegal for civilians, and had exchanged in the West at the rate of one West to four East Marks. That was the official bank exchange in West Berlin; had I taken the time to change on the black market at the Bahnhof Zoo, I might have received six to one or more.
At the Zoo, the exchange rate depended on the desperation of the currency seller, many working, I found out later, for the East German Reichsbahn or state railway that ran the “S-Bahn” or overhead railway operating throughout all Berlin, despite the Wall’s truncation of the city. Frequently Reichsbahn agents acted as “unofficial bankers” for East Berliners who needed West Marks to shop in East Berlin’s HO Stores, where only western currency was accepted.
Taking the sausages and leaving a one Mark tip, a further provocation to the sullen masses at the kiosk, I pocketed my 15 Mark change.
As usual, I ate the bread, drank the beer and gave the sausages to my glutinous friend. The kiosk crowd, observing this additional insult to “socialist manners,” gave me blatant hostile stares and only the children seemed amused watching the sausages disappear in the hairy “wau-wau’s” jaws.
Most likely, East Germans considered this gesture of feeding my dog an arrogant display of “capitalist” belittlement of their small pleasures. What I had done countless of times in the West was certainly viewed with different eyes in the East. And given their muzzled existence and limited pleasures, they have been right.
Once on the Alex I joined a group of teenagers by the “Weltzeituhr,” the international clock tower, and was immediately engaged in conversation; Brutus spoiled with more sausages. Although I don’t smoke, I carried cigarettes and gave them a pack, declining an offer of the local weed. Music was a subject. Many had listened to RIAS—Radio in the American Sector—and knew the latest hits—Isaac Hayes’ “Shaft” or the Rolling Stones’ “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction”--even though they could never buy the records.
I observed American and British soldiers, one in tan the other in green and red uniforms, some with their wives, strolling across the Alex.
Good, I thought, the Allied troops are out.
A few entered the Centrum-Warenhaus, East Berlin’s largest department store, to shop for porcelain, crystal glasses or featherbedding, popular items among military housewives. I knew the Centrum carried a fine selection of high quality featherbedding, for I had purchased one several months ago
Purchases in East Berlin by Western Allied military shoppers revealed yet another paradox of that time.
The East German featherbedding, for example, was produced at a labor cost fixed by the state, not much with wages of about 400 East Marks a month; in addition, it was sold at a price set by the state, estimated to make goods available to the recipients of the low salaries.
But goods in East Berlin were also purchased by Western Allied military, who had brought East currency with them—what must have seemed “Monopoly money”—and bought East German goods for less than nothing; the “real market value” of the purchase appreciated in the West, when the goods were exhibited like “victory trophies.” East Germany’s closed economic system had to tolerate this “open market” practiced by the Allies but only in East Berlin, given its special status.
All these transactions were legal, and within the rights of the Occupation Forces. Only the Soviet troops had no money to spend. When I saw them in East Berlin, and that was rare for they were mostly confined to their barracks, they walked in twos visited parks, public monuments or museums, having just enough money to buy an ice cream cone in the summer or a soft drink in the winter.
Brutus was reluctant to leave with so much affection from the teenagers at the clock tower, but I was on a survey trip for the “mission ” Returning to the passageway of the Alex’s S-Bahn station I turned left toward the side streets lined by iron girders supporting the overhead rail lines of the city trains. Following the train’s overhead down nearly deserted streets for about half an hour, I stopped at an intersection and inspected the area. On the opposite side of the street a massive 19th century building spanned an entire block, on my side, the darkness of the iron girders. All was quiet with neither pedestrians nor cars in sight. A sign read “Littenstrasse;” I crossed the street and walked along the monumental building noting the opaque windows on the first floors. No view from there, good I thought.
At the building’s end I crossed and retraced my walk along the overhead, feeling the pavement vibrate as trains rushed-by. Distracting train noise and activity, another good sign. Back at the intersection I stopped and scanned the street scene, considering possibilities of approaching the area.
I imagined driving along the train-side of Littenstrasse, stopping briefly in the middle on the dark side of the iron girders, quickly opening the right, middle door of the van and admitting the clandestine passengers.
It was now almost noon, I reflected, and the right side of Littenstrasse was in near darkness. Cover looks fine. I walked under the overhead to the parallel street—deserted, good. I looked back to Littenstrasse and could barely make out the shadowed building, ominous from this perspective. –So much the better.
Satisfied with my reconnaissance, I headed back toward the busier streets near the Alex. Along the way, I stopped at a butcher’s, leashed Brutus outside and joined the queue of East German housewives, who gave me wary looks. The butcher ignored me as long as possible and reluctantly filled my order of ten kilos of smoked pork ribs—Kassler Rippchen—and a large beef bone. That order would take care of several communal dinners and Brutus’s afternoon in the van. Upon returning to my vehicle, I packed the meat in the small refrigerator and walked in the direction of the Rathaus. Descending the stairs to the Ratskeller with Brutus in the lead, I opened the massive door to the cavernous cellars of Berlin’s Old Municipal Hall.
“Halt!” a shrill falsetto stopped us at the entrance. “Dogs are not allowed in the Ratskeller, mein Herr,” sputtered an agitated waiter. Having encountered this situation before, I knew it was useless to argue and left.
We strolled over to the deserted Nikolaiviertel, the former parish district of St. Nicolas, one of the most historic quarters of Berlin; now the once proud medieval and renaissance commercial houses were standing in squalor, neglected since the bombardments and street fighting of the war, only ruins and shells of buildings with a few decrepit used book shops or dusty restaurants remaining.
Entering one restaurant, I seated myself on an oak bench with Brutus underneath. The menu’s profuse listing labeled “buergerliche Kueche” (burgher’s kitchen) was quickly dismissed by the waiter who informed me that there was only one dish of sausages and mashed potatoes with sauerkraut. Still, the lunch was tasty, the fatty sausages thoroughly enjoyed by Brutus, whereas I delighted drinking Radeberger beer.
The waiter, cook and owner told me that his modest establishment was not a “VEB”- “People’s Own Enterprise” or government owned, and unlike the state-run restaurants, like the Ratskeller, he had limited access to food or supplies. He had only survived all these years as the government completely neglected this district in the heart of Berlin.
“Today we look toward the future, not to the past,” he stated with some regret.
“The Nikolaiviertel is identified, unfortunately, with the commerce of the bourgeois class and has become, eh… a victim of historical forces,” he added shrugging his shoulders.
Having heard similar terminology from Helmut, but with another meaning, I nodded; declining to ask what “historical forces” he meant.
In East Berlin you could take your pick: the fascists, who were responsible for the destruction of the city, or the communists for their neglect of renovating historic buildings. Perhaps it’s the logic of dialectics, I reasoned, one historical force negated by the other. Was this Hegel’s philosophy actualized? I considered visiting the great philosopher’s grave in East Berlin’s Dorotheum cemetery.
After lunch, I drove slowly down Unter den Linden and noted with satisfaction the many Western Allied soldiers at the Neue Wache. As the Friedrich Engels Honor Guard shifted to goosestep cadence, I heard the applause of the on-lookers. Apparently the goose-step has a popular following.
Crossing the Marx-Engels Bridge and pulling into the wide square, the Marx-Engels Platz, I parked the van, closed the curtains and settled Brutus in the back with the beef bone.
I walked back to the former Arsenal, no doubt Berlin’s finest baroque building, now housing the “Honor Guards” on one side and the “Museum for German History,” on the other. A large sign in front of the Museum read “Memorial: Lenin in Berlin;” I entered and moved slowly through the museum’s exposition, from one room to the next, glancing at display cases holding letters, photos, and documents of the founder of contemporary communism.
One letter, written by Rosa Luxemburg caught my attention: “Yesterday Lenin arrived…I enjoyed talking with him, he is intelligent and educated…Lenin was much impressed by poor Mimi, he said he had seen such magnificent specimens in Siberia and that she was…a really high-class cat.”
Someone tucked at my sleeve. I turned slowly facing Kristin who remarked casually, “She was known as “Red Rosa” and murdered by the reactionary Freikorps; her body tossed in one of Berlin’s canals--the Landwehrkanal, now in West Berlin.”
“I wonder what happened to high-class Mimi?” I asked and locked my arm around Kristin as we casually strolled past more display cases.
I enjoyed holding her arm and that’s all that seemed to matter at the moment.
We sought to give the impression of a self-absorbed duo, enjoying a carefree afternoon together; and if anyone observed us, and that was a given with an army of informers working for the Stasi in East Berlin, we played the part of the content couple, holding hands and expressing interest in a thoroughly boring exhibition.
We left the museum in the direction of the Marx-Engels Platz.
“That’s my car,” I said, nodding my head in the direction of the van.
“The blue one with the green plates?” asked Kristin.
“Yes, and my dog Brutus is inside chewing a bone.”
Kristin laughingly remarked: “ You are with a Brutus, the nemesis of a tyrant and the defender of freedom. I am in good hands, after all.”
“I should hope so. But do you know what you’re doing? You have a child. What if something goes wrong?”
In response she merely released her arm from mine, putting her hand in my jacket pocket.
“That’s the telephone number of my parents; they live in the West, Lueneburger Heide. Give them a call when you return, and they’ll tell you what you wish to know.”
Kristin directed me across the Marx Engels Forum, a large park devoid of trees and overseen by the bronze figures of Marx and Engels; on the other side of the Forum we entered a café and ordered ice cream.
“I would like my child to know her father, of course. But also I do not want her to grow up here, to experience what I have. I want her to have the normal life of a child,” Kristin stated assertively.
“Coming from California, you may find it difficult to understand me” she emphasized.
“But I don’t want child in the “Pioneers” or later in the “FDJ,” those youth organizations where my daughter would be instructed to spy on her friends or on her mother.”
“She deserves a real childhood and not a political indoctrination,” she stated assertively.
“I was born under fascism and when nearly three years old my parents had trouble because of me, according to my grandfather,” I replied.
“I saw a bust of Hitler and shouted ‘Head Off!’ What of course was true enough; but that’s not how my parents’ guests understood it. When there is no freedom, there is no innocence, not even for a child,” I concluded
“Then you understand why I want to leave.”
I nodded and outlined my plan, the place, the day, and the time.
“It has to be a Wednesday afternoon. Gabi will contact you. I don’t know when exactly. So, make whatever preparations you need as soon as possible.”
We walked to the Alex, briefly mingled with the late afternoon crowd, and parted, as lovers should.
In passing the clock tower someone put a hand on my shoulder.
I froze, and tried to focus, turning slowly toward a blurred face, gradually recognizing a smiling teenager.
“How about joining us for a smoke?”
I thought he couldn’t mean shit, not in East Berlin. With relief, I recalled the boy from our earlier conversation at the clock tower, the one I had given a pack of PX rationed Marlboros.
“The next time,” I replied with a big smile..
Passing the Rathaus, I crossed toward the large “Neptune Fountain,” admired the sculpture and casually surveying the route I had just taken. I was satisfied; no one had followed me, at least not that I noticed. No, not paranoia, just plain fear, I thought. It’s time to leave.
Returning to the van, I was greeted by a smelly and grease covered canine, happily attempting to lick my face. I tussled Brutus’s hair exposing his eyes, one brown, and the other blue.
“Jesus, you’re disgusting,” I said, kissing his moist, black nose.
Driving down Spandauer Strasse and crossing the Molkenmarkt to enter Stralauer Strasse, I slowly turned into Littenstrasse and passed the spot I had inspected earlier. I was the only one on the street. Satisfied with the location’s isolation, I circumvented the Alex and drove toward the Brandenburg Gate, throwing a glance at the Neue Wache on my right, now empty except for the two guards at its entrance.
