A Writer's World

by Jan Morris

  And it is realized most explicitly at Lübars, at the northern extremity of West Berlin. Lübars is a genuine farming community, surrounded by meadows and marshland within the limits of the great city, It is crystallized gemütlichkeit. There is a pretty village church in a sweet village green; there are farmyards and stables and a restaurant with lace tablecloths. Sometimes a plump farmer trundles by in a trap drawn by two horses, and if you walk out of the village centre you may find a kind of pixie settlement, all enveloped in green, where people live in little toylike houses, attended by gooseberry bushes and small lawns exquisitely trimmed, like Germans in a fairy tale.

  *

  I looked through a big hole hammered in the Berlin Wall, quite near the site of the old Checkpoint Charlie, and saw into the patch of no-man’s-land beyond. It was littered with rolls of discarded barbed wire, surrounded by ruined buildings, and floored with the dismal mixture of sand, gravel and rubble that has resulted from three decades of herbicide – no greenery was allowed to soften the allegory of the Wall, let alone provide cover for escapers. Three East German soldiers were in there, one tilted back on a kitchen chair with his cap over his eyes, the others kicking an old steel helmet about in the dust. It was an epitome of squalor and wasted time.

  For yes, the squalor of the Cold War certainly survives in Berlin. Farther along the Wall, Potsdamer Platz, once the busiest intersection in Europe, is now a dingy wilderness of gravel and miscellaneous huts through which the traffic passes as across a patch of desert. Verminous wild rabbits hop around down there, anachronistic hippies with headbands and small children protest against this and that outside grubby tents. Not far away hundreds of Poles run their shambled market of trucks and awnings, selling American cigarettes, crude transistors, some bilious-looking cheese and dismal bric-à-brac; they were guarded, when I was there, by a huge, mastiffy kind of animal, slavering at the jaws, which was not just the most gruesome dog I have ever set eyes on, but the most horrible creature of any species.

  Even now, in the centre of Berlin, you know when you are approaching the line of the Wall, whether from the western or eastern side, by an unmistakable air of dubious dereliction: bombed, rubbish-strewn spaces, peeling posters, huddles of men in dark clothes, vestigial street marts with stalls and trailers, apparently abandoned vehicles, faded graffiti like KILL REAGAN or PUNKS UNITE, and, in the more touristically accessible parts, souvenir huts selling Soviet army caps or bits of the Wall encased in plastic. Nobody knows what to do with this dismal swathe, sweeping through the heart of the city in such an unlovely way; for the moment it is like the pale strip that is left on the human skin when a bandage is ripped off.

  Seediness enough, then, from the days when spies were swapped across this false frontier and young people were murdered just for trying to cross it. But the sinister part of my third image? Gone, it seems to me, all gone. Utterly dispersed is the awful fear that used to hang over the Wall like a black cloud, making every crossing from East to West a chill apprehension. The soldiers of the People’s Army kick a redundant helmet about a rubble yard, instead of peering over their gun sights from a watch post, and the Democratic Republic’s immigration officials, once so terrifyingly robotlike in their zeal, have turned out, to everyone’s surprise, to be human after all. The Television Tower above Alexanderplatz, whose bulbous platform used to look like some sleepless, ominous, all-seeing eye, now merely reminds us that if we care to go that way there is a revolving restaurant at the 680-foot level, and an obliging tourist office at the bottom.

  All the resonances of the antagonism have gone, too – a whole genre of legend, politics, art, and humour made irrelevant overnight. I had a meeting one day with two German officials, one from each side of the former border, itself an appointment that I would have thought a wild improbability ten years ago. Extracting spontaneous responses from them was rather like unpacking particularly fragile pieces of china, so anxious were they both to appear neither overweening nor apologetic. But I sensed no animosity between them and no resentment, though one was dressed in the sportiest Western fashion and gave me a handsomely printed visiting card with translations in English and Japanese, while the other wore an ill-cut dark suit without a tie, and offered me only a piece of pasteboard with his name typed upon it and a crookedly stamped logo on the back.

