A Small Revolution in Germany

by Philip Hensher

  We had arrived at the pension in West Berlin. I had found it by luck. A Germanist colleague of mine from university, when appealed to, had said, ‘Oh, anywhere in Charlottenburg should be fine.’ I had acquired a greasy catalogue, both flimsy and thick, containing long lists of the hotels and pensions of West Berlin. I had dismissed the childish temptation to book a place that would demonstrate some fact about capitalism. An exploitative fleapit where the unemployed moaned through the walls at night. Or a palace of vulgar luxury, shining our own faces back at us from the spotlit mirrors in the lifts. I think we had passed the age when everything needs to prove a large point about society. I had plucked the Pension Dittberner from the page at random. The places we would be staying in the DDR, for the next two weeks, had more or less chosen themselves – there were fewer options. The price categories had been clearly indicated.

  ‘Why don’t we set off tomorrow?’ Ogden said. He put out his cigarette in the bedside ashtray. He rubbed his eyes with his fists. He sat up on his bed.

  ‘I don’t know how long it’s going to take at the Reisebüro,’ I said.

  ‘The – oh, the office in charge of stuff over here,’ he said. ‘Isn’t it all arranged? I thought you’d arranged everything.’

  ‘You need to show them your itinerary,’ I said. ‘They look it over, they check the hotel bookings in the places you’re going to, they give you a visa, then you’re off. I don’t think it’s complicated. We’ll go first thing tomorrow morning. I think they issue everything you need the same day. I was being cautious, I expect. In case it’s an overnight thing.’

  ‘International co-operation,’ Ogden said. ‘Or lack of it. The Westerners sitting in the office here, looking over your application. Taking their time. Don’t want to be too speedy and efficient and helpful to their opposite numbers. Or anyone proposing to go and visit the other side of the Wall.’

  ‘They’re not Westerners,’ I said. ‘I don’t think they are.’

  ‘They’re over here, though,’ Ogden said. ‘What, do they live in the East and come here to work every day? And then go back home at night?’

  ‘I expect so,’ I said. ‘I can’t think what else they would do.’

  ‘They don’t—’ Ogden said, but checked himself in what he was about to ask. Then he smiled brightly. ‘I don’t know about you but I’m a bit starving. I haven’t had anything since breakfast. Phil always says you should never skip lunch if you want to get work done. It’s nearly five – well, four English time. Let’s go.’

  At the time, I thought nothing much of Ogden starting a question before thinking better of it. It was not hard to work out what he was about to ask. He was thinking of the DDR office workers who, every day, crossed the border to come to work in the West, and every evening went back over the same border. In time, I was to discover that in fact many inhabitants of the DDR had the right to travel in the West for professional purposes. It was not as unusual as we had been led to believe. Ogden’s question, if he had posed it, was one based in more human and irrational urges. He had been about to ask why the clerks in the Reisebüro didn’t just leave their office in the West, walk out into the street and never return. The answer would have been a simple one. These clerks had stable and well-supported lives. They certainly believed in their country. They could understand that human happiness was not a universal condition in the other Germany, or beyond. Of course they returned home each night. I would have had no hesitation in being able to explain that. The aspect of Ogden’s restraint that I might have paid more attention to was why he did not want to ask this question now, of me. Perhaps it was a delusion, but in the past no question had been out of bounds. I should have understood straight away that his behaviour had changed – had been changed by university, by a year working for a Labour MP, or something else entirely. The name of the Labour MP was Phil.

  We left the pension building, walking down the wide flights of stairs. Almost immediately we were on the Kurfürstendamm, which I understood was the main shopping street of West Berlin. It was a beautiful afternoon, warm and bright. The street was foreign in striking ways. The pavement was immensely wide. In the centre of it were placed glass vitrines in a row, containing objects from the shops that stood behind – exquisite little arrangements of hats and socks, boxed photographs of people having good times in restaurants. I would have liked to pause to examine them.