On Unter den Linden, I turned left into Friedrichstrasse and direction of the border crossing. Entering the intersection of Leipziger Strasse I was slowed down by a traffic jam ahead, joining a line of cars. I was happy to note that all vehicles had military plates, and regular crowd of military personnel now returned to the West. That’s good timing, I thought, and congratulated myself.
At the frontier, the border guard checked my military travel permit I pressed against the window. He walked around the bus, but could not see anything as I had drawn the curtains in the back. Studying my permit again and then Brutus, he waived his hand, and I followed a Land Rover with British military plates. The guard’s examination of my papers at the west end of the border followed a similar routine and I rolled toward Checkpoint Charlie with ease.
The same MP was still on duty. He checked the rooster, registered the time, and looked with amused alarm at my dog.
“What the hell did you feed your buddy? He looks like a grease ball.”
“Hey, man, East Germany’s finest, nothing but the best for my friend! Take care!” I shouted as I drove off and into the bright lights of West Berlin.
Not even half an hour from Littenstrasse to Checkpoint Charlie, I reflected, shifting gear and shooting cross Kochstrasse towards the Ku’damm.
Later that evening after we finished making love, Carmen asked: “Are you going to do it?”
Feeling the heavy smoked ribs in my stomach, I rolled to my side with an “hmmm” and tumbled into deep sleep.
“Dat mutha’s gonna feel my ‘rath! No way, he’s gonna git away with dat sheet!”
Shouting and wrath came from Jimmy, Air Force sergeant, and assistant manager of Tempelhof’s NCO Club, where I sat at the bar sipping a Beck’s beer.
I was at the Tempelhof Air Force Base to apply for travel to East Berlin and to have lunch with Carmen, who worked at the Club as a cashier.
“Ho, my man how’s tricks?” Jimmy flashed his wide grin and slapped my hand.
In his early thirties Jimmy was a slender athletic black; he was also Carmen’s boss; and. I suspected her lover. Still, I liked him, even admired his wit and histrionics.
Both of which Jimmy applied astutely to charm, and to survive—whatever was required at the moment.
Jimmy and his friends were among the few soldiers who tolerated and accepted me at Tempelhof. For others I was just another longhaired freak—dismissed as anti-military or anti-war or both.
“Fine, Jimmy, you alright?”
“No, I ain’t alright—I’m uptight, nuthin’s right. Yu see this tube with the switch and six buttons. Yeah, well, dat’s the problum.”
Holding a white tube in his hand, he looked intently at me and carefully explained its function.
“Look here, six tiny buttons, each for a different drink. Four buttons are for booze. See the markings: bourbon, whiskey, gin and vodka. Yeah? And here, do you see, two others for soft drinks. You want a whiskey and soda. Well, just press this button for whiskey and that one for soda. That’s it, very simple.”
“So, what’s the problem, Jimmy?”
“The tube contains six small hoses, leading to the cellar and six separate containers. Soda hoses pass directly to large containers, and the bartender controls the amount going into a glass. For the alcohol it’s different. Sure, the hoses are connected to the booze, but they pass through a small plastic bottle, which measures the alcohol going to the hose upstairs. That way a jigger of vodka is measured and counted automatically. The bartender just pushes the button.”
Jimmy gave me a critical look to see if I was following the mechanics.
“Ok, Jimmy, but what’s the problem.”
“The problem is big, man. You know Sergeant Cippolla, who tends bar on weekends and for special parties. You know—Bill the Pill?”
“Sure, the balding guy turning fatty.”
“Yeah, round as an onion. Well, he jiggered the jiggers of the booze. He’s been doing it for over two years. For two gad dam years he cheated everyone here. Bill the Pill shortened the automatic measure downstairs and sold all the extra booze he pilfered to the Germans. He must have made a fortune. Man from MI, who’s been on to him, figures that he made about a 100,000 Dollars.
C-a-n-y-o-u i-m-a-g-i-n-e!”
“Not really. You guys must really drink a lot.”
“Man, what else is there, but whiskey and women.”
“Well, at least Bill didn’t sell weapons to the RAF,” I commented. “You heard about that, didn’t you? A large cachet of US weapons and ammo was found in the Dahlem forest.”
“This is Berlin, man,” Jimmy said with a shrug.”Guns, booze, dope, sex, and people—everyone is buying or selling. Look at the East German government. It’s selling its own people to the West. So what if Red is doing the same thing. Only difference is he’s small time. Old story, man, there’s the big time--governments, corporations—and heavy money, and there’s the small time collecting loose change. Man, this whole town is nuthin’ but a freakin’ bazaar.”
“Keeps the motors of capitalism greased, Jimmy. I’ll take another Beck’s. Who’s Red?”
Jimmy put the beer in front of me and leaned over the bar.
“You know Red,” he lowered his voice. “He works in the stereo shop on the Base, right. Bought himself a new BMW a couple of months ago—a real beauty. Well, Red, so the story goes—and I’m telling you this confidentially—he’s got himself a private travel agency, if you know what I mean, specializes in one-way trips from East to West Berlin.”
“He brings people across the Wall? I asked astonished. “You’re talking about the tall guy who’s always trying to sell Bose speakers?”
“Yeah, except that he’s selling more than Bose.”
“How do you know,” I asked slowly sipping the beer, which suddently lost its flavor.
“Leroy in the car shop told me. Red had Leroy weld in some extra metal between the backseat and the trunk of his old Chevy. That was some time ago. But when MI came around asking Leroy about Red, well, Leroy put two and two together. He didn’t say nothing to MI, but what about all the East Germans down in Lichterfelde? Somebody must have talked otherwise MI wouldn’t come around asking questions.”
“Lichterfelde?”I looked puzzled.
“That’s the refugee camp, man, at Lichterfelde, where escaped East Germans are processed by MI and German intelligence. Once cleared they get a West German passport and they’re out. But first they’re interrogated. People want to know how they got out. You know, they could be spies. Anyway, somebody must have said something or MI wouldn’t be asking about Red.”
“What do you think will happen to Red?”
“I don’t know. If the East Germans get him he’s done—jail, big time. If Uncle Sam collars him, he’ll probably lose his job, get kicked out of Berlin. Red’s a civilian. If he stays cool, well, he might still sell you some Bose.
“Carmen said you’re coming to the Club this weekend for the party.”
“Sounds right, Jimmy, guess Bill won’t be tending bar.”
“No way, bars will be tending Bill for a long time!”
I finished my drink and walked to the cashier’s office.
That throws a spanner in the works, I thought. Once in West Berlin, Kristin will be interrogated; and in my imagination I already played out the scenario:
“Now Miss, would you mind telling us how you and your child crossed the nearly impregnable Berlin Wall?”
It wouldn’t take long for a skilled interrogator to find the truth. And then MI will be looking for me.
Carmen was waiting for me by the office of the Club.
Her long black hair brushed to the side exposed her large black eyes, carefully lined and hooded with chocolate colored eye shadow. She wore a simple brown skirt with a matching sweater exposing the full form of her round breasts.
Good looking and good- natured in an American way, earnest and wholesome and a ready wide smile, Carmen was in many ways what I was not.
At times I leaned towards the dark side of life, would brood or descend into melancholy; she, on the other hand, would smile or laugh, find the sunny side of life, and dispel the gloom of the night. I was at times stumbled in. We often joked that opposites attract.
“Is there anything wrong with the cheeseburger?” she asked.
“What cheeseburger? I can’t even see what’s on the plate. Why is this place always so dark? Look at the lights, dark red and blue. You would think this is a strip joint and not a dining room.”
“For God’s sake relax. You’re here for the food, not the atmosphere. The cheeseburger is really good.”
“If I can find it, I’ll eat it.”
“You found the beer; now try for the cheeseburger. So, what’s wrong?”
“I just spoke with Jimmy,” I began watching her eyes narrow with interest. I stopped to observe her reaction; was she uncertain what direction I would take this conversation? Should I ask her about Jimmy? But then I dropped it.
Feeling my tension ebb I told her Jimmy’s story about Red and the interrogation of East German refugees in Lichterfelde.
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. I started to believe in the possibility of carrying this off. Sure, there are risks in East Berlin and anything could happen. The East German guards could call for the Russians, and they could insist that I open the van.
“But that’s unlikely,” I argued, “and I think they would have to call the US MPs. Still, there are risks. I mean, anything could happen.
“But now I found out that there are dangers on this side as well. Even arriving safely in West Berlin, there is still a chance that I might be discovered. I can’t think of all the consequences. But one is certain, and that is that we would be forced to leave West Berlin. If that happens, I would lose the scholarship. That could ruin my chances in graduate school. What then? The risks are simply overwhelming.”
“What if Kristin were to show up in West Germany and not West Berlin?” Carmen reasoned. “There must be all kinds of escape routes from Eastern Europe to West Germany. She could say she came through Yugoslavia, or crossed the Bohemian Forest to Bavaria. I don’t know where, just as long as it’s not West Berlin.”
“That means, I would have to bring her to West Berlin and then out again through the GDR to West Germany. Jesus, that’s crazy. How many East German checkpoints—East Berlin, Dreilinden and then Helmstedt—three checkpoints and 170 kilometers through East Germany with, God knows, how many patrols and possible checks. Are you serious?”
“It’s an idea. Hey, if you’re intent on going through with this, you have to consider all possibilities. You’re the one who has been thinking about this. It’s your decision.”
“Is everything alright, sir?” the waitress hovered above me with a smile pasted on her face. “Can I get you some desert? We have…”
“No, thank you,” I interrupted her. “I’ll just have another Beck’s.”
“I’ll have apple pie with vanilla ice cream and a coffee. Thanks, Jane, everything was fine.”
And it was, or so I then thought upon considering Carmen’s suggestion. Two trips, two escape routes in one day, longer journey, more border checks, more risks, but ultimately if all went well, what I sincerely hoped, less chance of discovery.
I would bring Kristin and her child to West Germany and to the Lueneburger Heide, the home of her parents. Let the interrogators in West Germany figure that out.
I walked to the administration offices in Tempelhof and applied for two travel permits, filling in the same day for both and giving the sergeant two photos. No questions were asked; no comments made. I was satisfied. On leaving the Base, I stopped at the stereo shop and asked for Red.
“Red is no longer with us, sir. May I help you,” asked a solicitous young man.
“Thank you. It’s just that he sold me a Bose sound system and I can’t seem to get the volume right. Do you have to place the speakers next to the wall or can you hang them from the ceiling?”
When I left the shop I couldn’t recall the seller’s technical explanations. My one thought was of Red’s fate and his failed travel agency. I just hoped he was not in an East German prison.
The blare of the music was easily heard at the entrance of the Air Base. Nearly mid-night when I arrived, the party sounded in full swing at the NCO Club. As I walked up stone steps that Air Marshall Goering might have taken thirty years earlier, a swaying couple came my way.
“Christ, it’s a bearded lady,” bellowed a drunken GI to his German girlfriend at the Club’s entrance.
“Wanna join us, girlie,” he tittered, swaggering down the stairs and bumping into me.
“Leave him alone, Schatzi, tonight you take care of me,” countered his bottle-blond escort with a wink in my direction.
Inside I found a jostling alcohol-charged crowd, blurred by dense cigarette smoke, dipping and moving to the numbing boom of the music.
Like a cork in water I was swirled onto the dance floor, where quirky motions of ecstatic dancers beckoned me to join their gyrations.
Encircling the dancers on three sides were tables packed with onlookers, smoking, drinking shouting.