  *

  And where now is the power of Berlin, which once made the world cringe before Prussian salute and Nazi goose-step, swastika, and rampant eagle? The divided Berlin of our time has possessed no real power, one half having been a mere puppet of Moscow, the other an all-too-obvious advertisement for capitalism. I had to try hard to recognize any symptoms of arrogance in this city.

  I did feel a few tremors of it, but only a few, among the relics of the frightful Prussian monarchy, especially in the old royal quarter of the city. There huge triumphal columns still stand on overwhelming façades, supervised by scowling lions, prancing griffins, winged horses, heroes and assorted divinities. The enormous dome of the Cathedral swells over Marx-Engels Platz (né Lustgarten); helmeted soldiers stamp outside the Memorial to the Victims of Fascism and Militarism (né the New Guardhouse). The Reichstag, rebuilt but still domeless, stands forlorn beyond Potsdamer Platz, and beside the Spree there loom the portentous classical piles of the institutions that proclaimed, in the last half of the nineteenth century, Berlin’s resurgent and assertive culture. A battered Brandenburg Gate still dominates the great avenue of Unter den Linden. Between its trees one can almost see, if one really concentrates, the plumed shakos of cavalry colonels, the fierce moustaches of Junkers, or even the open carriage of the All-Highest himself, the Kaiser, the Emperor of all the Germanies, escorted by uhlans from his war ministry to his schloss …

  But only just, and still less remains of Hitler’s hubris. There is the brilliantly conceived city-centre airport of Tempelhof, the best thing the Nazis ever built, and there is the unfortunately splendid stadium in which, during the 1936 Olympics, Hitler found himself made a fool of by Jesse Owens (who has a street named after him, just around the corner – more than can be said for the Führer). The rest has mostly gone, and to me it all feels drained of menace. That airport is just a visionary airport, that stadium is just a stadium. I can pass the site of the Gestapo headquarters without a tremor. I can survey without fear the bump where Hitler’s bunker used to be. Goering’s fat spectre does not show itself upon the steps of his air ministry. The evil has been exorcized.

  As for the postwar structures of consequence, they have no sense of command at all. The official buildings of the communist East may be vast and overbearing, but they are essentially sterile, without the sap of true virility. The monumental buildings of the capitalist West feel flimsy, impoverished or contrived: The roof of the Congress Hall collapsed not long ago, the Philharmonic Hall looks as though it has been banged together out of odds and ends, and Mies van der Rohe’s design for the New National Gallery was originally used for the Bacardi Building in Cuba.

  Few cities on earth, in fact, now feel more dismissive of power for power’s sake than Berlin, 1989; all the monuments of Establishment, whether curly-wigged Junker Baroque, Nazi Neo-Classical, steel-and-concrete Stalinist Dogmatic or Capitalist Junk Pile, look a little ridiculous.

  *

  Fun, gemütlichkeit, malignity, dominance – some of these emblematic qualities I found alive, some mercifully buried. At the end of my stay I searched for another that might represent not my responses to Berlin’s past and present, but my intuitions about its future. I spread out before me – in the Café Einstein, pre-eminently the writer’s café of contemporary Berlin, where you can write novels until closing time over a single cup of coffee – my 1913 Baedeker’s plan of Berlin, and looked for omens in it.

  It showed a city of great magnificence, compact and ordered around the ceremonial focus of the Brandenburg Gate, with parklands and residential districts to the west of it, the offices of state and finance to the east. Where now almost everything seems random, a
d hoc, or in transition, Baedeker’s 1913 plan shows nothing but rational and permanent arrangement. Modern Berlin has no real centre or balance, devastated as it has been by war and fractured by that vile Wall, but the old Berlin was, in its heavy and self-conscious way, almost a model capital.

