2) Eastalgia

The European leg of my journey had begun some months before. I got off the plane in Frankfurt in early March of 2008. I had just flown in from Cairo—only a few hours away by plane, yet worlds apart. German culture hit me like a cold shower. Everyone was whisking about the airport with that icy unfriendliness that I only notice when I re-enter the West. Naked tits poked rudely out at me from nudie calendars that were displayed on sales racks for every passing five-year-old to see. My stomach turned to look at them. In Egypt, it was risque for women to display their hair.

I went to the baggage terminal and heaved my mammoth luggage onto my shoulders. I had a silly habit of carting a library of books with me wherever I went, and I had become very good at packing bags to precisely the maximum weight the airline would allow. Yesterday evening I was dangling all three of them from a meat hook at a Cairean butcher shop, deliberating whether or not I could jam more books into the bursting zippers. Today I put them all on my back. They knocked the breath from my lungs when I picked them up, and after a few steps my shoulders started to burn. I chuckled. These monsters were coming with me from Frankfurt to Beijing by rail.

I floundered helplessly in the airport rail station as a tried to decipher the labyrinth of German that covered all sides of the ticket machine. I strangely found it personally offensive that there was no English. In Egypt, everything was written in English. Germans passed me and bought their tickets, taking no notice of the perplexed Canadian sitting across from the machine atop a mountain of unnecessary baggage. I asked three of them for a bit of help to buy a ticket to Berlin. Two of them didn’t even look at me.

Christ. In Egypt, everyone was friendly.

I was directed to an office where I could get a ticket to Berlin. The battlecraft who sold it to me looked indignant that she had to speak English. She greeted me with a frosty German pout.

“How much would a ticket to Berlin be?”

In Egypt from anywhere to anywhere was about fifteen dollars.

“That will be 120 Euro please.”

I gawked at her.

“I there any cheaper train?”

“Well…there is one for 32 Euro but it will take ten hours and you must change trains eight times. No one wants to do that. And especially with your bags, you don’t want to do that, do you?”

It did not take ten hours, it took fourteen. I cursed my way off of the final connection, and humped my impossible baggage up the stairs to the Berlin metro. The ticket machine dumbfounded me, so I ignored it. I contemplated that the retribution for riding the metro without a ticket was likely to be severe and pitiless. I finally arrived, and a long flight of stairs extended up to the street. I felt like Atlas hauling my way up one painfully slow step after another. My shoulders burned from the baggage straps. When I reached the street, I found that the bottom of my giant bag had a gaping hole from me foolishly dragging it behind me by its strap. I patched it with a prayer and a plastic bag.

On the street, I heard some American girl prattling in English to two friends. I accosted her to ask if there was a hostel close to here. She looked at me as if I had just urinated on her shoes. “I think there’s one near here” she said, in a faux-innocent, mocking tone that meant: never speak to me again, you filthy tourist.

Twenty minutes later I had grunted my impedimenta two blocks away to the door of a hostel. The price inside was thirty Euros—not the ten that the Lying Planet had led me to expect. I refused to pay that much. I trudged back out the door to the rainy courtyard where I had left my bags. My shoulders were red and chafed from the last time I picked them up. I looked at them.

They sat there, as immobile as Easter Island monuments.

I kept looking at them.

I had piled them atop one another; now they sagged outward in a formless mass. Toothbrushes, deodorant, Egyptian statues, one kilogram of green tea, and a mosque-shaped alarm clock that wailed the call to prayer were stuffed haphazardly into my two obese duffel bags and internal frame pack along with a cascade of clothing and twenty thick books which I had somehow convinced myself I couldn’t live without.

They began to gather a dust of rain. A puddle began to form at the base of them.

I walked in and paid the blessed thirty Euros. As I entered my quarters, I fell to my knees in joy. My room was a spotless paradise of starched linen. Swedish furniture adorned the small room with a sloping ceiling; my impregnable haven inside of swirling Berlin. Warmth flared out from the heater by my bed. Out the window, I could see the dying sunlight above the rooftops. It was as quiet as sleep itself.

I murmured a thank you to the gods of traveling before the coup-de-grace. In a bathroom of bleached white tile, with the faint smell of chemical cleaner still hanging in the air, I immersed myself in the steaming rapture of a boiling shower.

————

“Our tour begins today at the Brandenburg Gate, a very appropriate place to begin a walking tour of Red Berlin. My name is Alex, and I will be showing you the key sites of Communist Berlin, during that tense period of time known as the Cold War.”

