by Helen Moat
The football match out of the way, Klaus busied himself in the kitchen preparing pasta, while I chopped up salad. He filled up a jug of his homemade lemonade, with mint picked from his garden, and poured me a glass: it was deliciously refreshing. As he put on the pan of water to boil, Klaus told me about his childhood: he’d grown up in a small village just five miles or so from ‘the Wall’, born a decade after its erection. His parents never spoke about the time before the country had been split down the middle – it was as if East Germany didn’t exist. Klaus knew the names of some of the villages across the border, just a handful of miles from where he lived, but that was it.
‘We all knew there was something on the other side, but we didn’t know what it looked like. It was like the dark side of the moon.’
I thought of the East German student I’d met on the Rhine train and her excitement at discovering the West. How the East Germans were kept in the dark about the FRG is well documented, but now Klaus was telling me he had been just as ignorant on the western side. There was something fundamentally tragic about a people who had shared a nationality, language, history and heritage to have been so arbitrarily separated.
‘The thing is, no one expected the Wall to come down. We all just assumed it would always be like that, and when it fell, we couldn’t believe it. There was massive excitement. In no time at all, we built up links with our neighbouring villages on the East German side, and before long, I was playing football matches against those East German villages that had just been names all my life.’
‘How much do you remember about the days after the Wall came down?’
‘I remember there was a mad flow of traffic in both directions. Everyone wanted to know what it was like on the other side. A whole new world had just been opened up to us – and it was right on our doorstep. It was bizarre. All of a sudden, our little village was inundated with people from East Germany.’
I wondered how Klaus had felt in the Cold War. Had he been afraid? Had he felt threatened living under the shadow of the Wall, so close to the border?
‘No, not at all. You know, I had a good life. It was really quiet where I lived, but I had good friends living in the surrounding villages and we’d all meet up in town and have a ball. We never talked about the Wall. It just wasn’t a topic. At the same time, it was kind of cool for me as a kid living so close to the Wall – we had a sort of ‘sponsorship’ with the Bundeswehr, the federal armed forces. They came at least once a year to carry out manoeuvres, the US army too. I remember German and US soldiers sleeping in our house. They made a point of building up good relationships with our village – showing us their weapons and so on. I even got to sit on a tank once. You can imagine how that felt for a young boy! I remember the US army had a band too. I loved it when the army came. Our quiet little village would come to life – there was so much to see and do. But no, I never felt unsafe.’
I thought of my parallel upbringing in Northern Ireland. There was no physical wall in the place where I grew up, but the divisions were real enough for all of that. The Catholic and Protestant populations lived at opposite ends of my town like bookends, separated by the town centre. By the time the Troubles had begun, there were no Catholic families left on our street. A mutual sectarian purge was taking place in council housing estates: Catholics were threatened and evicted from Protestant strongholds, Protestants from Catholic. It wasn’t long before self-imposed segregation had taken place across most of our town. Like in Germany, our (albeit invisible) wall divided us from unknown places – places unsafe for us to enter for fear the other side would ask you for your religion. It was the dark side of the moon, as Klaus had said.
But I was curious about these alien Catholics. What were they really like? Were they as bad as people said? Would they really stab you in the back with a knife if you turned around, as some Loyalists I knew claimed? At secondary school, I met my first Catholics (bar the next-door family from early childhood). They were normal human beings, I discovered, not these fearsome monsters portrayed by some people in my community. It was a revelation. I started to argue with my father over politics. Discrimination against Catholics wasn’t the answer, but rather integration and equal opportunity. Catholics weren’t the enemy. When my father ran out of counter-arguments, he dismissed me with a You’ll understand one day when you’re older. I was already in my twenties. But bit by bit, the Troubles rumbled to an end. Years of negotiations had brought us a peace deal. It was a painful birth into a new era, an uneasy peace.
Reunification in Germany was another matter: the events unfolded almost overnight. I watched the crowds chisel away the Berlin Wall on the TV screen of my flat in Switzerland. Could this really be happening? As a friend of a friend was writing a dissertation arguing that the Wall would never fall, it collapsed. Overnight, my East German unit at university became obsolete. Reunited, friends and families in Germany hugged and cried after decades of separation. The joy was palpable, even through the glass of my TV screen.
‘I remember the moment so clearly,’ said Klaus. ‘And the Year-12 trip to eastern Germany on the day of reunification in October 1990. We went to Weimar and Dresden and stayed overnight at the Elbterrassen – you know, on the Elbe. Everyone was celebrating. It’s an experience I’ll never forget.’
3. Blah-blah with Kat
I had messaged Kat from a room in the eaves of a rickety hotel in Ulm. Kat wrote back quickly: You’re in luck this weekend – I’m at home. If you come after 5pm, I will be here and you can surely surf my couch. The last sentence made me smile – I had visions of standing on Kat’s couch with arms outstretched as if balancing the waves on a surfboard.
Like Klaus, Kat lived on the other side of the railway line in a quiet suburban street on the outskirts of Straubing. She opened the door, grabbed my bike and hauled it down to the basement, and then we climbed the steps to her attic flat. Kat opened the door to a rooftop jungle: plants hung from the ceiling, crowded shelves and crept along the wooden floor. Between the sloping eaves, an enormous L-shaped sofa took up most of the floorspace.
