In the Mouth of the Bear

The best of times? I don’t know…
The worst of times? Maybe…
Paris? Of course not.

The City of the Bear: two cities in one, Siamese twins conjoined at the heart by concrete and watchtowers. Or a solid mandala, if that's your preference: Yin - the grey capital of a corrupt and dying regime, Yang - the glitzy whore’s heart of mostly upbeat –isms; capitalism, hedonism and dubious sexual tourism. One year to go to Orwell’s dystopian vision; who knew it would turn out like this? In six short years all the certainties of the Cold War would start to crumble: they’d applied the Domino Theory to the wrong game.

How exciting! You say. City of spies, escapes and drama. Did you know? Could you tell the twilight was coming? And the answer is no, how could I? It was all numbers and databases, trends, peaks and troughs: statistics, not dead-letter drops, honey traps and exchanges of spies on neutral ground. And we were young, early 20s or younger – interested in birds, bands and booze, pockets full of money. Deliberately overpaid to help us flaunt our conspicuous consumption in front of the Soviets and the fuming Ostberliners: Propagandist Party Animals.

There was a train. If you didn’t drive -and wouldn’t fly- it was how you got from West Berlin to West Germany. The Berlin Military Train: several coaches and a large dining car. We used to board at 0800 hours: by 9 we had started on the canned beer. The locomotive would be changed after the checkpoint on the edge of West Berlin: an East German engine pulled you all the way to Magdeburg, the last stop before entering the free world. Lunch and wine from a very good 'cellar' was served as the Duty Train Officer handed all the Berlin Travel Documents to a Soviet Captain in full dress uniform on the platform. Someone likely to have queued for potatoes at a butcher’s watched us swilling the red and chomping our steak, no wonder he pretended to dot every incomprehensible i and cross every non-cyrillic t. The Berlin Military Train travelled daily.

So no, I didn’t feel the hand of history: we drank, danced and debauched for 10 years and were as self-important as any twenty-somethings have any right to be. And yet… we were spied upon, by untrained fellow servicemen: our own mini-STASI on the wrong side of the wall.

But what a time it was. What a city. Berliners knew it and wouldn’t hesitate to tell you so. It was a magnet for draft dodgers, alternative lifestyles and sexual outcasts. No wonder Bowie had moved there for a few years. How fitting it was that the City of the Bear nestled like a stale blini in the mouth of the Russian Bear, we were closer to Warsaw than Hamburg.

So this is a flavour of our Berlin; not much Realpolitik, no espionage secrets and no I-told-you-so analysis: just young people, away from home, with too much money and not quite enough sense.