  ‘Is it too early for dinner?’ Ogden said. ‘This looks like a bit of a tourist area. We ought to find a district where ordinary people live. Where’s your map?’

  Together we examined it. It was uninformative, giving only the names of districts. One was called Wedding, which struck us as funny. But that was too far. In a practical way, I hadn’t done much investigation of the shape of West Berlin apart from the location of the Reisebüro.

  We would not be spending much time in this part of the city.

  ‘Do any normal people live in West Berlin?’ I said. ‘It isn’t a normal city.’

  ‘I expect some people do,’ Ogden said. ‘They go about their normal lives. They take their children to school. They watch game shows on TV. They go for walks on Sunday in the countryside.’

  ‘I don’t think they can do that,’ I said. ‘The Wall goes all the way round. There isn’t any countryside that they can get to.’

  ‘We’re getting off the point,’ Ogden said. ‘Where’s the nearest underground station? What do they call it – U-Bahn, is it?’

  We carried on walking in the same direction. The atmosphere was unusual. The street was made up of one luxury Western business after another, with cinemas, hotels, clothes shops and other retail experiences. It was very much like the main shopping streets of a rich British city, but the width of the pavement gave it an empty feeling. There were few people walking along. They were lost in the space. They hardly had anything to do with each other. Nobody was shopping or, rather, buying anything.

  Some of the businesses were cafés and restaurants, jutting out onto the pavement with covered terraces. They were the busiest parts of the street. Waiters were standing at the back of each, looking out for a customer who needed something. The one we were now coming up to was called Androvič, the name of the restaurant spelt out in a neon sign above the awning. It had a menu on a pedestal at the entrance to the terrace. I veered over to take a look at it.

  ‘To be honest, I’m starving,’ Ogden said, following me after a thoughtful pause. ‘What does it look like?’

  ‘Not too bad,’ I said, meaning that it was not obviously expensive.

  ‘There ought to be rules about how to discover a good place and stay away from rip-offs in places you don’t know,’ Ogden said. ‘I need a me.’

  ‘What do you mean, “I need a me”?’

  ‘I need someone to sort me out the way I sort Phil out. I need a me. What sort of food is it?’

  ‘They have pork and sausages,’ I said. ‘And – oh. I think it’s from Yugoslavia. Serbischen is a part of Yugoslavia, isn’t it? Serbia?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Ogden said, not sarcastically but encouragingly. ‘It could be good. I’m hungry.’

  We went in. We stood there until a waiter at the back noticed us. He was wearing the traditional outfit of his profession, a white shirt, a bow-tie and a long black apron over black trousers, though his shoes were American trainers. Waiters walk a good deal in the course of the day. Those shoes must have been a practical solution. He hurried over to us in an impatient way, gesturing widely across the terrace. There were several empty tables. I think he was suggesting without saying anything that we should take our pick and sit down. We did so. In two minutes another waiter came over with menus that had the Serbo-Croat names for the dishes, but also translated into German and English. The prices were very reasonable. We began to relax.

  I had seen Ogden regularly since we left school. He had chosen to go to Manchester University to study economics. Three of
us had got into Oxford – me, James Frinton and Tracy Cartwright. Ogden, like Eric and Mohammed, had maintained that Oxford was not the place for people like us. He had not applied. We had argued about this a good deal at the time. But Ogden and I had still met up in the vacations. When my father committed suicide, Ogden wrote a kind letter. He had asked if I wanted to go to stay with him ‘to get away from things’. I actually had somewhere to go to get away from things, but it was thoughtful of him. Tracy and James Frinton, with whom I had gone to university, were the ones I was not very close to as time went on. Ogden, who had gone somewhere else, had carried on making an effort. I had made an effort in his direction, too. Sometimes a phone call would come late at night, and it would be Ogden saying he had thought about it, and that I should move my PhD to a college in London, where I could live with him. Or he would suggest that we should go on holiday to India together to look at temples. I was touched but puzzled by these kind suggestions out of the blue. Often, when he rang, Ogden was calling from a phone box. He would go on talking until he ran out of ten-pence pieces, persuading and cajoling until his final sentences were blotted out by the telephone system’s warning bleeps. Quite frequently he was drunk when he called me. He could begin, without saying anything else, by howling down the phone, ‘GREEEAAASBROUGH,’ whether it had been me or Joaquin who had picked it up. Joaquin would hand it to me without comment. He would go back to his book. The excitement from that end would die down; comments about the horrors in the House of Commons would run their course; Ogden would make an enquiry about my work; derision-flavoured advice about ideology and theory would be swiftly run through. Finally the sequence of suggested trip, lyrical evocation, cajoling, encouragement, disappointed reiteration, insistence. Then the beeps from the telephone system. The next time he rang it would all have been forgotten.

