Happy May Day -- My life under Communism
My tour of East Berlin’s gray streets and empty stores in the spring of 1988 taught me all I needed to know about how grim and unfree daily life was under Soviet-style socialism.
In April of 1988, when the Soviet Union's evil empire still looked strong and the Berlin Wall was still unbreachable, I caught up with my brother Dan's touring rock band Kingdom Come in West Germany.
The first article , which I wrote for the L.A. Times, was 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 about to come down, I wrote a second version about what I learned from my life under Communism.
Later, at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in the early 2000s, I got still more mileage from my brief look behind the rusted Iron Curtain.
East of Eden in a Commie Cafe
Los Angeles Times Calendar Section, 1988
The surly young East German guard at the Checkpoint Charlie border crossing looks at my U.S. passport and brusquely directs me into an empty room. He closes the door and gestures impatiently at me with both arms.
Oh oh. He wants me to undress. A strip search? I start to pull off my jacket.
What crime against his miserable state did I commit this morning? Am I smirking too much at the Early Bureaucratic office decor? Am I packing too many pens?
Maybe he’s detected the Reason magazine T-shirt hidden under my sweater that reads “Free Minds and Free Markets”?
But all Herr Warmth wants me to do is empty my pockets on the table. He frisks me, then paws through my money, camera stuff, notebooks and the anti-Berlin Wall post cards I had just bought at the Checkpoint Charlie Museum across the street in West Berlin.
As he browses through my wallet with bored, officious arrogance, he asks why I’ve come to East Berlin.
I’ll not tell him the real reason, I decide, unless he starts torturing me. Anyway, he’d never believe I’ve come to do lunch at a trendy communist cafeteria.
A friend who’s a restaurant writer had told me about it. She’d never been there, didn’t know its name or address and warned that the food was hardly worth defecting over.
But she’d been told that the place was so popular that at lunch time a soldier with a machine gun had to be posted outside to keep the overflow crowd in line.
What a metaphor! The machine-gun part sounded like something (right-wing LA talk show guy) Wally George might invent, but who knows?
Maybe it was some new kind of communist theme restaurant. I had to see it.
I had always imagined a communist country as a huge, well-guarded post office and East Berlin fulfills all my preconceptions.
After a diesel-fume-choked hike through a gigantic construction zone I take a train to Alexanderplatz, which my guidebook promises is the center of East Berlin activity.
Like the whole city, Alexanderplatz could use a fresh coat of paint and a lot of repairs. It’s a sprawling, shabby, sterile square lined with dull modern buildings, restaurants and . . .
Hey, what’s that way over there next to that G-R-I-L-L sign. . . ?
C-A-F-E-T-E-R-I-A !!!
Suddenly I’m hip to the ways of ‘Generic-land’: The cafeteria I seek is probably the East German capital’s only cafeteria. The fancy red letters scream to me as I hurry across the plaza, but there’s no line outside, and no armed guard. . . .
Inside it’s just as disappointing. Hardly any people. The food being served is the traditional German breakfast of hard rolls with a slice of cheese and a slice of sausage. Plain rolls. Butter. Tea. Milk.
I quickly leave without buying anything. Thoroughly dejected and feeling pretty stupid for having believed my friend’s second-hand disinformation, I head down broad Karl Marx Allee toward the city’s main post office, so I can mail my silly post cards and get out of town.
Along the way I pop in and out of a sad 15-item florist shop and an equally grim toy store before spending 15 minutes in a depressing supermarket where desperate shoppers push child-size carts down pleasureless, colorless, loosely stocked aisles.
By the time I have mailed my post cards from the dingy and supremely bureaucratic post office under a train station, I realize it is 2 p.m. and I am starving.
Back to Alexanderplatz. Snow flurries (in late April).
I enter a busy stand-up sausage restaurant and order what the kid in front of me ordered. Aghhhh, one foul bite of what I now know was blood sausage and I’m looking for the wastebasket. I dump my full paper plate discreetly on the way out.
Across the plaza the cafeteria calls to me. I answer. It’s crowded now. Maybe 50 people in line, but no armed guard. Trays are dripping wet and spotted with soggy food particles. No steam tables.
Just past the cold lunch meat of unknown derivation, two men in white coats and little chef hats are setting plates of hot food on the counter shelf next to dishes of cold carrots and cold green beans.
The goulash thing and the pork something-or-other look OK, but I grab a plate with a white sausage, French fried potato bits and a blob of cabbage. Two or three equally mysterious kinds of desserts--pudding things--are next, but I pass.
My bill is 3 marks 10 (about $2.50). I take one of 10 paper napkins from the loose pile by the register, grab a tin fork and a weightless tin knife with a hollow handle and find a seat at one of the crowded cafeteria tables.
My Weisswurst is stone cold, but tastes great (I find out later in my guidebook that German white sausage is “often a medley of veal, calves’ brains and spleen”).
Looking around, I notice that the decor is uncommunistically sunny and pleasant. Red-and-white window shades, even. Real wood paneling. Hat and coat racks. I’m so cheered up I decide to take some pictures of the joint.
I stand near the front door and frame both the cafeteria line and the chalk board that lists the day’s specials and their prices. Suddenly, I hear two voices shouting one of the dozen or so German words I understand.
“ Verboten, verboten ,” shout two women employees. They’re waving their hands at me as they approach.