Our guide was a short thirty-two-year-old with sideburns. He sported a toque and a jacket in the brisk morning air. I had to keep my hood cinched and my hands jammed in my pockets to keep from shivering. The square on the east side of the Brandenburg Gate was packed with tourists—most of them there to see the free tour that was being offered. I showed up for this, but on an impulse I scorned my poverty and forked out some Euros to see the Red Berlin tour. The ticket I was holding showed a historic photograph—an East German soldier jumping the barbed wire and sprinted into the West during the early days when the Berlin Wall had not yet been erected. The other people on the tour with me were the usual suspects: two middle-aged British ladies, some quiet Asian girls, and two pale and staggering American college students gravely trying to hold in last night’s liquor.

“I am actually a child of the Cold War,” Alex explained after we had stopped at our first checkpoint. “My parents were from Romania. My father was a mathematician. And when he realized that he could get paid three times in America what he could make in Romania, they decided to leave. We left for the United States when I was six, and that is where I grew up. I don’t remember too many firsthand experiences of what Communism was like in Romania, but my parents and grandparents do.”

“Today I am going to be talking to you about the DDR. It means Deutsche Democratic Republic, or German Democratic Republic, but I am going to call it by its abbreviation, the DDR. When Stalin vanquished Nazi Germany, of course, Germany was divided up into four zones of control by each of its four conquerors, America, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. When relations between them went sour, the Soviets blocked off their zone of control and established the DDR in what would become East Germany.”

“Just a few months after the truce in 1945, Stalin began what is known as the Berlin Blockade. You see Berlin, as well as Vienna, was a divided city. Stalin’s plan was to starve West Berlin until it fell, since it was encircled by the Soviet zone of control. The Americans responded by sending planes of supplies into West Berlin. The Soviets didn’t shoot down the supply planes, and World War Three was averted. A new airport was constructed in West Berlin to deal with all the planes…a new plane touched down here every eight minutes. They moved an entire factory here from West Germany by supply plane. And during the entire Cold War, West Berlin was a Western outpost…a thorn in the side of the Soviets.”

Alex had taken us under the flapping British and French flags of the local embassies, before stopping in the shadow of the American one. “No pictures here, please,” he said. “I’m quite serious about this.”

“These embassies have been here since before the Cold War, on the Eastern side. “Berlin, as well as Vienna, was a divided city. As you can imagine, they were centers of intense spy activity. “Right where I’m standing, the Soviets ran underground telephone cables for their communication with their East German counterparts. During the early 1950s, a tunnel was dug beneath the American embassy, and they plugged a little listening device into these cables so they could hear what was being said.

“One day, sometime after the 20^th Party Congress, the wife of an East German diplomat called home to her daughter. ‘Khrushchev just denounced Stalin!’ she said. The speech Khrushchev gave was kept under the highest secrecy by the Party itself, and this was the first time the West had heard anything about it. Officials listening to this were absolutely shocked…they did not see it coming that anyone from inside the Kremlin would actually denounce their old leader. It was the first sign of any liberal change in the Soviet system.”

Alex paused for a second and looked at us.

“Does anybody here know the story of George Blake?”

The group looked at him without reply. The wind whistled through the street between the embassies. People shuffled and stamped their feet to keep warm.

“George Blake was one of the most famous spies of the Cold War. His real name was George Behar, he was originally from the Netherlands. He fled to Britain during the Nazi occupation, and eventually wound up working for the British Secret Service. He was captured by the reds in the Korean War and tortured. Eventually, he was returned in a prisoner exchange. He rose so high in the ranks that he eventually became one of only five people who knew the most carefully guarded secrets in Britain.

“But the Brits didn’t realize that during his internment in Korea, he was under powerful brainwashing techniques. And one day he woke up and realized that he had been fighting all his life for the wrong side. He instantly became the highest-ranking mole the Soviets had in the West. He began passing extremely sensitive information to them, including knowledge of this little listening device here in East Berlin.

“Blake’s position was so important that the Soviets kept passing extremely sensitive information through these wires—they didn’t want to indicate to the West that they knew. Then one day, when Khrushchev thought it would be politically expedient, someone called and said they heard a strange static in the line. They tunneled underground, and found these devices. And no matter how British-manufactured those devices were, Khrushchev blamed it on America. He got the whole world press there to see the American spy tactics against the Soviet Union.

“Know what the Americans thought when they heard of this? They thought ‘good job.’ Because McCarthyism was going on in the States at this time, people were happy to hear their boys in the CIA were doing good work. And as for George Blake, he was eventually caught. His position was revealed by a Polish intelligence officer defecting to the West.