Kat and Jamie discovered they shared the same taste in music. ‘You’re in charge of the CDs, Jamie. Pick out something good.’
While Jamie sorted the music, I helped Kat in the studio kitchen as she prepared a Bavarian Kartoffelsalad and fried Leberkäse and eggs. LeberKäse is neither liver nor cheese, despite its name. It’s pure comfort food: a mix of corned beef, pork, bacon and onions, all chopped up finely and compressed in a loaf-tin, then baked in the oven. It’s a meal beloved of southern Germans, Austrians and the German-speaking Swiss. The loaf-shaped Leberkäse is sliced and fried along with eggs that are placed on top and accompanied by potato salad. It’s a rich and tasty meal, and while it may not be the finest dining, it was a calorie-packed treat for hungry cyclists.
We settled down to chat. Kat was full of stories – but she was also interested in our lives and our cycle trip. She explained that she used the company BlaBlaCar to car-share. It was a more sociable and environmentally friendly way to travel, and cheaper too. ‘BlaBla refers to the test you take when you join, to let your driver know how sociable you are – and how sociable they want you to be,’ Kat explained. ‘Blah-blah-blahs are the people who never shut up, while the blahs are the silent types.’ Kat had clearly mastered the art of ‘blah-blah’ herself. She was good at conversation and she was good at listening.
While our previous host, Klaus, had grown up in the shadows of the Wall on the western side, Kat was on the other side as a small child, living in the heart of the ‘dark side of the moon’, as Klaus had called it, near Dresden.
Kat was lucky to exist at all. When the British and Americans carpet-bombed Dresden in February 1945, around 25,000 Dresden inhabitants were killed. Kat’s grandparents were eighteen and nineteen years old at the time, and were fortunate enough to escape the bombing as they lived on the edge of the city. Having survived the war, her grandparents lived in poverty, as German rations were even more meagre th
an their British counterparts’. Germany had to rise from the ashes and rebuild in every sense of the word.
Kat’s parents were born just a couple of years before the erection of the Wall in 1961, too young to remember the life ‘before’. But for her grandparents, it must have been a shock: the Wall had gone up virtually overnight, with kilometres of barbed wire rolled out as people slept.
1961 was also the year my parents gave birth to me, far away in Northern Ireland. Two weeks after my arrival, Germany was torn down the middle and Berlin was split up by the Allies, with the British, American and French sectors of the city becoming an isolated island in the middle of the new East German Republic. As German tensions rose with the Cold War, Northern Ireland was still at peace, my parents quietly living in Wood Lane on their edge-of-town development flanked by sleepy countryside. When East Germans were being shot at, as they tried to cross no man’s land into West Germany, someone planted a rose field opposite my house. Colour filled our front windows and sweet perfume permeated the air for a couple of summers until the business venture was found to be unprofitable.
There’s a picture of me in one of my mother’s homemade dresses, with its flounced border trimmed with lace and little white buttons down the centre. My sister, Audrey, is holding my chin up, forcing me to look at the camera. I’m grabbing her hands, or maybe pushing them away, and I have a sly smile on my face. My mother is wearing a dress of lilac flowers and my father is wearing his suit, a hanky in his pocket. We are standing between the rose bushes in our Sunday best, in among the lemon, bluish-red and dusty pink rose-heads with emerald- green fields stretching behind to low-lying cottages. It’s a picture of childhood perfection, if you don’t look too closely.
I asked Kat what she remembered about the Republic before the Wall toppled in 1989.
‘Well, I wasn’t born until 1983, so I wasn’t really aware of the politics. All I have are my memories and the warm feelings I had from that time that I’ve carried with me into adulthood.’
As Kat talked about her early childhood in Dresden, it reminded me of the opening scenes of Good Bye Lenin!, set in East Germany during the Cold War – with its soft camera shots and warm light and the soundtrack of children’s laughter in the garden of a cosy dacha. The similar expression of nostalgia in Kat’s childhood reflections was striking.
‘There was a strong community, for sure. I remember lots of barbecues and parties. We kids were always running in and out of each other’s apartments in our block.’ Kat smiled at the memory. ‘I remember all the bathrooms were on the ground floor and that it was really scary for us kids when we had to go to the toilet in the middle of the night.’
She laughed. ‘You know I’m one of the GDR baby boomers. In East Germany at that time, you were stuck with your parents until you got married, so people tended to marry young. They had their kids young, too, because childcare was excellent and there were lots of benefits.’
Kat’s parents both worked, as was usual in the GDR: her father for the local transport company; her mother in the sweet factory filling Schultüten – the little cones of bonbons every child received on starting school. Kat went to nursery at the factory from the age of six months, surrounded by other babies and small children until one of her parents picked her up at lunchtime.
‘I remember the small grocery store at the bottom of our apartment block too. When they got a stock of exotic fruits, we kids got first dibs and were sent straight to the front of the queue, ahead of all the grown-ups. The child was king – or queen – in the GDR! Children were seen as the future and to be nurtured.’