To my right, either by chance or design, two tables seated white soldiers whereas the other one was packed with blacks. I saw Carmen at the latter next to Jimmy and a blond woman.
I elbowed my way in their direction.
Greeted by Jimmy, kissed by Carmen and enriched by someone with a bottle of beer, I was pushed into an empty chair. The sonic levels of the music reduced communications to gestures and signs. After a second beer, Carmen shouted something in my ear and Jimmy motioned toward the exit.
We left sucking Beck’s on the way to the parking lot.
“Man, what a scene! Those fuck’n honkies—no offense, my man—are sure spreading the bread. Money’s rolling in and Bill the Pill’s in the slammer, folks. Yeah, let the good times roll, baby!”
Jimmy was in a good mood and behind the wheel of his sleek, black Mercedes coupe, gliding down Yorck Strasse.
Squeezed in the back of the coupe between Carmen and blond Helga, I surveyed Jimmy’s sidekick in front who was passing a “bomber,” a cigar-size mix of tobacco and Turkish hash around. Yeah, look around you…you’re there when I need you.
We took turns taking hits, swaying to the rapid turns of the coupe on to Potsdamer Strasse and down several side streets with neon lights flashing like lighting past the Mercedes. Streets were a mere blur, the dope was starting to rock my brain and the soft female curves encasing me were warming my senses. Let me look at you now…I know that fascination.
“Hey, Jimmy,” I managed in feeble protest, “You’re drivn’ too fast.” The obvious as camouflage…pretty lame, but there it was.
Just as we finished the giant joint and me seeking affection on either side…you got me in a love spell, woman…Jimmy stopped sharply under a bright neon sign that had attracted a crowd like moths drawn to a light bulb.
I tried to orientate myself as we descended dark stairs into a basement club.
This Berlin was totally new to me. All along the club’s staircase and entrance, American blacks were smoking joints and chatting up attractive and laughing German women…yeah, because the night belongs to lovers.
The bar’s sound system blasted up the stairs with a falsetto voice screaming “Crackers, niggas, whities…”
“That’s my man Mayfield, right on bro,” yelled Jimmy clearly in his element slapping hands, taking puffs of joints offered and exchanging greetings all around with the brothers.
Inside Carmen and Helga disappeared in the swaying mass on the dance floor now flowing to the rhythm of funk, shaking their booty down… everybody dancing to the funk.
Unsteady on my feet I sought the support of a wall, searching for something solid in this fluid force of sounds, smoke and human motion; I was floundering in the hot air, a heady mixture of sweet hash and sour whiskey flogging my senses.
“Lighten-up, dude, you look like you need a toke,” shouted someone next to me.
“Just breathing the air is getting me stoned,” I protested.
“Yeah, but a HIET will get you higher. Make it FUNKY!” screeched his buddy with soprano laughter, swaying his body from right to left, and slapping the hand of his friend.
As my eyes adjusted to the dim lights and thick air engulfing me, I now looked around and saw everyone smoking large joints of hash. Hey, am I in Marrakech, or some hash head’s heaven?
I had watched people smoke dope in West Berlin clubs before, but never so obviously, never so freely, and never with such blithe ease.
The apparent hit me, and then paranoia took hold.
“With all this dope floating around, you guys not worried about the cops?” I queried my neighbors, two blacks, who looked at each other and bent over laughing and choking on their smokes.
It’s a family affair?
One took my arm and blew smoke in my face, uttering “Kiss it, dude, “ while the other put his face in mine and shouted “SHEE-IT!
“Oh man, a joker. Hey, dude, you’se lookin’ at the poe-lice, the FUZZ, the MAN?
T-H-E- P-O-E-L-I-C-E!
“Yeah, whitey, wee’s ‘s the POOE-LIICE.
“And if you don’t get stoned, wee’s goin’ to arrest your white ass!”
Wild laughter, heavy wheezing between more puffs of sweet smoke, a jerk and a shuffle and I was their best friend, both giving me friendly squeezes and pats on the back.
Hey, I was one of the brothers!
The one on my left locked my arm, pushed his head in my face, and shouted in my ear:
“Ain’t that the truth, bro, yeah wee’s the P-O-E-LICE! Wee’s hear to prootect, serve, and, yeah, get wasted, mi’man! Righteous, mutthafucka!”
I threw a quick glance at the crowded door, baffled yet alert for a rapid exist.
His friend caught my furtive look and chuckled, nearly screaming above the reggae sound of Jimmy Cliff’s “Workn’ the Nightshift.“
“Wee’s the Military Police—MP, mothafucka, the big M-AND-P, ” chuckled his friend smiling, grasping my shoulder and sweeping his other arm to encompass all the blacks crowding the bar and dance floor.
He took a deep hit exhaling slowly and continued: “Leroy is ex-MP- he’s the owner, married a German and stayed in the city. Most of the folks here are MP—it’s our hangout. And the Kraut cops know all about us.”
“Yeah, man, they never bother us,” his buddy affirmed with a smile and handed me the joint. Brother, brother, I love you like no other.
“You guys stationed at Checkpoint Charlie?” I inquired, taking a small drag.
“Sure. Charlie, Bravo, that’s the other one. You know, when you enter the Bad Bee.”
“Yeah, so what do you do besides check passes?”
“Kick ASSES, my man” he responded, squeezing my shoulder. “We patrol the border. Pursue the Russkies—you know, Soviet Mission vehicles in our Sector. We log traffic from West Gee in at Bravo, and at Charlie we log all visits to East Bee in and out. Stamp tourist passports, and sometimes check vehicles at Charlie. Spot-checks, don’t want trouble with the Russkies.”
“What kind of trouble?” I was now very alert.
“Border incidents, man, like, unauthorized personnel in military vehicles.
You get my drift?”
“Right, happen often?”
“Not on my watch.”
Jesus Christ, another problem, and in four days it’s Wednesday. Great planning!
This is not going to work, no way. Unless, I find me an angle, which will set me free.
Bullshit.
Too much dope, and yes, despite it all, too much reality.
When Carmen and I left the club the eastern sky cast its light westward, and Berlin was rising to its only break in the Wall.
The morning light breaking the Wall, and, yes, I thought, the shadows are falling and I don’t need any walls around me and I don’t need any thought control. I have seen the writing on the Wall. And it was not anything at all. But I was too wasted from just breathing the brotherly air of love to put my thoughts into context, and we took a cab to Sesenheimer.
I would retrieve my van later in the day at Tempelhof.
Carmen was already asleep on my side, but I was wide- awake, examining the ceiling of our bedroom. Too many difficulties, I reasoned.
It’s foolish to go through with this thing.
Today I would call Kristin’s parents.
No, I would call Gabi and cancel the trip.
With my resolution firmly made, I finally fell asleep
Instead of Gabi I called Kristin’s parents in the late afternoon.
I had intended to explain to them the risks the escape involved for their daughter; and to inform them of the consequences failure might bring, especially for their granddaughter.
I never got that far in our conversation. Between tears and laughter, the grateful parents thanked me profusely. They couldn’t wait until Wednesday.
Evidently, Gabi had already spoken to them and committed me to this insane venture.
SHEE-IT.
How could this happen to me?—right, a Full-of-Shit, not a Fulbright.
That evening I took the subway to pick up my van. At the Base I first went to the NCO Club to see Jimmy. He was drinking a coffee in the dining room and I joined him.
“That was quite a night,” I said.
“What night? I just got back, my man. My head is a jackhammer, my mouth an ashtray, and I have to work, man,” complained a sad-looking Jimmy.
“Excess, Jimmy, it’s not good for body or mind,” I reasoned.
“Yeah, but its sure good for the soul,” philosophized Jimmy with a smile.
“Jimmy, you know all the MPs…” I began.
“Only the brothers,” interrupted Jimmy. “I stay clear of the rest, ...redneck muthafuckas.”
“Right, well, I’m crossing to the East on Wednesday, and if one of the brothers is on watch at Charlie, I appreciate you letting him know that I’m cool. I’m rolling back between 18 and 20 hundred. Is that cool?
“Not bringing in some Turkish brown, are you?” Jimmy smiled and gave me a wink.
He continued: “Anyway, that’s your business, man. I’ll check with the brothers and pass it on to Carmen. Just cover your ass, my man, this town is full of snitches.”
“Hey, Jimmy, we can still be friends?”
“Yeah, if you smile at me we still be friends, only you’re from the other side. Get my drift?”
“Right, wooden ships on the water, Jimmy”
“You’re my man!” said Jimmy flashing his ultra white teeth and clasping my extended hand.
I left the NCO Club feeling good and headed toward the west end of Berlin.
On my drive to Sesenheimer, I impulsively pulled into Kreuzberg Strasse, parked the van and walked up the hill of Kreuzberg Park. I needed encouragement, I needed guidance, and for me history is prologue.
In happier times it was known as Victoria Park in honor of a British monarch.
Night had fallen hours ago and the vegetation was shrouded in darkness, but there was light enough for me to follow the path to the top. Here and there I heard low voices and soft laughter. Lovers, I guessed.
On the summit, I faced a grim monument with cast iron spiral. Designed by Berlin’s most renowned architect Schinkel, the memorial, akin to a Gothic church steeple, commemorated Prussia’s victory over Napoleon in 1814. Now it stood forlorn in the dark stillness of a very different Berlin.
Below the city’s lights depicted Berlin’s ideological vivisection even at night.
To my left the urban brightness of West Berlin illuminated the sky with the shining Mercedes-Benz circle on the Europa Center, its blue neon icon dominating the night of the city’s west end.
To my right a few blinking red lights of East Berlin’s television tower accompanied by the piercing spotlights of the guard towers, standing uniform , threatening, reminiscent of Germany’s dark past, marking the urban divide and casting an ominous glare on the Wall. The rest of East Berlin was in utter gloom, like a black hole lost in space.
An unexpected sadness griped me and I slowly descended the hill.
On Wednesday morning I rose earlier than usual. I had slept little during the night, but was full of energy. Dressing quickly I slipped out the door with Brutus. The sun was breaking over the rooftops of the city. Although the air was chilly with a cool eastern breeze I judged it would be a sunny and warm day--a good day for military visitors to the East, I hoped.
Passing the deserted playground between Schiller and Goethe streets, I leisurely followed Brutus who seemed to know where we were going. It was a pleasure to watch him sprinting down empty streets enjoying his freedom.
“Freedom is what’s all about,” I pondered Jack Nicolson’s words in “Easy Rider,” a film that had left an impression on me, yet was vilified by my German friends. They were fighting for “social justice” against “political oppression.” I was still under the influence of the lone cowboy, they argued, an American myth, glorified by Hollywood.
Helmut kept me informed of the on-going political activities.
Currently the struggle was for Professor Ernst Mandel, a political economist from Belgium and advocate of Trotsky’s “permanent revolution,” who was denied a chair at the FU. In a rare act of student solidarity the “progressive left”—the KSV (Maoists), the SEW (orthodox Marxists) and, Helmut’s group, the M-L (Marxist-Leninist)—joined forces for a university-wide strike to open debates on the politics of education.
As Brutus and I stood at Kantstrasse waiting for cars to pass, I reflected on the notion of freedom and the experience of it. A book came to mind, one I had read for my exams, Krieger’s “The German Idea of Freedom,” and its argument convinced me that freedom is more than a first-class idea or a second-hand emotion, for it to exist it must be lived. In West Berlin, the students had the freedom to debate the “oppression” of the state; on the other side of the wall, only a few city blocks away students lived under the oppression of the state and could not debate it. That’s Berlin’s schizophrenia.
After crossing Kantstrasse we leisurely strolled down the tree-lined residential side streets when Brutus suddenly took a sharp left and disappeared behind the hedges of a corner street.
