Berlin on the threshold of unification

It was in 1988, one year before the Berlin wall came down, that I had my last encounter with East Germany. I was sent by an Austrian newspaper to cover a so-called "peace festival" in East Berlin, something of the kind the East German government frequently organised during its last phase, obviously to signal to the rest of the world how conciliatory, placid and open-minded it was.

However, journalists had to get an official accreditation from the German Democratic Republic (GDR) embassies in the countries they worked in, which proved difficult for many colleagues from Western papers and broadcasters as the authorities in East Germany did not trust them.

For me, an Austrian, it was easier as Germany and Austria maintained a love-hate relationship. Austria was important to the GDR as neutral territory where it could nourish an influential Communist Party offshoot and where its intelligence service met with informants of all kinds in the smoky backrooms of Vienna's countless coffee houses, and where a great part of the GDR's foreign currency procurement was processed via accounts at discreet Austrian banks.

So, as an Austrian journalist I enjoyed something like a special status and was handled as a neutral entity by East German authorities.

The document issued by the GDR's Vienna embassy, which carried an impressive handstamp displaying the state symbols — hammer and dividers within a garland of corn — turned out to be of great value during my trip.

Officers of the "Volks-polizei" (people's police), who frequently approached me when I strolled about East Berlin and asked for my travel documents, seemed impressed when I produced the document. One officer even reminded me how proud I should be that Austria has been one of the first countries to officially recognise the GDR as an independent state in 1972.

"Yes sir," I said. "This was a great diplomatic move to underline the amity between our countries." My approach seemed to satisfy them and in the days that followed they left me alone when I walked around the blocks near my hotel at Alexanderplatz in East Berlin's city centre.

My stay in Berlin also turned out to be an ideal opportunity to conduct a field study of two different political systems as I discovered to my surprise that for Austrians and some other Western passport holders, including West Berliners, it was easy to walk from the communist part of the city to the capitalist and back by simply getting our passports stamped if we only used Checkpoint Charlie or, much better, the notorious metro station crosspoint at East Berlin's Friedrichstrasse, which served as an underground passage between the East and West at that time.

One had to enter the Berlin subway in the West and take the Friedrichstrasse-bound train, which went in a curve below eastern Berlin along abandoned, bricked-up stations and stopped at the underground border crossing to the east. The poorly lit transfer passage was, in a sense, a kind of surreal place, a no-man's land between the blocks, with a rigorous procedure for travellers.

At first it was mandatory to exchange at least 25 western marks at a 1:1 rate into eastern marks per day, per person at a GDR state bank office to be allowed to enter East Berlin. The street rate at that time was 1:8 or better and the money couldn't be changed back afterwards.

Secondly, the more the East German regime showed signs of disintegration (in 1988 the upcoming collapse could literally be felt in the sticky air of the underground station) the more the border posts developed an obsession to decorate empty passport pages with their colourful stamps and ornamental signatures.

East Berlin at that time was a quite mirthless place, at least on its surface. Streets were dominated by Trabant, Wartburg and Lada vehicles and people were dressed as in the 1970s, measured against Western standards. There were absolutely no advertising billboards or placards, apart from the occasional party slogan painted on building walls, creating a dull and colourless atmosphere. There were not many grocery stores around and the variety of goods available was rather limited.

On the other hand, it was worth spending some time in book and music stores, and there were quite many in the city centre. Apart from bulky editions of the complete works of Marx and Engels, there were interesting compilations of German and English classics, edited and commented by communist professors, or history books describing the Roman Empire or the journeys of Columbus, for example, from the socialist angle, which made quite an interesting read.

Music stores displayed, among mostly classical recordings, rare blues compilations from the 1950s, which came with booklets explaining how oppressed cotton field workers in the United States were at that time.

One evening as I was standing in Alexanderplatz, camera in hand, a girl approached me and pointed to the silver ball at the top of the tall television tower, which has been East Berlin's landmark. "Look at this," she said.

"When the evening sun shines on the ball, it reflects a vertical and a horizontal line, and they together form a cross," she said. And she was right. There was the huge symbol of a cross visible at the top of the TV tower, and it was shining all over atheistic East Berlin.

The girl told me that this natural phenomenon was a great nuisance for the party leaders, particularly as the TV tower could be seen from the "Palace of the Republic", the former seat of the GDR's one-party parliament. But they had no idea how to get rid of the cross.

One year later, they still had no idea where all this might be going. But their people simply battered the wall down and the German socialist experiment eventually came to an end.