Kat’s shared memories helped me understand why so many East Germans look back to the GDR era with longing, as a time when every citizen was looked after from ‘cradle to grave’. The harsh reality of fierce competition in the newly reunited capitalist Germany hit the Ossies hard: you had to find your own job and head off any competitors. No one was guaranteed a job anymore and you had to secure your own childcare – and pay for it. If your business couldn’t compete, there was no one to bail you out. And so, the euphoria that Klaus had experienced on the Elbe river was short-lived: East Germans felt disadvantaged compared to their West German cousins, while Wessies thought the Ossies were whingers and needed to learn to compete like everyone else in the real world. Kat was one of the survivors: young enough to adapt, smart enough to get ahead. But she still looked back on her early years in East Germany with gratitude.
‘Did your parents miss the German Democratic Republic after reunification?’ I asked.
‘Well, they were happy enough in the system. They were given a flat when they got married, they received lots of benefits when they had a family, and their places of work provided them with cheap holidays. But everything was decided for them.’
Kat absentmindedly pushed a piece of potato around her plate, then said quietly, ‘They didn’t really know what true freedom meant until the Wall came down.’
‘And you, do you remember the fall of the Wall at all?’ I asked Kat.
‘Not much. I asked my dad about it recently and he told me we had missed out on being in the centre of Berlin when it all happened. Instead we spent the evening huddled around the radio. My parents were really excited when the news came through – but they were also scared because they didn’t know what the future was going to hold: and sure enough, my mum lost her job. But then she took the opportunity to go back to school.’
‘How did things change for you?’
‘I was only six, too young to really understand. I remember Saturday school stopped all of a sudden. And I remember my parents receiving their Trabant in 1991 after we’d been told we wouldn’t receive it until 2002! We all drove down to Bavaria. I think we were the slowest car on the motorway. And I remember thinking Bavarians had really strange accents – and that their lives were very different from mine. Little did I know that I would end up living here.’
‘Do you think your experience of East Germany influenced you politically?’
‘Good question … I think my grandparents were more open-minded from their experiences of the War, but the generation who grew up in the GDR had had little experience of the outside world. So now they fear they’ll lose their jobs and they worry about the future. They worry about how women are treated differently in Islamic cultures. That generation didn’t travel, so they fear what they don’t know and what’s different, whereas I’ve had the chance to explore other places and different cultures. But then again, my mum didn’t have that either, and in spite of everything, my parents raised me to be open-minded. They don’t support AfD – you know, the extreme right-wing party, Alternative für Deutschland – but many other East Germans do, especially those who are not so well-educated. It breaks my heart that Dresden, my hometown, is the heartland of the anti-Islamic party, Pegida (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident).’
‘And did the lack of freedom in the GDR feed your desire for travel?’
‘For sure. My grandmother has never seen the sea to this day. Isn’t that incredible? My mum knew what it was like not to be able to travel wherever she wanted. Before I finished school, she said to me, “You go, girl. Be smart and travel the world. Do what we were never able to do.” So, I took her advice. I remember having this intense feeling, this urge to travel beyond the horizon of the country I was born in – to go beyond those boundaries that locked my parents in.’
Kat stopped speaking. There was just the drone of frogs outside the window. I thought about the descriptions of her childhood: so different from mine in Northern Ireland – and yet not so different. We both shared a romanticised view of our young lives, where love was unconditional and the light soft and warm: Kat roaming the Dresden streets with friends and screaming through the flats in her apartment block; me playing British bulldog, red lights, kerby and German jumps on our road just down from the rose field. We shared a soundscape of high-pitched screams and bubbling laughter and the too-loud voices that children use.
/> In my father’s photograph album there are pictures I keep returning to: me in a cumbersome pram, my father’s arms proudly enfolding its hood; me as a smiling toddler on my father’s knee, little hands resting on his legs; and another one, of my father carrying me, as I clutch the lapel of his shop coat with a chubby fist. There’s me as a young teenager leaning into my father as he rests his hands on my little sister’s head. We are smiling in the blurry picture, confirming the rose-field view of my childhood. Everything we needed was there in our childhood places. It was only later I yearned to explore the world beyond our streets and fields.
The light was fading and I could just make out Kat’s eyes shining in the gathering dusk. Then Kat laughed again. ‘You know, when my grandfather remarried, he started travelling and I’m convinced he’s going to keep going until his feet won’t let him anymore. He and his wife have been a huge inspiration to me, ever since I was a child. They’re almost eighty now but they know what it means to be free – and that they can make friends wherever they go in the world.’
4. Auf Wiedersehen Deutschland
On 31 May, Jamie and I cycled into Passau. We’d been on the road for a whole month.
That first chilly day in May, when we’d emerged from the belly of the ferry in Rotterdam, blinking like newborns in the daylight, seemed such a long time ago. Now cycling was as natural as breathing. And Germany, along with the pocketful of days in the Netherlands and Switzerland, had been an easy home the length of the Rhine and Danube to this point. Meanwhile, Britain was receding in my memory – a half-forgotten island from the past.