  ‘Maybe he loves you,’ Joaquin said from time to time.

  I had once agreed to a suggestion, and had spent a weekend at Ogden’s place in South London when there was a big demo planned. His flatmates were away. There was no suggestion that Joaquin could come – it was one of the things that had been established between us that Joaquin’s name was not going to be mentioned. The flat was a conversion, and the conversion had been adapted again by a greedy landlord – it would have done quite well for one person, or a couple in a bedroom with a tiny boxroom and a small sitting room. The sitting room had been turned into a bedroom that the others had to walk through to get to the kitchen. Ogden had the bedroom, which stank of old cigarette smoke. I stayed in the tiny, foetid, barely windowed boxroom that his flatmate Sue normally lived in from Monday to Thursday. On the Saturday morning, lying in bed waiting for sounds of movement to come from Ogden’s part of the flat, I found a half-empty tub of hummus just under the bed, thick with mould. Just by it, there was a more recently abandoned used condom. It was what London living for people our age was like. We went to an Irish folk night on the Friday; we went to the demo; we had a dissection of it in the pub the rest of Saturday with some kids we’d marched alongside, who I’d never seen before and never saw again (I can’t speak about Ogden). Late Sunday morning I got on a coach after a big fry-up breakfast in Tooting. I turned down another couple of suggestions from Ogden, but a year after that I agreed to go with him for two weeks to the German Democratic Republic. To see socialism, Ogden said.

  ‘In two weeks that one is never going to mention my name,’ Joaquin had said. ‘And you know why?’

  ‘Ideological differences, these days,’ I said. ‘He believes in parliamentary democracy and working for change through mainstream party policy. He doesn’t have anything to say to people like you.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ Joaquin said. It was true that my ideological differences from Ogden were also quite marked. We overlapped. But I had not yet got to the point where I thought bourgeois voting rituals would ever change anything. There was a quality of the unspoken whenever I was in the same room with Ogden. Was it down to unresolved differences in ideological assumptions? Joaquin had reached his own conclusion. He thought love was at the bottom of it, or something that thought of itself as love. I didn’t think so. Ogden and I had agreed to save some money by sharing a room (with single beds) all through the trip. The Interhotel network that Western travellers were required to stay in was quite expensive.

  The menu in the Yugoslavian restaurant on the Kurfürstendamm had been simple but puzzling. It asked you to choose a meal, all straightforwardly priced, its components described in a succession of lists. Although the menu was long, and the number of possible meals was high, this was because the twenty or so items the restaurant provided could be permutated in a lot of different ways. We had taken a long time to choose. We thought we had gone for two quite different meals. But, in the event, the food that arrived looked very similar. It was served on strange dishes, with numerous indentations for different items, each filled with either meat or vegetables in a thick brown sauce. The waiter placed them in front of us with an exaggerated flourish. It might have been satirical. I comforted myself with the thought that after this we would no longer have to think about the problem of finding food until lunchtime the next day. I started to eat.

  ‘Look at that man over there,’ Ogden said. He lit a cigarette.

