Letters to the Editor
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Freedom to explore
Christine Smallwood's evocative article on Berlin, triggered many memories. I worked there for two summers in the mid-seventies, before and during college, and lived and studied there for a year after graduation.
Being plunged into Berlin's peculiar mix - part glittering outpost of capitalism, part leftist student/punk/dropout countercultural mecca - when I found a job there the summer before starting college, was quite a shock. The jagged geography of the city forced me to learn, and come to terms with, its equally jagged history. The ethnic diversity, and the obvious tensions between affluent middle-class Germans and the Turkish "guest-workers", relegated to the ghettos of Kreuzberg and Neukölln, were an eye-opener to someone who grew up in the conservative, homogeneous milieu of Catholic Ireland.
Berlin is the city where I went through many rites of passage. My first real job - on a filling line in a schnaps factory, mind-numbingly boring, but the pay was good. The first time I got really drunk - on "Persiko", Berlin's signature peach liqueur - bad mistake! The first time I got comfortable enough with being gay to act on it. My first romance and my first breakup. The first (and only) time I got arrested - for jaywalking in East Berlin - was basically an intimidation scam, through which the East German police could "justify" relieving me of every pfennig of hard currency I had with me.
The year I studied there was like a gift. I was on full scholarship and I knew that any academic credits were non-transferable, so basically I was being generously paid to take any classes I liked. Free to learn Spanish and Russian, never mind that I was a math major. Free to hear von Karajan at the Philharmonie, to see Shakespeare at the Schaubühne am Halleschen Ufer, or Brecht at the Berliner Ensemble. Or just to catch "Harold and Maude" at one of the many funky moviehouses scattered throughout the city.
Memories of the border and the wall. I was lucky enough to make some really close friends in East Berlin, despite the practical obstacles posed by the wall. To spend the weekend with them required recrossing the border each night before and after midnight, as visitors' visas were valid for 24 hours only. Occasionally, I would smuggle across books that my friends had asked for - I remember one long conversation trying to convince the border guard that the reason I had a copy of Freud's "Totem and Taboo" was because I was reading it for a class. By then, my German was good enough to get away with it. But crossing the border was always a crapshoot - we used to gauge the local temperature of East-West relations by the frequency with which we would be taken aside and strip-searched.
The cold war cliché was that Berlin was a symbol of political and economic freedom. For me, it was the city where I found the personal freedom to explore and experiment, and ultimately, to grow up. I have a godchild there who just turned 21 - I can't wait to get back to visit.
I hesitate to add to Christine Smallwood's excellent reading list, but Peter Schneider's "The Wall Jumper" is worth mentioning, as is Alexandra Richie's history of the city, "Faust's Metropolis".