Wonder years in Berlin

When the Wall fell, I had already managed to go through three autumns in West Berlin, six different apartment sublets and one night in the interrogation room of the East German border police in Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse.

I had experienced the last echo of the Cold War in the form of police batons whizzing in the big anti-Reagan demonstration in 1987 and on countless occasions heard the German shepherds of DDR Customs yelping on the quay at Sassnitz from inside a sealed sleeping car. In East Berlin, I had reluctantly drunk from an open bottle of chocolate liqueur making the rounds when three Bulgarian dissidents were lauded at the opening of an underground art gallery; in West Berlin, I had attended sleep-inducing seminars with the star philosopher of the era, Jacques Derrida, and tried to suppress my coughs at press conferences where Heiner Müller waved his Cuban cigar and to the audience’s glee called Gorbachev “a Messiah in a bearskin hat.”

One bitterly cold January night, I encountered a gigantic black rat on my return home sitting halfway up the staircase hissing with his front teeth bared.

At a shabby hotel in the notorious red light district around Stuttgarter Platz, in my capacity as night porter I was given about a hundred and fifty tongue-lashings from American backpackers who had found the address in that year’s Let’s Go Europe and had now learnt that the door to their room did not lock and the sink was lying dismantled in the closet.

I had seen the supermarket chain Bolle’s branch in Kreuzberg plundered by a nocturnal, heterogeneous mob consisting of punk rockers and retirement-age housewives (the first group emptied the shelves of liquor in no time, the second calmly filled their carts with mountains of cat food and bird seed) and followed with fascination the reports in the local press about a party at the presidential palace where a “happening” artist know as The Swede was paid an enormous fee to throw frozen fish fingers at the foreign ambassadors there.

I had also been ignominiously fired from my job manning the fire at one of the most renowned avant-garde theatres in that era. (The fire in the tile stove, which was my responsibility, went out before a premiere.)

In short, when it came to Berlin, I was a veteran. Perhaps that was why I missed the actual Event. Today I can reconstruct in exact detail what I was doing the moment the Wall fell: I was lying on the sofa not thinking of anything at all. It was Thursday, 9 November, 1989. I remember that I turned off all the lights and watched the crowns of the trees along the pavement outside, the leaves still green, bending in the gentle breeze: every now and then, a tardy chestnut fell to the floor of the balcony. The peace was destroyed by the sound of a TV being turned on in the apartment above me; a diffuse murmur was heard, honking cars and an excited voice shouting, “This is an historic moment.”

Something came to an end that night. While the heroes of labour danced under fountains of champagne on the luxury thoroughfare of Kurfürstendamm, cement block after cement block was knocked out of existence by the jaws of demolition cranes. On the west side, everyone agreed that it was Communism that had died. No one really wanted to acknowledge that the bell was also tolling for that eccentric little biotope West Berlin.

It had been such a forgotten, peripheral enclave for so long that, when history finally happened, it was mistaken for an immensely successful happening. West Berliners accepted the fall of the Wall as long as it was a question of a spontaneous act of solidarity at border control, showers of confetti and people kneeling in the mud around the clock to knock loose giant neon-coloured flakes from a Wall that no longer divided the city. But the very next night, when Helmut Kohl and Willy Brandt, standing side by side, tried to break into the national anthem on the site where Kennedy many years before had said he was ein Berliner, they were booed mercilessly.

During the months that followed, events accelerated out of control. It was soon clear that a majority of East Germans saw the fall of the Wall as the beginning of something new. The peaceable yet obstinate Eastern revolutionaries who demonstrated for reform when it was still dangerous and who were systematically beaten in dark alleys by Stasi rowdies and moonlighting skinheads loyal to the regime were now quickly pushed aside and replaced in the “Monday demonstrations” in Leipzig and East Berlin by a petty bourgeois pack of Helmut Kohl fans waving West German flags and chanting Deutschland – einig Vaterland. The rate of change, to repeat, was extreme. The Communist Party was dead and buried, experts from the Reeperbahn visited East Berlin and instructed local restaurateurs in the art of arranging Miss Wet T-shirt competitions, and suddenly the inconceivable was a fact: divided Germany was to be reunited.

When the West Germans realized the bill would be costly, it was already too late.

The rest of the world also looked on reunification with a certain amount of scepticism. In London, Paris and Stockholm, voices were raised warning of a fourth Reich. Budding suspicions were further nurtured when Germany recognised first Slovenia and then Croatia as independent states – on its own authority and without consulting its allies. Another development generating bad blood abroad was the trials of the DDR’s border soldiers.

