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of East Berlin.
I paid off the cab and made a point of asking the American soldier on duty in
the temporary hut, which has been positioned there for forty years, what time
the checkpoint closed. It never closed, he told me; never! It was enough to
make sure he remembered me passing through. If I was going to leave a trail
that the MPs would follow, it would be better to make it wide and deep. The
Department would not be fooled, but on past performance it would take a little
time to get them into action. A Friday evening: Dicky Cruyer would have to be
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got back to his office from somewhere where the fishing and shooting was good
and the telephoning demonstrably bad.
On the Western side of Checkpoint Charlie you ll find only a couple of well
laid-back GIs lounging in a hut, but the Eastern side is crowded with
gun-toting men in uniforms deliberately designed in the pattern of the old
Prussian armies. I gave my passport to the surly DDR frontier guard who showed
it to his senior officer who pushed it through the slot under the glass
window. There it was photographed and put under the lights to find any secret
marks that previous DDR frontier police might have put there. They gripped my
passport with that proprietorial manner that all bureaucrats adopt towards
identity papers. For men who man frontiers regard passports and manifests as
communications to them from other bureaucrats in other lands. The bearers of
such paper are no more than lowly messengers.
As a thinly disguised tax, all visitors are made to exchange Western money
for DDR currency at an exorbitant rate. I paid. Guards came and went. Tourists
formed a line. Buses and private cars crawled through and were examined
underneath with the aid of large wheeled mirrors. A shiny new black Mercedes,
flying the flag of some remote and impoverished African nation, was halted at
the barrier behind a US army jeep that was demonstrating the victorious
armies right to patrol both sides of the city. The DDR guards did everything
with a studied slowness. It all takes time: here everything takes time. And
some of the victors have to be kept in their place.
East Berlin is virtually the only place to find a regime staunch and
wholehearted in its application of the teachings of Karl Marx. Why not? Who
could have doubted that the Germans, who had given such unquestioning faith
and loyalty - not to mention countless million lives - to Kaiser Wilhelm and
Adolf Hitler, would soldier on, long after Marxism had perished at its own
hand and been relegated to the levelled Fdhrerbunker of history.
The taller buildings around the shanty-town of huts that is Checkpoint
Charlie give the feeling of being in an arena. So do the banners and the
slogans. But the bellicose themes have gone. It is a time of retrenchment. The
communist propaganda has abandoned the promises of outstripping the West in
prosperity or converting it politically. Now the messages stress continuity
and security and tell the proletariat to be grateful.
Emerging from Checkpoint Charlie you can see all the way to Friedrichstrasse
station. There, a steel bridge crossing the street cuts a pattern in the
indigo sky. Across the bridge go the trains that connect Paris with Warsaw and
eventually Moscow, but the bridge itself is also the Friedrichstrasse station
platform of the elevated S-Bahn, the commuter line that runs through both East
and West Berlin.
The sight of the bridge gives the impression that the station is only a short
walk, but the distance is deceptive and as I walked up Friedrichstrasse - past
the blackened and pockmarked shells of bombed buildings that people said were
owned by mysterious Swiss companies that even the DDR did not wish to offend -
I remembered too late that it s worth getting a cab that short distance when
one is in a hurry.
The S-Bahn station Friedrichstrasse provides another demonstration of the
enormous workforce that the DDR devotes to manning the Wall. I went through
its agonizingly slow passport control - there are even more checks on people
leaving than on those entering - and eventually went through the tunnel and up
to the platform.
The station is a huge open-ended hangar-like building with overhead gantries
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patrolled by guards brandishing machine guns. The S-Bahn s rolling stock, like
the stations and the track, are ancient and dilapidated. The train came
rattling in, its windows dirty and the lights dim. I got in. It was almost
empty: those privileged few permitted to cross the border are not to be found
travelling westwards at this time of evening. It took only a few minutes to
clatter over the Wall. The  antifascist protection barrier is particularly
deep and formidable here where the railway crosses the Alexander Ufer: perhaps
the sight of it is intended to be a deterrent.
There is an almost audible sigh of relief from the passengers who alight at
Zoo Station. I had to change trains for Grunewald, but there was only a minute
or two to wait and it was quicker than taking a cab and getting tangled up in
the Ku-Damm traffic which would be thick at this time.
From the station I walked to Frank Harrington s home. I approached it
carefully in case there was anyone waiting for me. It seemed unlikely. The
standard procedure was to cover the frontier crossing points - those for
German nationals as well as the ones for foreigners - and the airport. On a
Friday night at short notice that would provide more than enough problems.
Frank as the Berlin chief was already given special protection by the civil [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]