Thursday, May 03, 2007

Achtung, Baby: Pink Slip in Berlin

Pink Slip has hit the road. We're in Berlin, so I'm now a foreign blog-espondent.

One of the few inspired and inspiring vacations I've ever taken - and I'll give credit for the inspiration to my husband, who had the idea - was visiting Berlin while The Wall was falling.

Over New Year's 1989-1900, Jim and I spent a week in Berlin.

It is hard to capture just how exhilarating it was to be in Berlin at that time.

As we neared the Reichstag Building, you could hear the faint chink-chink-chink of all kinds of people, young-old, men-women, girls-boys, chipped away at The Wall that had separated the two halves of Berlin for nearly 30 years, and which represented the great divide between freedom and totalitarianism.

I used a nail file to pry out pieces of The Wall for souvenirs. At one point, I was leaning half my body in through a large hole, jabbing a way. A young Eastie-soldier, machine gun slung over his shoulder, approached me. I tried to pull my self back to the West, but he was smiling. Despite the fact that my mother was of German background (and German was her first language), I know only the smattering of words I picked up from war movies - Achtung! Mach schnell. Jawhol, Herr Hauptmann. Rauchen verboten. Or the odd word picked up from my grandmother's fractured English.

But I knew what the soldier-boy was telling me: my nail file was klein - too small. I needed something bigger to help take down this wall.

You still had to go through Checkpoint Charlie to get to the East, and most days we did.

East Berlin was a revelation.

This was the showplace of communism?

It's amazing it lasted as long as it did.

West Berlin (at least the parts we spent our time in) was cheerful, bright, lively, prosperous.

East Berlin, on the other hand...drab and numbingly gray.

We went into a number of stores. The goods were shoddy, fabrics coarse, colors dull, selection limited. In a grocery store, we saw apples for sale that were bruised and spotted. In the West, they would have gone for cider. I nearly gagged at the fish counter: the fish all slimy and half rotten.

Beer was selling for what translated into a nickel a bottle.

That's one way to keep the populace in check.

Because the border was now porous, East Berliners were pouring into West Berlin.

It was easy to spot them on the streets in their drab, ill-fitting clothing. We walked by a Woolworth's, and a crowd of Osties were standing there, noses pressed up against the windows like the poor little match girl. At the KaDeWe - Berlin's answer to Harrod's - the East Berliners we saw in the food courts looked stunned, slack-jawed in amazement at the plentitude and bounty.

As I said, it's truly amazing that communism lasted as long as it did - and that it still survives anywhere.

Of course, it's easy to say that, never having lived under totalitarianism and, thus, having no understanding of how it can sap the soul and life-blood out of everyone and everything. Thus, I recommend that any one who has not yet seen The Lives of Others, which is about the Stasi (East German state police) spying apparatus in the mid-1980's, to make sure that they see it. Brilliant and gripping.

Meanwhile, for the next week - other than for a sidetrip to Dresden - ich bin ein Berliner, and will (I hope) be blogging about what's happening here.

(And, by the way, according to Wikipedia, the "JFK was actually saying he's a jelly doughnut" story is an urban legend.)

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