On the night of 6 February 1989, 20-year-old Chris Gueffroy was shot to death as he attempted to climb over the Berlin Wall. When West Berlin prosecutors eventually started proceedings against the soldiers that shot him, it was readily compared internationally to the administration of justice in 1950s West Germany, which critics noted often had a tendency to put away the small fry and let the really big fish go.

In Sweden the daily Dagens Nyheter carried continuous coverage of the trials. The names of the victims were consistently misspelled, while the newspaper’s correspondents addressed the perpetrators familiarly as Andreas, Peter, Mike and Ingo, further establishing that they were “boys.” The career of border soldier was described as follows:

Andreas cried the entire time the first few days. He had long avoided guard duty along the Wall and taken jobs in the kitchen. But when he was teased for being a “kitchen cockroach,” he took his rifle and went along. He will always regret it.

When it came time for the closing argument, DN summed up the entire trial with the words, “There is a demand for revenge there, mixed in with demands for justice.” The tabloid Expressen noted acidly, “from having been a liberator, West Germany is increasingly taking on the character of a victorious power, teaching the East Germans their version of justice and freedom from above.”

There was more such atmospheric interference to come. All across Europe (not least in Sweden), it became the fashion amongst Germany experts to point out that reunification “was not a voluntary merger between two states as much as an incorporation of the DDR into West Germany.” The quote is from DN but could easily have come from any other left/liberal paper. Germany was once again the brute in Europe’s international politics, and many people who disliked the country, with its alleged sharp elbows, cheered a little harder when Denmark, which was critical of the EU, defeated Stefan Effenberg & Co. in the European Football Championship final in 1992.

For those of us who lived in Berlin in those years, the scepticism abroad seemed unwarranted.

In 1991, the Parliament in Bonn had voted to make Berlin the German capital. Great plans were forged, but in actuality the city’s status as a charming temporary solution barely changed. Those were the years when Berlin seemed to be swinging to the sounds of the Love Parade. Bohemians in the west, who initially distanced themselves from the patriotic hurrahs of reunification, were now discovering bit by bit that the eastern parts of the city were just as exciting as Kreuzberg. People gathered their belongings – Heidegger’s collected works under one arm, their scraggly marijuana plant under the other – and moved to a delightful old building slated for demolition in Mitte or Prenzlauer Berg. The fact that it took fifteen months or more to get a telephone only increased the charm; time was something there was plenty of. As for me, I worked hard to redeem my reputation as a deficient fire stoker, and by around 1994 I had refined what is known as the pyramid technique (which uses not just lignite of Czech origin but also wood from banana cases and long, desiccated strips of Bild-Zeitung) into a mastery that won the respect of the East Germans and the admiration of many visitors.

The only worrisome thing in those years was the growing right-wing extremism. In two small West German cities, Mölln and Solingen, Turkish families were burnt alive in their homes. Refugee camps in the East German countryside were also burning steadily, and the farther east one went in East Berlin, the more skinheads one came across. Out of fear for West Berlin’s numerous Turks, they mainly lay low. Nonetheless, the atmosphere was menacing. In retrospect, I think the hedonism in those years was as naïve and removed from reality as the bohemian life in old West Berlin had been.

Everywhere, there were forgotten buildings – a bank vault, an old brewery, a disused petrol station – which were quickly transformed into that cross between sitting room, bar and dance floor that was so characteristic of the era. The furnishings were always the same: tattered vinyl sofas and lights with fringed lampshades. If you wanted to order a beer, you had to wait for the bartender to finish rolling his joint and tire of his crossword puzzle. Everyone was constantly dancing, the only excuse perhaps being that the city in those years was brimming with a sense of enormous relief. World history had stopped in, rulers had been overthrown, statues had been dismounted and hauled away in the early morning fog, streets, squares and public buildings had changed names, but the actual city was still the same, unchanged. An enclave lost in time and space.

Immediately after the fall of the Wall, a prominent West German economist wrote in Die Zeit, “Now Berlin will become what it always has been: a poor city close to the Polish border.” Perhaps the prophesy had come true; anyway, it did not do any harm. The bitter aftermath was the high degree of egocentrism and self-indulgence. There was war in the Balkans and in Chechnya, there was genocide in Rwanda, and all we did was dance, non-stop.

In actuality, it as not until 1998 that Berlin awoke from this apolitical coma.

