When dad had divorced mum in 1986 a couple of year later mum’s friendship with our former neighbours in Berlin had survived. We were invited out to Berlin in 1988 when Berlin was still a divided city and as a 10.5 year old boy I was given the amazing experience of visiting Communist East Berlin for the day within my own living memory. This experience ranks amongst the three most significant in my entire life. Some of my experiences were recorded in my book about my association with the city and my German exchange visits with Henning von Wittich in the 90s and early 00s. Here are a few extracts.

Extracts from My Little Book of Berlin 1979-2023 – My association with Germany’s capital city

Coming into land at allied Berlin Tegel Airport

We flew into Berlin on a Dan Air flight from Gatwick which must have been a BAC111 Tristar. It’s an old-fashioned jet plane with an extra engine on the tail fin, with a descent so steep that it made your ears pop every time, despite the fact they always issued sweeties to everyone on the way down. We flew into Tegel, then the main airport for West Berlin in the French sector in the north of the city.

Berlin had three airports at the time. The airport for East Berlin was called Berlin Schönefeld (now Berlin’s main airport). Templehof was the one built by the Nazis in the pre-war era and the one used for the Berlin airlift in the late 1940s. After the airlift three air corridors and three land corridors were marked out through Soviet-controlled territory to link West Berlin with the rest of West Germany. We were travelling in via such an air corridor when the cloud lifted suddenly as we were coming over the Berlin Wall and I got to see all the tank traps and watch towers. There were two walls, one on the eastern and one on the western side (somewhat larger). It is an enduring image in my mind because I never saw it again from the air. It must have been around 2,500 feet above the Wall coming into land. I was so glad I’d chosen the window seat.

First encounter with the Wall at the Brandenburg Gate.

After an evening becoming reunited with old friends, Gunther von Wittich, Henning’s father, drove us up to the Brandenburg Gate in his Mercedes the following day. I remember that first time I’d really taken it into my conscience in living memory. The memory lingers of driving down the Strasse des 17. Juni towards the Brandenburg Gate and seeing a grey band covering the whole horizon, first very thin and far away and then growing larger and larger until it filled the entire view from left to right. In front of us was the Brandenburg Gate hermetically sealed within the two walls that kept East and West Berlin apart and with no other buildings surrounding it as is the case today. In front of us was a huge legal warning sign saying

‘Achtung Sie Verlassen jetzt West-Berlin!’

Warning you that you were then leaving West Berlin!

Day Trip to East Berlin on the second of June 1988.

On the second of June 1988 my mother and I boarded a Severin and Kühn tour bus for a standard tour of East Berlin city centre, what was then the Russian Sector of Berlin. I ran upstairs on the bus whilst mum was supposed to be doing the passports. This proved dangerous as they didn’t realise that I was there and mum very nearly didn’t register me downstairs as having been on the tour. Everyone was supposed to do this before we went over the border at the infamous Checkpoint Charlie so I very nearly didn’t return for another eighteen months until the wall came down. That would have been a major diplomatic incident in those days.

There were three stops on the standard tour – Mitte, Unter den Linden and the Pergamon Museum – the Russian war memorial and a communist café that took Deutsche Marks and not the currency of the GDR (Ostmarks). This café was situated on the eastern side of the Havel lake. I wasn’t supposed to take photos – in fact we were explicitly told not to, but I’m glad I did anyway. I got a superb shot of the eastern side of the Berlin Wall, the Brandenburg Gate and border guards.

Mum also got a great shot of what was to become the scene of one of the key protests in the East German revolution of 1989, the rear of the East German Parliament building, the Palast der Republik. The East German Parliament building had a communist hammer and sickle emblem on the front, and was obviously a concrete block of Russian design with tinted windows.

They could see you and you couldn’t see them. Did you know that their debating chamber converted into a rock concert hall and performance space for the Berlin people, and there was an Erich Honecker sponsored interior lighting shop. There was also a fine shot of communist pre-revolutionary Alexanderplatz, with its clean lines and street furniture.

In the 1989 revolution, people gathered on the grass bank opposite the Palast der Republik to heckle Honecker and Gorbachev who were inside celebrating forty years of the GDR. Famously the Stasi appeared from defensive tunnels near the bridge at the top of the picture and clubbed the protestors over the head to stop them storming parliament.

By this stage, communism in Germany was failing and what you saw in the window was everything there was in the store. I remember there being nothing whatsoever for sale on the shelves and in stock. We then went around the Pergamon Museum which was on the Karl Marx Platz (now called Friedrichsplatz) in Mitte. The Pergamon museum contains the Greek Pergamon and the gates to the hanging gardens of Babylon.

When we came out of the museum I remember seeing that virtually every car was a Trabant. Trabants (or Trabbis as they were affectionately known) were a make of car in East Germany, in fact one of only two makes within the country. Everyone who could be supplied with one had one, but the waiting list was longer than a giant’s arm so you had to be quite influential to jump the queue if you wanted one. In East Germany people very often had money but they couldn’t spend their money to get products or materials for their households because the supply was so poor. Communist philosophy did put an emphasis on them having love and respect for one another however. This is another shot of the Trabbis. This time, they all lined up together at the traffic lights outside the cathedral. We then travelled to the outskirts of East Berlin to the Russian War Memorial and Cemetery.

The Russians liked to show this off to westerners as they built it out of all the red marble left over from Hitler’s Reichskanzlei. I took a shot there with some very dodgy-looking Bond villain types in the foreground who were either Stasi or KGB. As you can see, there were also a lot of concrete paving blocks everywhere like they still have in Stalinist Pyongyang in North Korea.

Moving on, this is an interesting café on the Havel lake that took western currency. It was on two tiers; all the communist hierarchy were allowed to sit down by the water next to the barbeques and heaters. We, as westerners were only allowed to sit on a raised platform in the centre of the restaurant overlooking everyone else but well away from them. I’d never experienced that sense of being confined and made a fuss of in the same way. When I went to the loo, I felt a strange beckoning energy from one of the tables down by the water as if they really wanted me to go and talk with them. Mum grabbed my hand and gave me a stern talking to, one of the sternest I’d ever had. The couple by the water had children and from then on it was my great ambition to play with children on the other side of the wall and to have the “little sister” from the other side of the Iron Curtain that my parents never provided me with. That concludes my first and only visit to the East German state that I can remember properly.