E-VITA

I remember Check point Charlie, where, in these tiny offices, there were mirrors all around so the soldiers could see from every angulation.However I did not see the legendary rabbits which are said to graze in the no man’s land between the two Germanys, proof, according to the East German government, that the area was not a minefield, of course rabbits weigh far less than people…And what about the East German Monopoly type money!

I remember a large grassy area we saw from the bus in West Berlin. Here, we were told, there had recently been a concert (possibly David Bowie); the young people from East Berlin had tried to get over the wall to see it, and for this reason were shot at by the border guards. The wall wasn’t very high, I remember a mural, on the West Berlin side, of a locked door with a sign “give us the key”…I remember East Berlin, and its tree-lined avenue “Unter den Linden” and its luxury restaurants (with violin-playing waiters) where the food was really cheap and where we managed to spend the last of our East Berlin Marks. Another lasting impression from East Berlin was of the battered old cars and the long queues outside the grocery stores.

The strongest sensations were linked to the Wall and that one of the most recent crosses indicating that an attempt to escape had ended tragically had been put there only a few days before our arrival. At the “ Haus am Check Point Charlie” an astonishing museum of the history of the Wall and of the “escape attempts” there was a ladder apparently without any sense, leading to a little window from which you could see the “other side” – a land of desolation). When going to East Berlin by metro there is a short corridor closed between two doors, where we were supposed to go in one at a time, show our papers and answer the questions of the officers-scary.The metro stations are one each so different from the other, and when passing through the tightly locked stations beneath East Berlin the wagons always sped up.

What about the tanks in Kreuzberg?– the empty shopping malls? The queues in front of the greengrocer’s and the baker’s?´How hard it was to spend all our East German marks! The drab, colourless desolation and silence in East Berlin moved me. Not one advertisement, no posters, no colours, only lots and lots of silence (there was only the noise we made tempered by our professors’ complaints)  Oh, I also have a picture of a car park full of those cheap two-cylinder Trabant cars.

There was also our “personal” interpretation of our music professor’s order to attend a concert in Charlottenburg without paying, because according to him, the event should have been free. Patrizia and Paola got in through the players’ dressing rooms. Barbara got in carrying a large, leafy plant, twice as tall as her. She was following a long line of big, tall guys in blue dungarees who were carrying  the props for the show… our teacher was laughing so hard he could hardly breathe… then Barbara put the plant down, brushed herself off and joined the audience.

In East Berlin we had indigestible fluorescent frankfurters and some kind of cola drink, miserably warm; this great food could be had only after a long queue at a kiosk.Then we had to change our money 20 or 25 marks with a rate of 1:1, even if it was actually 5:1.  Elderly East Berliners could make the trek to the western part of the city but I don’t think they could afford to buy much, I remember a nice old lady who wanted to buy two bars of soap. I also recall seeing postcards with pictures of parking lots!Some public squares were fenced off for military training or socialist youth marches.The air conditioning in the Museum was freezing and we dared not go near the fan coils for fear of hidden microphones or worse. We asked quite a few questions to our guide, but she wasn’t at all at ease in answering.There were shops selling music scores SO much cheaper, but some pieces and composers were conspicuously absent. There was a wide range of choice of classic music and scores, but nothing modern of course. They had something of the Italians Ricchi e Poveri.In the bookshops, socialist posters all but covering their windows, there were a lot of scientific books, but no literature at all, naturally no Goethe.We went to the famous Konsum shopping centre. There were light-blue men’s suits made of terital on sale, the artificial fibre was clearly considered very fashionable… A combination radio-tape recorder was being advertised as a great novelty with a cassette by Boney-M, really modern for the time! But time had stopped long ago in East Berlin. Even basic bath foams were presented as luxury products.We went to a cafè-patisserie. There were hardly any patrons. Nonetheless they made us wait a very long time. Then we sat down and ordered a slice of a cake, similar to a Roulade made with, I suppose, margarine and apricots and we drank a sort of orange juice. I doubt it contained any orange in it at all! We would have ordered another slice of cake and a bottle of Krimsekt but it was not possible to order twice.I bought some chocolate biscuits, but in the end we had to leave them as exporting food was not allowed.It was an unearthly situation, being able to see over that wall from the famous white ladders. Passing by that wall and thinking that it had been built all in one night.Then there was the Phil Collins concert and the famous David Bowie one. When the wind was blowing in the right direction the people on the Eastern side could listen to the music because the concert was held near the wall. If wind turned the other way you could hear the Eastern people’s cries.We saw the Fernsehturm (the television tower) whose cross-shaped structure particularly evident at sundown disturbed East Berliners.  When we visited the city, West Berlin was full of tanks because the American President Reagan was visiting and demonstrations were expected.I recall the trip by train, when it stopped early in the morning in the middle of nowhere, one could see nothing from the windows. The border police in their light blue short-sleeved uniforms got on with their cases and stamps. All of a sudden the lights went on, we had been sleeping in our bunks, the doors opened forcefully and a harsh voice called out for our papers “Passcontrolle bitte!” We sat up on our bunks to show the officer our documents, all of us except one who kept on sleeping, we forced her to get up, the policeman checked her papers, and seeing that it was her birthday, to our surprise, offered his “Kongratulation”.

At the train station in Berlin there were still the original Reichsbahn trains.I also remember one night when we escaped from our hostel, unknown to our professors, to go to a disco. It was in an underground venue and above us, there was a riot, with Molotov bombs and burning cars. The morning after the prof really had it in for us…I remember the striking shop  widows, that were absolutely empty – I couldn’t see anything but white tiles, because they had nothing left in them…Ice cream tasted like dried milk… in restaurants they didn’t have any meat…The few cars I could see were all the same, the  legendary Trabant, that people had to wait 14 years to receive them after the order, and then, after the fall of the Berlin wall, they were thrown in the trenches. Streets were not tarmacked (Kopfsteinpflaster). Everywhere you could smell coal that was coming out from the chimneys … only our hostel was stinky. I remember they made us eat that sort of sausages that tasted like plastic, and then they gave us a bucket and a sponge to clean the tables up …

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