glitzy establishments just the other side of the Wall: a flower shop that bore the name Blumen (Flowers), but didn’t actually have any most of the time. Then there was Uhren Schmuck (literally: Watches, Jewellery), the name for all of what passed for jewellers’ shops in the communist paradise, most of which contained no more than a few, usually second-hand watches, old brooches and – just occasionally – cheap pieces of amber from the coast of neighbouring Poland. By the time we reached Dimitroffstrasse , once Danziger Strasse but since Danzig had become Polish Gdansk, renamed in favour of a Bulgarian communist (it has since reverted), we were in need of a little light relief.
Around the corner were two old-fashioned bars, though just how old-fashioned we were still to find out. They faced each other on opposing corners across the broad main street. One was called Schusterjunge (Cobbler’s Boy), the other Hackepeter (Chopped Peter). In reality these referred to two traditional, complementary Berlin culinary specialities: the former was a small brown ryebread roll usually served with the latter: a dish of spicily seasoned raw minced pork. It was a neat conceit therefore for them to be the names of two facing pubs. The opposition had been rather more pointed in the early 1930s, before Hitler’s rise to power, when one had been a drinking den for Nazis and the other for communists, and they had traded insults and hurled cobblestones at each other. We had no idea which was which. It didn’t take long to form an opinion.
Hackepeter was like something transplanted straight from the set of Cabaret, without the singing girls: brown-painted walls, dark, smoky, lit by low-wattage bulbs in low-hanging yellow shades. On a small raised stage a two-piece ensemble of keyboard player and drummer who used mostly cymbals trotted out tunes from the fifties. There were two waiters, one rotund, balding and middle-aged, the other scrawny and ancient, both in stained white jackets, carrying trays of quarter-litres of state-brewed Berliner Pilsener beer. Sitting over a couple – regular service ensured by the astute tip of a single Western D-Mark – felt like being in a surreal time warp. Over the bar hung a faded photograph of a woodland scene, a young boy and girl holding hands in a forest glade in the Harz Mountains. It looked sentimental and bucolic. Until I squinted to read the caption: Buchen Wald im Harz . Had it always been there, I wondered, from the time before Buchenwald became a synonym for evil, or for the time when it became one? But then the occasional sinister frisson was part of the essential Berlin experience. In the West money and conscience had sanitised all traces of the past. There was less of each in the East.
Ironically it was in the West that the real remnant of Nazism remained, alive if not quite kicking. In 1981 Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s right-hand man arrested in Scotland on a controversial mission (the subject of countless conspiracy theories) to make peace with Britain prior to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, had for many years been the solitary inmate of the vast redbrick Spandau Prison. By then eighty-seven, Hess was on what newsmen consider a perennial death watch, and Reuters news desk asked me to ‘redo’ his obituary. The message from London added the rider – in the even then outdated telexese from the days when costs were calculated perword – ‘though realise he ungotaboutalot recently’. Hess might have ‘ungotaboutalot’, but the fears of his imminent demise were serious enough to have his son Wolf-Rüdiger come to visit him. I met him outside. Having been just three years old when his father made his ill-fated mission, and having not seen him again until he was in his thirties (Hess was allowed only one thirty-minute visit per month), he could tell me little. As I shook his hand in farewell, it occurred to me that I was now just ‘two handshakes’ away from Adolf Hitler. A
Around the corner were two old-fashioned bars, though just how old-fashioned we were still to find out. They faced each other on opposing corners across the broad main street. One was called Schusterjunge (Cobbler’s Boy), the other Hackepeter (Chopped Peter). In reality these referred to two traditional, complementary Berlin culinary specialities: the former was a small brown ryebread roll usually served with the latter: a dish of spicily seasoned raw minced pork. It was a neat conceit therefore for them to be the names of two facing pubs. The opposition had been rather more pointed in the early 1930s, before Hitler’s rise to power, when one had been a drinking den for Nazis and the other for communists, and they had traded insults and hurled cobblestones at each other. We had no idea which was which. It didn’t take long to form an opinion.
Hackepeter was like something transplanted straight from the set of Cabaret, without the singing girls: brown-painted walls, dark, smoky, lit by low-wattage bulbs in low-hanging yellow shades. On a small raised stage a two-piece ensemble of keyboard player and drummer who used mostly cymbals trotted out tunes from the fifties. There were two waiters, one rotund, balding and middle-aged, the other scrawny and ancient, both in stained white jackets, carrying trays of quarter-litres of state-brewed Berliner Pilsener beer. Sitting over a couple – regular service ensured by the astute tip of a single Western D-Mark – felt like being in a surreal time warp. Over the bar hung a faded photograph of a woodland scene, a young boy and girl holding hands in a forest glade in the Harz Mountains. It looked sentimental and bucolic. Until I squinted to read the caption: Buchen Wald im Harz . Had it always been there, I wondered, from the time before Buchenwald became a synonym for evil, or for the time when it became one? But then the occasional sinister frisson was part of the essential Berlin experience. In the West money and conscience had sanitised all traces of the past. There was less of each in the East.
Ironically it was in the West that the real remnant of Nazism remained, alive if not quite kicking. In 1981 Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s right-hand man arrested in Scotland on a controversial mission (the subject of countless conspiracy theories) to make peace with Britain prior to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, had for many years been the solitary inmate of the vast redbrick Spandau Prison. By then eighty-seven, Hess was on what newsmen consider a perennial death watch, and Reuters news desk asked me to ‘redo’ his obituary. The message from London added the rider – in the even then outdated telexese from the days when costs were calculated perword – ‘though realise he ungotaboutalot recently’. Hess might have ‘ungotaboutalot’, but the fears of his imminent demise were serious enough to have his son Wolf-Rüdiger come to visit him. I met him outside. Having been just three years old when his father made his ill-fated mission, and having not seen him again until he was in his thirties (Hess was allowed only one thirty-minute visit per month), he could tell me little. As I shook his hand in farewell, it occurred to me that I was now just ‘two handshakes’ away from Adolf Hitler. A
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