I quickly followed and was surprised to see that we were on Mommsen Strasse.
After a short distance an excited Brutus stopped in front of a stately apartment building alternatively looking at me and at the front door. When I saw the building I realized that Brutus was anticipating his friend Polly to dash out of the apartment block in front of us.
Yes, my four-footed pal, here is where “the rivers of our vision flow into one another,” the Byrds’ lyrics of “Wasn’t Born to Follow,” struck me, and my best friend understood, for we shared the feeling.
We silently stood gazing at the door of Gabi’s apartment building and then slowly continued our walk, returning to Sesenheimer with less enthusiasm than when we started.
A dog’s life is not easy.
Standing by the van Carmen squeezed my arm and stroked my hair.
“Don’t cross the border before seven and everything will be fine,” she advised with a look of concern. And she was right, and I loved her for her care and pragmatic advice. American Woman.
I started the van and headed east, leaving Brutus in her care, vaguely wondering if they will greet me this evening upon my return, or if another, darker fate awaits me.
To this day, so many years later, I still remember those events as if they happened yesterday.
At Checkpoint Charlie I register with the duty MP and drive towards the border, following a heavy Buick. I carefully observe a group of East German border guards surrounding the imposing car, scrutinizing the occupants and shoving mirrors under the chassis. One guard walks towards my vehicle, looks at the license plates and at my travel permit. When the Buick moves forward, the guard waves me on. We are forced to stop again at the eastern end of the crossing and press our travel permits to the closed windows of our cars, allowing the East Germans to read the documents. Then the barrier opens and we were permitted to drive on, both of us heading towards Unter den Linden. Easy as pie. Encouraged by the smooth crossing, I am optimistic for the return trip.
Parking again on the Marx-Engels Platz, I walk towards the Alex. I have about three hours until the changing of the Friedrich-Engles honor guards at the Neue Wache. At the Neptune Fountain, I stop and survey the area to assert that no one is following me. Assured that no had, I enter the Ratskeller.
This time I am seated without difficulty and looking around am glad to see groups of uniformed American and British soldiers, some with families others alone, enjoying their inexpensive lunch like feudal lords. Everyone knew the soldiers had brought the cheap East German currency with them and were eating a sumptuous meal by East Berlin standards for the price of cup of coffee in the West.
Only one year had passed since the Western Allies recognized the independence of East Germany. Nevertheless, the supreme power of the Allies, by right of victory in World War II, remained unchallenged as their uniformed presence in East Berlin testifies regardless of recent treaties.
Savoring an excellent glass of Radeberger beer, I watch the unctuous waiters serving the “imperialist military,” hoping for a tip in western currency.
After lunch, I cross the Alex enter a record shop and purchase Russian classics, the quartets of Borodin and a selection of Rimski-Kursakov’s symphonies. With my cachet of records I stroll casually by the S-Bahn overhead along Littenstrasse, stopping nonchalantly to exam the street traffic. Satisfied that I am not followed and seeing the street nearly deserted I return to city center, crossing the Karl Marx Forum and the Spree River to join the crowd that had gathered at the Neue Wache.
To the fanfare of martial music the Friedrich Engels Guards Regiment marches from the Arsenal, the “armory” of baroque vintage to the Neue Wache now the Memorial for the Victims of Fascism.
I was always amazed to witness the military show at the Neue Wache, where American and British soldiers applaud East German Guards, defenders of communism, who ape the traditional Prussian military ritual with great precision, almost reverence, as they goose-march to their posts..
Was this pleasure or mockery? I was not sure. Perhaps military, no matter what nationality, enjoy martial rituals, even those of an enemy.
And why did the East German military cloak itself in Prussian tradition? Did the government not demolish the Imperial Palace, to eradicate for all time the symbols of Prussian power in Berlin?
Following a group of American soldiers, I amble into the Opera Café, where I intend to finish the tourist itinerary of the day, complete with chicory coffee and plasterboard pastry.
High on Cuban sugar, I briskly walk to the Karl Marx Forum, where I notice two young men in black leather jackets studying my van. Immediately I retreat to the banks of the Spree River yet keeping an eye on them. The question flashes through my mind: was theirs idle curiosity or was I under surveillance? No, I was not paranoia; I was in East Berlin with thousands of “IMs” or informants working for the secret service or the Stasi eager to spy on wives, husbands, friends, neighbors and especially foreigners, the more comfortable target, I am sure.
My rendezvous with Kristin was only minutes away, yet I resist approaching my van with the leather men there. After what seemed like hours but may have been minutes, I see that they are leaving. Have they taken down my license plate number for future reference, or are they just interested in converting a Trabi into a camping van? In East Berlin, the apparent banal may turn out to be a cunning trap.
I unlock the door, start the engine and turn into Spandauer Strasse passing the Rathaus. This was it: I am on my way, committed.
After the Molkenmarkt I ease into Stralauer Strasse , slowly turning into Littenstrasse cruising in second gear and looking right and left. No panic. Easy does it. Do not want to attract anyone’s attention.
I see no one on the street. With tingle of regret but definitely a feeling of relieve I image that Kristin had left when I failed to show at the agreed time. Okay, that’s that. I gave it my best shot. I start to accelerate and take pleasure in leaving the East as quickly as possible.
But just as I reach the end of the street-length dark building, the corner of my eye catches a bundled figure appearing out of the darkness of the city train’s overhead in front of me on the right.
That’s her! Christ, Christ, here we go! Slow, slow, no panic.
Throwing a fast glance in the rear view mirror—all clear—I drive to the curb and stop, jerking up the hand brake. Quickly leaving my seat I step in the back of the van and open the middle door. Kristin with child bundled in her arms rushes in and hands me her baby. I notice it has large, round brown eyes that twinkle at me. I wonder why they are not slanted.
Once Kristin settles on the backbench and I returned her child, I close and lock the door of the van, take my seat and slam the shift into first gear ready to floor the accelerator. Wrong, dump, dump, slowly does it. I try to relax, taking deep breaths, and ease away from the curb in what seems to me slow motion.
Nothing out of the ordinary happening here, I tell myself, turning the phrase into my mantra as I will myself to drive slowly yet anxious to fly away.
Down the street, I check the rear view again—no one— and I tell Kristin to draw the curtains behind my seat to hide her presence. Slowly and with caution I drive towards the Alex and around the large square finding myself on Prenzlauer Allee. Panic hit: where the fuck am I?
My only coherent thought was to escape the East as quickly as I could. Yet here I am already lost in a maze of gloomy streets.
Constantly glancing in the side mirrors to view traffic behind I drive down numerous streets of the Prenzlauer Berg district without direction or goal. I do not sense that I am followed, but such a feeling can be deceiving.
Out! And out of here, my brain screams, and where the fuck is Friedrichstrasse? Do not panic now, the phrase pounding inside of me like a drumbeat.
Kristin breaks the tension.
“I thought you couldn’t come and wasn’t sure if I should wait. But then you arrived. Don’t worry the street was empty. I’m certain no one saw us.”
Right. But then no one ever sees the Stasi until it’s too late.
Still my mind slows down and I feel that I could function in a rational manner. Hey, I am driving and talking at the same time, aren’t I? I’m okay, actually, just fine. Now all I need to do is just drive a few city blocks, cross the most fortified frontier in Central Europe, and everything will be all right. Yeah, I’m fine.
I pull back the curtains so that Kristin could see the road ahead.
“No cars tailing us,” I said, “but I don’t know where we are right now and we have half an hour before we cross the border.
“We need to reach Checkpoint Charlie after seven, but not earlier. Do you understand?” I almost roll the words into one phrase, talking so fast.
“Yes, I understand. Where are we now? What street are we on?” Kristin replies calmly.
Wow, I marvel, she is totally composed. Why is she so cool? Is this a set-up?
After all, I don’t know a thing about her except what she told me. Only my instincts followed my instincts on this one. And given some of my fuck ups in the past based on following my instincts, my instincts have started telling me not to follow my instincts. So why am I here?
I look ahead and see trees to my left and to my right a ruined building sporting a rusted enamel sign with several letters missing but enough to make out a name.
“Looks like a park on my left and the street ahead is Veteranenstrasse.”
“Take a left and go straight. That should take you to Invalidenstrasse. Continue to the intersection Chausseestrasse and Friedrichstrasse and turn left,” Kristin instructs from the backbench.
“Kristin,” I respond adding some confidence to my voice, “ on Friedrichstrasse it’s straight to the border and to freedom.”
Not hearing a reply I look in the mirror and see her shake her head in silence, cradling her child in one hand and touching its cheek with the other. I thought I heard muffled sobs coming from her, but I am too tense to be sure.
Although I drive slowly with frequent glances in the mirror my pulse and mind are racing. In the back of the van, the baby starts coming to life mumbling sounds and Kristin responds with tender murmurs, a mother and child conversation.
As we cross onto Friedrichstrasse I anxiously but firmly tell her, “Kristin, you and the child will have to get inside the bench your sitting on.
“Lift the cushions, open the top and climb inside. Make yourself and the baby comfortable. The crossing may take half an hour. “
I add softly, “You should fit inside without a problem. I’ve tested it with Heidrun and she’s taller than you.”
I look in the mirror to see Kristin clutching her baby and disappearing in the bench box.
Passing the Friedrichstrasse train station, I slow down approaching Unter den Linden, hoping to the catch the light.
As the red light flashes at the intersection, I quickly pull the handbrake and step into the back, placing the cushions on the bench and scattering the records I had purchased over them. Looks good. Just another GI bringing plunder from the East.
Returning to the driver’s seat I continue down Friedrichstrasse. In front of me the glaring lights of border crossing beckoning us to freedom, or to doom. The wager was on.
“Can you hear me Kristin? I am leaving the curtains open. It looks less suspicious that way. Don’t lift the bench top until I tell you, okay? We are now approaching the border. Is everything alright?”
“We’re squeezed in, but we’re fine,” I hear her muffled response.
Sadly, there are no cars ahead of mine. I already knew that the military tourists I had counted on to camouflage my crossing as I joined their caravan had returned about an hour ago.
In approaching the near empty border crossing, I wasn’t sure if it was such a good idea to have waited until seven o’clock, even if one of Jimmy’s brothers was on duty at Checkpoint Charlie. The greater danger was on this side of the border, not on the other, but it was too late now for second thoughts.
Maybe I played this just a bit too smart, and now I am the dumb one, alone with East German border guards, whose natural inclination was suspicion and whose social engagement was regulated by paranoia.
Zu spaet! Too late, I am in the machinery of the border crossing and in tense anticipation of the ominous mechanics awaiting me up ahead.
The border guards were all line-up in their grey riding pants and knee boots, ready, and I sense more than willing to skewer a western hippie.
Unfortunately, no one else is there to distract them: I am their sole focus, and they would have the opportunity to display all their skills on me.
Just as I am readying my travel permit for the guards, sharp, piercing cries from Kristin’s baby spill from under the bench and nearly stop my heart. Holy Christ! This can’t be true!
Panic hits me hard. My heart pumps wildly and my mind screams: we are fucked! It’s jail time, and big.
Of course, it’s impossible to turn back. The only move is forward toward the guards, and to the impending disaster once they hear the child’s crying.
Without thinking I quickly fumble for a cassette and ram it into the player, flicking the volume to full blast.
Someone screams at me: “I can’t, no, I can’t, I can’t get no SAA-THIS-FACTION!”
I am disorientated and wonder why are the guards screaming at me in English?
It takes moments to realize that I am listening to Mick Jagger, whose song, at that volume, started to shake the tin walls of the van.