“You may have thought he’d be shot for treason. But spies have an interesting life span. He was brought back to the Soviet Union in a prisoner exchange for British spies. He lived out the rest of his days teaching at a KGB academy in Moscow. In fact,” Alex finished with a laugh, “he was there lecturing when Vladmir Putin was going to school. He might have even taught Putin in one of his classes!”

Alex took us a few blocks away, and the landscape of the city changed. A host of yellow buildings sat innocuously in a rather empty dirt lot. A few naked trees twisted awkwardly up from the ground. The air was brisk and clouds of rain occasionally swept over us.

“This may not look like much,” Alex began, “but this is actually the site of the center of the East German Secret Police—the infamous Stasi. After the war, the Soviets put their man as head of the Stasi—a guy by the name of Erich Mielke. When Mielke came here he found them using all sorts of Nazi interrogation techniques…pulling out fingernails and such…and he found people would give all sorts of panicked answers to keep from pain. He upgraded things so there would be much more psychological forms of torture…like making people stand naked in a cold room for sixteen hours with the constant sound of dripping water. These, he found, were much more effective.”

“They recruited thousands of Germans to help them. They weren’t who you’d think spies would be. They recruited young women and men to seduce foreign diplomats and get them to inform. It’s important to remember, that it wasn’t always just good guys and bad guys. They actually lured in a British politician who was gay, and threatened to reveal this information to his friends and family in England unless he passed them state secrets.

“But that was just their foreign operations. The true extent of the Stasi was their control over the East German people themselves. They had over ninety thousand employees, and these employees worked through something like three hundred thousand main informants. These informants, too, worked through lesser informants too. They estimate that in all, there about one in every seven Germans was working in some form for the Stasi.”

“Can you imagine?” he said, stressing his voice for the tour group. “Can you imagine having one in every seven people spying on you? That’s incredible! They say that in every public building that there was at least one person there to report everything that happened to the Stasi.”

“When my father was working in Romania, he always had a bet with his friends on who the KGB guy in the building was. They were sure they had him nailed—he was always in his office by himself with his typewriter, spooky and unsociable. They would never say anything controversial around him.

“Do you know who the KGB informant actually was? It was the guy at the back who was everybody’s friend. He was the last person anyone would suspect.”

“My grandmother and grandfather were spied upon by the KGB in Romania. And after the fall of the Communist government there, it was imperative that the citizens get to read everything in their personal file. My grandfather and grandmother’s personal files are available to us to read…my parents’ own file will be available to me only when they die. There is even something in the Romanian archives on me! Yes, they saw that my grandmother was sending me chocolates in America, and someone had written: ‘so young, and he is already developing bourgeois tastes!’”

Alex was an experienced talker. He had given this tour a dozen times. He emphasized his voice at just the right times in order to give the intended effect.

“My grandfather and grandmother were never enemies of the people. Incidentally, my grandfather had an affair—but he never did anything contrary to the government. They have full transcripts of conversations that went on over my grandparents’ dinner table. And do you know who spied on them? It was the old lady who lived downstairs; the woman who my grandmother shared recipes with. It was her job, every evening, to get up on a ladder and change a tape in a compartment in the roof that was recording the conversations from my grandparents’ dining room above.”

“And it’s important for me to stress—these are third-world countries we are talking about. They put so much money, and so many resources into all of this espionage that could have been going towards things such as health care, housing, a better economy…but they were used to pay citizens to spy on one another, because the Party was paranoid about dissent.”

Alex’s words hung in the air as he took us to the next site. A middle-aged British lady clucked in front of me about how wonderful it was to be brought up in a free society, how we have no idea what it was like to live under Communism. I couldn’t give her much credence. She was a plump little stereotype who spent our metro rides muttering prejudices against Muslims in Britain.

“This is one of the only fragments of the Berlin Wall left standing. It was built here in 1963 when the Soviets became really dissatisfied with unbridled East German immigration to the West.”

Alex was in front of a large section of the infamous Berlin Wall. It was grey and drab and foreboding; over twice my height, with a curl of black-painted concrete at the top. It appeared as though the city was waging a war with some graffiti artists and losing badly.

“It is almost impossible to imagine the extent of the human tragedy this wall caused. This wall divided families, and sometimes even separated parents from children. There was a woman from East Germany who delivered her firstborn in a West German hospital on the night the wall was to go up. She went home that night, and woke up on the wrong side of the wall from her newborn son. She never knew him; he grew up in the West.

“Right at this spot was the first death to be associated with it. At one time there were some apartment blocks right here, and people would jump through third-storey windows to West Berlin fire crews who were holding safety nets below. In once case, a young woman tried to jump, but a secret serviceman was there and grabbed her arm. She made it out the window, but instead of falling into the firefighters’ net, she fell short and died.

