Berlin blew cold then hot, but underneath it all is still Berlin

I remember the old West Berlin before the Wall fell in 1989, it was a strange place to visit as a tourist, writes Michael Russell

A crowd of people are separated from the Brandenburg gate by the Berlin Wall on November 10, 1989. File picture: Paul O'Driscoll

• The Dead City 
• Michael Russell 
• Constable, £15.99

Carol Reed’s film about Vienna after the Second World War, The Third Man, begins: ‘I don’t remember the old Vienna …’  The city was carved up between America, Britain, France and the USSR. 

It was in the dark underworld that marked the beginning of the Cold War that the black-marketeer Harry Lime operated. 

A divided Vienna lasted 10 years. However, in Berlin the Allies stayed until German reunification in 1991. When they left, it was the formal end of the Second World War. Forty-five years on.

I know several Berlins. The Nazis’ ‘Old Berlin’ appears in two of my novels about Garda detective Stefan Gillespie. I have accumulated the quirky, unregarded background that makes fiction a sideways-on view of history. 

Stefan encounters the city in 1940 at the height of Hitler’s success, then in 1944 as it awaits the Russians. 

I know the ‘New Berlin’ a little, cosmopolitan, diverse, all experimental art and techno-raves. But the Berlin I know best is the ‘Old Berlin’ of the 1980’s Cold War.

Visiting recently with my children, it was hard to describe what the city was like when West Berlin was a beleaguered island of capitalism inside the German Democratic Republic, shut in by a Wall that is now a few metres of tourist-fodder.

The city was the focus of the Cold War, especially in books and films. Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Deighton’s The Ipcress File, and a thousand variations. 

Yes, there was a lot of spying somewhere. It was Western intelligence’s window into the East. 

For the Warsaw Pact West Berlin was the wild animal of capitalism in captivity. In the early 1980s the Cold War was still hot. But what it was like to be in the city then was strange — especially as a foreign visitor.

West Berlin was a tiny, isolated enclave of West Germany. Stalin tried to force the Allies out in 1948. Road access was cut off. For a year the city had to be supplied with everything by air. The Berlin Airlift just kept it alive. The Russians backed off. 

The next step was to isolate the Western sectors. In 1961 the Wall went up, enclosing the few square miles of West Berlin not just with stone and barbed wire but watchtowers, armed guards and waste ground that was a kill-zone. 

The communist claim was that the Wall protected its people from the ‘anti-democratic’ West. However, it was not there to keep the West out.

It was not a few thousand West Berliners who were imprisoned, it was the population of the GDR.

West Berlin did not feel like a prison. It was as lively as any European city, with an intensity all its own. The Wall was not round every corner, though you came on it in unexpected places. But the quirks the Wall created were everywhere.

Michael Russell: 'I know the ‘New Berlin’ a little, cosmopolitan, diverse, all experimental art and techno-raves. But the Berlin I know best is the ‘Old Berlin’ of the 1980’s Cold War.'

Over coffee outside the Kranzler, West Berlin’s most famous café on its most prestigious shopping street, Kurfurstendamm, you watched parked-up Soviet soldiers smoke cigarettes and they watched you back.

On a visit to East Berlin’s Unter den Linden (light on prestigious shopping), you were watched by a jeep of British MPs. The 1945 rules were still in force. 

Soviet military police could drive round Western sectors at will and vice versa. There was no purpose. Both sides did it because they could.

The most iconic image of the split city was the Brandenburg Gate. The Wall went straight across the gate, just in the East, at the top of the beautiful avenue from the Tiergarten park, in the West. 

But there too, also in the West, was the Soviet War Memorial, ostentatiously guarded day and night by Russian troops.

East and West intersected on public transport, especially the U-Bahn. The Wall was a clear barrier but underground, to get from one side of West Berlin to another, lines went under East Berlin.

Trains travelled through ‘ghost stations’ unused since the 1950s. 

They were dark but you saw peeling posters from 30 years ago and in the shadows an East German guard with his machinegun. 

Here the U-Bahn tunnels were cemented so there was barely an inch between them and the carriage roofs. No one could hope to escape by climbing on to an U-Bahn train.

Friedrichstrasse Station was one of East Berlin’s only entry points, with its own customs’ post. Foreigners could get off a train from West Berlin and go into the East. One platform was officially ‘in’ West Berlin. 

When the international Ostende-Moscow train arrived at the opposite platform, ‘in’ East Berlin, rifle-toting soldiers rattled down steps and lined up with their backs to the West Berlin platform. 

Since the train had stopped elsewhere in the GDR, no East German could get off and jump the lines. It was a chilling sight. Escape could still be that close.

It was easy for sightseeing foreigners to visit the East. Harder for West Berliners to see relatives there.  GDR restrictions were severe and arbitrary. It was impossible for East Berliners to visit the West. 

It was a common sight at Friedrichstrasse to see elderly people hugging each other tearfully. They might be 80-year-old brothers and sisters, or ageing parents and children, living on either side of the Wall.  They could not know when or even if they would meet again. 

In November 1989, I was in Berlin as the Wall came down. I walked along Kurfurstendamm. It was very cold, snowing.

Everywhere there were small family groups in thin clothes. They walked slowly, staring in wonder at shop windows crammed with the great brands of the West and car showrooms full of Mercedes, BMWs, and Porsches. They were the people of East Berlin, taking in the West.

Next day, at the KaDeWe, West Berlin’s Harrods, the same people queued and struggled to get inside. From car roofs model-thin women threw cigarettes into the crowd. 

A German brand called ‘West’. The advertising read, ‘Test the West’. The KaDeWe’s full name is ‘The Great Department Store of the West’. In the 1930s it was Berlin’s Westend, but it had new meaning. 

Travelling into the East, almost everyone had a KaDeWe bag. They had bought something, the cheapest things they could, to show they had ‘Tested the West’. Freedom, but first shopping.

I watched people breaking up the Wall in different parts of Berlin. Allied soldiers were there keeping order. Notably, the Russians were absent. 

The British army set up mobile kitchens in the rubble and handed out soup and, true to form, cups of tea. 

British MPs now smoked with chummy East German guards wearing flowers in their lapels. 

The final act of the Second World War. And the end of that Berlin.