  It is fashionable just now to imagine it as an imperial capital again – as the future capital of Europe, in fact, at the place where the western half of the continent meets the east. In some ways indeed it feels like an international metropolis already, frequented as it is by Westerners of every nationality, and by Turks, Romanians, Poles, Arabs, Africans and gypsies; road signs direct one to Prague and to Warsaw, and at the Zoo railway station you may meet the tired eyes of travellers, peering out of their sleeper windows, who have come direct from Moscow and are going straight on to Paris.

  Physically, no doubt, Berlin can be restored to true unity. Already its wonderful profusion of parks, gardens, forests and avenues, lovingly planted and replanted through peace and war, give it a certain sense of organic wholeness. When the wasteland of the Wall is filled in with new building, when the communist pomposities of Karl-Marx Allee and Alexanderplatz have been upstaged by the cheerful detritus of free enterprise, we may see the old municipal logic re-emerging too. The focus of life will return to the old imperial quarter, and the Brandenburg Gate will once more mark the transition between public and private purpose.

  But metaphysically, my ancient Baedeker suggests, it will be a different matter. The lost Berlin of its plan was built upon victory – the victory over France, in 1871, which led to the unification of Germany and made this the proudest and most militaristic capital on earth. Everything about it spoke of triumph, Empire, and further victories to come. In today’s Berlin the very idea of victory is anomalous, and triumph no longer seems a civic vocation. The world at large may still, at the back of its mind, dread the prospect of German re-unification and the revival of German power, but in my judgement at least, Berlin is no longer a place to be afraid of. I strongly suspect that half a century from now, when this city has finally recovered its united self, it will turn out to be something much less fateful than Europe’s capital. It will be a terrific city, beyond all doubt – a city of marvellous orchestras, famous theatres, of scholarship, of research, of all the pleasurable arts – but not, instinct and Baedeker together tell me, the political and economic apex of a continent.

  If I had to choose a single abstraction to suggest its future, I thought to myself as I ordered a second coffee after all, it would be something fond and unambitious: relief, perhaps, in this city of interesting times, that the worst is surely over.

  Please God.

  The last decade of the century seemed to me an indeterminate decade, when nothing was conclusive. There was no world war, but no world reconciliation either, although an abstraction called ‘the international community’ was much touted. Half the world got richer, but half got poorer too. The Americans continued their apparently inexorable march towards domination of all the continents, fighting a war against Iraq along the way. The communist empire finally disintegrated, a denouement defined by Boris Yeltsin, who presided over it, as ‘the end of the twentieth century’, but its successor the Russian Federation floundered in corruption and disillusionment. The progress of Europe towards unity was mocked by the terrible War of the Yugoslav Secession. Fundamental brands of Islam became more ominously powerful.

  It could have been worse, but it could have been better. For me personally it was a European decade, with intermittent forays elsewhere, and I spent much of it gathering material for a book called Fifty Years of Europe. I had come to agree with Lord Tennyson’s dictum ‘better 50 years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay’.

  29

  The Flux of Europe

  Europe was in a state of flux, as the former states of the Soviet empire tentatively moved into independence, and the old democracies tried to reconcile their disparate identities with the idea of a continental whole. Contemplating its continuing uncertainties, and at the same time feeling footloose and escapist, one day I decided to jump in my car and visit three of those classically consistent parts of the continent, its famous wine-lands. This slight essay originally ended with the exclamation ‘O, the writer’s life for me!’, but it was really a light-hearted prologue to more serious explorations of Europe in the 1990s.

  Vineyards

  First I went to Haro, in Spain. I bought a bottle of a 1990 Reserva, from the Abeica bodega in the nearby village of Albeca, which was recommended to me as an exceptional example of modern Rioja, and I drank it at a table outside the Café Madrid, in the main square of the town, with a large plate of miscellaneous tapas.

