Parallels between Dublin and East Berlin became clear when hacks taking us for Osties began to ask for interviews, writes ANN MARIE HOURIHANE
YOU KNOW those columns where boring old hacks reminisce about times gone by, the fascinating events they have lived through and how right the boring old hack has always been about everything? Well this is one of those columns. By rights it should be delivered from the book-lined reading room of some old colonialists’ club, with me swigging whiskey and soda and you furtively ordering a cab. Instead I’m on a computer, and you might be too. Luckily, smugness does not change with the fashions. The thing is, I was in Berlin when the Berlin Wall came down.
I am not saying that I have anything intelligent to say about the Berlin Wall coming down; but then it doesn’t seem that anyone else does either. Actually, pretty well everything intelligent to be said about the fall of the Berlin Wall had already been said before the three of us flew out of Dublin on our way to Germany in November 1989. Berlin 20 years ago was awash with camera crews and commentators and more like a film set than anything else.
Presumably it is like that again now, on the 20th anniversary of that strange week.
The most striking thing about West Berlin at that time was that, to Irish people, even Irish people who were working in television and therefore quite prosperous, it seemed so extraordinarily rich. I was travelling with a female television producer and a male production assistant, both of whom spoke German. They were well able to identify the banned anthems playing on the radio in the taxi cabs.
But nothing could have prepared us for the richness of West Berlin. We gawped at the cars and the clothes, like yokels in a city for the first time. Even the air seemed to be cushioned with money, like the air in Zurich. We walked through West Berlin like those lonely representatives of the Star Trek crew when they have been beamed down to the surface of yet another new planet. It was really like being in another world.
The German camera crew we were to use for our report arrived – amazing to be able to remember this, 20 years later – in a Mercedes estate. They were exotic to us, and rather unexcited at the prospect of working with three Irish people – although this ennui, we reassured ourselves, is common amongst freelance camera crews. The two of them were wearing enough expensive male casual clothing – a lot of punched suede, if I recall – to make us cough slightly.
My main memory of our 24-hour stay in the Berlin of November 1989 is of looking for people to interview, then interviewing them until their ears bled. We met a group of orchestra members from East Berlin who didn’t really want to talk about it – who could blame them? – preferring to watch some south American women dancing instead. It was embarrassing to see such sophisticated people – much more sophisticated than we were ourselves – treated like something in a zoo. I think there were crowds queuing at the West Berlin branch of McDonalds, but that could be a dream.
Most of the East Berliners we spoke to were heading for Paris, thanks very much. No one was boasting about the collapse of communism. Or the reunification of Germany. In fact it was a bit like being at a Christmas party at which no one mentioned Christmas. The celebration alone was what was meant to occupy us, and the people who really had something to say kept quiet.
East Berlin itself looked very much as large tracts of Dublin had looked in the 1970s, and in some cases still did. There was nothing in East Berlin more shabby and derelict than, for example, Clanbrassil Street. And nowhere in East Berlin, bombed, bullet-ridden and crushed as it was, looked any worse than Lower Mount Street or Gardiner Street or Mountjoy Square or indeed O’Connell Street.
This parallel between the two cities must have shown in our faces, because a strange thing happened: other journalists started asking us for interviews. They thought that we were Ost Berliners. It could have been that the German spoken by my two colleagues was so idiomatic that foreigners were fooled. But no. It was just that we dressed like the Ost Berliners. We were in the nylon jumpers and the stone-washed denim and the leather jackets that were the uniform of the people coming over the Wall.
The production assistant, a redhead, began to feel a little bit harassed every time someone said “Ost Berliner?” to him, replying with some asperity that he was, in fact, from Moate. (Hi, Brian!) It had been obvious from the start that the only thing that distinguished East Berliners from the people congratulating them, interviewing them, filming them and patronising them was the fact that they were so badly dressed. In other words, that they were so much poorer than everybody else in Berlin – except for us.
Shortly after our return, I threw away my piece of the Berlin Wall. There is only so much crumbling concrete breeze-block you can try to make sacred. And shortly after that again our contemporaries began to return from abroad and Ireland began to get rich. But that’s another story.