  It was hard to do so, because Ogden was showing an interest in someone behind me. I turned. The man was in fact at the next table, no more than eight feet away. He was so close that he looked up at me, startled. He was neatly dressed, completely white hair brushed with a parting and a white moustache. He had a German newspaper in front of him folded vertically. His face was very pink. He gave the impression of cleanliness. I made an embarrassed pretence at calling the waiter over to ask for some salt, as if I had turned to look for him: the waiter was surprised, partly because there could hardly be anything saltier than their food, but also because, as he pointed out, there was salt in front of me. I apologized.

  ‘How old do you think he is?’ Ogden said.

  ‘That man? Sixty-five, seventy? Why?’

  ‘I’m looking out down the street and seeing all these Germans. They look so nice and neat and happy. The retired ones, I mean. He’s really enjoying his dinner. But if he’s sixty-five he would have been twenty in 1943. Look at him shovelling in his Serbian pork stew. Do you think when he was our age he was shovelling dead bodies out of gas chambers?’

  ‘Hard to say,’ I said. I thought he was eating neatly and carefully, not shovelling anything in at all. ‘He might have been a resistance fighter, I suppose. Maybe he was just a fireman or something like that.’

  ‘Or look at her – this one. She’s just stopped to have a look at the glove display, over there, the one with the two terriers. She’s just the right age, I reckon.’

  ‘Right age for what?’

  ‘Hitler Youth. Or she could have been Goebbels’s mistress. That fur collar and the dogs’ little tartan coats. She likes things just so. Always has done. You can tell. It was tough after the war for her, but Goebbels gave her a painting by Renoir. One he’d acquired from a rich Jewish family ‒ they’d tried to bribe him with it. He didn’t much like it, but it would do for – what’s her name?’

  ‘Ingrid.’

  ‘Ingrid liked it. And she liked it much more after the war when she could sell it to an American collector. Lived on the proceeds for five years. During the difficult times.’

  ‘Lovely. Do you think they know each other?’ I made a backwards gesture of the head, indicating the dapper man at the table behind me.

  ‘They do, but they’re not going to greet each other in public. That would be fatal. They’ll see each other at the annual party for the old gang, the one to celebrate Wolfi’s birthday. They’ll kiss each other then. Talk about old times.’

  ‘Who’s Wolfi?’

  ‘They don’t refer to the Leader by name. Mr A. H. Not even in private.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ I said. I always relished Ogden’s ability
to spin speculation out of nothing. It was with beady enjoyment that he watched the neat and, surely, completely respectable woman in late middle age trot off with her two terriers, one black and one white, like an advertisement for whisky.

  ‘This food is terrible,’ Ogden said. He spoke quite mildly, without much in the way of disappointment. In fact being able to dismiss the food, coming after his indulgence in an elaborate and baseless fantasy of war criminals, definitely cheered him up. His manner from the airport to now had been veiled in some way, covered with a layer of assertive self-importance, performed bored indifference, of a clear intention not to engage with me. In short, he had been stiff. But now that the food had been agreed to be terrible we could move on. He looked at me, apparently for the first time. His gaze was blue, wide, intense and blank. He could have been looking at a monument. ‘This is going to be fun,’ he said.

  West Berlin, even then, had a reputation as a late-night city, but all that we experienced that evening was a walk past old-fashioned cafés with pink signs in the cursive writing of giants, a pause in front of a cinema to work out that the apparently poignant German melodrama with a poetic title was, in fact, the very ordinary American film now playing at the Gaumont at home, extravagantly translated. We saw some sights: we walked past a church that had been ripped to pieces by a wartime bomb, its fragmentary tower supported by a modern shell. We supposed they’d left it there to remind people either of what they had done or what had been done to them. One of the two. We found ourselves standing in front of a preposterous Chinese gate, the entrance to the zoo. On our way back, my map in my hand, we were walking through the bus station. We found ourselves in the middle of an unadvertised market of dereliction, dozens of victims of the savagery of capitalism selling themselves or vials of oblivion. The centre, or one of the centres of heroin and prostitution in this money-making island city, kept going by the artificial support of the imperialist powers without much thought for the lives of the victims. We had a lot to say about these final results of historical forces, in ways that afterwards turned out to have been abstract and impersonal.