20 Years on

Monday, Nov 9th

I visited Berlin for the first, and so far the only, time in March 1990. My uncle was stationed in the Kladow army base in what was still then the British sector (South West) of the city. The Wall had only just started to come down, and in many places it was still standing in long, graffitied sections. In Potsdamer Platz and in front of the Brandenburger Tor opportunisitic hawkers were selling model Trabants and pebble-sized bits of wall on plastic stands to the gullible tourists from the US. If you drove a couple of miles in either direction you could pick up whole sections, still intact, fence posts, guard stations, checkpoints. The Russians had already sold their guns, their tanks, their uniforms and everything else they could lay their hands on. By the time the crossings opened, the Red Army in Berlin was reduced to a shadow of its former self. If the order had come from Moscow to invade the West, they would have had to commandeer cars and tractors from the citizens of the DDR. They had nothing left.

It was a strange experience being there in those days. I didn't really understand the significance of what was happening. I was only nine, and I didn't know much about the USSR, communism, or Eastern Europe. The furthest I'd been was France, and part of me just assumed that you could travel everywhere in the world, and that everywhere, apart from the third world, was pretty much alike, that it was basically a series of consumer democracies where you could buy what you liked and the standard of living was similar. I had a vague notion of the Second World, and that Russia (as I still thought of it) was a fairly grey and regimented society. I knew a lot about the Second World War, but next to nothing about post-1945 politics.

So East Berlin was a shock. It was the clothes, and the buildings, and the food, that got me. It's always the clothes and the food and the buidlings that make the strongest initial impression, but in East Berlin they were so drab, so poor, so old, that I knew something strange was going on. Nobody had adjusted to the sudden re-unification of the city (they had only had a few months to get used to the changes, so little wonder) and prices in East Berlin still stayed at Communist levels. You could go round museums for 50 Pfennings, or go to the opera for a couple of Marks, and we did. There was something glorious and otherworldly about it - as if it was a short holiday from ordinary history. I was underwhelmed by the Pergamon altar, supposedly one of the Wonders of the World, but mighty impressed by the Ishtar gate. I didn't even know its full significance then. When I look back on it I can hardly believe that I've walked through it, under the blue clay tiles, still dazzling with their winged lions, the ancient gate of Babylon.

In the Altes Museum I was teased by a group of three French boys, who had that particularly silly but sexually precocious humour that only French teenagers do. One of them put his arm on my shoulder while another touched the nipples of some Roman statue and giggled. I felt upset, but they were only joking. Later we visited the Reichstag, where the bullet holes were still visible on its scarred grey surface, Unter den Linden, Ka de We, the giant department store with, I seem to remember, a whole department full of sausages, Potsdam and Sans Souci with its unforgettable tiered fountains. All around Charlottenberg were the great iron street lamps where Hitler had had deserters hung in the final days of the Battle for Berlin. Over the city hovered the slender TV tower, with the cruciform shadow bouncing from its dome.

The city was not even starting yet to come to terms with its past, to attempt to move forward, it was just breathing a long sigh of relief, after the separation, enjoying a sacred moment of peace, by itself, after the trauma of destruction and division that had lasted so many decades, that had felt as if it would go on for ever.

We drove from Stafford, using a map my uncle had marked up with Post-its and scribbled instructions, crossed at Dover on the ferry and drove from Zeebrugge through Belgium and Holland to the Ruhr, joined the Autobahn and stayed a night in Dortmund West, where my Dad tried to bribe the three of us kids to eat an olive before supper in the restaurant of the empty Novotel. My brother and sister tasted the green fleshy fruit, and promptly spat out what they'd eaten, while I refused to be tempted.

The drive across Germany was enormous, and took us a whole day, despite the lack of a speed limit. By the time we came to the exit for the city, it was starting to get dark, and in those days before satnav, and with very little street lighting, we soon found ourselves lost in the East, rattling over cobbled streets, passing by grey apartment blocks, catching sight of bewildered old women in our headlights, sweeping their front yards in the gloomy evening. It was only with the help of a compass that I'd cleverly stowed that we could tell which direction we were moving in. We passed right by the Brandenburg Gate, and took a scenic tour of the city centre illuminated in a pale green glow, as we made our way gradually West.

How could a child have understood what those scenes meant, those pictures of jubilant Berliners pouring through the checkpoints, standing on top of the wall, hammering at it, chipping it to smithereens? How could I even know what was happening across Eastern Europe, across the Soviet Empire, that the whole edifice was crumbling? I didn't even know what Communism was. I just thought that East Berlin looked shabby. I knew what the Cold War was, thanks mainly to Frederick Forsyth, and that the KGB was a terrifying and dangerous organisation and that they would kill British and American spies in Moscow or in the Kamchatka, but I had no idea what it was about, all of this tension, this repression. It made no sense to me.

Berlin was beautiful, though; incredibly beautiful. Its fragility, its woundedness, made it beautiful. Even I couldn't avoid that. The bizarre architectural mixture of the ultra-precise and ultra-modern with the neo-classical ruins and battered Nineteenth-century splendour. The huge cleared areas that seemed to mask some terrible scar or absence. The Wall itself, the most potent of symbols. The horrible concrete pen that cut one group of people off from another, sealed them in a little enclave. The Death Strip. Ideology made real.

And now, after twenty years, even though the wounds have not healed, and even though re-unification has been fraught with all kinds of troubles and resentments, and even though the past still lies there, buried like an unexploded bomb still to be defused, Berlin thrives again. It lives again. It's probably the coolest city in Europe apart from London. It certainly reminds me most of London, of Shoreditch and Dalston in particular, but also in a funny way of Westminser and Piccadilly, of the South Bank and South Kensington and Kew. It has London's mixture of the creative and counter-cultural bleeding edge with the nobility and grandeur of an ancient capital.

I watched the BBC's archived news bulletin today from the night of the 9th of November 1989, and I cried, because this time I did understand what was going on, and I understood the history of it, the power of it. And the happiness of all those people, freed from the oppression of the state, going to see friends and relatives for the first time in a quarter of a century, going to be reunited with their families, their sadness and their excitement and their dancing and tears and cries for joy were overwhelming.