Fear must have instilled some acting skills in me, for I start swaying with the booming music and at the same time press my travel permit to the window. Naturally, the guards become even more aware of my presence. I certainly have their full attention now.
But what alternative do I have?
Several more guards in the barracks quickly join the group outside, and they begin circling the van, expressing curiosity, then distain and certainly anger.
Finally one furious guard gestures violently at me to turn off the music, screaming above the Mick: “SCHALTE DAS SCHEISS DING AUS!—Shut that shitty thing!”
But with the muffled cries of the baby still audible behind me, I desperately mimick Mick with ludicrous shouts of “Yeah, yeah, I can’t, I can’t…but I try.”
An officer arrives and directs me to drive to the side, what I do. More than half a dozen guards had by now surrounded the van, surveying it from all angles.
One repeatedly hits the side of the van with the flat of his hands, adding to the cacophony of the music, the screaming guards, and the cries of the baby. Another presses his distorted face against the driver’s side window and shouts in slow but vigorous motion “”DREH DIE SCHEISS MUSIK AUS!”—Stop the shitty music!” It was apparent that the guards do not like the sounds of the Stones.
The officer, on the other hand, is calm and studiously examines my travel document, which I still press to my window, and then he illuminates the interior of the van with his flashlight and periodically turns the flashlight into my face, studying me as if I were a protozoon under a microscope.
The Mick is relentless, as always, and keeps shrieking, but I start to weaken in my swaying, nausea setting in, bile palatable in the back of my throat, and the screams of the baby looming louder, forecasting disaster in the back of the van.
The officer returns to the guardhouse leaving his troops surveying the van. They all know I am with the US Military Forces, based on my license plates and travel documents, yet I do not look like GI Joe. My long hair and beard was AWOL—absent without official leave, certainly beyond the military barber’s regulation.
If the officer now calls for a Soviet military patrol it’s all over for us. I knew that the East Germans do not have the right to confront Allied military in Berlin. That issue was settled in August 1961, right here at Checkpoint Charlie, when US tanks confronted Soviets and the latter retreated, permitting the Western Allies into East Berlin without hindrance.
I gambled on that right of passage, and now feebly swaying to the Mick, silently promise that if I make it out of here, I would faithfully buy all of the Stones’ music and forever, although right now, I am sick of it.
With Mick on replay, I continue my mad farce for the guards, who are becoming more and more disgruntled, avidly slapping the sides of the van and shouting in chorus at me to put the Mick down. Added to this bedlam, the volume of the baby’s screams increases, or so it seems to me.
“KA—NNST DU DIE KLEI—NE BIT--TE BE-RUH--I--GEN! Can you please calm the little one,” I desperately yell at Kristin to the beat of the Mick and between my “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I can’t get no satisfaction.”
I feel my existence dropping into another zone, where time is measured by Jagger’s beat and space confined by East German border guards.
I am almost numb when I see the officer sticking his head out the barrack door and waiving me on to the final control. As I slowly drive to the western section of the frontier, I lower the music only to hear an uncontrolled sobbing coming from the back of the van. Approaching the watchtower where a guard is waiting for me, I turn up the sound and resume my rocker number.
The guard’s astonished expression suggests more trouble.
He scrutinizes me as if I were from another planet. And indeed I am and sincerely want to return to it.
Gyrating in my seat and pointing one hand in direction West, I press the travel permit to the windshield. Two more guards join, look inside the van, walk around and return to study my travel permit. Chanting with Mick I can still hear the baby’s agonizing cries. With menacing stares the guards stand by the driver’s side and shout at me.
One places a finger to his head and drills his temple. “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah,” I shout in agreement.
After a standoff of tense minutes, one guard, shaking his head in disbelieve, slowly raises the barrier, and I rock and roll across the frontier.
Ahead Checkpoint Charlie welcomes me with its hallowed lights illuminating the Allied flags. Oh man, oh man, what a sight! It was so near, but minutes ago it seemed so far away that I would never reach it.
The duty MP standing outside the guard shack is waiting for me.
I park the van by the curb, leave the music blaring, and walk toward the MP.
“H’ve some trouble with the East Germans? They hassle you?” asks the black soldier.
“I guess they didn’t like my music,” I respond with a smile.
“Well, shit, Mick the Dick. I can’t blame them, man. You should get some cool sounds,” suggests the MP with a broad grin.
“Yeah, Jimmy tells me the same thing. Next time I’ll play ‘Cool and the Gang’.”
“Right on! You be sure to checkout now, hear? His words drifted behind me as I walk toward the guard shack.
After signing-out at Charlie, I return to the van and drive off. Passing the Kochstrasse underground, I finally turn the music off and slow down, silently thanking the Stones..
“Kristin, we are in West Berlin. Come out and see the city.”
A clearly shaken Kristin and her baby still crying surface from the bench box.
“Good God, I couldn’t stop Monica from crying. And once you played the music she cried even louder. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay, we made it. Come up front and look at the West.”
That’s the way I remember it. And considering what happened and how frightened I was, I am not sure why I put myself so foolishly and so easily in harm’s way. Given what I know today, I would not have done what I did, but I was much younger then and not yet jaded by the grubby affairs of life on this planet.
With Kristin and Monica on her lap sitting next to me, I drove through the illuminated heart of West Berlin.
Monica was now unusually quiet now and attentive to the bright lights.
We passed the Europa-Center, the Memorial Church and headed down the Ku’damm.
As Kristin saw the crowded sidewalks with packed cafes, the glaring lights of the shops and row after row of endless cars streaming by, tears flowed down her face.
Now it was Kristin’s turn to cry.
In the Sesenheimer apartment Carmen, Heidrun and Gabi warmly welcomed the refugees. Everyone was elated, hugging and kissing Kristin and coo-cooing Monica.
Once settled in the salon with Monica in Carmen’s arms sucking on a bottle of warm milk, the others drinking tea, I began my narrative of the evening’s events.
But I did no get far into my story. As I lifted my teacup to my mouth my body became spastic. Cup and saucer crashed to the ground, my teeth clattered and my arm and leg muscles jerked askew.
An alarmed Gabi embraced me as Heidrun wrapped a blanket around me, and Carmen cuddled up with Monica, both smiling at me.
When the shaking had subsided and I slowly regained my composure, I quietly remarked: “Better now than earlier or later.”
Eventually I sipped my tea and prepared myself for the second leg of our journey.
Carmen had packed my bag and a thermos of tea, and Heidrun had refilled the baby bottle and given Kristin a package of mild sedatives for the child.
Gabi was ready with luggage in her car.
With farewells and promises to telephone from West Germany, Kristin with Monica sleeping in her arms got in the van and I drove to the city’s western border. It was around 9:30 and our trip would take at least two and a half hours.
Kristin sat in the back with Monica as I steered towards Dreilinden, also known as Checkpoint Bravo.
Gabi followed in her car. She had volunteered to trail the van in case of unpleasant surprises. With frequent East German patrols on the transit road it seemed a good idea to all of us. Even if she could not intervene if disaster should strike us, she could at least notify the Western authorities that we had been intercepted.
Not much to hope for, but at least it was something. Today I am baffled why I took on this extra danger for myself and for the woman and her child. After all, I had already brought them to West Berlin. I should have left it at that. Yet at time I thought it was the best way to avoid my exposure to the US authorities and subsequent expulsion from West Berlin. But when I think about that now, it was sheer naivety, worse foolishness to drive back into East Germany and risk capture. I put the freedom of three lives on the line for that idiotic idea.
As we approach Dreilinden, Kristin and Monica disappear again under the bench and I drive to the US military barracks to the left of the exit.
Monica is thankfully quiet and most likely sleeping as I park the van and check in with the duty MP.
An NCO logs me in and gives me an instruction sheet to read.
“Don’t speed. The limit is 100 kilometers an hour. And should you be stopped by East Germans, for whatever reason, stay inside your vehicle and demand Allied assistance. We have patrols going down the transit route all the time.”
“Sergeant, did you see my van? I can’t push more than a 100.”
“Keep it that way, son, and you’ll be fine.”
I return to the van and drive down a special lane marked “only military vehicles.” Gabi had disappeared through another exit for German traffic.
A US soldier opens the gate and I continue down the marked strip. Ahead I see a small group of soldiers in rust-brown uniforms standing in the middle of the roadway.
“Kristin is everything alright? We’re coming to a checkpoint.”
“We’re fine. Monica is sleeping. No problem this time.”
I sincerely hope so, for the situation is potentially dangerous and we have to be alert. The Soviets have the right to search my vehicle in the presence of US authorities. And should they suspect something out of the ordinary, they would definitely do that, if only to embarrass the US military in Berlin. The Stones could not help us here.
Two Soviet soldiers step gingerly in front of the van, forcing me to come to an abrupt stop. Another walks to the driver’s door and stares at me with a challenging look on his face. Their actions and looks state clearly that “we are in charge, we are the victors here.” And they are right: it was the Soviet army that defeated Hitler in Berlin, took the city 27 years ago and has ruled supreme to this day, at least in East Germany.
I open the window and with my best smile hand the Russian my travel permit. He reads the Cyrillic text, studies the photo and my face, says something I do not understand and walks away with my papers. The other guards keep their position in front of the vehicle. At least five minutes pass, but the guard has not returned.
Thank God, not a sound out of Monica.
Nervous energy propels me out of the van, I stretch, yawn, and greet the Russian troops, who ignore me, survey the van, gaze at the East German frontier, speak quietly among themselves, and keep an eye on me.
I keep smiling at the guards and silently pray Monica would sleep soundly.
About 100 meters to my right stands the guard shack the Soviet soldier had entered with my papers. Farther back I can see the lights of the East German checkpoint, where the West German traveler are being processed.
Perhaps several dozen cars or more are waiting to travel through East Germany.
To my left a high concrete wall and guard towers with glaring spotlights that immediately give one the impression of facing an enormous and menacing prison. And that was not far off the mark, for behind that fortification was East Germany.
After another tense ten minutes, the Russian soldier reappears and hands me my travel permit without a word.
The other guards silently move to the side of the traffic lane and I am permitted to enter the transit road to Helmstedt.
Several hundred meters down the road my van merges with West German traffic from the other crossing.
“Kristin we’ve cleared the checkpoint. You can come out now. How is Monica?”
“Sound asleep. It must have been the warm milk.”
“That was Carmen’s idea.”
“Sounds like a mother. Is she one?”
“No, but I think she would like to be one.”
With Kristin and Monica comfortable on the bench I partially draw aside the curtain behind my seat, giving Kristin a view of the road yet keeping her out of sight. We drink tea and look into the darkness of the road ahead. Every now and then a car passes.
Kristin begins a conversation awkwardly.
“I have a very good friend in Dresden who would like to leave for the West. She has spent two years in prison for a failed escape. Before that she was a successful ballerina. Now she is a waitress in poor physical condition. Prison ruined her life and health.”
“What happened to her?” I ask for the sake of the conversation, thinking that I will never do this again, if I get out of this free and sane.
“When she was caught she was only twenty-two. Once very beautiful, she now looks ten years older. Her career ended and so did her appearance.”
“Her appearance? What do you mean,” I ask for the sake of keeping the conversation going and myself alert.
“Under nourishment in prison resulted in the loss of her teeth and hair, and the deterioration of her muscles.”
“Jesus Christ! Do they do that on purpose?” I ask in astonishment, suddenly very alert.
“Of course,” Kristin responds calmly. “If you are not a believer, and especially if you try to escape, they will break you with whatever means possible.”
I contemplate this in silence as I navigate through the darkness of the East German countryside.