When people came staggering off those late-night dance floors, they saw a country they obviously lived in, but had never really identified with. The rest of the world’s horror of a strong and powerful united Germany had slowly but surely turned into irritation over the stuttering of “the engine of Europe.” Neighbouring countries were no longer afraid, but instead were worried, almost pitying them – for this once strong economy was bleeding, jobs (especially in manufacturing) were already being relocated to countries like Slovakia and the reforms needed were conspicuous in their absence.

Germany simply began to be viewed as slightly retarded.

No matter how polysexual Berlin was, the rest of the country was still built up around values from the early 1950s. It was the nuclear family, with housewives lovingly keeping food warm for when their children came home from school at one o’clock on the dot. There were long, lovely years of schooling for the daughters of the middle class, and as soon as they married some Rotarian in a double-breasted suit, the writings of Wittgenstein were replaced by a gingham apron and feather duster. Even integration limped along. The first generation of Turkish Gastarbeiter had children and grandchildren, but even though they were born in Berlin or Frankfurt, they seldom if ever became German citizens and increasingly lived in a parallel universe.

The Brits had Tony Blair and the whole Cool Britannia campaign; France and the Netherlands had brilliant, multi-cultural football teams. Germany, on the other hand, was still governed by a man who was called the pear because of the peculiar shape of his head and whose whole lifestyle incarnated the anti-modern province.

So nine years after the East German velvet revolution, the West Germans launched their revolutionary project: voting Helmut Kohl out of office.

It was the German post-war left that won the election for Gerhard Schröder in 1998 – all those millions of people who had grown up with Auschwitz trials, hand-painted doves of peace, batik prints and demonstrations against nuclear power and who were dissatisfied with Kohl because they, perhaps unfairly, accused him of embodying the older, stricter and more authoritarian Germany.

With the benefit of hindsight, it may seem strange, but the swearing in of Schröder as head of government and the slightly bohemian Joschka Fischer as foreign minister triggered a wave of euphoria in Germany. Both had a past in the radical student movement and with their being hoisted to power, they together constituted a perfect projection screen. Urban Germany could give into the illusion, at least for a few moments, that it was their own ideals that were occupying power.

Far-reaching reforms were promised; there was a bit of polishing to some new citizenship laws and, pleased with what they thought they had achieved, Berliners could once again safely withdraw to their dance floors.

In actuality, Schröder’s time in office was not a break with the tradition of Adenauer and Kohl but rather the farcical final act. Bild-Zeitung loved him precisely because, in the eyes of these powerful editors, he embodied continuity instead of change. Within a short period of time, the entire tabloid press had crowned him “the sexiest man in Germany.” He received this acclaim with a yawn, as if the title was merely a belated confirmation of an objective truth in the same way that the sun rises in the east. To slightly tone down the impression that what he expected above all was admiration from the populace, he challenged voters to set tough demands on him. “If I do not reduce the number of people unemployed to under 3.5 million, you should vote me out of office.”

Voters delayed their response, but the first few years of the new millennium were nonetheless a time of disillusionment. In the 2005 election, when Schröder ran against a candidate who was empty, so completely empty, that a Christian Democratic supporter of Angela Merkel could say, “She’s a brilliant politician, but to tell the truth I’ve never really understood why she’s in our party,” he was destined to lose.

The transition was in no way dramatic. Schröder withdrew to his obscure job with Gazprom, but the Social Democrats remained in power, albeit as junior partners with Merkel’s CDU.

And yet something had been set rocking: the dazzling Brioni suit, like a suit of armour, had been replaced by Merkel’s not entirely becoming red blazer, and suddenly there was time and space for reforms. As for foreign policy, Germany swung back toward the middle, away from the fatal fawning over Putin’s Russia, and with the charismatic Family Minister Ursula von der Leyen as her right-hand man, Merkel introduced parental leave benefits which, combined with an expansion in the number of day care places, aimed to relegate the housewife to history.

As for me, I was not on that ship much longer. After eighteen wonderful years in Berlin, I moved in 2004, precisely because the preschools available in that metropolis did not really seem attractive. At the same time, countless other Swedes made the reverse journey, putting down stakes in districts like Friedrichshain and Treptow. With any luck, this generation will develop a new and constructive relation with Germany. The giant people’s party during the 2006 World Cup in football was an opening, but the image of Germany in Sweden is still weighted, completely unnecessarily, by an enormous ballast of prejudices and old, antiquated clichés. Particularly in the media, Germany and the Germans are allowed to represent all sorts of rubbish that Swedes are proud to have left behind.

I still cannot understand why the fire in that avant-garde theatre in Kreuzberg went out. I lit the fire with what is known as Eierkohlen, of extra high quality, and was careful not to smother the flame when I shovelled new layers on.