Starting Young in Germany’s Capital
Extract from My Little Book of Berlin 1979 – 2023 by Hugh Waldock
1. West Berlin in 1979
1.1 My parents
In 1979 the British economy was on its knees, plagued
by heavily unionised industries that held real power
over politicians. We’d just had the winter of discontent
when the bins weren’t emptied. I was born two years
earlier in 1977 and Dad had only been fully qualified as
an architect for a few years. When the building trade fell
through the floor he became a real-life Auf Wiedersehen
Pet character and applied for a job in the then booming
West Berlin. According to his recollection of the matter,
talking to me over lunch in 1992 not long before his
death, he didn’t have a very sophisticated knowledge of
German at the time so he’d bought a dictionary, gone
through all the words he needed for the interview, and
applied anyway. Strangely enough he got the job, which
says something about how charismatic my father was.
Somehow, and sometime later, we all arrived in Berlin
and settled into the garden house at Ringstraße 73a in
Lichterfelde which was then in West Berlin.
German Exchange trips to and Holidays in Berlin
Living in Kassel, Wuppertal and Cologne.
1.2 Berlin Life; 1979-1980.
I remember a few very isolated things about Berlin at
that time despite being a baby. One of them was being
driven around the block in my father’s VW T2
transporter van to send me to sleep. I remember trying
to electrocute myself by sticking one of my dad’s
screwdrivers in the wall socket and getting a good
telling off for that. The funniest occurrence was at the
local IKEA. IKEA West Berlin was a bit of a phenomenon
back then as it hadn’t been open long and was stuffed
full of western luxuries from another EU member state.
Berliners loved it. However, at the time all IKEA stores
had a kid’s sandpit or ball pool filled with plastic red
balls for kids to play in. I couldn’t figure out the easiest
way to get out of the ball pool. Instead of attempting to
flip myself over onto my tummy and stand up, I tried to
sit up directly from lying on my back. I remember rather
desperately reaching out for mum and dad standing on
the other side of the glass partition then slipping
underneath the surface of the balls as if I were
drowning and getting into some distress. I simply
couldn’t get myself up for some reason. Dad was trying
to gesticulate instructions to me in a kind of charade,
but I didn’t understand him. Another memory was of
going to dad’s office when he was looking after me one
day and him buying me a tube of Smarties to keep me
quiet and sit me by his drawing board. I ate them all,
then hassled him endlessly to buy me some more, and
remember staring at the motorcycle shop over the road,
him trying to interest me in the bikes, and at the same
time desperately trying to finish something important.
I played in a sandpit with a little German girl and found
a toy VW beetle, which I kept. It was a battered Corgi
with paint scratched off the side from having been
buried and trampled on for a while. That car was every
easterner’s dream.
1.4 Little Linguists
Lilly von Wittich wanted me to go to Kindergarten in
Germany so that I could learn German properly.
Unfortunately, this did not happen because dad was far
30too cautious about him wanting me to ‘grow up a Brit’
and send me to an English public school like his father
had done.
However, the research showed even then that the earlier you
started with foreign languages the better. Mum had already
shown me flashcards and pictures in English and Lilly
had sung to me in German. She played me a recording
Of East German Pioneer Children singing German Folk
Music called ‘Ein Männlein Steht im Walde’ and I watched
Sandmännchen children’s films from the DDR with Henning
who had only just been born my later exchange partner. I
was also bought the Usbourne books First Thousand
Words in German and First Thousand Words in French.
As I learned later in a psycholinguistics lecture ninety
percent of all the connections made in your brain for
your entire life happen from eighteen months until you
are aged three, so if you want your child to be a genius
at languages and other things that is the time to start
“assailing” his or her “ears with the target language”
(Alexander von Humboldt). Languages were my best
subject at school academically and my musical ability
developed with them.
Ein Männlein Steht Im Walde