“She has adjusted to her circumstances, and her hair has grown back. But she was broken by prison, dislikes her job, and all she thinks about is escaping to the West.”
“That’s horrible, Kristin, the poor woman, “ I respond with sincerity.
“But, I have to be honest and tell you that I’m not sure if I can do this sort of thing again. I’ll think about it, Kristin, but I don’t know. So far we have been lucky, you know,” I tell her as I look in the rear view mirror to see her reaction.
Just then I notice with alarm that behind me bright lights flash and a vehicle pulls alongside the van.
To my relief I recognize Gabi’s car.
She slows down, pulls back and follows; a small caravan that continues direction West.
Every now and then West German cars roar past and a few East German ones sputter onward. Once a Soviet military vehicle drives alongside for a few kilometers, a head appears at the window surveys the van and looks at me, and then disappears in the darkness of the night.
Monica wakes up and speaks in her own language, uttering sounds of contentment. Upon receiving milk from her mother she falls asleep again.
The silence matches the darkness of the area.
Only headlines of infrequent transit traffic penetrate the utter darkness of the night. The countryside around us is like a sea of black ink with an occasional dim flicker of light floating to the surface.
Lost in the black hole of communism, I reflect as I watch the van’s dim lights illuminating only the concrete surface directly ahead.
Then on the horizon a half-circle of dull light, crowning the road in a strange hallo, penetrates the darkness and beckons the end of this long journey through the night.
“Do you see the lights ahead, Kristin? I think we’re approaching the frontier.”
I hear Kristin enter the bench and draw the curtain back.
Within minutes I enter the illuminated road and see guard shacks on both sides of the road, border guards everywhere, mesh wire fences and concrete walls enclosing the area. We are approaching midnight, yet the area is bustling with activities and the lights are so bright that the area is illuminated as if it were day, a very gray day, that is.
I observe Gabi’s car turning toward the center of the frontier’s exit as I am directed into the lane reserved for military vehicles.
Stopping in front of the Soviet military guard shack. I quickly arrange the cushions on the bench and place my travel bag on top. With travel permit in hand I exist the van and greet the Russian soldier who has walked towards me.
Taking my document in silence, he studies my face, examines the plates, and without a word disappears inside the military barracks.
As I stretch my legs in front of the van, I hear car doors slam and turn toward the sound. Two Soviet soldiers walk away from a vehicle similar to the one that passed me earlier on the highway and come towards me.
The uniform of one indicates that he is an officer. Both walk around the van, casually smoking cigarettes, quietly speaking to each other, throwing occasional glances at me and at the van.
My muscles tense and I swallow sour fluids that somehow reached my mouth.
What are they going to do? My mind is racing. Christ, they can do anything. This is their zone of occupation, the big SZ.
On impulse I open the middle doors of the van, unzip my bag, take out my sweater, and leave the middle doors open exposing the entire interior of the van.
This catches their attention and they walk toward the open doors, survey the interior with curiosity and cast inquisitive looks at me.
I casually put on my sweater and light a Marlboro.
As the Russians continue to exam the interior of the van, I move closer and offer them a cigarette. The soldier looks at the officer, who, after a moment of hesitation, takes a cigarette from the pack. The soldier follows and the three of us stand in silence smoking in front of the van’s open doors.
If Monica cries now, I consider in cold blood with an illegal smile on my face, it’s straight to jail and good-bye hair and teeth.
With my best smile still caked on my face, I offer the officer my pack of cigarettes. He too smiles, pockets the pack and says something to the soldier who smiles in turn. I continue to smile at them.
Hell, were all allies, really, and there is nothing like sharing a Marlboro in East Germany with Russian soldiers. Or so I tell myself to suppress the panic that was surging from my stomach and threatening to engulf me.
After some chilling minutes of smoking in silence with two smiling Russians, the guard returns and hands me my travel permit.
With the Russians now in discussion, I gently close the doors of the van, bid the soldiers farewell, and swing into the driver’s seat.
With one eye on the side mirror, I drive slowly to the frontier’s exit, where I glide into the West. Under the bench all is quiet.
On the Westside of the frontier, I park in front of the Allied guardhouse. We had arrived at Checkpoint Alpha, the US military post at the West German frontier near the city of Helmstedt..
I lock the doors of the van and enter an overheated hut, the US military station.
“Any problems on the road,” queered the desk MP as he logged my passage in the register.
“Smooth as silk,” I respond. “Except that I seriously need to find a bathroom.”
“Take the door to the back on your left.”
I splash my face with water, rub the cold liquid hard into my skin, and vigorously scrub myself with a paper towel. I look at my reflection in the mirror and notice that I am smiling back at myself.
Hey! We made it!
Retrieving the travel permit from the MP with a silly grin, I dash out of Checkpoint Alpha.
The road ahead of me opens into the broad and well-lit lanes so typical of the West German autobahn. We are home free!
In reflecting on those events today, I still don’t know what compelled me to open the doors of the van for the Russian soldiers. It surely was an act of sheer madness. What if Monica had cried out?
I would never gamble that recklessly again with my life or with that of others. But in those days I did, and I still don’t know why after all the years that have passed since then.
I gestured wildly and shouted to the back of the van, unable to control my emotions.
“Kristin, come on out! Get yourself to the front seat! Out of the bench! We are in West Germany and on the road to Hanover. HAN--OVER! Do you hear me?”
A sobbing Kristin with a sleeping Monica emerged from the back of the van.
We sat next to each other, a very happy couple with child. And by all appearances, we were a fine family on a very normal trip. Our silence was occasionally broken by easy banter and ready laughter.
Gabi had caught up with us and followed the van with her car. After some distance, I pulled into an autobahn stop, where we celebrated our successful venture in the parking lot. Our second celebration that evening, but this time it was final. We had reached our destination: Freedom.
The rest of our journey was an ordinary night’s drive through West Germany’s north country.
From the Helmstedt autobahn intersection I turned north direction Lueneburg.
Passing the village of Marienthal on the local road, I let loose with an off key version of “Happy Days are here again” to the delight of Monica. We were elated, animated and wide-awake, enjoying our company as we passed through a series of small villages: Tiddische, Ehra, Wittingen and on. It was nearly two hours since we left Helmstedt and the frontier. Gabi now led the way and it was long after midnight as we passed through more sleepy villages. Then a sign read Lueneburg.
We had arrived and came to a stop in front of a small wooden fence lined with trees and shrubs. Although it was nearly three in the morning, the house was lit up; and when our car doors slammed an elderly couple rushed down the stairs. I watched the reunion of the family, heard their laughter, saw their tears of joy. In awe Kristin’s father kept repeating “unglaublich—unbelievable.” Yes, I reflected, it was indeed, un-fucking-glaublich!
In the salon, the elated couple thanked me while Kristin telephoned Japan. Monica was put to bed, and we drank tea, ate biscuits as I narrated events, leaving out the tense moments with the East Germans at Checkpoint Charlie and with the Russians on the transit route.
I did not want to think about that, not just yet; and I certainly did not want to break any tea cups here.
When Gabi and I finally said our good-bys it was well after five in the morning. Before we left Kristin’s parents told me they would send me money for what I did. I was embarrassed but thanked them.
Kristin and I embraced and she thanked me for the last time, slipping a piece of paper in my pocket.
“That’s Rosemarie’s address in Dresden. Just in case. And I’ll workout an escape story with my parents in preparation for the interview with the authorities. Don’t worry; no one will know it was you.
“But I will never forget what you did.” She embraced me again, and that was the last I saw or heard of her and her child.
Outside birds were chirping as day was breaking, the early light visible in the east. I felt exhausted and desired nothing more than sleep.
“Follow me,” Gabi instructed. “We’ll find a place to rest.”
I followed her car onto a dirt road and into a dense pine grove. We parked and I took a deep breadth of fresh air, admiring the luscious green needles.
Memories flooded me of my student days in the Santa Cruz forest. How simple life was, then, I reflected.
I folded out the bench in the van and prepared the bed. Under the covers, I embraced Gabi, who had joined me, and I immediately tumbled into a deep sleep. Much later in the day, awakening to the scent of pines and to Gabi’s warmth, we made love.
My grandfather had taught me to play chess. His favorite tactic was the gambit, and that may have been a reflection of his life, or of a philosophy he had given to it.
For indeed, if anyone had experienced sacrifices in his life, it was my grandfather, who was thrown hither and thither by German history, having lost several life’s fortunes, changing nationality yet living in the same area, and in the end, when he had lost all, he hoped for the luck of the lottery to turn things around. And it might have worked, had my grandmother not interceded.
I remember when he worked out the lottery numbers, and I am not talking about someone using favorite birthdays. My grandfather was a known mathematician and he now applied his skills solely to winning the lottery. He had the numbers all worked out he believed, and he took me with him to the newspaper store to place his bet, when my grandmother got wind. She refused this awful waste of several marks on a game a chance, marks that could be used to buy a kilo of potatoes, for example. Thus my grandfather did not place the bet that would have won them a fortune, for he had the numbers right as I saw from his worksheet.
That’s my gambit story. And perhaps that should have given me a clue about applying the gambit, whether in chess or in life.
Still, I now used it against Uli, who like most players saw an easy capture of an unguarded pawn. But chess is also about the position of the pieces and Uli soon discovered that he was out maneuvered.
We were fairly evenly matched and enjoyed our regular matches.
Let me introduce Uli: he was Helmut’s best friend from high school. They both chose West Berlin to study architecture at the Technical University. Although friends with Helmut, he remained aloof from politics, preferring discussions of architecture and art history.
During one of our games we spoke about renaissance paintings, and that was when I shared my knowledge of the private art collection in East Berlin I had seen.
Uli had heard of the architect, knew of his work, but had no idea of his valuable collection.
“Well, what do you think of the Queen’s gambit now,” I queried contently, having won the match.
“Like so much in life, it is an effective illusion,” he remarked with a smile, and came directly to the point.
“Are you thinking of bringing out the paintings?”
Uli knew from Heidrun about the escape I had organized. Helmut knew as well but never spoke about it.
“I don’t know,” I replied slowly. “It’s probably easier bringing out paintings and with less risk than people.
“Although the Canaletto is huge and may be a problem. Still, it’s worth thinking about considering the enormous sums of money involved.”
Looking at Uli with a serious expression, I had stated the obvious and continued along that line of reasoning.
“After all, the paintings are the man’s property and the state is prepared to play the thief. That should tell you something, especially if you are a renaissance man.”
Uli smiled at me with his sad, almost melancholic expression, and shrugged his shoulders, as if to say what can I do.
I don’t know if Uli’s was a very subtle German expression, or just plain resignation, for if anything Uli was sophisticated. Yet, while I thought I understood his friend Helmut with his heart throbbing for the social revolution, I could not fathom Uli, who remained a mystery to me.
“Maybe, but if you’re caught with the paintings, you’ll be labeled the thief,” he finally stated.
“Yeah, and I’ve heard what can happen to you in an East German prison. I like to keep my hair and teeth until old age”
It was then that Uli told me about his East German girlfriend, Elisabeth, who had recently finished her medical studies and was now an intern in a Leipzig hospital.
I was astonished. This was more of his private life that Uli has told me in over a year of playing chess together.
“You’re engaged? Jesus Christ! But how are you going to marry? You’re not thinking of moving to East Germany, are you?” I sputtered out the words thoughtlessly.
“I don’t think of that! Everything there is twisted politics, meaning there is no freedom,” he shrugged his shoulders again, adding a wry smile.
“But we’re in love, and only recently did I find out how much she has suffered. I had hoped that she could apply for an exit visa. It’s happened before.