“They had a small space of no-man’s land in between two walls. No one could cross it. Once an East German kid—nineteen years old—tried to make it across. He was shot in no-man’s land. He lay there, bleeding. The American soldiers on the other side couldn’t do anything: to step over the line would be a declaration of World War Three. He died there and the Soviet soldiers dragged him back. Stories like this would be published in the news every week in the West.”

“But even so there were ways of resisting. In one famous example, there was an Argentine man and his East German girlfriend. They were going to make a break for it through the wall in his car. But at the last moment, the East German girlfriend insisted—she wouldn’t go without her mother. The couple would ride in the front cab, and the mother would crouch down in the back of the trunk.

“When they got to the border control, they asked for passports. They gave the passports and ducked, and the Argentine slammed on the gas and broke right through the traffic arm. They made it to the West. And then they published that story in the newspaper, and it happened again twice that week!”

Alex laughed sarcastically.

“My favorite story, however, was of an East Berliner who could fake a good Austrian accent. He came up to the checkpoint, explaining that he was an Austrian student studying in East Berlin, and he would like to visit his mother in a hospital in West Berlin. When the guard asked him where his passport was, he explained it was in the hut off to the left. This was unusual procedure, but the guard called over other guards to watch him, and strode off to the hut.

“The guards then asked him what was the problem. He told them he was an Austrian student studying in West Berlin, and he wanted to visit his mother in a hospital in East Berlin, but he had forgotten his passport in his dormitory. The new guards gave him a puzzled look. Why shouldn’t he just walk back to get his passport from his West Berlin residence?

“He agreed, that it seemed to make sense. And he walked off into the West.”

Alex took us on a fairly extensive tour that day—it lasted a good five hours. He brought us to the customs’ office where the West Germans could go if they wanted to visit relatives in East Germany; the strip in East Germany which the president drove down every day. In side comments he indicated the parts of town that had the most neo-Nazi skinheads, or where some Nazi-style Germanic lettering still hung around on the entrance signs of certain metro stations.

“That over there, is a historic McDonalds,” he told us, while we stopped at one complex of white-brick buildings. “It is the first McDonalds ever to be built in East Germany after the Wall came down. It’s fairly significant that it was built in this building complex too.”

He indicated the buildings all around us that dominated every side of the street.

“This is one of the best examples of Stalinist architecture we have here in Germany. Notice the white bricks, the hard corners, the chrome-blue windows, the stalwart and imposing features? That’s that Stalinist style. In the 1953, right after Stalin died, construction workers working on these apartment buildings went on strike for higher wages and better living conditions.

“In Moscow, there was a power vacuum, and a struggle over who Stalin’s successor should be. Lavrentii Beria, the chief of Stalin’s secret police, thought that if he came to Germany and put down this revolt, surely the popularity he gained at home would make him General Secretary. Here in Berlin, he sent in the tanks and the troops to crush the demonstrations with brute force.

“But when he went back to Moscow, things didn’t go exactly as planned. He was arrested on the tarmac when he left his plane, and tried and convicted on trumped-up charges for being a traitor to the people. Khrushchev had him executed. He was strangled to death by his own secret service officers. A pretty brutal death…but…perhaps a bit appropriate for someone who did so much to create this type of culture in Eastern Europe.”

The sun was yellowing in the sky as Alex led the way to the final stop of the tour. With glee I noticed that it was just two blocks away from my hotel.

“This is known as the East Side Gallery. It is the longest stretch of the Berlin Wall still in existence; it is kept up as a big graffiti gallery in remembrance of the division of Berlin and the partition of Germany.”

I watched it snake away along the side of the river. The sun was setting and casting the whole area into a copper glow. Windows glinted in buildings behind Alex’s head.

“It is important to note that the tour we’ve done today, has been a tour of East Germany history, of the western view of East German history. We have to remember that the winners write the history books, and we have been basically looking at most of the negative aspects of the DDR. But there were a lot of positive things about a Communist society. It has created a lot of what the Germans like to call Ostalgie—‘Eastalgia’, ‘nostalgia for the East’—something like that. It just means nostalgia for some of the way things were in the socialist days.

“One thing that was an immediate disadvantage of capitalism was unemployment—you had lots and lots of East Germans needing jobs. While West German politicians begged West German companies to build factories in East Germany, they built them instead in places like India where labour was a lot cheaper. They’ve had tons of economic problems getting the East reunite with the West. And under Communism, there was always a job, and always a place to live.