They point to the cafeteria line and to the chalk board and to my camera and repeat their commands until they’re sure I verstehen that it is permitted to take pictures of customers eating, but not of food being served—and especially not of the list of prices. In state-run economies, prices of things are treated like national secrets.
I take more photos, but afraid my hooliganism might bring a guard with a machine gun, I fade away. An hour later, grateful to be back on the good side of the Wall, I head for the McDonald’s on West Berlin’s main drag and buy an ice cream cone.
Back in L.A., I call the guy who first told my friend about the communist cafeteria. He tells me the day he was there for lunch it was raining heavily and a long line snaked outside onto Alexanderplatz.
A policeman with a gun was there to make sure people in line didn’t crowd anarchically into the cafeteria’s small entry way.
No, he’s sure the cop didn’t carry a machine gun. Just a pistol.
Oh, well.
I felt cheated that I hadn’t seen the guard. But the guy I was talking to and I were certain we’d eaten at the same communist cafeteria.
He thought the food was pretty bad, however, and I thought it was pretty good. But some things are relative.
Note: I didn't take photos of the pathetic grocery store, for some dumb reason. But East Berlin had a higher standard of living in 1988 than Moscow, the 'most-livable' city in the USSR, which helps you understand why when Boris Yeltsin visited a typical American supermarket in Texas he was so shocked by the variety and quality of its contents he realized the USSR had to dismantle itself. Here are some photos of what passed for everyday life in East Germany by a man who had to live in constant fear of the Stasi.
My grim tour of East Berlin’s gray streets and empty stores taught me all I needed to know about 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.
Boy, that Reagan sure was 'dumb'
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
All this stuff about how Ronald Reagan won the Cold War reminds me of the time I lived under communism.
It was back in the cold, gray spring of 1988. East Berlin was ugly and Third World-shabby. The city air was choked with the smell of diesel exhaust.
East Berlin was a subdued, colorless metropolis of concrete with no signs of human energy or spirit or commerce — no advertisements, billboards or neon anywhere. It was the perfect anti-consumer society.
Its dominant architecture — imagine 1950s U.S. Post Office meets underground public mass transit station — was late Soviet bureaucratic. Many buildings still had artillery shell holes in their walls from World War II.
A sad excuse for a large, modern supermarket was thinly stocked with generically packaged groceries. Black bread and cheese were plentiful. But the produce department was nothing but mutant lemons. The frozen-food section was a single freezer case containing a dozen icy, unidentifiable chicken body parts.
Both sides of broad Karl Marx Allee, where they held May Day parades, were lined with identically hideous "Nineteen Eighty-Four"-style apartment blocks. The side streets were quiet — there were few cars. The crumbling public platzes were spotless and litter-free — because there was nothing to throw away.
I was exploring communist life on the wrong side of the Wall 10 months after President Reagan had stood in front of it and challenged Mr. Gorbachev to tear it down.
Visiting West Germany to do a free-lance article on my brother Dan's touring rock band, Kingdom Come, I had made a point to visit East Berlin.
For years I had read about communism's many failures. I wanted to see them firsthand. I had come intending to laugh and snicker like a spoiled capitalist at the obvious socioeconomic stupidities, shortcomings and scarcities of communism.
But after experiencing state bookstores, state toy stores, state hamburger grills, barely stocked state supermarkets and hilariously over-staffed state convenience stores, I returned to the Freer World sad and depressed -- and outraged that in 1988 adults were still being treated like kindergartners by a police state.
I spent seven hours of my life behind the Iron Curtain. (OK, so I'm no Solzhenitsyn.)
But simply by walking around East Berlin, I saw what famed historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and influential economists Paul Samuelson and Lester Thurow could not see or would not admit at the time: communism was a political, economic and spiritual basket case.
In the 1980s, while Ronald Reagan, that ex-actor, was confidently predicting — and hastening -- the death of communism and the Evil Empire, those soft-boiled eggheads were writing and saying some now very embarrassing things about the strong economic condition and bright prospects of the Soviet system.
That liberal troika of intellectuals ought to be publicly shamed for having been so wrong about state socialism and being so blinded by their own ideology.
The crummy, dispirited society I saw that day behind the Wall was the best communism could offer people in its entire history.
East Berlin was no match for the run-away freedom, wealth and decadence of West Berlin, or the most broken down post-industrialized steeltown in the USA. Yet it "enjoyed" the highest standard of living in the Soviet Bloc, including Moscow.
In 1988 you didn't need to be an Einstein to see that East Berlin was a socialist-worker's paradise lost or to predict communism had no future. All you had to do was go for a stroll behind the Wall and keep your eyes open — or be as "dumb" as President Reagan.
And don’t forget the Stasi
Sept. 19, 2023
I didn’t run into the Stasi on my Day Trip to Communism, I don’t think, and I wasn’t fully aware of what an Orwellian police state East Germany was in 1988.
For those fans of the great movie ‘The Lives of Others’ and anyone else who wants to know how unfree and scary East Germany was, check out the writing of Anna Funder — whose existence, I’m ashamed to say, I just found out about.
In 2000 or thereabouts the Australian wrote 'Stasiland,' a book in which she interviewed both victims of East Germany's infamous police state and the creeps who worked for the Stasi that made it so awful and Orwellian.
In 2019 Funder wrote a great, long piece in an Australian magazine titled 'Stasiland Now' that describes how her book came to be and why, as late as the year 2004, Stasi alumni were still doing their dirty work in the unified Germany.