“But after our engagement, she was depressed and told me that they would never let her leave,” responded Uli with eyes downcast and voice near whisper
“What happened to her?” I blurted the obvious.
“I’d rather have her tell you. We’re seeing each other in East Berlin next week, and I would like you to meet her,” Uli shot back almost instantly.
I was taken aback. East Berlin again?—Oh shit, no! I wanted nothing more to do with that urban prison and its cynical border guards.
I looked at the chessboard for a moment, studied the pieces still standing in the squares, and came to a snap decision, one certainly against my better judgment.
“Alright, Uli, I’ll go over with you,” I replied firmly, but with definite lack of enthusiasm.
I was caught off balance. Could I refuse a friend what I had already granted a stranger…or was it for Gabi’s affection that I had risked my freedom?
There was no harm in meeting Uli’s fiancé, I reasoned. I could always decline to take the chance of bringing someone across the wall again, especially now that I was fully aware of the dangers and risks involved.
Still, I was surprised by Uli’s disclosure of engagement to an East German.
Uli of all people: This intellectually engaging discussant of art and serious chess partner, this grave and somber student of architecture!
Actually, he was, by his full name, Ulrich Baron von Kreuzlingen, whose tall, gaunt physic and stern, polite demeanor marked him as the prototypical German aristocrat.
And this paragon of the German past, I just found out, was engaged to an East German communist doctor!
Later in the day I was at the Hundekehle holding Gabi’s hand and rounding the pond with Brutus and Polly leading the way.
“Will you do it?” Gabi asked.
“It’s not much really, and it would make Arno and Klaus very happy,” she continued her plea squeezing my hand.
“They’ll have something for you in exchange. You’ll like it, but you’ll have to pay them; they don’t have much money. About a thousand East Marks.”
“Fine, Gabi. What do they have? Not that I need anything from the GDR.”
“Something I’ve selected for you. And don’t forget you’re to meet Rosemarie in the Alex café at four,” she squeezed my hand again as confirmation.
“What about the paintings?” she asked.
“The old man keeps asking me and I promised I’d talk with you,” she gave my shoulder a friendly jostle.
“Tell him I’ll take out his paintings, but the Canaletto may be a problem. He’ll have to fold it and roll it into a compact package, small enough for me to pack under the bench. That may damage the painting, but he should know that,” I stated looking at her to determine her reaction.
She kept walking smiling in the distance and still holding my hand
“The others I can store without frames in the closet of the van,” I added and then laughed.
“As a gesture of good will, he can leave the antique frames to the East German state museum.”
She laughed in return: “I’m sure he would like that. You discovered his sense of humor.”
Yet, my spontaneous acquiescence to Gabi’s request surprised and troubled me. I had not given the paintings a serious thought. Why should I risk prison to enrich an East German communist that had benefited from the system he had served faithfully?
Was I so keen on pleasing her? I was not even certain whether I wanted to take out the paintings, at least not just yet.
After my last experience of illegal border transport, I had vowed never to place myself in such a precarious and dangerous situation again.
But look at me now. I was lining up transit traffic like an international trucking company: priceless paintings, ex-ballerina Rosemarie, and even Uli’s fiancé Elisabeth.
Certainly, the choices were mine, yet I felt uneasy and anxious that I was heading for disaster, and bringing happiness to people, if that happened at all, might just be mere accident.
What was not accident, however, was the formidable apparatus of the East German state that would crush me to nothing if I were caught in its machinery.
After our stroll through the forest, I drove to Gabi’s apartment, where German order reigned. Only after Brutus and Polly were thoroughly washed, dried and feed did Gabi relax with a glass of white wine in the kitchen.
In the meantime, I had prepared “aubergine Istanbul” a dish my Lebanese friends had taught me. Gabi enjoyed it thoroughly and we ended the evening on the carpet, making love on a rubberized blanket, while the exhausted dogs lounged on the sofa.
In the pine forest, following our first intimate experience, Gabi had confessed to me that she urinates during orgasm. The strangeness of that, however, did not retrain our passion, and we let our fluids flow.
The rest of the week passed quickly. I shopped at the PX, applied for my travel permit to East Berlin and reassured Uli that I would meet Elisabeth.
On Friday I packed my purchase in the van and left with Brutus for Checkpoint Charlie.
Entry into East Berlin was routine and I quickly cruised down Unter den Linden earlier than I had expected.
I parked in the August Bebel Square and walked Brutus along the Spree River, passing Museum Island with its shattered landmarks. The ruins were a depressing sight. Yet better the scared glory of feudalism, I reflected, than the cement construction of socialism. At the least the old, mutilated stones with carvings and baubles expressed a faded glory that exhibited a certain historical character, whereas the new cement boxes were bland, gray and anonymous yet capable of evoking intimidation, even terror.
We crossed the bridge into Monbijou Park, once site of the stately Monbijou Palace, now long demolished and gone, a vacant lot with untended shrubs was all that remained. On our way to Oranienburger Strasse we passed shabby buildings lining the deserted street, reflecting nothing of the street’s former bustle as one of Berlin’s lively Jewish quarters. Only the ruin of the large synagogue, torched by the Nazis, remained as sad witness.
How can anyone study architecture here, I pondered, thinking of Arno and Klaus.
I followed Brutus down a side street where a high church tower displayed the artisan skills of the baroque period. Walking slowly past this beautiful building, I marveled that it had survived all the destruction nearby.
Soon we passed old tenements and a market hall, an artifact of the 19th century, which too had outlived the ruin of war and socialist planning. As we came up to Veteranenstrasse, I looked around and spotted the park.
It was here, I recalled, that Kristin had directed me back to the city center after our aimless near desperate drive from the Alex. I silently shook my head, no, I’m not sure I want to do this again. With that determination in mind, I entered the “Alt-Berliner Cafehaus,” where Uli and Elisabeth already sat at a table. Luckily, no one protested Brutus’s entrance.
Elisabeth was an attractive brunette, of slim medium height with large brown eyes that sparkled of intelligent curiosity. I immediately liked her.
After I had ordered, Uli left with the excuse that Elisabeth should tell her story without him. My initial perplexity soon changed to amazement and then to indignation as she told me her baneful story.
The Stasi had recruited Elisabeth three years ago to act as hostess at the Leipzig Fair. The fair is a grand annual event for the East Germans with industrial products from all over the world on display in that city. As such the Leipzig Fair is a showcase for the city and the GDR, attracting many international visitors, and filling the state’s treasury with hard currency. For the event, the city engages many attractive females fluent in English to act as hostess for the international guests. What the foreign visitors may not know is that the Stasi uses the hostesses for industrial espionage.
“The first year was not so bad,” Elisabeth said in monotone. “ I was asked to date representatives from certain companies and obtain whatever information I could about their products. But the following year it got worse. Many businessmen returned, and I knew them from the previous fair. The Stasi had a file on those it targeted for special interest, especially in electronics. I was pressured to have intimate contact with them. If I refused, I would be expelled from medical school. The Stasi even threatened to have my brother thrown out of the university and my father fired from his position. He is director of a medical clinic in Leipzig. My brother is working on his doctorate in sociology.”
I tried to search her eyes for some glimmer of emotion, but she lowered her head and studied the glass in front of her.
“There was nothing I could do, Roman, “she slowly continued. “Even after I finished medical school, the Stasi insisted that I continue. Last year’s fair was terrible. I was forced into sexual relations with many men—engineers, technicians, and salesmen. The Stasi may even have filmed our encounters to blackmail them. It’s a nightmare and I don’t think I can continue, but I’m trapped.”
She looked at me and I saw that her eyes had swelled with fluid. She briefly interrupted her narrative to compose herself. My God, I thought, the lives people are forced to live. She was just a graduate student like me, but circumstance had placed her on the dark side of the moon. For a while we sipped our drinks in silence.
“Last summer I met Uli and everything changed for me. We fell in love and I had hopes for another existence. He believed we could settle in the West, but I knew they would never let me out. When we engaged I told him the truth. He had a right to know.
“I didn’t know what to do. I love Uli, but the Stasi control my life. Recently Uli told me about you, and that you helped someone to escape to the West.
“Roman, that’s my only chance. Please get me out of this hell!”
“I’ll try to help you, but it’s more difficult than I first imagined. Give me a bit of time to think about it; I’ll let Uli know.”
Our eyes locked briefly and then she looked away. Her bosom heaved and I noticed her singular ornament, a small golden heart, hanging in the cleavage.
“If I can do it, Elisabeth, I will!”
I didn’t know why I had said that, since I wasn’t sure at all, if I would ever put myself through that ordeal again. Perhaps it was the desperation I read in her eyes or perhaps it was the compassion I felt for her. I just could not leave without giving her some hope.
We walked out of the café and joined Uli who was waiting for us. I could think of nothing to say and merely offered him a firm handshake and left. Before I turned the corner, I looked back and saw them still standing where we had parted: A tall elegant young man protectively embracing a much smaller and very attractive young woman.
I briskly walked back to the van only stopping to buy sausages for Brutus. Since the Alex café would certainly not admit canine guests, I settled Brutus in the van with his booty of fatty East German wurst. Arriving at the café, I had to wait to be seated. It was the “Kaffee und Kuchen” or coffee and cake hour in East Berlin, a good time for clandestine meetings. Gabi had said Rosemarie would wear a green dress, but I saw no one in green. After more than an hour with watery ice cream, three thin coffees and still no Rosemarie in sight, I decided to leave.
Crossing the Alex I entered “The Good Book Store” where I browsed in the collection of classical literature, the only “good books” in East Berlin, since works of history were too ideological for serious reading. Selecting a fine 19th century edition of Goethe’s “Faust” and an art deco designed paperback of Schiller’s major plays, I added as well two copies of the popular “Philosophical Dictionary,” one for myself and one for Helmut. The “Dictionary” was a hot item among leftist students in West Berlin as it critiqued empiricism and offered a solid interpretation of Hegelian and Marxian dialectics. And what leftist student in West Berlin could get a date without discoursing dialectics?
While glancing through pages of Anna Segher’s novels, I observed Arno and Klaus enter the bookstore. We casually chatted about literature and left “The Good Book” behind us. Near the Alex’s train station I slipped Klaus an envelope with a thousand East Marks and we agreed to rendezvous on Littenstrasse. At the moment, I could not think of an alternative and by now I certainly knew that street well. Yet, as I turned into Littenstrasse twenty minutes later, I was not so sure about my choice. The maladroit gray stone on one side, and the dark overhead on the other, brought vivid memories of my dangerous adventure. I turned right onto Voltairestrasse, parked under the overhead, and opened the middle door of the van to let Brutus out. Arno and Klaus quickly pulled in behind the van blocking its license plate. While I walked Brutus the two adroitly exchanged packages from one vehicle to the other.
I had stocked the van with the latest American records from the Grateful Dead to Frank Zappa, had colorful tee shirts and recent newspapers and journals, all purchased at the PX. After hearing doors closing and a car driving off, I returned to my van with Brutus slipping in the front seat. Looking around I saw no one and still wondered if this was not the ideal place for covert activities. On the way to city center I saw that the back of my van held five large cardboard boxes, containing Gabi’s surprise. Before driving to the frontier, I stowed two boxes under the bench and pushed the others to the rear, covering them with a blanket and placing my book purchases on top. The sound of the content informed him that I had glass or china inside. I was greatly relieved, because for a stressful moment I had thought that Gabi might have placed paintings into the boxes.
Just as I arrived at the East German border a US jeep with three MPs pulled in front of me. With the military vehicle in advance the crossing was the fastest I had experienced. I followed the jeep with a sardonic smile on my face all the way to Checkpoint Charlie. Perhaps the East Germans assumed that I had an official escort.