“Another thing? Crime. Do you know what is the safest city in the world right now? Pyongyang, North Korea. In East Germany crime has gone up by factors of ten since the Wall fell. There’s a serious graffiti problem in Berlin, as you can see, which never would have existed under the DDR.

“Finally, there is just public morality. When I was growing up in Romania, I used to go to boy scouts. What’s one of the things you did if you saw and old lady walking with bags? You run up to her and carry them for her. And if she needs to cross the street you help her cross the street as well. Needless to say, nobody taught me this in America.”

He paused for a minute, letting the group take in the view of the wall and the river.

“Now I’m going to leave you here to take some photos of the East Side Gallery before the sun sets. This is the end of the tour. Thanks very much guys, and enjoy your time in Berlin.”

————

I walked up and down the hundreds of meters of wall, covered with elaborate graffiti. There were cartoon drawings of the soldier on my ticket who jumped the barbed wire; the Argentine who smashed through the border with his car. There were drawings of the Brandenburg Gate with the wall snaking around it, in its old form. There was a timeline of the lifespan of the wall, beginning with its construction in 1961, concluding with its fall in 1989.

When the wall was first erected, President Kennedy stood in front of it and gave a speech, known afterwards as Ich bin ein Berliner (I am a Berliner), in which he staunchly protested the construction of this wall and the division of the German people.

Twenty years later, Ronald Reagan stood in front of it, with the Brandenburg Gate behind him, and challenged Gorbachev to show that he was truly serious about reconciliation with the West.

“Mr. Gorbachev, come to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate.”

The crowd before him erupted. American and West German flags waved back and forth in the air. Reagan, clearly not finished, waited until a natural silence settled from out of the cheers.

“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

In 1989, Gorbachev announced that he would allow Eastern European countries to secede from the Soviet sphere of influence without the fear of military intervention by Soviet troops. Protests erupted across East Germany for a change. One November evening, an official announced publicly on television that there would be permission given to cross to the West to visit. While the order was to be for the next day, it was publicized as being immediate.

Millions of East Berliners watching television instantly flooded the checkpoints in the middle of the night. The border guards, who had no instructions to let them cross, were overwhelmed and held them back. They faced crowds of furious people arguing with them, berating them for not doing as the government had supposedly promised.

Soon the border guards realized that no one in the East German border authority would give the order to use force on the crowd. The guards had no other choice. They opened the gates. Thousands of East Berliners streamed through the checkpoints into the West.

One year later, the reunification of Germany had been achieved. There was no more East and West. The Cold War was buried. And by that time the Berlin Wall had been broken and chipped away, not only by the military but by individual citizens taking historical souvenirs.

Now, almost a full twenty years after the day, the old pieces of the Wall have to be forcibly preserved, lest its history fade forever in public memory.

I came upon perhaps the boldest piece of graffiti in the East Side Gallery: a giant picture of a three-part flag—the Israeli Flag, the Palestinian Flag, and the German Flag together in one.

An inscription beneath a nearby work of graffiti read:

NO MORE WALLS. NO MORE WARS. A UNITED WORLD.

The sky was growing dim. I started up the hill in the direction of my hotel. On my way I passed two huge medieval-looking towers on a bridge over the river. A historical photo stood nearby…of the two towers blown to bits during the Second World War. They were now restored and celebrated as monuments to historical Berlin.

It was 2008. There was no more Wall. There was no more Cold War. Perhaps the world was not united, but the traditional barriers that kept me from heading Eastward had fallen.

I could never give a rational explanation of what attracted me to the Communist World. I was in no way a socialist. But already I had been to Russia once, to a former Soviet satellite nation in Africa, to the Czech Republic, and to Castro’s Cuba. Perhaps I had a feeling of historical attachment for a system of government that is an endangered species; one that will go extinct in the coming century.

I was going to the Republic of Belarus, lauded in the Lonely Planet as a Soviet time capsule, for four months to study the Russian Language. I would meet my mother and brother in Russia and tour Moscow and St. Petersburg with them. I would head eastwards across Siberia on the longest railway in the world, and cut south into Mongolia, Moscow’s former satellite in the Soviet days. And finally I would conclude by going to China—the People’s Republic in name; the capitalist powerhouse in practice—for the Olympics in Beijing.

I was on my way eastward, propelled by my own Eastalgia. I was going to seek out the crumbled temples to the God That Failed, and scavenge among the ruins for souvenirs.

But with this trip in front of me, which would consume at least half a year of my time, most of my thoughts were not on the allure of the East and its history and culture.

My thoughts were on the girl I had asked to come with me.