Don't rest in peace, Berlin Wall
My grim tour of East Berlin’s gray streets and empty stores 32 years ago taught me all I needed to know about life under Communism.
The Berlin Wall fell on Nov. 9, 1989. In April of 1988, when the Soviet Union's evil empire still looked strong and the Wall was still unbreachable, I caught up with my brother Dan's touring rock band Kingdom Come in West Germany. I wrote an article for the L.A. Times about my search for a popular cafeteria on the communist side of the Wall in East Berlin. A year and a half later, when I was at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Wall was cracking and about to come down, I wrote this version about what I learned from my brief life under Communism.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Oct. 4, 1989
Spend six hours in East Berlin.
That's all you really need to do to understand why thousands of the best and brightest young East Germans have been dashing to the West through the cracks in the rusting Iron Curtain.
In the spring of 1988, while in West Berlin chasing my brother's touring rock band Kingdom Come, I crossed alone into East Berlin at Checkpoint Charlie.
The crossing experience was like a scene from a bad spy movie down to the surly border guard who ordered me into a side room and made me empty my pockets.
He rummaged rudely through my wallet and explored my notebooks while asking menacing questions about the purpose of my visit.
I didn't dare tell him I had come to chuckle firsthand at some of the well-known idiocies and inefficiencies of state socialism. Or that I had come to see for myself if life under communism was as grim as I'd read it was.
Soon Herr Warmth let me go and I was marching through the gigantic, permanent construction zone just inside the Berlin Wall.
It was hard to tell whether buildings were going up or being torn down. Some seemed to have been halted in mid-construction, apparently years ago.
Workmen were mixing cement by hand and there was no high-tech machinery or giant cranes like the ones found hovering over any American construction site or, for that matter, found only 500 yards away in wild and glitzy West Berlin, where everyone seems totally sold on high fashion, $25,000 Volvos and American culture, and where kids watch MTV on cable.
Before boarding a commuter train on broad Karl Marx Allee, I went into the station minimarket. About one-fourth the size of a 7-Eleven, with about one-100th of the items, it was staffed by 14 young women in white uniforms. I counted them twice, trying to imagine the damage when perestroika's winds start whistling through East Germany.
As the train passed buildings still pockmarked with holes from World War II artillery fire, I noticed that, unlike the voracious West Berliners, no one was reading anything. Then I realized that they had nothing to read that was worth reading. Not in public, anyway.
I had imagined East Berlin to be like a huge, well-guarded, open-air post office. It was. All of East Berlin needed a paint job. With no advertising anywhere, it was colorless and gray. Even Alexanderplatz, the city's expansive main square, was shabby and architecturally bureaucratic.
I went into a flower shop, a toy store and a dairy store. Each was pitifully understocked. A book store was overflowing with the works of anonymous but presumably state-pleasing authors.
Traffic was light on broad Karl Marx Allee. All the cars were the cheap East German genericmobiles — Trabants — that make Yugos look luxurious.
Dozens of government-issue high-rise apartments, hideously similar, flanked the avenue's wide and deserted sidewalks. I peered into the trash baskets as I came to them. Empty. Empty. Empty. Empty, except for two cigarette butts.
I suddenly realized why there was no litter problem in East Berlin. There's nothing to throw away.
Before I reached my ultimate destination, the main East Berlin post office, I discovered a neighborhood supermarket into which a steady stream of serious shoppers was pouring.
I entered, looking and feeling extra-conspicuous with my 35-mm camera and new $65 Reeboks. The busy market was a Kroger or Ralph’s in size and configuration, but it was a cruel parody.
Bread and cheese sausages were in relative abundance, but the produce department was a pathetic bunch of bins full of potatoes, lumpy beet-like things and mutant lemons, the only citrus product.
The single frozen-food case contained about 20 packs of unidentifiable chicken parts. The aisle shelves were loosely stocked with generically packaged goods. The whole scene was slightly surreal. Up close and personal, socialism no longer seemed funny.
Capitalism and the West have their faults, but this was depressing.
These grim-faced shoppers — no different at all from their fat and happy and free brothers and sisters in West Berlin — were perfectly aware of how out of it they are, politically and economically.
But they were stuck on the wrong side of the Wall and I felt sorry for them. It was hard to believe the standard of living is higher in East Berlin than it is in Moscow.
Arriving at the shabby main post office at lunchtime, I wrote three post cards to America.
They were Berlin Wall post cards I had bought in West Berlin at the Checkpoint Charlie Museum, a shrine to all those who've run, crawled, dug, jumped, flown or sneaked themselves over, around or through the Wall since it was built in 1961.
The Orwellian East German government called the Wall the "Bulwark of Socialism."
I carefully stuck on the proper amount of East German postage and opened the lone mail slot. As I dropped the cards in, I peeked in the slot and saw what looked like a plastic laundry basket on the floor. It was empty.
It's been almost 17 months now and my parents still haven't received their promised post card from behind the Iron Curtain.
Somehow, I'm not surprised my mail never made it out of East Berlin. But it's wonderful to see that at least for now some of its people can.