  Haro stands in the purest Spanish countryside, bare mountains, vine-sprinkled hillsides, castles, village churches like cathedrals, hilltop hermitages, cuckoos and crickets and solitary elderly men hoeing fields. The pilgrim route to Santiago passes near by, and nobody could ask much more of Spanishness than the Plaza de la Paz before me, which is built on a gentle slope around a florid bandstand, and has all the requisite lamp-posts, pigeons, clocks, cobbles, arcades, benches with old men asleep on them and mostly inoperative fountains. On a rooftop above my head a pair of storks is nesting.

  Everyone seems to know everyone else in the Plaza de la Paz. Everyone knows the two ancient ladies who walk up and down, up and down past the café tables beneath a shared white parasol. Everyone greets the extremely genteel seller of lottery tickets, and time and again the cry of Hombre! rings across the square as stocky Jarreños (jug-makers, as they call citizens of Haro) greet one another around the bandstand. Every passer-by peers into the convivial interior of the Café Madrid to see what friends are propping up the bar, and a few look at me curiously as I pour more wine from the bottle I have put under the table to keep it out of the sun.

  I must not idealize this scene. A group of suaver Spaniards (from Burgos, they tell me) has just settled at a pair of tables on the pavement, very gold-bangled and silk-scarved and sunglassed, and a terrific pair of thugs whom I take to be Basque terrorists has just swaggered by with an alarming dog. There are a few weirdos about, bikers in leather jackets, babies in ostentatious prams. But in general the citizens do seem people without pose or affectation, a rough but serene kind of people, from a rough but generally serene place.

  And the wine? Give me a moment, while I swallow this prawn and think about it. Mmm. More serenity than roughness, I think. It is example number 1,301 of a remarkable vintage of 8,400 bottles that won important prizes in Bordeaux last year, but it is loyal Rioja all the same, well-oaked, honest, strong, straight, an organic-tasting wine; and as is only proper in the new Spain – in the new Europe – its wine-maker was a woman.

  *

  Next to constancy of a very different kind – to the Côte de Beaune in Burgundy, France, where the Mercs and Jaguars from Switzerland cruise around looking for rich luncheons and crates of the most expensive white wine in the world.

  This is a long way from the storks and homely boulevardiers of Haro. Here, one after another, the wine villages succeed each other in well-heeled complacency, like clichés: their narrow streets are spotless, their charming courtyarded villas all look as though they were steam-cleaned last week. They seem to be mostly deserted, except for meandering gourmands and the odd viniculturist stepping in or out of his Range Rover, but on every other corner a discreetly sculpted sign announces an opportunity of dégustation.

  Being a crude islander myself, and an iconoclast at that, I decided to cock a snook here. I bought, for the first and probably the last time in my life a Grand Cru Montrachet – Marquis de Laguiche, vintage 1993. I got a kindly waitress in a café to uncork it for me, and picked up a hefty ham and cheese baguette to eat with it. ‘Kindly direct me,’ I said to a viniculturist who happened to arrive at that moment in his Range Rover, ‘to the exact patch of soil that has produced this bottle of wine.’

  He raised his eyebrows slightly when he saw its label and the napk
in-wrapped sandwich in my hand. It was not much of a day for a picnic, he said, but perhaps the wine would help – and with a wonderfully subtle suggestion of disapproval he pointed the way to Le Montrachet. ‘Bon appétit,’ he brought himself to say, for your Burgundy viniculturist is nothing if not charming, and so a few minutes later I found myself sitting on the low stone wall that bounds the celebrated vineyard of Le Montrachet. It might have been made for picnickers. I could reach out and touch the vines, and slowly across the little road in front of me a large grey snail crawled towards the scarcely less illustrious vineyard on the other side.

  There I sat and ate my baguette and drank, out of a plastic mug, the most famous dry white on earth. It was very peaceful, rather like picnicking in an extremely up-market cemetery. Not a bird twitched or a lizard flickered. Once or twice people in cars, on the little vineyard road, slowed down to take a look at me, swinging my legs there on the wall, and responded with wary smiles when I raised my mug to them. All around the vineyards extended symmetrically, neat as could be, perfect in their regularity, part of the very contours of the land, as though no human hand had ever tilled or planted them.