A tale of two cities – Berlin, June 1989 vs Berlin, October 2019.
Part of my student exchange year was taken up with excursions organised by Rotary, where they gathered all of us ‘exchangees’ who were scattered across the country in to one place and tried to teach us something of German history, architecture and culture. My first visit to Berlin was on one of these trips with my 1989 fellow 17- and 18-year-old cohorts – not sure how much we actually learnt, but we had a blast!
Getting into West Berlin, as it was back then, was no easy feat in itself, especially for any foreigners, i.e.., non-Germans. We were driving from the Bavarian border, so needed to apply for a visa to pass through East Germany in both directions. Soldiers were on patrol at the border and off loaded us from the bus to go over our passports and verify our visas while some of their comrades swept through the bus with a fine-toothed comb looking for any ‘filthy Western’ contraband and possibly the odd smuggled refugee, although that was a lot more likely on the way out of GDR than on the way in….. Of course, we had to adhere to the same protocols getting into West Berlin from GDR, but then we had made it. It is hard to imagine now but remember back to those days of Reagan imploring Gorby to ‘tear down those walls’ and you will get some sense of how weird it felt to be in the West within the East – very odd.
One of our 5 days in Berlin was to be taken up with a visit to East Berlin. Another visa was needed, which cost us 25 West German Marks, in exchange for which we received our paper visa to go in our passports, to be kept with us at ALL times and 25 East Marks, which we had to spend, as no East German currency was allowed to leave with us at the end of the day. You probably think that seems fair – 25 East Marks in exchange for 25 West Marks – except that the West German Mark was one of the strongest currencies in the world at the time and the GDR currency was barely worth the paper it was printed on. On top of that, we had to find something to spend our 25 GDR Marks on, when there were barely any shops and the shop’s we could find had nothing on the shelves. (25 GDR marks could probably have bought me a Trabi, but I couldn’t wait the 10 years it took to get to the top of the list.) So, the whole ‘visa system’ was a bit of a money-making scheme, a way to get some cold, hard currency into the country that seemed above board, while being very much under the table.
Flash forward to 2019 – 30 years after my original visit to Berlin, both the east and west sectors and I am finally back again, but this time Berlin is only one, single, unified city. My entry into Berlin this time could not have contrasted more starkly with the first time I arrived….
Germany is a main player in the European Union and as such does not have ‘borders’ with any other EU partner members. We flew to Berlin from Amsterdam, which apparently meant that customs and immigration assumed that all passengers on our flight were from the Netherlands heading to Germany, or Germans returning home, or visitors from any other EU country that did not require them to stop us to even check our passports, let alone ask all those fun questions that they usually love to ask to delay your trip to the luggage carousel for as long as possible. We got off the plane, where the arrivals hall and the luggage collection bay are one and the same thing and two more steps took us out on to the footpath, where our transfer driver was waiting for us.
This process would have been unfathomable to the old Stasi officers eyeing all of us ‘Westerners’ so suspiciously as we nervously made our way through their controls in 1989 – positively head spinning!
But, apart from that very obvious difference, has much about Berlin really changed in those 30 years? Not really. Yes, the Wall is gone (for the most part, while small remnants remain in a few places throughout the city) and the only Trabi’s you will see on the roads now are only for the benefit of sightseeing tourists. The architecture of the grand buildings is as impressive as ever. The feel of the city is as cosmopolitan as ever, now taking pride of place as one of the most multi-cultural cities in Europe.
The people of Berlin are very aware of their recent history and are happy to talk about it and if you are lucky enough strike up a conversation with anyone from a certain generation you may well be talking to one of the Stasi officers who scared the living daylights out of me with his death stares full of mistrust on the frontline as I was coming into Berlin the first time. Of course, he will never admit that he may, or may not have been there, so you will never really know…..