While I signed out with the duty MP, the other soldiers walked around my vehicle and gave Brutus a hello.
“Mind if have a look inside?” asked one MP. I opened the door to let out Brutus and the MP entered the back.
“Nice camper,” approved the MP as he opened the bench. “Did some shopping in the East? What’s in the boxes?”
“I bought china. Take a look. You might like it. Not expensive either.”
The MP satisfied his curiosity and opened the side closets. He checked under the gas burner found the propane bottle, looked behind it and opened the refrigerator. The beer did not interest him.
“Like I said, nice camper,” remarked the MP with finality and left.
“Well, what do you make of that?” I pondered aloud turning to Brutus on our drive home. Even if the paintings were inside the van I doubted that the MP would have objected. And it was highly unlikely that he would even have recognized their true value. No, the MP was searching for something else, maybe dope.
In the Sesenheimer kitchen I unpacked the boxes and staked a variety of plates—soup, dessert, service—platters oval and rectangular, bowls, tureens, saucers, cups, coffee and tea pots on the table.
“Oh my God, this is antique Meissen china,” exclaimed Heidrun. “My mother always dreamed of owning Meissen porcelain.”
Heidrun marveled at the excellent condition of the china, and Carmen loved the blue design on white background and the unusual forms of the large platters.
“It’s the famous onion design,” Heidrun explained. “Just look at the intensity of the blue. Do you see the crossed swords? Those markings date the manufacture. I’m sure it’s over a hundred years old. The quality of this workmanship is rare today.”
That evening we sat in the kitchen: Carmen, Helmut and I, while Heidrun prepared a superb meal served on our china acquisition. We drank Riesling out of “Roemer” or crystal glasses of long stems that were packed with the porcelain. Each glass was of a different brilliant color.
“You have to hold the bottom of the stem with three fingers, raise the glass to your mouth and look me in the eyes,” instructed Heidrun. “Now lift the glass a little higher and bow your head. That’s it!”
With that bit of folklore, Heidrun lifted her blue “Roemer” and we all toasted in this German manner. I felt moved and found the toast appropriate for a drink that moved within stylish antique crystal, like a fermented snowflake.
False Impressions
The sky was yellow and the sun was too. It was a beautiful morning and nature had beckoned. What started out as a frolicking picnic in the Gruenewald, the lush pine forest of West Berlin, was suddenly transformed into panic and a minor crisis. Gabi’s girl friend ran screaming through the Gruenewald shouting in terror she was the victim of history, and the object of Hegel’s dialectic. Helmut and I had joined Gabi and Beate for a day in the forest, where we each swallowed an LSD tab after our brunch of wine, cheese and bread. While I was cuddled next to Gabi watching the sky turn yellow, Beate’s piercing scream brought me out of my mellow reverie. It took us hours to calm Beate and put her to bed.
“Well, that’s the story Jimmy,” I narrated in the NCO Club that evening. “So, never take an LSD trip with a German philosophy student who knows more about Hegel than drugs. No girl with kaleidoscope eyes, man, but a terror stricken female, seeing the dialectical forces of history squashing humanity into pulp. We’re only raw material for great men to use in their ambition to advance history.”
“Hey, you’re talking to a black. No need to know German philosophy. Yeah, man, sounds like heavy shit. But if you was looking for a good time, you should’ve all given the lady some sweet smoke,” countered Jimmy with a wink.
“Right, you are. I’ll take another Beck’s.” I said pushing my empty glass across the bar. “Say, man, I’m going across to the East next Wednesday. Do you think a brother is pulling duty at Charlie that evening?”
“I sure can find out. You want to stay cool, right?” asked Jimmy as he refilled my glass with beer.
“As cool as this beer, my good man,” I replied. “Say, Jimmy, what’s this movie about tonight? Carmen told me I would like it, but you know, I seldom go to the flicks. Reality is enough of a movie for me.”
“Not the reality you’re going see!” promised Jimmy with a laugh.
And Jimmy was right. Carmen and I were among the few whites in an overwhelmingly black audience that filled the Tempelhof Air Force Base movie theater. Seated between Jimmy and I, Carmen was elated and in her element as she joked with soldiers and their spouses. The only other whites in the crowd were the German girlfriends of the black soldiers. I felt a bit awkward as the only white male in the audience.
That feeling evaporated as the music of Isaac Hayes filled the auditorium and the film started. It was called “Shaft” and the audience was completely behind the hero, a black private eye, who put the bad guys, white crooks, in their place. Yeah, Shaft was the man, who would risk his life for his brother man. And the brothers shouted: Right on!
What a clever reversal of life, I thought, watching the audacious acts of the protagonist, who was a sort of black James Bond, with beautiful, ebony-skinned women gliding through his hands. Yeah, a quixotic hero, for no one understood Shaft but his woman, so the theme. And the brothers shouted: Can you dig it? Damn right!
“Yeah, Shaft, a bad mother fuc…hush, shut your mouth,” as the refrain had it, repeated by many in the crowd as we left the theater and headed for the NCO Club.
The Club was half-empty with white soldiers and their friends sipping beer at tables or the bar. The movie crowd, in a joyous mood, filled the tables and appeared happy as if it had experienced a great victory of its favorite team. And perhaps it had, I reflected, at least on the screen. For in the Club little had changed as the blacks and whites sat in their usual separate sections, with the white women of each group giving the other chilled looks. Where is that girl with kaleidoscope eyes? I wondered.
Outside the sky was black and the moon was blue. As I drove toward Sesenheimer, I felt that maybe I had too much to drink. And there was no one to take the dark out of the nighttime. Whatever the reason, I rushed through an intersection in front of Sesenheimer and another car came to a screeching halt to avert colliding with my van. I pulled in front of my apartment house and walked toward the car to apologize to the driver. Before I could reach the car, two men bolted out of it and threw me against the wall of the building, screaming at me that I was under arrest. One drew a pistol and put it against my temple condemning me as a shit anarchist while pushing my face into the wall of the house. As the pain hit me I heard Carmen screaming for help. Lights went on in the houses and people opened windows. When I turned my head I saw one of the men grasping Carmen by the hair and pushing her against the building. Now I screamed and heard Helmut shouting down from the window above. Then I yelled that I was an American and would call the MPs. The men immediately released me and asked for my papers. Upon seeing my US Forces ID Card, they relaxed their grip on me; let Carmen go and mumbled apologies mixed with threats of reporting my bad driving. Now Helmut had joined us and asked the men to identify themselves. By that time the street was filled with curious onlookers who had surrounded us and asked everyone questions. More in deference to the crowd than to Helmut’s request, the men relented by showing documents identifying themselves as VS or members of the West German Secret Service. After more apologies, the men returned to their car and drove off. The crowd dispersed as if nothing had happened, and the night regained its silent darkness.
Later in the Spanish restaurant, the Bodega, which was open until four in the morning, Carmen and I narrated the events of the evening to Helmut and Heidrun over a dish of spicy octopus and strong red wine. We speculated that the VS might have our apartment under surveillance. Some weeks ago, Helmut confessed, he had lodged an acquaintance from West Germany, a certain Ralf, who may well have links to the RAF, or the urban guerilla group that was waging war against capitalist West Germany.
“Christ, Helmut, you don’t mess with the VS! That bastard put a gun to my head! He was insane enough to shoot me! I mean, they shot George von Rauch and got away with it,” I sputtered in indignation.
“But they didn’t arrest you,” he responded weakly. “Besides, they’re not going to shoot an American. You saw how they reacted when they found out that you have a US military ID.”
“I might as well tell you. I decided to bring out Uli’s girlfriend Elisabeth. Imagine Helmut, I arrive with her in Sesenheimer and the VS decide to search the apartment. What then?”
“You told me that you were not going to take that risk again. Wasn’t once enough for you?” responded Helmut with a look of surprise.
“I met Elisabeth in East Berlin the other day, and changed my mind. Besides, she is your best friend’s fiancée. You should be happy for him.”
“Roman, I have not altered my opinion since we last talked about this. I still think in weighing the risks to the results, it’s not worth it. You won’t change anything.”
“Do you really think Ralf or the RAF is going to transform society?” I shoot back aggressively.
“They are involved in a revolutionary movement that will impact society one way or the other. Not that I am supporter of RAF, but their militant actions will leave a mark on society, a negative one. But that may contribute to a positive change. RAF violence will bring more police repression and that will turn people against the police and the tactics of the police state. From a dialectical perspective, RAF is the initial stage of a revolutionary process. You read Lefevre’s analysis of the militant sans-culottes with their impact on the French revolution,” responded Helmut with his penchant for philosophical reflection.
“No, but I know that German history is very different from French. While the one has a record of betrayed and failed revolutions, the other has a long revolutionary tradition. Do you think May 1968 could have happened in Bonn or Frankfurt or West Berlin? I doubt it,” I countered, shaking my head.
“Roman, I think it’s just great bringing Elisabeth to the West,” interrupted Heidrun, placing her hand on top of mine. “But are you sure you want to do this? I know that Uli and Elisabeth long to be together, but they also have their own lives to think of. And now you know very well how dangerous it is for all involved. Do you really want to gamble with your, with their lives?”
“Heidrun, it’s their choice; and they asked me. As for myself, I feel it’s something I can do right now. I mean, not much makes sense here in Berlin, at least not to me, but somehow this makes sense. It’s not something I think about at night; I just feel it. I don’t know,” I responded lamely, aware of my inadequate reasoning.
“Besides, Jimmy is going to make sure a black MP is standing guard at Checkpoint Charlie next Wednesday,” interjected Carmen with a certain pride.
“That’s great! But Jimmy can’t do a thing about the East German and Soviet guards! And they’re the ones to worry about,” hissed Heidrun with anger.
Our discussion was interrupted as the Bodega was closing and we had to leave. Helmut suggested we go to Litfass, a bar known for its early morning crowd as it served those who worked at night, assembling a mixed crowd of taxi drivers, bartenders, waitresses, entertainers, and students. The rest of us declined; Carmen and I were still bruised and exhausted from the events of the evening; and we trudged direction Sesenheimer.
With Carmen asleep, her right leg and arm wrapped around me, I watching the street lights reflecting off the ceiling of our room. Gently easing myself out of bed, I tiptoed to Heidrun’s room, quietly opening the door and slipping under the sheets of her bed. In the background I discerned the sound of Rod Stuart’s raspy voice with “Tonight’s the Night.”
“I knew you would come,” whispered Heidrun as her naked body entwined mine, her fingers caressing the back of my head, threading my hair. She covered my face with soft, wet kisses, touching the bruises with her fine lips, her long fingers stroking my limp muscles, tapping unknown sources of energy. Rod lulled on with “when I need love, I hold out my hand to touch love” as Heidrun gently transported the lyrics to our bodies. We coupled and I vaguely heard “it’s going to be alright, come on my angel, my heart is on fire” not able to distinguish the source, I let myself be engulfed by Heidrun’s gently movements, soothing as Santa Monica’s rolling surf. Afterwards drifting into sleep, I perceived a distant voice stilling me with “its cold out, so just hold out...so much love…a heartbeat away.”
“Brutus, stop it!” I muttered in protest, awakening to the wetness gliding across my face.
“Hey, I’m not your dog,” admonished Heidrun with a lilting laugh, pulling my hair. I gently kissed her with promises of more nights of love and left. Crossing the threshold, I nearly tripped over Brutus sleeping in front of Heidrun’s door. We trudged into the bathroom, where I washed, flushed the toilet, and returned to my room. Carmen was still sleeping as Brutus and I settled into bed with her.
To be continued…